But it was an explorer’s, not an exile’s library; with books on British history, British geology, British birds, British flora, books on the making of the English countryside and on the sociology of modern Britain. I wanted to find out what, on earth or sea, made my peculiar country tick: Cobbett might yield a clue, so might Defoe—and G. M. Trevelyan, and Nikolaus Pevsner, and Arthur Mee, and a whole rack of books with oppressive titles like The Development of the British Economy, 1914–1950, Rural Depopulation in England and Wales, 1851–1951 and The Labour Government’s Economic Record, 1964–1970. Even if one couldn’t read them, at least they’d serve as ballast and keep the boat sailing squarely on its waterline.
The boat was ready on February 24. It was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent—just the right moment for even a disbeliever to take to the wilderness. High tide was at seven in the morning and it was still almost dark when the tubby hull was cranked down the slip into the water. It looked less like the launching of a boat than the eccentric submersion of a thatched tudor cottage. There was no champagne about. The wit from the boatyard yawned, shrinking himself as far as possible into his furry parka. “Give her five minutes, and all you’ll see will be the bubbles.”
She floated. By lunchtime she was fully rigged as a working ketch, with two stocky masts, her heavy sails sagging on their booms. Shackled to a mooring buoy in the middle of the estuary, she turned to face the incoming tide with a broad-beamed dowager’s stateliness. It was not that she waddled, exactly; rather that her age and bulk took automatic precedence over the younger, slimmer boats on the water.
I rowed away from her feeling house-proud as I’d never felt house-proud before. She looked like home. Up till now, home had always been a rented or a mortgaged box in someone else’s freehold, an unstable affair, floating adrift high in London plane trees. This big white boat, with her trimmings of (as yet) unscuffed white and blue, her books and pictures, her oak beams which had been approvingly described by the surveyor as “massive,” looked so much more solid and steady than any of the flats in which I’d recently capsized.
No flag wagged at the back of her. Whatever the rules said, I didn’t intend to sail under the British ensign. When I crossed over the border from territorial to international waters, I was going to go there as a private person—in the Greek word, an idiot.
The boat had one visible defect: her name. The Gosfield brewer who had originally registered her as a British ship of 10.39 Gross Tons had called her the Gosfield Maid. This would be a fine title for a frowsty aunt who keeps cats and smells of camphor balls, but as the name of my boat I would have been happier if the brewer had chosen Mon Repos, Laburnams, or Dunroamin.
It is famously unlucky to change a boat’s name: you are pretty well guaranteed an early death by drowning. But it is permissible, as far as I know, to switch the letters about. Chuck GOSFIELD MAID into the air, let the pieces fall where they will, and they come out as DIE, DISMAL FOG. As mottoes for British voyages go, Die, Dismal Fog will do well.
CHAPTER 2
IN THE ARCHIPELAGO
For four years now, Gosfield Maid has been slowly circling round the British Isles. When she first rumbled down the slipway into the Fowey Estuary, I had never taken charge of a boat at sea in my life. A retired naval commander let me play the role of an elderly midshipman, and in a fortnight taught me how to raise sails, drop anchor, steer a compass course and bleed a diesel engine. In the evenings I taught myself navigation out of books, with the watery yellow lamplight dodging all over the cabin as the boat wallowed in the wakes of passing china-clay coasters. On April Fools’ Day I left Fowey alone and nervously picked my way out into the English Channel. I had hardly set my course and made my first penciled cross on the chart before the land faded into the haze. First there was Captain Mitchell’s Californian ranch-style house on the hill, and the Coastguard lookout, and the striped beacon on Gribben Head; then an indecipherable gray scribble across the horizon; then just the intimidating whiteness of the blank page.
The voyage turned into the usual epical-pastoral-tragical-comical-historical-amorous and lonely story—of innocence lost, ritual tests and trials, the holy terrors, funny interludes, romances caught on the wing, lightning strikes of wisdom and dim longueurs. It yielded calms, storms, sunsets, fogs, mirrored landscapes, welcoming ports glistering in the twilight under auroras of blown gulls, enormous skies, waves green as jade: all the set pieces in the marine painter’s repertoire.
