The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  And let na the sea come in.

  —ANONYMOUS, The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens

  Whitstable is a seaside town that got left behind in the 1930s, the sort of place where Enid Blyton children still go to buy ginger pop and paper kites for a shilling before cycling back to their secret camp on the downs to foil all those spies and ruffian smugglers. It is the sort of place where fishing boats come into harbour trailing the coconut flakes of sea-birds, and the huge orange crates of dead fish on the wharves are picked over by squabbling, sardonic herring gulls. There are weatherboard houses in salty-white or tarry-black, converted net-drying lofts or kipper-smoking rooms, with names like ‘Hove-To House’ or ‘Sou’wester Cottage’ or ‘The Oysterbed B&B.’ Each one has a large ginger cat and a brass telescope in the window. Along the seafront there is a continual parade of headscarfed housewives with shopping bags off to buy a bit o’ fresh ’addock for ’is Lordship’s tea, or retired Colonels walking their tartan-jacketed Scotty dogs, or young mothers wheeling pushchairs with toddlers in them and their hair blown all over their faces, and everyone says, ‘’Allo, luv!’ as you pass, except the Colonels who say, ‘Bit fresh, what?’ as they march by into the gale. It is a peaceful, safe sort of place to spend five or so days, the only danger being from the Famous Five if they think you look suspiciously foreign and spy-like.

  The reason I was forced to stay in Whitstable for the next five days will soon become apparent. For now that we have wandered on this sunny breezy morning along the seafront, past the gaily striped beach huts (whose proud owners enjoy a day at the seaside by huddling together around a kettle and a transistor radio out of the sleet and drizzle of an English summer’s day), we have come at last to the outlying village of Seasalter, the long strip of shingle backed by the cottages and strewn with driftwood, including the rather sorry sight of a small and sea-battered Mirror lying high up on the tideline of kelp.

  With a spring in my step and hope in my heart, I have come armed with a new pulley, a packet of screws and a couple of bits of timber to fix all that went wrong yesterday. What I have not come prepared to do is fix the gaping hole in her keel. That last mocking wave of the night which deposited Jack de Crow above the tideline had dumped her fair and square on a wicked iron spike hidden in the black kelp, and this had punched a raw hole right through her hull. It is still there, in fact, stabbing through the timbers from below. She is mortally wounded and I possess neither the tools nor the skill to mend her. Nor, to be honest, the heart. The journey, it seems, ends here.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  A lady has emerged from a nearby cottage. If she has come to ask me to remove my dinghy and myself from her property, I will drown her here and now. She is certainly walking towards me with a sense of busy purpose, and has the air of one who has come to be polite but firm to vagabonds.

  ‘Yoo-hoo! Young man?! Is that your dinghy?’ I resign myself to the lecture about trespassing.

  ‘Look – ’ begin I, but am cut off by the torrent.

  ‘If I’m being terribly nosy, do send me packing, but I couldn’t help wondering if I could be of any use. And I’m simply dying to know who you are and where you’ve come from and what on earth you think you’re doing. And whether you’d like a coffee? I’m Daphne, Daphne Dunster, by the way. What a dear little boat! Can I help? Or shall I just tiptoe away again?’

  Daphne, says her husband Peter, is of the Mongoose Tribe – her motto is ‘Go and find out.’ On further acquaintance, I found this to be indubitably true, but it would also appear to be backed by various other mottos such as ‘Offer Assistance to Possible Lunatics,’ ‘Ruthlessly Organise Those Less Capable Than Oneself ’ and ‘Try my Date-and-Walnut Slice and Die.’ I experienced all these philosophies over the next five days in a giddy whirl of kindness and competence and good fortune unparalleled in the history of seafaring. From the moment when I first allowed myself to be chivvied inside by the ever-so-slightly bossy Daphne for a coffee and a good cry, she and her husband … and later her entire family … went into action to make sure that Jack and myself had no excuse for abandoning the voyage there and then.

  Blast them.

