“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
The truculence on my part was a bold affectation. Every time I looked my father in the eye, I felt the depth of my own failure. He represented all the things that I knew that I was doomed to flunk. In an austere time, when people still carried ration books and everyone’s clothes were darned and patched, my father was Austerity itself. Once a week he bathed in two and a quarter inches of lukewarm water. Carving a Sunday joint, he peeled off the meat in slivers as fine as microscopic slides; you could see shafts of gray daylight through the lean. With razor blades, he performed miracles of honing, wiping, drying, and gave them something close to everlasting life. There was nothing mean in his approach to domestic economy—he was just keeping perfectly in step with the times. His thrift and self-denial, his willingness to tighten his belt when the call came made him a pedigreed specimen of Winston Churchill’s bulldog breed.
What I saw across the breakfast table—and saw with the pitiless egotism of the thwarted child—was not my father, it was England. Towering over the stoved-in shells of the pullets’ eggs in their floral ceramic cups, there sat the Conservative Party in person, the Army in person, the Church in person, the Public School system in person, the Dunkirk Spirit in person, Manliness, Discipline, Duty, Self-sacrifice and all the rest. His threadbare cassock clothed the whole galaxy of terrible abstractions.
Seeing him now through different eyes, I find myself watching a sorrowful lean and angular young man, hopelessly lost for words. He coughs. He reaches for a brass ashtray made from the base of an old artillery shell and knocks out his dottle in it. He makes a busy show of burying my school report under a bill from the gas company and an overdraft notice from Lloyds Bank. He searches the face of his child for a clue as to how to go on, and finds there only a vacant, resentful, supercilious gaze—a mask more impenetrable than the mask he presents to his son.
The child is blind to all this. He’s putting the finishing touches to his Bored Aristocrat face. His eyeballs are rolled so high that he can’t see anything much except his own eyelashes. He is levitating. Inch by inch he rises Above This World, leaving his father down at the breakfast table with the smashed eggs. He is afloat over England. Airborne.
The young man pretends to study the columns of advertisements on the front page of The Times. Eventually he says: “D’you think—old boy—that there’s any way we can do something about this business of—Geography?”
The astral child replies (in a fine and withering phrase that he’s filched from the lips of his housemaster, Major MacTurk): “I don’t know and I couldn’t care less.”
This was very barefaced stuff. I cared. Had I seen any way of worming my way into my father’s exacting version of England, I’d have leaped at it. Give me only the legs for the job and I’d score the winning try in the house match and bring home the family bacon. I’d furnish the parsonage with prizes—the Latin prize, the Greek prize, the Colonel’s Efficiency Shield and the leather-bound set of Macaulay awarded annually for Outstanding Contribution To The Life Of The School.
Every morning in chapel I stood singing manly hymns:
“I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trin-i-tee—”
Overhead were the richly scrolled and varnished pine boards emblazoned with the names of boys from the school who had attained the ultimate in English citizenship. DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI. There were hundreds of them, every name picked out in scarlet edged with gold, with their houses and the dates at which they’d attended the school. In the 1914–18 war, the Old Boys had done the school proud, dying in whole dormitoryfuls; in 1939–45 there were enough to man a platoon-and-a-bit or put on a Shakespeare play.
For a would-be Englishman, there was clearly some sort of opening here. Some of these certificated heroes had probably been as dim as I was, yet they had still managed to go over the top, buy it, or meet a bullet with their name on it—expressions which, in 1955, didn’t yet sound dated in the least. But did LAYCOCK, R. W. P. (SCHOOL HOUSE 1938–1943) have asthma, hay fever and flat feet too? I bet he didn’t. The chances were that the Army wouldn’t want my services at all—and if it did, I’d probably land up as a lance-corporal in the Pioneer Corps, digging latrines in Wales.
So I looked at my father with his campaign ribbons, his priestly vocation, his pipe, his English reticence, and knew I’d never make the grade. Maybe there was some run-down South American republic where I might have passed myself off as an averagely respectable type, but it wouldn’t wash in England—at least, not in the dutiful, constrained, genteel 1950s England that I knew. The schoolmasters were unarguably right when they dismissed me as a hopeless coaster.