In an unscheduled gale off the coast of Sussex, the collected works of Laurence Sterne took flight in the saloon and flapped about like doves escaping from a magician’s hat: hellfire sermons colliding in midair with three panic-stricken volumes of Tristram Shandy, and A Sentimental Journey making a break for it through the galley and up into the wheelhouse. Clinging on to the wheel, too busy trying to angle the bow of the boat into the next wave to be frightened, I thought coldly that death looked as if it was definitely in the cards. There were other times when the sea was as dull and gray as an infinity of lukewarm porridge, with ports extending a welcome no friendlier than the litter of bills which always lies in wait for one behind the front door.
The difficulty with a circular voyage is that once you have gone on past your original point of departure (as Gosfield Maid did, a little more than a year after setting out), it has no destination and no ending—at least not until it’s too late to tell the tale. It would be handy to contrive a McMullen-like finale, the helmsman a bag of bleached bones held together by a rotting pea jacket and the boat surviving to sail off into the blue. But this voyage goes on. For as long as the book continues to be written, the helmsman’s still alive. However, for those who insist on traveling in a more orderly sequence and demand a strict and conventional economy of literary means, here goes—
I got drunk in Torquay, had a fit of memoirs in Portsmouth, turned lyrical in Brighton and philosophical off Beachy Head, was affronted in Dover, ill in Harwich, happy in Grimsby, maudlin in Bridlington, was pleased with myself on Holy Island, got drunk again in Leith, was superior in Inverness, fell in love in Oban and out of love by Stranraer, was at my wits’ end in Dublin, said some very clever things in Fishguard, lost my temper off Land’s End and summed things up pretty neatly in Falmouth. THE END.
53°47’ North. 4°45’ West. The spot is marked by a circled cross—our last ascertained position. Nothing could be less parochial than this navigator’s way of saying where he is. He sites himself in global terms, even universal ones, measuring the angles between his ship and the equator, the sun, the stars and the hypothetical meridian which stretches north and south from Greenwich to the poles.
On that particular afternoon at that particular point on the earth’s surface, the water was as calm and full of mercurial color as a pool of motor oil. Earlier on there had been a wind—a steady draught from the northeast which plumped up the sails and pushed Gosfield Maid south with the tide. For the sea was going my way, for once. The Irish Sea is like a shallow pudding basin: twice a day it empties and fills up, the water streaming through the narrow channels at its northern and southern ends. That afternoon it was emptying out, and the sea on which I was moving was itself moving invisibly at a comfortable two and a half knots. Riding the tide is exactly like being on a moving walkway: you have only to amble for the world to whistle past.
So when the wind died I let the sails hang in useless creases from the masts, reluctant to start the engine for fear of spoiling the afternoon. The sea was empty of shipping. I went below and made coffee in the galley. I sat out in the cockpit listening to the chuckle of the wavelets against the hull and feeling something of that pride of possession which a great landowner must feel when he looks out from his window, proprietor of everything he can see.
For the moment, at least, this sea was legally mine. In territorial waters, the most one has is a meager concession called “the right of innocent passage”; but at 53°47’ N, 4°45’ W, you enjoy “the freedom of high-seas navigation”—a freedo
m with a happy multitude of entailments. You are free-floating in your own freehold. Weather permitting (the one major snag in this otherwise ideal bargain), you have absolute freedom. Out at sea, no one can prosecute you for sedition, blasphemy, or being a public nuisance. Seeing what you like, saying what you like, sailing along on any damn-fool course you choose, you are—weather permitting—as liberated a spirit as any human being on the face of the globe, with the full weight of international maritime law to back your amazing license.
That afternoon the weather did permit. My sky was wide open, and my miles of colored water were coasting companionably alongside. Two and a half knots may not sound very fast—an old lady on a sit-up-and-beg bike could easily double that speed without running short of breath. But it is a good pace for an observant free spirit; and at two and a half knots you could encircle the earth in a year, with five days to spare.
