by Julia Jones
Hoi Fung left then.
“Time you went home as well,” one of the boatmen said to the two young girls. But they sat there transfixed, watching the violence as if it was reality TV.
Donny could hear the police sirens from Vexilla. He already had her tarpaulin off and warps ready to slip.
There was a blue light flashing outside the Buccaneers’ Arms. These were regular police with legal power to enter and search. A runaway chef with a stash of cash wouldn’t want to be picked up by them.
“Passengers for you, Sinbad.”
Quiet voices in the darkness and a large figure climbing awkwardly into the dinghy. No kitchen knives now. Both hands needed to grip the gunwale and steady himself against the damp pontoon. Great Aunt Ellen was beside him.
“I’m shipping with you too. The Reverend’s well away. No sense me waiting there to be bothered for a witness statement. Set to your oars, I’ll cast off.”
There were three vertical red lights at the river exit.
This meant stop. All vessels. There was a boom across the end of the New Cut to reduce the flow of the tide after periods of heavy rainfall and it had just been raised from the river-bed.
Was this bad luck or had someone guessed they were there?
“Her centre-plate’s up isn’t it?”
It was.
Gold Dragon spoke rapidly in Cantonese and the chef turned to lift the rudder. At that moment Donny felt Vexilla slide to a halt, caught by something underneath.
There was a police car by the boatyard now. He could hear footsteps along the pontoon: questions being asked, sleepers woken.
Gold Dragon, as the lightest, had been sitting in the bows. She grabbed one of his oars and began prodding one-handed down into the water. There was relief in her voice when she spoke next in both languages. The chef scrambled forward lightening the stern. She passed him the oar.
“Look sharp, both of you, reach back and shove her off, hard. Last time I was stuck like this I was on the back of a whale in the middle of the Indian Ocean!”
As Vexilla slipped smoothly over the barrier, Donny realised how much his great-aunt was enjoying herself. She’d even persuaded cautious Edward to meet Hoi Fung somewhere beyond the sewage treatment works and whisk the chef and his cash discreetly back to Lowestoft.
Some people never grew up.
25 March 2007
They scattered Oboe’s ashes early on a March morning – after Science had taken the bits it wanted. The date was a few days after the equinox but as close as could be managed considering tides and work and the children still needing to get to school.
The wind was from the north-east, keen and cold, building up a long slow swell across the expanse of the North Sea. It was a melancholy wind. It reminded Donny of the night they’d stood beside the Euroscope, looking out across the globe, feeling its vastness and its grief.
The little fleet had found shelter behind a curving shingle bank topped with pines. When the mourners looked up from the decks of their ships, they could glimpse the minarets of Bawdsey Manor – the house where two people had clung together in the darkness as a flying bomb passed by.
Then had missed one other for the rest of their lives.
Edward had driven over from Cambridge a few days previously; bringing the ashes in a box that he said had once housed his old friend’s first telescope. He said it was up to Ellen whether she threw the box in or kept it: he personally didn’t want it back. He didn’t want to come with them either. Boats always made him feel sick.
At the first hint of dawn, the ships put out to sea. Even without Edward there were fourteen people on board the two yachts. Gerald and Rev. Wendy had joined the Ribieros on board the repaired, re-launched Snow Goose while Lottie Livesey, her children and step-children were all crammed into Strong Winds’ welcoming saloon. Lively Lady was up in davits: Vexilla was being towed empty behind Snow Goose.
The River Deben entrance was unlit and potentially dangerous. Gales and strong tides throughout the winter always caused the shingle banks to shift unpredictably and this year was no exception. Joshua Ribiero and Polly Lee had taken careful bearings as they’d entered the river on the previous afternoon and Joshua had used his GPS for position fixing. Now both skippers reversed their routes with only the faintest glimmerings of morning light relieving the darkness of sky and sea.
This Sunday morning was the first day of British Summer Time. The early hour seemed even earlier as the two yachts motored slowly towards their seamark. Eirene’s swallow flag was flying at half-mast on Strong Winds. Polly Lee’s gold dragon was at half-mast too.
They’d agreed to open the box two cables beyond the Woodbridge Haven buoy. When the first light of the rising sun touched the far side of the red and white painted safe water mark, Anna and Ellen would let the ashes go.
Donny looked up at two dipped flags fluttering against the gloomy sky. If only Anna’s Internet searches had located Oboe a few weeks sooner, the two old friends who should have been lovers could have been reunited one last time.