The dictionary does the word proud. To coast is to proceed without great effort, to move by momentum or force of gravity, to march on the flank of, to skirt, to sail from port to port of the same country, to explore or scour, to bicycle downhill without pedaling, and to slide down a slope on a sled. The coaster—as my school report pointed out in no uncertain terms—is someone who uses the minimum of effort to go down a slippery slope on the margin of things.
The coaster never stays in one berth longer than he can help. He’ll take on any cargo for a short distance—coal, scrap iron, timber, day-old chicks. He doesn’t quite belong either to the land or to the ocean. He is a betwixt-and-between man, neither exactly a citizen nor exactly a foreigner. Choosing to live on the shifting frontier where the land meets the water and the water shades into the land, he has to make himself the master of a specialized kind of knowledge not taught in English public schools. Admiral Smyth’s The Sailor’s Word Book of 1867 puts it nicely:
COASTING, or To Coast Along. The act of making a progress along the sea-coast of any country, for which purpose it is necessary to observe the time and direction of the tide, to know the reigning winds, the roads and havens, the different depths of water, and the qualities of the ground.
It makes a happy metaphor for a life on the fringe. For years I coasted, from job to job, place to place, person to person. At the first hint of adverse weather I hauled up my anchor and moved on with the tide, letting the reigning winds take care of the direction of the voyage. In writing I found a good coaster’s occupation, unloading my mixed cargoes at one port after another. The writer, sitting alone in a room, watching society go past his window and trying to re-create it by playing with words on a page, has his own kind of sea distance … a sense of pushing up-Channel on a lumpy swell while the men and women on the shore go comfortably about their business, caring nothing about the pitch and roll and flap of the solitary small vessel on the horizon.
It was only a matter of time before the metaphor insisted on making itself actual. I was nearly forty, a little older than my father, when I bought a real boat, fitted it up as a floating house and set out to sail alone around the British Isles. It was rather late in the day to run away to sea (thirteen is supposed to be the standard age for that chronically English escapade) but I wasn’t going to let ordinary caution or common sense get in the way of this imperious compulsion. I was besotted by the idea. Britain still seemed to be somehow more my father’s land than my own—and home is always the hardest place to get into sharp focus. If only it could be encompassed … by a slow, stopping, circular voyage … if only one could go back to all the stages and places of one’s own life, as a stranger, out of the blue … couldn’t one emerge at the end as a domestic Columbus, the true discoverer of a doorstep empire? With all the ardent solemnity of a thirteen-year-old, at thirty-nine I saw my trip as a test, a reckoning, a voyage of territorial conquest, a homecoming.
I was not alone. I was bringing up the rear of a long queue of certifiable obsessives. This notion of taking to a boat and grandly coming to terms with one’s native land is one that regularly presents itself to a certain dubious brand of Englishman, and I should have felt more disturbed than I was by the company I found myself keeping.
John MacGregor stood at t
he head of the line; and MacGregor’s book, The Voyage Alone in the Yawl “Rob Roy,” started a national craze for solitary coastal voyaging when it came out in 1867. MacGregor had a lot to live up to and a lot to prove: his father was a famous general, and when the infant John was plucked safely from a shipwreck in the Bay of Biscay at the age of five weeks, the incident was held by the MacGregor family to be a clear case of Divine Intervention, in the same category, if not quite of the same rank, as the Virgin Birth.
MacGregor grew up to be a crashingly hearty Victorian bachelor. In an age untainted by suspicions fed on Freud and Krafft-Ebbing, he was able, as an evangelical philanthropist, to devote his life to Boys. His mission was to rescue street arabs from the London slums for Christ and the open-air life. He worked for the Ragged Schools, to which all his fees as a lecturer and royalties as an author were donated. He set up the Shoeblack Brigade (whose battalions of small boys, each equipped with brushes and polish, used to assemble every morning in the Strand at seven, to sing hymns and say prayers under MacGregor’s enthusiastic conductorship), and was a co-founder of the Boy’s Own Paper.