Contentedly out of reach of any of their local laws and customs, I was floating through an archipelago of distant islands, watching their indefinite dark shapes change configuration on the horizon, and taking bearings on them each half-hour to keep a check on where I was. They wobbled, fading and sharpening, over the enlarged, reflected numbers in the compass lens. One small pointed atoll showed clearly at 158°; another, lumpier one at 232°, or maybe 234°; there was a definite smoky pimple in the sea at 046° and a smudge at about 012°. Much the biggest of the islands lay almost dead astern at 358°; a commanding mass of black alps with a shallow coastal basin littered with still-just-visible towns and cities.
For almost as long as I’ve been able to speak, I must have been using the phrase “The British Isles” as a careless political abstraction. I had never actually seen the British isles in life until that clear-skied afternoon in September when they arranged themselves around the boat in just as tangible and diminutive an archipelago as the Cyclades. The pointed atoll on the port beam was Mount Snowdon in Wales; the irregular lump to starboard was the Sugar Loaf Mountain in the Wicklow Hills, south of Dublin in Ireland; the pimple on the port quarter was the English Lake District topped by Scafell Pike; and the smudge (I almost swear to this) was the mountains of Galloway in Scotland. The great island astern, the continental center of things, with its magnificent bulk and all the signs of a thriving civilization, was the Isle of Man, from where I’d sailed five hours before.
The coffee had gone cold in the mug, and the motion of the boat was so slight that the surface of the coffee had crazed into a milky skin. Nothing moved except the sea itself, running like a deep river down to the ocean. I loved the breadth and stillness of it—the painted islands, the flawless wash of the sky, the winking, rainbow water. The stillness was so complete that the structural tensions of the boat itself were making themselves audible. Plank on beam; larch on oak. The woods were straining, each against the other, their acids bleeding and mingling as the sea pressed in. Not many people ever know quite such a magical solitude as this.
Then I saw that I had company. It was many miles away, as small as a gnat or a dust speck; an aircraft of some sort, flying fast and low over the water to the far south.
The weather was breaking when I came to the Isle of Man. I’d sailed down from the Clyde through the straits between Ulster and the Mull of Galloway, to find every wave in the Irish Sea snarling and baring its teeth. A thin rain was falling and there was no land to be seen anywhere. Gosfield Maid slammed and jolted like a country bus on a bad road. I sailed it up to where the Isle of Man should have been, and found just rain and lumpy sea and untidy rags of foam. The island was not where it was marked on the chart. Either that, or I wasn’t where I was marked on the chart. I checked and rechecked my last bearings. Nothing seemed wrong. I hunted with binoculars for a lighthouse or a cliff or the white water of a coastal shoal, and drew a monotonous greeny-gray blank.
As islands nearly always do, the Isle of Man came up unexpectedly, in the wrong place. It was steaming straight past my bows like a rusty ship, and I half expected it to disappear again into the murk, flying a disreputable flag of convenience from its stern. I slid along its side where the water was calmer, grateful for the shelter it offered but not much impressed by the vessel itself. Only a very tired sea gull would have brightened at the sight of its dank greenstone cliffs, the dripping ledges of bare rock, the heather looking like a black fungus in the rain. A castle came and went—but after Scotland I was tired of castles. Then a dismal holiday place with an empty beach and a line of boardinghouses on a promenade.
At the southern end of the island there was an islet which looked even sadder and rainier than its parent; and between Man and the Calf of Man there was a narrrow channel, no wider than a city street, through which the tide was streaming like a millrace, the water humped and broken, piling against boulders, creaming white as it thundered through the Sound. What was oddest about this place, though, was that I could see the sea beyond and it was definitely lower than the sea on which I was afloat. Calf Sound was a hill of water, a chute through which one half of the Irish Sea was doing its damnedest to fill up the other.
I had been bored before; the life of Man had struck me as being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and mercifully, after only fifteen miles of it, short. But this was one of the most unboring performances that I’d ever seen the sea put up. I called the Manx coastguard over the radio and described Calf Sound to him in all its glory.
