The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  Meanwhile, the wind is growing brisker and the waves bigger, but it is nothing that Jack and I cannot handle. An hour ago we passed a large green buoy and I guessed that it might be one of the ones I had seen earlier on a chart marking the shipping channel. I estimate that soon we should be passing a buoy marking the further side of the three-mile-wide highway and then we can start reasonably looking for signs of Calais.

  An hour later and I am puzzled by the failure of any buoy to appear. I have just had to dodge yet another tanker, a large rusty freighter with Cyrillic lettering on its hull, close enough to feel the temper of its wash, so am probably still in the main channel. I do not know exactly how fast Jack de Crow travels, but I would estimate about three or four miles per hour in this wind. I have been travelling for five hours now, and I really am expecting to see signs of Europe. It is quite a large place, I believe.

  I see a mile ahead a large buoy and breathe a sigh of relief. I am more than halfway across. Beyond and to the right of it, I can also see yet another large ship moving northwards. Something strikes me as odd about the ship’s motion – it would almost appear to be sailing backwards, blunt end first as it drifts along the far horizon past the buoy in the foreground. And then, like Tweety-Bird in the cartoon, I find myself exclaiming out loud, ‘It is! It is! It is moving stern-first, naughty puddy-tat!’ and wonder at the sheer irresponsibility of these Russian freighters that not only steer outside the main shipping channel, but also try clever stunts like sailing backwards, all tanked up on vodka, no doubt, tut, tut.

  It is only when I have left the buoy behind me and am approaching the backwards freighter that I discover another anomaly. It has a large anchor chain sloping at an angle into the sea. It is, in fact, at rest. As was the buoy, presumably. Urr …? Brain cogs whirr slowly. Synapses feebly kick-start into life. Dimly remembered trigonometry lessons float out of the past to prompt me. If a sailing boat passes a buoy at three knots and the angle between the buoy, the boat and an anchored vessel has increased by ten degrees in four minutes, how fast is the tide carrying the boat?

  Tide? Again? Not out here, surely. But a few minutes later I have worked it out. There is indeed a tide, a current carrying me northward almost as fast as I can sail east-south-eastward. Already the buoy that I have left a mile behind me is in fact nearly a mile south of me as well. Despite all my care with the compass and keeping angled consistently into the wind and the waves, nothing that I have done has compensated for the strong current carrying me all this time up the Channel. That is why it has taken me so long to cross the main channel, why ships have sailed backwards against buoys in the foreground, and why – mercifully, I now realise – I have not been mown down by every Sea Cat and Cross-Channel Ferry out of Dover that day. They have been plying their direct route straight across between Dover and Calais, unhindered by this petty piece of matchwood that has pursued its own diagonal course out of harm’s way.

  For this unwitting mercy, I am grateful … and alive today … but it still leaves me with the problem of being adrift I know not where in the English Channel and with the hours of daylight shortening. That I have drifted north, I am now sure – but how far? What course must I take to reach Calais? If I turn south, will I be battling with a current too strong to make any headway against? Would it be better, perhaps, to keep struggling eastward in the hope that I will come at least to some land, any land? I try picturing the map in my head, trying to remember what lies north of Calais. Dunkirk? Ostend? Den Haag?

  Norway?

  Resolutely I turn south and hope for the best.

  After only half-an-hour of sailing, steering an uneasy course between due south and south-east, I am in luck. There ahead of me and off to the left is a long dark smudge on the horizon. It is indistinct, but there seem to be several tall chimneys and blocks that could well be factories or the skyscrapers of Calais. (Does Calais have skyscrapers?) I steer towards the long, low mass with a feeling of relief. That could have been a disaster, I tell myself firmly, and it’s only due to your usual good luck that …

  … that …

  ‘Calais’ is near enough for me to see it clearly and has revealed itself as not the gateway to a continent but as yet another tanker, anchored in mid-Channel. It is enormous, about the size of Luxembourg in fact, but it is not land. My heart sinks. How far have I come off course to discover this phantasm? Where now is Europe? Apart from the vast bulk of the ship, the horizon is utterly empty. I might as well be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

