Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

  The best days of that time were spent sailing. There is nothing to beat messing about in boats (well, yes: there is writing and making love and travelling and looking at pictures, but there is nothing like it, and it is good). Estuary sailing in a fourteen-foot half-decked cutter of doubtful class but sound performance was what Paul introduced me to, so estuary sailing is the kind I like best. To do more than poke my nose out to sea, while inching along the coast from one river mouth to another, frightens me a little. Sailing on the open sea is surely even better, to those who are accustomed to it, but I remain uneasily aware of how extraordinary it is that so small and frail a man-made contraption as a sailing-boat can survive such gigantic and indifferent opposition. Water I have always loved, but the sea—there is too much of it. Only one thing is more frightening: cloud seen from above, on those hallucinating occasions when it takes the form of landscape. After a flight in such conditions I am haunted by those gullies, those escarpments, those cliff faces and peaks rising out of stretches of eroded desert. I cannot throw off the feeling that I have been watching a real world. The common-sense knowledge that if I were to float down on it by parachute I should go through it is bad enough; but worse is the nightmare image of landing on it, finding that it existed, but on unearthly terms—no water, no warmth, no growth—so that I would be the only living thing, with no prospect but to die slowly as I stumbled antlike through a world that was solid but belonged to an eternally foreign order of being. The sea, too, is a world with laws which do not accommodate human life. That human ingenuity has found ways of using it, even of playing with it, is foolhardiness.

  But an estuary—from the first shift of shingle under rope soles, the first breath of river-mud smell, I was ready to be at home. The sound made by the planks of a jetty underfoot, the strands of seaweed drying on its piles above water level, unfolding beneath it; the glimpses of water between its planks and the feel of rough iron rings to which dinghies are made fast: I know no purer or simpler pleasure than sitting with legs dangling over the edge of a jetty while someone has gone to fetch the new tiller, or to fill water containers, or (more often) to see the man who is repairing the outboard motor.

  The waiting about which attends any sort of boat’s motor is the only thing I like about them. In use they are a torment. Chuff chuff chuff—silence. Chuff, a couple of smoke rings, a reek of petrol—silence. ‘You’d better go up and take another sounding.’ ‘There’s enough water but we’re drifting to port.’ ‘God damn this bloody bastard.’ The absence of a motor can be inconvenient, however, as I learnt when becalmed without one for a whole week on the Clyde, sailing with a man who allowed six inches of weed to flourish on the bottom of his already lumpish boat and who left wet sails huddled in a heap at the end of a day (Paul’s ghost asking, ‘What on earth are you doing with this frightful chap?’).

  That boat would hardly come about in anything less than a stiff breeze, and in the few light airs we had each morning it was no more handy than a dead whale. On those light airs, and on tide and current, we meandered slowly about the Clyde, getting stuck at last at an anchorage off a tiny island called the Little Cumbrae, in the middle of an hysterical ternery. The birds felt our presence an outrage the whole day long, their querulous screaming and wheeling turning our idle craft into some ravening sea monster, so that when on the second morning there was a breath of wind it was a relief to put off. A long reach took us to the edge of a sandbank running out from the mainland, and there the wind died. There was a mist. ‘I’m going to row to the Great Cumbrae and ask for a tow home,’ said the boat’s owner—there was a village on the Great Cumbrae. ‘You take soundings and anchor when you get between four and three fathoms.’ He set off in a vile temper to row for more than a mile, vanishing into the mist after about fifty yards.

  It was a thirty-foot boat, everything about it heavy and contrary. After I had got the anchor down I doubted whether it was holding in the sandy bottom, but I could not check whether we were drifting because I could see nothing to check by. Bits of flotsam on the oil-smooth water were certainly moving in relation to the boat, but was it because they were being carried on a slow current, or was it because the boat was being carried? I could sense the cat-backed sand lying in wait, expected every instant that deceptively gentle stroking sensation which heralds running quietly aground. If we did? I saw myself going overboard into water up to my neck to prop her side against the tide’s ebbing with oars and the table-top from the cabin. It would not be the first time I had done it, but I had never done it alone, without help. And supposing a squall struck? Squalls could come up in two minutes out of a dead calm on those mountain-surrounded waters, or so I had repeatedly been told: ‘A very tricky estuary, you have to know it well.’ I did not know it at all.

  I tried to repeat poems to myself, and I tried to summarize the plot of Emma—not just what happened, but the exact order in which it happened—but every few minutes I would notice that a particular clot of weed was now floating to the right of the cleat for the jib sheet instead of to its left—that it had crept another six inches towards the stern. After half an hour my hands were sweating, and when something suddenly began to snort out of the mist I could feel the blood draining from my face. ‘I am going mad!’ I thought, until smooth shapes came rolling lazily out of the soft greyness: a couple of porpoises to distract me. They had never come so close before and made me happy for a few moments, but soon they went away again, and then there was nothing but a few invisible birds going over, lamenting like exiled ghosts. When I went below to get a whisky I could hear the rim of the glass clinking against my teeth. A book, I thought, and dug out an Agatha Christie from a mess of rotten cord and baked-bean tins, but could not concentrate. To be so scared is ridiculous, I thought. Even if we do run aground…. But what if running aground and the squall happen at the same moment?