“And it’s safe to go through there?”
“Stick to the middle of the channel. Keep the beacon to starboard and Thousla Rock to port.”
“It’s all white water.”
“You’ve got about twenty meters under you all the way through.”
Half a mile off, I poured myself a slug of whisky. Two hundreds yards from the beacon I needed another. I fed the boat into the race with the engine growling underfoot.
Bloody maniac. What you doing? Cocksure bastard. Trying to kill us? Proving something? Watch it, boyo. Bloody watch it.
The current wrenched at the rudder and the short steep waves did their best to climb on board over the bows. The beacon shot past the wheelhouse like a lamppost on a motorway, no sooner seen than overtaken. The boat was being poured down the gradient of the Sound; all I had to do was keep it pointed roughly in the right direction while the sea gathered us up and tossed us out at the other end.
The whole dizzying business took a minute at the most; and the water beyond the Sound was almost as impressively mysterious as the water in it. Shielded by steep headlands on either side, it was as still and black as a monastery fishpond. It deserved lily pads and dragonflies and the occasional bursting bubble released by a rootling carp. Its broodily calm surface was gritted with raindrops. On a ledge of rock on the Calf of Man side, five gray seals squatted on their hunkers. Sleek, big-eyed, lugubriously mustached, they had the air of a cabinet of Edwardian politicians as drawn by Max Beerbohm. When I shut off the engine, I could hear them making rude parliamentary noises.
I had meant to skip the Isle of Man and head straight on for Wales. It was getting late in the year, and I was running out of time and weather. But Calf Sound and the pool under Spanish Head made me stop, just long enough to take stock of the pleasure I’d had in that queer place. I nursed the boat through an easy sea round to the fishing harbor of port St. Mary on the southeast of the island, where I tied up to the quay and grounded with the tide. Next morning a gale was blowing and even the fishing fleet was weatherbound, huddled together in the lee of the outer breakwater as the sea feathered and plumed over the esplanade. For two weeks, whenever there was a lull in the wind the fog came down, and whenever the fog lifted the wind blew up. Stranded (if not quite like Crusoe) on the island, I had to make the most of the little world of Man.
Once, twice, three times. The aircraft was quartering the entire sea. Every twenty minutes or so I saw it flying west to Ireland, then east back to Wales, and coming nearer all the time. On this run it was heading straight for Gosfield Maid, its black shadow racing across the sea like the track
of a submerged whale. It was a big RAF Nimrod, with a kind of glass conservatory up in the front. As it came over, its engines drummed in my back teeth and made the water crackle. It banked and encircled me with a stockade of solid noise, flying so low that I could see faces in its windows, but couldn’t make out their expressions. I stood in the cockpit and waved as cheerily as I could. I’m innocent. I’m just enjoying the freedom of high-seas navigation. No one waved back. The huge gray wings tilted again and the plane went on toward Ireland; but the self-contained peace of the boat on the water had been shattered like an expensive vase, and I mourned its loss.
The castellated stone hotel on the hill above Port St. Mary smelled of empty rooms, of stale vegetables and disinfectant, like a boarding school closed for the holidays with only Matron and a couple of bachelor masters in residence. The tourist season had gone badly. The people from the industrial cities of northern England who had used to come to the Isle of Man in swarming boatloads every year were now going to places with a more reliable ration of sunshine, like Ibiza and Majorca and the Costa del Sol; and the locals had the hotel bar more or less to themselves. There were the local butcher, the local dentist, in a threadbare crested blazer, a smallholder and a lobster-and-scallop fisherman, freshly tanned from his own holiday in the Canary Islands. These men all appeared to be somehow related to each other, and they all spoke in the same accent. It wasn’t Welsh, although it had a distinct Welsh lilt; it wasn’t Lancashire, although it had Lancashire’s nasality and flat vowels; and it wasn’t Irish, although it had the thickness of a brogue and the Irish way of saying d for th.
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