  With grim resolution I turn southward once more. The light has begun to take on that faint golden tint of late afternoon, flushing each wave with a gilded crest and making my scarlet sail glow warmly in the levelling rays of strong sunlight. It is a classic light, the sort of light used by Edward Hopper in his Cape Cod seascapes, side-lighting solitary lighthouses and seaside houses of whitewashed weatherboard, or throwing the long violet shadows of abandoned sandcastles across emptying beaches where each breaking comber glows emerald and aquamarine in a caught curl of colour. It is a light that heralds an end-of-the-day happiness, plod-home tiredness, supper-on-the-table contentment, and the coming of the night. Of this last aspect I am acutely conscious.

  Another ten minutes ushers in a new and promising streak of towered grey on the horizon, this time off to the east. Half-an-hour later, this too has resolved itself into the shape of a vast tanker, and I am beginning to despair. The sun is really quite definitely westering, and I am zigzagging around the open sea in a ten-foot dinghy like a blowfly on a windowpane. I have by now lost any real sense of where Europe should be, and I realise that very soon I am going to have to do something absurd. I am going to have to approach one of these tankers – there are now two or three anchored around me – sail my tiny vessel up to the beetling iron cliff of its hull (somehow avoiding being dashed to pieces by the swell of waves on steel) and knock on the side to try to attract the attention of someone aboard. I will probably have to knock quite hard. What I will do once I have their attention, I am not quite sure. They will, after all, be some sixty feet above me and possibly Russian. Will they understand me when I call up in a tremulous voice, ‘Er … excuse me. Sorry to bother you, but could you tell me the way to Calais? ’

  I have just made up my mind that this, unlikely though it seems, is my best option, and am carefully choosing the friendliest-looking tanker, when I change my plan. For at this moment a flock of seagulls comes flying by. They are the first birds I have seen all day, and even in my present circumstances I am carried away by how lovely they are, crisp and clean-lined and keen-eyed. And more to the point, these gulls look purposeful. They are flying in a neat flock and heading due south, even a little westward, and have about them the air of gulls who, after a hard day’s fishing, are heading home for a quiet beer and a night in front of the telly. They also look distinctly French to me – something about the beaks, perhaps, or the careless tilt of their wings. In fact, I am sure of it. They are Calais gulls, and they are going home right now. Without a single sensible thought in my head, I turn my back on the tankers and follow the seagulls across the empty waves.

  And ten minutes later, Calais, unmistakable Calais, heaves into view on the southern horizon.

  That last run is splendid. The wind is now behind me, but not so much as to be precarious. The Edward Hopper light I can now enjoy to the full, knowing that within the hour I will be safely in harbour. Off to my left are what seem to be long dunes and empty stretches of shore, and for a moment I am tempted to abandon the idea of Calais Harbour and run ashore on the wide sandy beaches re-enacting my own private Dunkirk, but common sense and a keen appetite for beer and omelette prevail, and I keep my course.

  Just as I round the great northern wall of the harbour, precisely the same thing happens to me as happened when I tried to enter Dover. A monstrous Cross-Channel Ferry is emerging at full speed from the harbour just as another ferry is arriving. For one awful moment I am caught like a tiny cork between the two steel chasm-w
alls of either ship. There is barely twenty feet on either side, and one or the other must have seen me, because there comes a booming foghorn blast from on high that threatens to overwhelm me with its sheer volume. But the moment passes and, once the wake has stopped throwing me carelessly about, I lower sail and row hard for the far pier. A few minutes later, I have slipped into a smaller inner harbour and tied up to the foot of a black and barnacle-covered ladder. The tide is ebbing, so I make sure that Jack is tethered on a long painter and then climb wearily up to the pier top. It is six o’clock, I have been sailing for eight hours, and I have made it. I am in France.