  An hour later, back at my flotsam-watching, I heard a new sound: the tap-tap of a rope end against wood. A breeze was coming up. I licked my finger and stuck it in the air: it was coming offshore, off the sandbank. I’ll give it five minutes, I thought, but in less than that time it was with me, a decent, steady breeze blowing in a direction which would sail me off that bank without any manœuvring being necessary. I knew that I could do nothing single-handed with that horrible boat but sail her in open water with just the right amount of wind; I had rarely done more than crew for Paul and had always had his vigilant eye on me when I took the tiller, and anyway I was not strong enough to handle this awkward bitch. ‘You will probably get in a mess,’ I told myself, but I did not care. I would not have sat there another minute for a hundred pounds. I skinned my hands as I hauled the anchor in—her bows swung across the chain—and I fumbled and cursed and even cried as I struggled to get the sails up, but I managed it, felt them fill, heard the popple start under her bows, and off I went.

  The breeze remained steady, so I could probably have succeeded in taking her into the harbour of the Great Cumbrae, where, no doubt, I should have fouled several people’s moorings and brought shame upon myself, but I had in mind nothing so definite as that intention. Just to be under sail in open water was all I wanted. If I had not met the returning dinghy by pure chance, I might be sailing still. I brought the boat about and picked up her owner very neatly, but he, who had found no tow available, whose hands were raw and whose every muscle was aching, was in no state to appreciate it. It was not, in any way, a successful week, since even before that contretemps we had discovered that we had nothing to say to each other, but it was a week which proved the magic of boats. Displeasing though that one was, frustrating though the weather had been, and uncongenial as the boat’s owner and I had found each other, what still lives in my memory (besides the sights and sounds, always a delight) is the sharpening tremor of fear in my nerves and the triumphant discovery that it blew away as soon as I was under sail.

  The first time I had stayed with Paul’s family in their seaside cottage I ate almost nothing for three days, chewing and c
hewing on mouthfuls which, I feared, would make me vomit if I swallowed them. Nor could I sleep—or not for one night, anyway. I lay listening to the sea on the shingle while feverish tiredness made the bed rock, and whatever I did to my hands—clenched them, shook them, rubbed them, relaxed them—I could not rid them of a dull ache in the palms. This sensation is one that I have not experienced, now, for many years and will almost certainly never experience again, for what could be exciting enough to send my nerves into such a state? I must have spoken, I suppose, since everyone welcomed me kindly and they always seemed pleased to see me again, but I cannot remember doing anything but listen and watch. Paul at the Farm was familiar and unalarming—I even lectured him, sometimes, with fifteen-year-old solemnity—but Paul with a boat, Paul with his gay, wild, funny, grown-up sister: there was something piratical about them together, they had a careless way of flouting the law under which I still was, they were so sure that their own touchstones made nonsense of the conventions. My complete acceptance of everything they said, my rapt attentiveness to every nuance of their behaviour, flattered them both into adopting me. There was never a cabin boy more eager to stow away on a gallant pirate ship than I was to join those two in whatever they did.

  Part of my tension came, of course, from love, but much of it was due to my ignorance of their chief occupation: sailing. Horses were my thing—and horses had taught me all the pitfalls of a sport. I knew well how damned was the rider who came to a meet in the wrong clothes, or worse, in clothes too right if his mount or riding was wrong; one shrewed glance at a newcomer and I could size him up, in or out. The man whose bridle had a coloured browband or who had shaped his horse’s tail by clipping instead of pulling; the girl who showed curls on her forehead under her bowler, or who had plaited her horse’s mane into more than seven plaits—they got short shrift from me. So thoroughly was I conditioned that I could no more have failed to react to such things than a dog could keep its hackles smooth if a strange dog came in at its front door.

  So sailing, I knew, would also have its language, its ritual, its taboos. Like anyone of that age, I greatly minded making a fool of myself, and to do it on Paul’s ground, under his eyes, would have been intolerable. I had to lie low, lurk in the undergrowth, all eyes and twitching whiskers, picking up clues. I had enough flair to avoid obvious mistakes. I knew, for instance, that I could not go far wrong in my clothes if I kept them warm, practical, and not showy. But all the rest I had to learn.

