“Oh that is clever, and what’s puss’s name?”
In these houses I spread condescension like treacle, chattering away in a voice carefully modeled on my mother’s and the Moral Welfare Worker’s. No one blew my cover. Nobody threw me bodily out. I was just “being polite,” and being polite meant that you had to be a prig and lie through your teeth. I was a paragon of politeness. My lies scaled new heights of daring; my priggishness shone like a saint’s inner light.
For the farther rim of the village, I had a quite different manner. At tea in Mulberry Lodge, or Chestnuts, or Wood-side House, I was boiled and dumb. I projected the little finger of my right hand outward as I held the cup. I nodded and tried to imitate my father’s resonant way of saying “Yes.” I never commented on the furniture and fittings here, but I took in the heavy chintzes, the little bowls of potpourri, the club fenders and firedogs, the engraved invitation cards on the mantelpiece, the smell of flowers and dry sherry, and filed them away for future reference.
“Thank you so much for your hospitality,” I said as we left. “Thanks awfully.”
But from my room at the top of the parsonage I could just see over the hedge to the Common, where the daughters of the Double-Barrels rode their ponies. Stupid bitches.
I did have a secret life of my own as a double agent. On the sly I mingled with the comeover kids. They had foreign names like Stew and Kevin and Marilyn and Tracey, and they spoke with a lazy-tough burr in their voices. Up to the age of twelve they fished in the posted waters of the brook, had fights, built dens and pedaled their bicycles round improvised dirt tracks. After the age of twelve, they gave all that up and devoted themselves to snogging.
Kicking stones and swapping obscenities with Kev, I would sometimes see my father, conspicuous from half a mile away in his cassock, ballooning round him like a black spinnaker, trawling for souls.
“Your dad.”
“Fuck him,” I said, and the word worked on me like a snort of cocaine. “I wish he’d go and stuff that fucking cassock up his arse.” These bold denials came hard. They were said with the same excitement and trepidation that the blasphemer feels when he reckons that there’s at least an even chance that God will actually strike him dead.
“He’s all right,” Kev said. Kev’s own father regularly beat his mother up, and she was an occasional late-night visitor to the parsonage.
“All right for some,” I said, kicking moodily at a dead hedgehog in the road.
At twelve I learned to snog with Tracey. It was passionless and apathetic, like doing things to frogs in Science. We lay in the long grass at the bottom of Lower Common, just a few yards from where we could hear Kev and Marilyn learning to snog too. We rubbed and wriggled against each other for a bit, tried a French Kiss, in which I choked on Tracey’s tongue, then Tracey sat up and fiddled with her hairdo. I stared resentfully at the ends of my first pair of long trousers. They were miles too wide. Kev’s were “twelves,” which meant that they clung tightly round his ankles in the peg-top style that the Teddy Boys were bringing in. Mine were twenty-twos—well, eighteens, anyway. Hideous public school trousers, like Oxford Bags. Hating my trouser ends must have given my face an expression of aroused broodiness, for Tracey said:
“Show?”
“What?”
“You know …”
She giggled and pulled a face. The she lifted her skirt with all its flouncing layers of accessory petticoats. Amazed and deeply interested, I saw the rigging of belt and suspenders that held up her nylons, and her navy blue pants. She tweaked the front of her pants down and held them there so that I could see.
I had expected—but there had been no time in which to expect anything. However, Kev had given me the general gist of the way things worked down there. Asked to describe it, I would have said that there should be a sort of dark fleshy tunnel, its entrance probably marked by a pair of smiling lips. I rather imagined that the lips might look rouged.
I was appalled by what I saw. It was a dreadful absence, like the bald scar tissue of an amputation. A few pale hairs sprouted from the pink skin around what appeared to be a healed cut.
The pants snapped back, to my immense relief.
“Now you.”
Good God!
“Go on, pet,” Tracey said. “Undo your trousers, then. Fair’s fair.”
I couldn’t. I blustered and stammered and said sorry, awfully sorry. I rode back to the island on my bike, knowing that I’d just had a close shave with the Scarlet Whore of Babylon in person. For several days I quaked every time I heard the doorbell ring, fearing either that Tracey would turn up to demand the payment of her forfeit or, far worse, that her father would come clumping down the drive with serious news for mine. But neither Tracey nor her father braved the hedge, and within a week I was safely away at boarding school. When the next holidays came, I wrote off the council estate as a no-go area and failed to recognize Kev in the Post Office, although the experience with Tracey, artistically embellished, had made me more nearly popular at school than I’d ever been before.
