One morning we awoke on the Golden Sunset, somewhat hung over, to find ourselves in motion. Not only was my head thumping but my stomach was lurching too. As I came to, I realised that the tourist boat captain was at the wheel. A huge oil tanker had arrived and there hadn’t been enough room for it to get into the harbour, so he’d simply jumped aboard and moved the boat for us without us even being aware of it.
‘Gracias!’ I called from my quarters.
‘De nada!’ he replied as he skipped off back to his pleasure boat.
The Captain and I kept ourselves afloat financially in the Med by chartering the boat for one-, two- or three-day trips. There were lots of beautiful places, including stunning, unspoiled beaches, within easy reach. Our service was, however, a little erratic. We once entertained a wedding party for a whole week: a wealthy couple from Milan, along with two of their friends, who had decided to do something a little different for their honeymoon. They found themselves having to sleep in bunk beds because the Captain refused to relinquish his cabin. They also did all the cooking, as they didn’t consider mine to be up to Italian standards, and we had wonderful pasta every day. Strangely, they seemed to enjoy their cruise.
Not everyone did. We once took a family of Spanish holidaymakers out for a day, telling them they didn’t really need to wear their lifejackets on this trip. The Captain, after one too many beers, grazed the hull on some rocks—which did make rather an alarming noise—and the kids began to cry while the parents rapidly made a beeline for the jackets. We returned to the harbour where, having had a couple of drinks myself by this time, I took the mooring lines, leaped from the bows and managed to miss the quay, slipping down the gap and disappearing from view. Our daytrippers literally ran off the boat screaming, the children barrelling down the quay as fast as their little legs would carry them, scarcely pausing to tear off the bright orange lifejackets and fling them back at us. The parents were right behind them, throwing us the money for the charter fee as they made a desperate escape.
I realised that making these short excursions around the Med for a day or so at a time and hanging around in port in between was not good for the Captain. It was clear he had a weakness for alcohol—though I can’t pretend that came as much of a surprise to me after the number of Glenmorangies I’d seen him put away the evening we’d first met—and this way of life exacerbated matters. A long sea voyage was the one thing that always sorted him out. ‘I’ve got to screw the nut’ was his way of telling me he needed to go to sea for a while and dry out.
I was gregarious and loved meeting new people and socialising in the local bars where, by now, I could chat away in Spanish. Although the Captain was fluent in Norwegian he struggled to learn any Spanish, so he preferred the ex-pat bars, where he would find new audiences for his tales of the Changi Sailing Club, which I’d heard over and over again. He was game enough, but at heart he was a loner, if a sociable one. I was perfectly content with my own company but for me a big part of the appeal of being at sea was the excitement of coming into port at a new, exotic place or returning to a favourite destination. The Captain was only ever really happy under sail.
Each morning was starting to feel like the dawn of another boring day in paradise. I’d always thought being aboard the boat would be a chance to do more writing but what with the daily chores, maintenance and all the partying ashore, there never seemed to be the time. I told the Captain I was ready for something different and suggested that maybe we really should be thinking now about the big voyage that he had always planned. Either that, or we could stay in the Med and charter the boat on a more businesslike footing—advertising with the proper chandlery companies, going to sea for longer, two weeks at a time, maybe getting a licence so we could do charter work in Italy, where they were more up on all the regulations. I reminded him that he was steadily going through his funds and they weren’t being replenished. The Captain was hopeless with money and put everything he had into the boat. I was worried that if it were to need some enormous repair or, worse, sink, he would be stuffed.
Someone offered us a charter that would have given his finances a big boost. All we were asked to do to secure the job was smarten up the boat, as it looked a bit neglected. While we were in Mallorca I got the Captain to buy a job lot of deck paint and then I set to work. After painting the decks, I started on the carriage roof and completed it all while the Captain sat in the bar for two days. I was stiff from head to foot and my back was black from the sun. But then I noticed that the paint was blistering. What was going on? Slowly it dawned on me that whatever it was he had bought, it was certainly not pukka deck paint. I was so exasperated I just threw down my brush, jumped into the water and swam some distance to a beach. I went to stay with some friends ashore and didn’t come back for several days.