His adventures at sea started with the Rob Roy canoe, a craft he designed himself so that his boys could paddle their way to piety at weekends. He held Sunday rallies on the Thames, half regattas and half prayer meetings, in which every time a canoe capsized another boy was simultaneously cleansed of his London dirt and washed in the blood of the Lamb.
After a series of canoeing adventures in the Holy Land and Scandinavia, MacGregor built himself a new boat, a 21-foot yawl planked in Honduras mahogany, with a cabin, a galley and a half-decked cockpit that looked as it if were closely modeled on a preacher’s pulpit. He took on a cargo of “several boxes of Testaments, books, pictures, and interesting papers, in different tongues,” and set sail for Paris by way of the Thames Estuary, the South coast of England and the Seine. “Truly,” he wrote, “there is a sea-mission yet to be worked. Good news was told on the water long ago, and by the Great Preacher from a boat.” Wherever he docked he handed out Bibles and “interesting papers” to passing tourists, fishermen, bargees and longshoremen. “The distribution of these was a constant pleasure to me. Permanent and positive good may have been done by the reading of their contents.”
He supplied his own illustrations, and on page 18 of The Voyage Alone he treated his readers to a flattering portrait of the Author At Home, in which MacGregor reclines majestically against a bolster in his pulpit-cockpit, his mustaches waxed to icicle-like points, his eyes hard and bright as a pair of chipped flints as he gazes out to sea. His finely sculpted head is turbaned against the sun, and he appears to be tippling from a mug, but the prominent teapot on the deck beside him is there to reassure you that MacGregor’s liquor is definitely nontoxic. Investigation of the crosshatching with a magnifying glass reveals an open bible propped against the gunwale.
Here is exactly the sort of Englishman that Thomas Arnold’s Rugby was created to manufacture. You could trust the colonization of Africa, or the management of the Sheffield steel industry, to this sturdy open-necked figure who exudes the Victorian virtues of Temperance, Probity, Resolution and Independence. Setting himself up as the very type of the hero of the age, MacGregor shows a well-built athlete sailing westward in the service of God and Queen.
Out at sea, MacGregor meditated on the condition of England:
In all our great towns there is a mass of human beings whose want, misery, and filth are more patent to the eye, and blatant to the ear, and pungent to the nostrils than in almost any other towns in the world. Their personal liberty is greater, too, than anywhere else. Are these two facts related to each other? Is the positive piggery of the lowest stratum of our fellows part of the price we have to pay for glorious freedom as guaranteed by our “British Constitution”? and do we not pay very dearly then? Must the masses be frowsy to be free?
From the long-distance perspective afforded by Rob Roy running before the wind off Southsea, the answers to the nation’s problems came pat: what was needed was “strong Tory government” and a great Christian crusade.
The Voyage Alone became a Victorian best-seller, not for its religious or political content but because it managed to glorify yachting as much more than a mere sport. MacGregor turned sailing a small boat into a species of high moral endeavor. He wrote infectiously of the pleasures of the business. Rob Roy was, he said, “my floating freehold,” and the water was “my road, my home, my very world.” His somewhat embroidered adventures at sea were conveyed in the elementary heroic prose which was to become the standard note of the Boy’s Own Paper. Yet simple adventure and simple pleasure weren’t enough in themselves. What was needed was a sense of uplift; and when MacGregor saw yachts, he didn’t see a collection of rich men’s toys, about which they ought to feel a stab of Christian guilt as they left the office on Friday for a long weekend’s messing about on the water, but rather—
That noble fleet of roaming craft which renew the nerve and energy of so many Englishmen by a manly and healthful enterprise, opening a whole new element of nature, and nursing a host of loyal seamen to defend our shores.
If MacGregor was an ace at flattering himself, he was also very clever at buttering up his readers. It was from MacGregor that the amateur sailor learned that he wasn’t just indulging himself in a hobby, he was sailing for Victoria, England and Saint George.