  The first thing she told me over morning coffee was that her husband was a keen yachtsman, and consequently his shed was full of equipment: power-tools, drills, varnish, marine ply, screws, fittings, paint; anything I might need, in fact, to rebuild a centreboard, fix the boom and generally sort out the problems that had arisen at sea in the storm. Meanwhile, although she couldn’t put me up here in the house because the entire Dunster tribe was arriving for the May Day holiday weekend, nevertheless she expected me to join the family for lunch the following day and to start work on the boat. I mournfully pointed out that though I had at last acquired some sort of competence at carpentry, the gaping gash in the hull was quite beyond me; she countered by playing her trump card. One of her numerous sons-in-law due to visit was a boat-builder, and of course he would be delighted to help and advise me in the mending of the dinghy. And now, if I had no more objections, the poor little thing couldn’t stay there on the shingle any longer, so would have to be moved up onto their lawn at once … and look, there’s a couple of joggers, such nice-looking young men, who will be happy to help haul the boat up.

  And off she trotted with a plate of date-and-walnut slice to bully the passing joggers into manhandling Jack de Crow up onto the grass outside the French windows to await the ministrations, expert and otherwise, that would fit her out for the crossing to France and beyond.

  The next five days were utterly wonderful, and so make poor telling, alas. It would be nice to linger here over the carpentry and the coffee and the cake, the long, leisurely lunches with the Dunster tribe, and the bright May days spent passing screws and pliers to Paul the carpenter son-in-law lying on his back under the propped-up dinghy while he did clever and mysterious things to the hull and got varnish dripped in his eyes. It would be nice to be back there, in fact, forever in the limbo of that sunny pause, Odysseus entertained by the gracious Phaecians, able for a while to turn my back on the grey sea with plausible excuse.

  Meanwhile, Jack de Crow was knocked into shape by the inestimable Paul. I must add that I didn’t entirely leave him to it; I did at least see what was going on, and for those who are interested, I will explain briefly the process of fixing a hole in the keel. First we had to cut out the damaged section, leaving a neat rectangular hole in the bottom of the boat. The edges of the hole had to be bevelled slightly, like the sides of a plug hole in your bathtub. Then a plug had to be made to fit, a rectangular piece of wood with similarly bevelled edges, and this we made out of a stack of old marine ply from the shed, part of an older vessel. Then a larger piece of ply had to be made as a sturdy plate. This plate would sit in the bottom of the bilges over the plug, screwed to the hull and with the plug screwed to it from below. Finally, once everything was in place, the whole had to be slathered in a noxious red syrup whose name I now cannot recall, but the fumes of which stung the skin and eyes at fifty yards and, when inhaled too heavily, had me thinking that I had cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem once more. There was the odd purple flying lobster to swat away as well.

  After five days, it was time to be off. As I wandered down the long shore to the Dunsters that morning, I pondered the good fortune that had driven me ashore at just this spot at just such a time. Are there many cottages along that stretch of the North Kent coast where boat-building is provided at the drop of a hat, accompanied, what is more, by five days of warmth and hospitality and good humour? I am fortunate enough to be accustomed to kindness in others, but this latest display had left even me bewildered. Was I suff ering from amnesia? Was I actually a member of the Dunster family who had suff ered a blow on the head and forgotten who he was? Would I suddenly come round, triggered by the fortieth slice of date-and-walnut loaf in five days, look about me and cry, ‘Mother?Father? What has happened? Where have I been? And whose is that ridiculous dinghy?’ and then trot upstairs to my old bedroom a
nd start to piece together my old life as a native of Whitstable? There seemed no other likely solution as I humped my bags along the shingle to Seasalter for the last time.

  The wind was perfect. It was setting due west, just right to take me along the coast to Margate, and beyond that to the North Foreland Light and the heel of England. There the coast turned sharply southwards towards Ramsgate and Dover, and I could happily reach down that section, sailing across the wind which would in all likelihood be diminished by the bulk of high land blocking it from the west. Such was the theory.