But they hadn’t. There had been no happy ending.
The wind came moaning through the rigging like an Ojibway lamentation. Wahonowin, wahonowin!
It hit them with its full force as they swung east towards the bar buoy. The channel was at its shallowest here and the seabed was uneven. Unexpected waves reared up and rushed past, hump-backed assassins clutching cloaks to conceal their guilty heads.
Two cables beyond the Woodbridge Haven buoy the yachts moved close together and both engines were reduced to minimum revs. Donny’s job was to keep the junk steadily head- to-wind as they waited for that first ray of sun.
The moment came. Anna and Great Aunt Ellen opened the box, held it over Strong Winds’ high stern and shook its contents out. Some of the gritty ash inside fell straight into the water, the finer particles were lifted up onto the wind and invisibly dispersed.
Flags were dipped low then raised to half-mast again. Rev. Wendy probably said a prayer. Donny blinked hard and looked away.
That was it.
Callum Reif, who he’d never met, was gone. Like Granny and her brothers; Eirene and Henry, Anna’s father and Luke and Liam’s mum.
Gone in a blur of dust and never coming back.
“Oh my darlings,” he heard Lottie say, “I’ve made such terrible mistakes.”
After a few moments’ stillness people began to move around their boats. Xanthe and Maggi took charge of Vexilla and sails were hoisted on all three vessels. One after another they swung south-west to begin their journey back to Harwich.
The sisters were first away, red tasselled caps streaming in the wind, while Joshua and June struggled to persuade their nervous passengers to help them set two jibs and the mizzen in addition to Snow Goose’s heavy gaff mainsail. Soon the yacht was in pursuit of the open boat and Strong Winds’ three broad-battened sails were straining to keep her in touch. Donny felt the junk pull and plunge as she settled onto her new course. Steadily the distances began to close.
It was so good to be alive and sailing! Donny hugged his mum and beamed at Gold Dragon. Her leathery face beamed back at him. “I think we can let her have another few inches on the mainsheet,” was all she actually said.
Vexilla reached Harwich Harbour first but only just. She had taken an audacious inshore route where the larger boats could not follow. Then Snow Goose changed tack and went close-hauled up the Orwell back to her berth below the Yacht Club. Donny watched her heeling like a racing yacht and wondered what on earth his former foster-carers were making of this experience.
Strong Winds headed westwards up the Stour.
They had passed the Shotley Spit buoy and were approaching the fake Hispaniola when Skye produced another flag. It wasn’t one that you would find in any Nautical Almanac or Register of Ships and Shipping; nor within the pages of a classic children
’s adventure story. Not even on the Internet.
Over the past few months, while everyone had been waiting and planning for Lottie’s return, Skye had collected all the fragments of the Allies’ dragon flag and re-woven them into a shimmering rectangle of black and gold. She had feather-stitched each frayed edge with embroidery silk and pressed them smooth. Then she’d wired her new standard to a stout bamboo pole.
Skye didn’t run her flag up the mast as her mother Eirene or anyone else would have done: she took the pole in both hands and waved it from side to side in great sweeping arcs so the black and gold silk rippled like a triumphal banner.
Luke and Liam left Lottie and came scrambling over. “Ha, ha, ha!” they shouted in defiance of everything gloomy and cruel. “HA, HA, HA!”
Anna started shouting too: so did Lottie, bouncing Vicky on her lap. Donny ran to the other two sets of signal halliards and raised the dipped flags back to the mastheads.
The sun was up; the sky was clear and the wind fresh. It was a beautiful spring day.
They were together. They were happy.
After a few moments Donny grabbed his mother’s arm and made her stop her flag-waving and look upwards.
There, sharp against the bright sky, were the first two swallows of summer.
From the Ship’s Log
The first draft of this story was written during the winter of 2006–2007 when Peter Duck was spending the winter in Shotley Marina. Peter Duck is a wooden ketch who I have known since I was three years old. She was built for Arthur Ransome at Pin Mill on the River Orwell and her logbooks stretch back to 1947. Looking at my entries for the mid-winter of 2006-2007 I see that the weather was just as wet and windy as my story says it was. There was certainly a day when we gave up an attempt to beat up the River Stour against wind and tide because the waves were ‘like walls’. Our return journey to the River Deben in late March 2007, coming in over the shingle bar with a strong North-Easterly behind us and the dinghy threatening to leap into the cockpit, was a piece of research I’m certainly not keen to repeat in a hurry.