One contemporary reader of the book was Empson Edward Middleton, a disgruntled ex-officer in the Indian army, a man whose head was peppered with stings from the swarm of bees that he kept in his bonnet. He was the first man to sail singlehanded round the British Isles, and in The Cruise of The Kate he explained how his own voyage started:
My wearied thoughts were wandering down the High Street of Southampton, during the Christmas week of 1868, and conducted tired limbs to the excellent circulating library of Messrs. Gutch, where faded eyesight fell upon a work bearing the title of The Voyage Alone in the Yawl Rob Roy. An instant sympathy with its contents created an exchange of matter; five shillings causing a deficiency of ballast in one pocket, while extracted essence of old clothes created a bulge in my starboard coat, correcting my proper trim, and allowing me to cruise to my usual station without more rolling than was actually necessary, in proportion to the paved or muddied depressions on the way. All hail The Voyage Alone.
He commissioned an enlarged replica of Rob Roy, and had his boat personally inspected by MacGregor before he put to sea. The Kate, also a yawl, was 25 feet long (according to Lloyd’s Register) or 23 feet (according to Middleton, who was probably foreshortening it for heroism’s sake). The big difference between the two boats—and the two voyages they made—was in their cargoes.
Middleton loaded The Kate with his own discontents. He was a misunderstood genius whose inner nobility had gone unrecognized. He had proved conclusively that the earth was—not quite flat, exactly, but bowl- or saucer-shaped. This important discovery had not been taken up by the Royal Geographical Society or the British Academy with anything like the excitement it deserved. He had also worked out that Heaven was located in the Sun whose rays were emitted by the combined souls of the blessed—another theory in which no one seemed to be at all interested. At the time of his voyage he was “engaged in the production of an arduous literary labour,” the verse translation to end all verse translations of Virgil’s Aeneid, of which several samples were smuggled into The Cruise of The Kate:
A sylvan scene adorns the dizzy height;
A gloomy grove refracts a softened light
On grots, and cooling springs within a cave
Where nymphs resort to dabble in the wave.
No eager publisher came forward with a contract, and Middleton smelled the London literary conspiracy at work. One surefire best-seller—a translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, “in large print, for the poor to read”—had already been rejected. Middleton was making the unoriginal discovery that publishers are astonishingly stupid and shortsighted and are in the business o
nly of promoting their friends.
So he went to a vanity press and had privately printed a fat pamphlet called The World of Wonders—a digest of his Latin translations, his scientific theories, his quarrels with various authorities, his cures for rheumatism and gout. The after-locker of The Kate was packed solid with copies, which he proposed to distribute round Britain on the model of MacGregor and his tracts and bibles. Like MacGregor’s, Middleton’s voyage was a sea mission, a crusade of enlightenment. Brave, cranky and in deadly earnest, he taught himself to sail in a week on the Solent, and set out to conquer his native land.
The Cruise of The Kate is a solemn chronicle. Wherever he stepped ashore, Middleton came face to face with the insolence and cupidity of his fellowmen. The builders were lazy and failed to finish his boat on schedule. Pilots overcharged him. Navigational aids, like buoys and lighthouses, were deliberately put in the wrong places, in order to tempt Middleton to shipwreck. Hoteliers refused to cash his checks. He saw himself as a stoned martyr in a naughty world, and stubbornly went on telling the good news. “The World of Wonders Magazine made me numberless friends.”
The dominant tone of the book is pained and blustery. Middleton’s voice is that of the well-spoken bore with a gigantic chip on his shoulder:
I can assure the world at large that I am about the last man to care about publicity; I do not care one straw for praise; I would not care one straw if praise were purposely withheld, where there could be no doubt that it was my due. What do I want of my fellows? I want their esteem, their goodwill, but not their praise. What am I driving at? You will see. I have stated that I do not care about publicity; but I have wished before today to be a voice in my own nation, to be able to speak when I like, to hold my tongue when I like. Such is my idea of society, and I would associate with the nation; nothing less than the nation will please me.
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