  Despite my overwhelming sense of relief and achievement, many things remained to be done. I went first to find some accommodation, carrying only my small day sack and leaving the rest of my gear in the dinghy, but when I returned an hour later to fetch it all – fresh clothes, toiletries, dry shoes and so on – I found that the ebbing tide had deposited Jack onto the harbour bed, and worse, onto two sharp lumps of rubble lying at the foot of the wall. There didn’t appear to be any damage yet – she had settled gently enough – but I also found when I clambered down the slimy ladder that this ended four feet or so above where Jack now lay. Ordinarily this was no great distance to jump, but lying as she was, I knew that any attempt to climb aboard would surely impale the dinghy’s keel on those pointy rocks. My dreams of a hot shower followed by climbing into clean, dry clothes were on hold until the tide floated Jack off the harbour bottom again. A quick calculation told me that this would not be until about midnight.

  “Er … Is This the Way to Calais?”

  The other problem was that the number I had been given with which to ring the Coastguard was also in the dinghy, and equally unattainable. I had promised to let them know of my safe arrival, and if I were to leave it until midnight, they would no doubt already have had the rescue helicopters out looking for me – or at least had sent out that seven-year-old in her Optimist for a quick look around. In lieu of a better plan, when I rang my long-suff ering sister Maggie to let her know of my safe arrival, I asked if she wouldn’t mind doing me a small favour and phoning the Dover Coastguard to pass on the news. For those of you not fortunate enough to know my sister, you must understand that among her many saintly qualities is a strongly held belief that one should not bother complete strangers with odd messages. For someone of my sister’s shy and retiring disposition, ringing a strange man out of the blue and saying, ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, my brother asked me to tell you that he managed to sail his Mirror dinghy across to Calais safely today, does that make any sense to you, this is the right number, isn’t it?’ is as awesomely embarrassing as most normal people would find a request to walk in on a stranger’s funeral service wearing nothing but a pink feather boa and shouting ‘The Piglets are coming!! The Piglets are coming!!’ during one of the quiet bits.

  Nevertheless, Maggie agreed to do this, as well as ringing various concerned family members around the world. Then she gave me a good ticking off when I told her about the ferries, chuckled gratifyingly about the seagulls, and rang off. I then had nothing else to do but squelch around Calais in soggy shoes, find myself some supper while avoiding mussel-poisoning, and write thirty promised postcards to everybody who had helped me along the way so far.

  One of those postcards would be to the Master-in-Charge of Sailing at Ellesmere College. Readers with long memories may recall a certain conversation on the sunny banks of Whitemere in North Shropshire almost a year before, something involving the phrases ‘borrow a dinghy’ and ‘pick it up from wherever you get it to’ and the possibility of Gloucester, say. I felt that by crossing the Channel, I had somewhat extended the concept of borrowing beyond its normal limits, and now an explanation was due. Consequently, one of the postcards read something like this:

  Dear Phil,

  Note the postmark and the picture on reverse! Arrived safely, both I and Jack de Crow cheerful and intact. Eight hours crossing in good NE wind, clear skies, but rotten navigation. Failure to take northerly current into account nearly had me landing in Denmark. Lost Europe for a while there, but saved by passing gulls.

  Er … about the dinghy? Can we now regard that loan as more like, say … um … a theft? Or will a £200 bribe do it? Please advise.

  Best wishes,

  Sandy & Jack de Crow

  With a cheque dispatched along with the postcard, I knew that my request was more in the nature of a fait accompli, but trusted that Phil would understand and buy the sailing club a new Laser or something else more up-to-date. Meanwhile, the fugitive Jack and I were at liberty to make our way across Europe, our debts settled and our hearts footloose and fancy-free. But for tonight there were another twenty-nine postcards to be getting on with, and that was a lot of writing. It was time to find an all-night laundromat, somewhere to sit and wait for the tide to come back in.

  Dead Dogs and Englishmen

  Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year’s pleasant king;

  Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,

  Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,

  Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

  The palm and may make country houses gay,

  Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,

  And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay,

  Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

  —THOMAS NASH, Spring

  Now there starts a period of travelling that, as I look back upon it, seems out of some enchanted story, some eighteenth-century Arcadian idyll, a heady mixture of Nymphs ’n’ Shepherds and Hey-Nonny-No, so much so that I fear to strain the reader’s credulity. For it was May, the pleasant King of the Year, and I was in Picardy, whose very name conjures up for me – who can say why? – troubadours in patched coats, antique roses and dusty white roads, and the Queen of Flanders’ daughter. And I was in a little boat, rowing by day and sleeping by night under warm stars, and living the life of a Scholar Gypsy.