Grumbles aside, I enjoyed Peter Duck’s months in Shotley Marina. One of the unexpected pleasures was the presence of the dancer Miranda Tufnell, who was living a few miles further up the Orwell. Miranda has a deep feeling for non-verbal communication and for the importance of dreams in other cultures. She introduced me to books by Hugh Brody and Louise Erdrich which helped me to understand more about the character of Skye.
Skye’s parents, Eirene and Henry, sailed westwards whereas Great Aunt Ellen has returned from the East. In the winter of 2006-2007 I watched Nick Broomfield’s brilliant and disturbing film Ghosts, based on investigative research by Chinese journalist Hsiang-Hung Pai. Ghosts dramatises the journey of one young mother from Fujian Province in China to England. She came seeking work to support her child and elderly parents but never saw any of them again as she was drowned collecting cockles in Morecambe Bay. Her family was left to pay her debt to the smugglers and money-lenders.
Shotley is not far from Ipswich. During the winter of 2006 the bodies of five women were discovered in some of the beautiful areas around the town. They had been murdered and although I have known Ipswich since I was a child, I was as shocked as Rev. Wendy to discover that the town had a red light district. I gave myself the shivers wondering where the next body would be found or whether the murderer might be hiding in one of the many deserted, winter-covered boats.
Grim things happen in books and life but as far as I’m concerned they are always outweighed by the goodness, kindness and generosity of other people. Where to start when saying thank-you? I could start at the beginning by thanking my father and mother for buying Peter Duck so long ago and giving my two brothers and myself such a wonderful introduction to sailing. I could thank the Palmer family – (Edith) Ann, Greg and Ned – for being adventurous owners of Peter Duck from 1987-1999 and for letting me use their names in my stories. Ann’s sister Eirene lent me her name too – it means ‘peace’.
I must certainly thank my beloved partner, Francis, for changing my life by buying Peter Duck back into our family and then I thank my brother Ned, my niece Ruthie and my youngest children Bertie and Archie for making summer sailing such fun and for checking out so many of the Strong Winds trilogy’s locations. (I freely admit to being very much less poised than Great Aunt Ellen when we were bumping up and down outside Lowestoft harbour entrance with all sails flapping and milk spilling in the cockpit.) I had better add that Erewhon Parva vicarage, Gallister High, the Floating Lotus and the Oriental Xpress are entirely fictional. As are all my characters – though not necessarily all of the boats.
Thanks to the people who have been generous with their special knowledge. Alec Reeve was the true inventor of OBOE. He was a brilliant and unusual personality whom I read about first in Andrew Wheen’s book From Dot-Dash to Dot-Com. My friend Heidi shared experiences that she’d rather not have endured (as did many of the families I met when I worked for the Workers’ Educational Association). Bertie Wheen did the binary conversion. Karen Lee named the Cantonese sea-cook. Peter Clay sent photographs of his yawl, Nirvana. Peter Dowden saved the book from two almighty howlers. Peter Willis and Andrew Craig-Bennett have been knowledgeable friends to me, my boat and my books throughout. I am particularly grateful to Christina Hardyment and the Executors of the Arthur Ransome Literary Estate for giving me permission to use the quotation from Winter Holiday in chapter ten. (And to AR for writing such an excellent book. If you like codes and communication systems, Winter Holiday is full of them.)
Working with Claudia Myatt has been a delight – especially when we were able to sit in the cockpit and discuss cover design while her son, James Crickmere, took Peter Duck storming out to sea. I continue to miss designer Roger Davies, who died shortly before the publication of The Salt-Stained Book, but working with Megan Trudell has been a new pleasure. Thanks to David Smith for his perceptive, professional editorial input and Francis Wheen, Frank Thorogood, Peter and Eleanor Dowden, Claudia Myatt, Megan Trudell and Ruth Elias Jones for dollops of the kitchen-table variety. Thanks also to Associated British Ports, Matti Gardner, Nicci Gerrard, Diana Heffer, Janine Johnston, Jan Needle, John Ravenscroft, Griff Rhys Jones, John Skermer, Gabrielle Wallington, Waveney District Council and all of the team at Signature Books for advice, help and kindness beyond the call of duty.
I am grateful, above all, to the readers who have ventured this far. I hope we’ll meet again in Ghosting Home.
Julia Jones, Essex, 2011