  I had said my farewells to Peter and the rest of the family the evening before, so it was just Daphne and me who carried Jack de Crow down to the sea’s edge. There Daphne presented me with a new bailer, something I had forgotten to obtain, gave me a last big hug and a stern admonition to be careful and to write when I reached France, and then steadied the dinghy in the waves while I climbed aboard.

  Those first few seconds of launching are always a flurry and a fury, especially when there are waves attempting to spew you back onto the shore like a cat rejecting worm tablets. There is the sail to hoist, the rudder-string to release and the centreboard to jam down when one is confident of being out in deep enough water. Then there is the first alarming slop of a wave over the bows, and the sudden awful fear that one is being driven back onto shore again, followed by the hand-over-hand hurry to haul in the mainsheet, already wringing wet and salty. But with that action, the wind takes hold, the little boat spurts forward, meets a wave, rides up and over it, and the tiller thrums once more beneath the hand. Only then do we have the leisure to turn and wave to Daphne on the shore, and we are surprised to see how far we have come already. She is two hundred yards away and diminishing further with every second, her hand upheld in a last heartening wave. Another wave threatens us, and we must turn our attention forwards again, so that is the last we see of her. Five minutes later she has gone inside and the shore is empty.

  But we are on our way again, and the Crow in her new and precious plumage is flying well. With our trap firmly closed, we sail on to Dover and the Channel crossing.

  Dashing to Dover

  ‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied.

  ‘There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

  The further off from England, the nearer is to France – Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.

  Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

  Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?’

  —LEWIS CARROLL, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  I have described at some length the discomfort and weariness of beating headlong into a brisk wind at sea – the strain of hauling on sodden ropes, the six-times-a-minute dousing with a pailful of cold salt water, the difficulties in hauling the boat about at each tack. But give me a choice between all that and the sailor’s dream of a following wind and I will take the beating every time. Running downwind that day was utterly terrifying.

  For most of the time I was surfing down each wave into a green-grey valley of water, the blunt bow, never designed for these speeds, sending two great fans of spray up on either side like egret’s wings. So highly powered was the boat with the sail out wide that the dinghy constantly threatened to nosedive into the waves and send the whole contraption somersaulting forward like a cyclist who has incautiously applied the front brakes too savagely on a steep descent. At times the prow did dip under, and the sea would sluice over the foredeck in a shining torrent, filling the dinghy with another few gallons of Channel water. What is more, with the wind off to one side, one can always balance the boat by leaning out into the wind on the opposite side of the sail. But here, with the wind directly aft, the whole boat rocked and swayed alarmingly with every swell and I was forced to sit crouched on my haunches in the middle of the dinghy, leaning from side to side to counteract each new wallow. An added danger was that of gybing, when the wind catches behind the sail and slams it across to the other side with murderous force. Had this happened, I could not have escaped capsizing and breaking the mast at the very least.

  Lastly, there is the sheer speed of travel. I was planing most of the time, a phenomenon usually associated with more hydrodynamic boats than a Mirror, skidding wildly down the face of each tremendous wave and setting every fibre of the old wooden hull straining and humming and vibrating until I thought she would disintegrate beneath me. All in all, the experience was rather like surfing on an elderly cello.

  One thing can be said for that leg of the voyage. I covered the miles with a rapidity I had not yet experienced. Whitstable vanished astern, Herne Bay came and went, and then the North Foreland cliffs. This is the Heel of England, the point beyond which you cannot even pretend that you are still in the Thames Estuary. You are now in the Channel. You are now officially at sea.

  All morning I had been praying hard for a chance to stop that precarious, headlong rush downwind, sometimes as many as three prayers a second, and as I rounded the Foreland, my prayers were answered. The wind changed in several ways: firstly, it doubled in speed and strength, and secondly, it now blew straight from the south, straight on the nose, and I was back to tacking. Two minutes later I was thinking back with tearful nostalgia to all that glorious surfing downwind and wondering how I could ever have thought that tacking was preferable.