  I never did learn enough to sail well myself. I was not there often enough, and when I was, my anxiety not to make mistakes kept me too docile so that I concentrated on doing what I was told rather than on working things out for myself. But I learnt that when a flight of dunlin zigzags against a thundery sky it is almost invisible until the birds turn so that for a moment all their bellies are exposed; then it is as though a faint streak of white lightning ran across the clouds. I learnt the gait of oyster catchers, the arrowy flight of terns, the ways in which water ruffles, goes sullen, or flashes with what were called locally ‘tinkling cymbals’—those neat points of light reflected from every ripple. I learnt that when you wake up at night on a boat anchored far out from the shore, you sometimes hear people walking round it, and that when you tip a bucket of water overboard in the darkness, with luck a plunge of white flame will go showering into the depths. I learnt the creakings and patterings, the strainings and shudderings of boats, the gentle winging of sailing before the wind, the clatter of going about, the hissing and ripping of tacking. And I learnt the comfortable silences of two people sailing together, out of which, in the relaxed moments, you say whatever comes into your head. It was an intermittent apprenticeship in sharing profound pleasure.

  Ashore, when I was a little older, we would drink beer and eat oysters or bread and cheese with pickled onions in small, dark pubs. I found that I could play darts fairly well—an agreeable surprise for someone with as little co-ordination between hand and eye as I have, to whom games were a mortification. There was a technique in getting in on a game of darts, or in getting accepted at all, for that matter. ‘Foreigners,’ meaning people who have not been established locally for several years, are distrusted in East Anglia, and the comfortable gossip of watermen and farm labourers over their pints would stop when we came in. Usually when they saw that it was ‘old Paul’ (everyone there is old, even a ‘little old baby’), they would greet us with pleasure, for he had been about those parts for some years and was known to be ‘all right,’ but even so it would have been a mistake to push in too eagerly, especially for a girl. Pub manners, on which Paul was an expert, demanded quietness, deference to whatever elder, male or female, was installed in ‘his’ or ‘her’ corner, familiarity (but not a display of familiarity) with water and country, and an appearance of being at ease without an impertinent assumption of being at home. After a while the presence of the well-behaved ‘foreigner’ would be forgotten by the people who were always there, then remembered again, but in a different way: ‘Anyone want a game of darts—what about the young lady?’—and we were off. If I were playing well—if, as on one triumphant occasion, I opened the game with plunk plunk, a double twenty—then we were off into celebration and festivity as well as acceptance. And nothing gave these times more flavour than the knowledge that I would have them to remember when I got back to school.

  6

  FOR I DID have to go to school soon after we had ‘lost our money’ and retreated to the Farm. I had been there a term or two by the time Paul came to us. I had not wanted to go, but I had been too ignorant of school life to dread it as I ought. As most adults accept a disagreeable climate, or a dull job, or illness, so children accept the conditions of life wished on them by adults: not willingly, but with fatalism.

  As schools go, it was a good school, and I knew as much even at the time. I was also prepared to believe that it would do me good, for at home I had begun to earn accusations of ‘uppishness,’ ‘sulks,’ and ‘superiority’ which I had not enjoyed. I had only been unable to see what I should do to stop earning them. If school would ‘rub the corners off’ me, as people said it would, if it would ‘teach me to get on with other girls,’ then good luck to it. But I was not able, and did not see why I should be expected, to go beyond resigned endurance, and enjoy it.

  It was a small school looking out over the North Sea. There must, somewhere, have been some kind of land mass between its playing fields and the North Pole, but it did not feel as though there was: in winter the sweat falling from your brow as you ran after a lacrosse ball (you never caught that ball if you were me) all but turned to icicles before it reached the ground. Irritatingly, the rigorous climate and our constant exposure to it, both outdoors and in, really were very healthy, so that no one there ever had an infectious disease and only twice was I able to escape into the civilized privacy of the sickroom.

  I was fourteen when I first set foot on the loose gravel made from small beach pebbles and went through the elaborate porch of white woodwork into that smell of polish, ink, and gym shoes; fourteen when I arrived, and almost eighteen when I left. A lifetime, it seemed. Good God, think only of one summer term! No stretch of time has ever looked so endless as those thirteen weeks before I had been able to black out one single day on my calendar. Three or four years ago I was walking down Oxford Street when I saw a shop-window display of school uniforms, trunks, and tuck boxes backed by a huge mockery of a school-child’s calendar, the days blacked out up to the current date, crowned by the monstrous legend ‘Only Five More Days to the Beginning of Term.’…I stared at it in incredulous horror. Whoever designed that display can only have heard of boarding schools, never have been at one, for how could anyone who had experienced it forget the despair under the stolid endurance with which one crept forward, square by tiny square, towards that red-embellished date which meant freedom regained?

  Apart from games, the things I had to do at school were not objectionable. Lessons I saw as necessary, often interesting, and someti
mes enjoyable; I made friends whose companionship I appreciated. It was the absence of things which had to be endured: the absence of freedom, the absence of home, the absence of privacy, the absence of pleasures. When I understood that not for one minute of the day could I be alone, except in the lavatory, and that every minute had its ordained employment, my spirit shrivelled.