  It was not entirely a picnic, I must add. There were moments – whole days sometimes – of raw ugliness and back-straining frustration, but transforming memory has leached these things away and left only a sun-gilt tale with the clarity and oddly tilted perspective of a mediaeval illuminated manuscript. How much is it now my duty to record the truth of those next few months, the routes taken, the mileage of the days, the locks ascended, the sights seen? Am I Baedeker or Thomas Cook? What is the reality of that strange voyage, gliding like a gilded barge through the woods and poppied fields of France? That the distance from Cambrai to Douai is twenty-six kilometres? Or that the banks are lined with walnut trees and each one holds an echoing cuckoo among its broad and spicy leaves? I feel I must add to these notes the old maritime warning: Not to be relied upon for navigational purposes.

  The first day out of Calais had me rowing through countryside in a surprisingly short time, out between banks frothing with cow-parsley in the hot May sunshine. Once I was clear of the last houses, a gentle breeze sprang up from behind and I was able to hoist my sail and ripple along sweetly, passing French fishermen, young and old, sitting on the banks dangling their lines in the green waters. French anglers seem to be more genial and complacent than their English counterparts; even when a momentary lapse in concentration sent me straight through a fishing line and had me dragging rod, stand and all into the canal, the owner merely grunted good-humouredly, muttered ‘De rien’ and set about retrieving his tackle. This went a long way to reassuring me of the friendliness of the natives – I had been assured at regular intervals from Shropshire to Kent that it was all very well relying on the goodwill of the English, but that anywhere beyond the Channel I was likely to meet with unabated hostility, surliness and unhealthy amounts of garlic. I was to find over the next few months that this was a pernicious lie, except about the garlic, and that I didn’t mind at all.

  As afternoon drew on to evening I found myself rowing along an empty stretch of pastureland where long rows of Monet poplars,
mauve and smudgy and thin-stemmed, marched away in spindly avenues across the flat fields. I came at dusk to a small hamlet, tied up in a clump of nettles and climbed ashore to find that the nearest café was back in Calais. Just as I was standing there feeling a little cross with France for being so unhelpful, a man pulled up on his motorbike – middle-aged, pleasant-seeming and curious about the presence of Jack. In halting schoolboy French I managed to explain what I was doing and two minutes later found myself sitting on the back of his motorbike, arms wrapped around his chest, tearing along a dirt track beside the canal. Soon we turned off into the courtyard of an airy modern villa, the bike spluttered to a halt, an ear-splitting scream rent the air and a magnificent peacock flapped to perch on a white railing. Alain, for that was the farmer’s name, showed me inside and introduced me to Benedicte, his pretty wife,

  The Canals and Rivers of Northern France

  and their golden-haired three-year-old son, Aurelian. Is it just me, or is that the most beautiful name in the world?

  It had not yet been made clear to me why I was there. My poor level of French comprehension had led me to believe that Alain was taking me to a café where I could get supper. Now he explained that he had brought me home for supper and to stay the night if I wished. Which I did, yes, very much and merci, monsieur et madame. In discussion with Benedicte, I was able to say nothing that involved any more extensive vocabulary than j’aime and beaucoup and bon and a list of simple household goods remembered from Third Form French. At one stage she asked me if I liked ears, which had me floundering until I remembered that oeufs means eggs, not ears. In my relief at comprehension I enthusiastically nodded and gesticulated, admitting that, yes, I adored eggs, I loved eggs, I had une grande passion for eggs – or at least compared to ears, to which I am largely indifferent. This resulted in a supper consisting of no less than five poached eggs for me alone, swimming in butter, lightly peppered and quite the best eggs I have ever tasted. They were all of different shapes and hues, ranging from bright sunny yellow to a bloody orange, and one of them had an alarmingly greenish tinge about the albumen. Hazarding a guess as to the origin of these wonderfully varied eggs, I dredged up some more vocabulary from Par-lez Français! Lesson Three: À la Campagne and asked if these were eggs de canard and eggs d’oie.