When I did return we made up and anchored in an idyllic bay. I happened to wake early and was sure I could hear running water. I got up and investigated. Opening the door to the engine room, I found water well above the level of the duckboards. The Captain had forgotten to screw up the valve in the loo and sea water was coming into the boat. If it had gone on any longer we would have sunk.
I had always been a little in awe of the Captain’s fearlessness and sailing prowess but a few silly mistakes like these made me wonder whether he was beginning to lose the plot, and this started to chip away at the great respect I had for him. I knew he liked the idea of being able to up anchor and leave everything behind him. But it meant that whenever he blotted his copy-book—made some kind of error, or had too much to drink somewhere—he could simply sail away, and as a result he never learned from his mistakes. He just went somewhere else and repeated them. While I was a Londoner and still had a home and friends in the capital, he was a wandering Scotsman who had never belonged in any big city. I realised that he really was the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the oceans forever.
At sea in the Balearics we encountered sudden bad weather. Trying to run from it, we headed straight into another weather system bringing with it high winds, gigantic waves and astonishing sheet lightning. We had to stick it out: there was nowhere else to run. The sails were down and we were at the mercy of the elements.
The northerly wind known as the tramontana was howling its way across the mountains of the islands. A relative of the French mistral, the tramontana can blow for over a week and is said to influence the psyche. There are stories of how it has driven people and animals alike to commit suicide. A character in a Victor Hugo play declares: ‘Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne me rendra fou’—‘the wind that comes across the mountain will drive me mad’—and the Garcia Marquez story ‘Tramontana’ also deals with a young boy marked by the mysterious effects of this wind.
I had reached the end of my tether after only a few hours. The Captain was on deck, struggling with the helm, when I stumbled my way up to him, screaming at him above the noise of the wind to get me out of this.
I was almost hysterical yet he remained strangely calm.
‘Don’t you think I would if I could?’
I gazed about me at black skies stabbed by forked lightning. It seemed as if we were the only boat at sea and I was seized by a kind of helplessness I hadn’t felt for a very long time. For several more hours there was nothing I could do but cling to the hope that we would ride out the storm until at last, by some miracle, the Captain was steering us out of the wind and into safety.
The following morning, we were anchored in a sheltered bay when we saw another boat limping in towards us. Its prow was shattered and the safety rail had gone. When it drew in alongside us we took on board a young couple and their baby. They were exhausted and shivering with shock. As I made them something to eat they marvelled over how we had escaped the storm unscathed. We insisted they spend the night in the dry cabin of the Golden Sunset. As they slept I asked the Captain, ‘How could you not be scared of the storm?’
He tells me the truth now, with no hint of bravado. ‘I was as terrified as you.�
�� He looks at me and then says something I will always remember. ‘After a while, you get tired of being scared.’
Perhaps my friends were right and I was running away from reality, seeking a cure for my heartache in far-flung ports. When I did manage to write, it was helping me to make sense of things. I now knew that wherever I went, I brought all my emotional baggage with me. Soon I came to realise that I wasn’t travelling but wandering.
Chapter Twelve
A New Tack
On 3 June 1988, I drank a toast to Sarah Louise and wished her all the happiness in the world as she embarked on her adult life. It was eighteen years to the day since I had given birth at the Salvation Army Mothers’ Hospital in Hackney. If my daughter had been told she was adopted she would almost certainly know that she now had a right to her original birth certificate. Sitting in the Mediterranean sunshine, I was taken back to another hot afternoon, to a registrar visiting a hospital ward, Martin and I deciding on a name for our baby and then adding our own. Would Sarah Louise ever read that indelible record?
Would she ever seek us out? Or would I live all my days waiting for her, as I had waited for a photograph that never arrived?