  But I have written enough about the discomforts of marine sailing in a boat built for the quiet inland waters of lake and mere. Let me record here that through all the drenchings, the haulings, the salt-slap-batterings of wave on bow, there was a great exhilaration, almost a lunatic hilarity, in my progress. There was an almost parental pride in the way that the rigging, as old-fashioned and Heath Robinson-ish as those little model boats I once made out of corks and matchsticks, was standing up to the strain and buff et of the winds: not least those bits of rigging I had had to glue and screw and bind myself with whatever had been handy at the time. For a thing of shreds and patches, she was doing well.

  The Heel of England

  So down that coast I tacked, at times drawing in close under the red cliffs where the wind lessened, and I glided between mats of slippery kelp before being forced by the black seething reefs to tack and turn out to sea once more. Then the wind would strengthen again, and the waves roll higher, and I would find myself in the dreadful quandary of fearing to tack, but knowing that as we drew further from the shore, the seas would grow fiercer and the winds gustier with every minute that passed. Then there would come the moment of courage, the thin cry of ‘Ready to go about?’ to my phantom crew, their white-faced nod of approval, and the pushing of the tiller to send us around. ‘Ready about!’ I would cry. The waves would heave, the sail clap like thunder, the poor dinghy would pitch and toss like a rearing pony, and then we’d be round once more, running for the shore and wondering if it was worthwhile bailing the boat yet again.

  At about six in the evening I tacked in behind the huge pier of Ramsgate Harbour, right under the bows of a beautiful old Dutch sailing-schooner called the Noordenlicht – timber, two-masted and with tan sails – which had kindly stopped to let me go first. Small wonder that havens and harbours are used so often in hymns and religious imagery: the still beauty of calm and windless waters behind a breakwater, the reassuring elegance and symbolism of a lighthouse, the security of tying up to a pontoon with shaking fin-gers and knowing that soon they will be shaking no more, that somewhere beyond the final stripping off of sodden clothes a hot bath is waiting – these are surely foretastes of Heaven.

  The local branch of Heaven in Ramsgate is known as the Royal Temple Yacht Club. It sits perched halfway up the cliffs above the harbour, a huge redbrick Victorian edifice. Behind its doors I found an enormous and elegant saloon with deep leather armchairs, old marine oil-paintings of ships and seascapes, a gigantic trophy cabinet blazing with silver cups and pewter platters and mahogany shields, newspapers to read at one�
�s elbow – and a bar. This bar was attended by a young man who had spent most of a very quiet afternoon watching in fascinated horror from his lofty vantage point my slow zigzag progress down the coast, his hand hovering over the phone for the Emergency Services every time a larger-than-usual wave obscured me from sight. He admitted to me later that when he finally saw me slip in behind the harbour wall he had poured himself a large vodka and downed it in sheer vicarious relief. This barman then proceeded to introduce me to the members of the club who were now drifting in for a sundowner, and they in turn kept buying me drinks, impressed by what they saw as my intrepid courage, rather than recognising it for what it was: the inability to read a weather forecast properly. I saw no need to disillusion them.

  Later that night in Ramsgate I met the sixteen crew members from the Dutch schooner, which, it transpired, had just arrived from the Azores. I thanked them warmly for their courtesy in having stopped earlier that afternoon at the harbour mouth to let me in first. They informed me a little curtly that they hadn’t stopped to let me through out of courtesy, they had steered to avoid my erratic course and run onto a sandbank, thank you very much. Still, by the end of the evening the skipper was sufficiently thawed to offer to put Jack de Crow and myself aboard the next day and take me across safely to Ostend – he possibly saw this as one way to remove a shipping hazard from the Channel, the major ports of Europe and from beneath the bows of his fellow skippers.

  Here was a quandary. The offer was certainly a good one, and seemed to be a gift on a plate, the hand of the gods again. The offer, though fuelled by an evening of beer and good company, appeared genuine – and what an opportunity to see the graceful Noordenlicht up close! To be sure, I would find myself in Ostend rather than Calais, but my map showed that here too there were canal entrances whereby I might enter the waterways system of Europe. How about it? The Channel crossing made easy? Nay, the Channel crossing made possible?