I had always known that my daughter was out there somewhere, in the background, but the thought that she might appear in my life at any moment from now on made me conscious that I needed to take stock. I was aware that I’d never really stretched myself careerwise but, having spent so long bobbing around on a boat, I was also beginning to feel under-used, as though I was wasting any small talent I might have. If I needed an example of what might happen if I didn’t get my act together, I had one right in front of me: the Captain was now almost fifty and still had no real plans to do anything with his life but sail. I had a wider sense, too, that the times were moving on without me and saw evidence of that when I went back to England and in the Brits who arrived on the islands clutching Filofaxes and staggering under the weight of the early portable phones. I felt that if I stayed on that boat much longer there would be no going back to London.
Not long after raising my glass to Sarah Louise, I met another Julie, known as Jools, an English girl in her late twenties who was holidaying alone in Menorca. She lived in London and it transpired that we had a mutual friend in Richard, who had first suggested that the Captain and I brought the boat to Ciudadella. Richard was also a friend of the owner of the countryside villa where she was staying. Small world. Jools and I took off to a pizzeria one evening and got on like a house on fire.
The waiter brought our pizzas and placed them before us with a flourish, smiling, ‘Julie la rubia…y Julie la negra.’ For fair Julie and dark Julie. Over our meal I found myself confiding to Jools that if I didn’t take on a new challenge soon I’d probably go mad, like a dog left out too long in the sun. She told me about her career as a commercials producer and I mentioned that I’d worked in radio drama before taking to the seas. Then, out of the blue, she offered me a job.
Jools suggested I might just fit into a new sideline to her business. She and her two partners had recently set up a publishing venture, a directory of services and personnel for the commercials industry, and they needed someone sparky and outgoing to sell advertising space in it. Work would start on the directory in September and it would be off to press by the following May, which would leave me free to spend the summer months on the boat. What did I think?
Her timing couldn’t have been better. It was the ideal solution.
The Captain was less enamoured of the idea. He took the news despondently, finding it hard to understand why anyone would want to go back and live in London. But we knew that coming with me was never going to be an option for him, and he accepted that remaining aboard the Golden Sunset wasn’t working for me. At Mahón airport we bade each other a tearful farewell, until the next voyage, and I moved back into my room at the Westy in Notting Hill.
It was something of a culture shock. Although I had been returning to London every so often, I hadn’t adjusted to the changing times on a day-to-day basis. Since all my clothes dated back to 1984 or 1985, I looked, and felt, like a recently released prisoner. Having always been a hippy at heart, I found I’d been parachuted into the yuppy era.
I’d spent my youth rejecting money-based values, aware that there had always been long-haired entrepreneurs around masquerading as hippy types—Richard Branson, for example. We had a derogatory word to describe them: breadheads. But suddenly it was OK to be a breadhead. Thatcherism was at its height and ‘Greed is good’, the motto of the ruthless Gordon Gekko in the Oscar-winning film Wall Street, released the previous year, seemed to have taken root in the national consciousness. I remembered the warning of another character in that movie, ‘Good things take time’, but no one wanted to hear that. It was all about the fast buck, cruising in your sleek BMW with the receiver of your car phone clamped to your ear, champagne flowing in City bars. Power dressing and big hair were the order of the day for the new generation of go-getting young women, who went around with their jacket sleeves rolled up to the elbow, ready for action. And here I was starting work in advertising, one of the industries that most typified these materialistic values.
I hated the trend for conspicuous displays of wealth and the clutter of consumerism. The wretched Filofaxes touted by Jools and her partners in my new office at the top end of Ladbroke Grove were a particular bête noire, to their amusement. As far as I was concerned it was nothing more than a glorified diary, designed to convey the impression that its owner’s life was so frantically busy every detail and appointment had to be catalogued, compartmentalised and at hand every minute of every day. I insisted on a small diary from Woolworth’s.
For the first time in my life, I heard myself sounding reactionary and even a little bitter. When mobile phones became more compact and more widely available, poor, dear Seb, who loved to be in the vanguard of fashion, got an earful.
‘I think I’ll get one of these new mobile phones,’ he mused.
‘Are you joking?’ I snapped. ‘They’re for posers! There’s even a stall down Portobello market selling rubber ones called phoney phones. Save yourself a few quid and buy one of those instead. It’s just a fad. People will get tired of those things soon.’
To this day I don’t have a mobile phone but I’m still waiting for everyone else to get tired of them.
Notting Hill, too, had changed in my absence. The bedsit population and the West Indians were being replaced by yuppies and the area was becoming a magnet for media types. Almost overnight, it seemed, the ironmongery shop vanished, the post office was transformed into a frighteningly expensive florist’s and a Tom Conran deli opened up next door to it. Soon Beach Blanket Babylon would appear on Ledbury Road along with the host of other trendy restaurants springing up on Portobello Road. My Notting Hill friends, mostly hippies who had lived there for years, shook their heads in dismay. ‘I feel like a bison on the North American plains when the settlers came,’ grumbled one girlfriend. ‘About to become extinct.’ The Westy began to seem like the last bastion of a simpler, more bohemian life.
Late on a Saturday night, after a crowd had dropped into the Westy, sunk a few too many drinks and were busy dancing around the sitting room with Seb’s plastic fruit on their heads like deranged Carmen Mirandas, he would whisper to me, ‘What would we do if your daughter knocked on the door now?’ I would laugh, but comments like that reinforced the sense I had that this freewheeling lifestyle—no proper home, no rent, no responsibilities—was hardly appropriate to my age, not to mention what a daughter might expect of her long-lost birth mother.
Still, I was heading in the right direction by having a proper job, and for once in my life I was being well paid. Jools and her partners, Debbie and Tina, were all younger than me by four or five years. Jools was a tomboy, a witty practical joker though always efficient when it came to work. Tina was stylish, beautiful and had a steely ambition; Debbie an eccentric bon viveur with a penchant for collecting lame ducks. They were all genero
us to a fault and they all worked hard and played hard. At six o’clock every evening they took turns to strike a metal radiator—bong!—to signal that it was time for our first vodka and tonic of the evening. There was always more than one.
All commercials producers themselves, they had spotted an information gap in their own market and had filled it with their directory, which was called The Knowledge. For £50 a copy, they offered listings of the kinds of contacts to be found in their Filofaxes. I was to sell advertising space in the new edition to the companies and crew who were included in the directory—anything from a little box ad at £200 to a front cover at £2,000.
The girls decided I needed transport and bought me a car, a green second-hand Renault 5 with matching scatter cushions on the back seat. The only hitch was I had never got round to learning to drive. I had to do so now. I was thirty-five years old and my instructor, Andy, wondered why I hadn’t had lessons as a teenager. I told him I’d had other things on my mind. As we spent morning after morning kangarooing up and down Kensington High Street, I couldn’t help wondering whether Sarah Louise was also struggling to remember ‘Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre’ or making a hash of a three-point turn. Or perhaps she had been given driving lessons the moment she turned seventeen, and was even now whizzing confidently past me to wherever she called home.
To Andy’s astonishment, I passed my driving test first time and set off to introduce The Knowledge to anyone in the business who might be interested in advertising in it. I got to meet lots of new people, from studio bosses to location chefs. I loved the social side of my job, and getting to visit professionals on site gave me a good overview of the industry and how its various elements fitted together, but eventually I found I sold more space by just staying in the office and making phone calls. I kept index cards to jog my memory. If someone told me they’d broken their leg skiing, for example, when I rang back in six weeks I would check the card and remember to ask, ‘How’s the leg?’ It wasn’t sales patter, just common courtesy, and besides, I was genuinely interested in the answer. I was making new friends among my customers as well as with my bosses.
More Than Just Coincidence Page 14