I was getting deep into my teens when, on the far edge of the parish, I found another island, just as socially isolated as our own. Where ours was frowsty and full of English lumber, the other island was glamorously tropical. It was a millionaire’s weekend cottage standing on several acres of lawns and woods. No one knew the people who lived there. They never showed up for Christmas drinks at the Double-Barrels’. They certainly never came near the church. The most one ever saw of the owners of the cottage was their new, gunmetal-gray Aston Martin purring through the village with its windows up.
This famous car once purred to a stop for me when I was hitchhiking, and my first anxiety was that its owner would tell the parsonage about how I traveled, thumbing my way to places as far as possible out of parental reach. I needn’t have worried. Talking to the driver as he swept us round the Winchester bypass at a hundred and ten, I made my first grown-up friend.
Mr. Rapp had taught Philosophy at Oxford, worked for Reuters, taken over his father’s scrap-metal business and turned it into one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of aluminum tubes. He drove like Fangio. His bare skull was tanned the color of teak, his beard closely clipped to a circle of gray round his upper lip and chin. I thought it likely that he was the cleverest man in England, and at weekends I cycled slowly backward and forward in front of his cottage, praying to be noticed and invited in.
The Rapps’ bookshelves were full of books that people actually read: green-backed Penguin thrillers, Left Book Club editions of Tawney and Crossman, the newest novels by Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis and C. P. Snow, whom Mr. Rapp always referred to as Mr. Pamela Hansford Johnson.
The Rapps themselves seemed to me at sixteen to have stepped out of a book. They were like people one read about, not people one knew. Mr. Rapp, with all his acres, his amazing car, his tailored shirts and handmade shoes, voted Labour—a wonderfully unlikely equation in my world. The whole family, parents and children together, had just been on the first Aldermaston March against the bomb, and all wore Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badges in their lapels. Inconceivable.
They said that they found the Double-Barrels “too tedious for words,” a phrase I clasped to myself and used till it went threadbare. Our isolation in the village was stiff and uncomfortable. It bristled with class tension, class guilt, class pride. Their isolation was lordly. They liked the view but the people bored them. They made living on an island look like a handsome and graceful thing to do.
Best of all, the Rapps were Jews. To them, the idea that the world had been created by a Palestinian peasant just a few hundred years ago was no more than a quaint conceit. To go to church every Sunday in order to eat this man’s flesh and drink his blood was an interesting survival of an old pagan ritual. It was like the business of saying hello to the fairies in the dell. Lots of people did it, but the Rapps wouldn’t bother.
I heroized them. Their free and easy talk went to my head. I ached
to be a part of their exotic diaspora. Late one night, Mr. Rapp drove me to the gate of the parsonage. The passenger door of the Aston Martin closed with a soft, expensive click, leaving a brief bubble of Havana cigar smoke in the air. When I walked up the drive toward the Ancestors glowering through their uncurtained windows, I was a comeover from a superior island.
When I tied up in Pwllheli, the pubs were full of talk of the South Stack. The total disappearance, in fine weather, of a large, well-found steel trawler was something for every fisherman to worry over and exorcise his own fears by speaking them out loud.
There was the Bermuda Triangle theory. Liverpool Bay was a bad and treacherous place for any ship. All sorts and conditions of boats had gone down there for no good reason. Why, only last year …
There was the Gas Bottle theory. One fisherman had heard a bang on the Saturday morning. It was not a big bang, mind. It was a very faraway bang, from somewhere beyond and beneath the horizon. It was so faraway that he could not rightly tell the direction of it, exactly. But it was a bang, definitely. If there had been a leak, or the gas bottles on board the South Stack had gone rusty, then perhaps one of the men, lighting a cigarette, maybe, or putting on the kettle for a brew …
There was the Secret Submarine theory. Everyone knew somebody who had gone trawling and suddenly found himself being pulled backward, or forward, or sideways through the sea at terrifying speed. He’d had to cut his nets to free himself from the underwater monster or be dragged down to the bottom as the sub dived. There were certainly submarines about—nuclear submarines, people said. You never saw them, but they made great, mysterious waves on the surface of the sea, like bulging muscles. Some thought they were “ours,” others were sure they were Russians. If they were ours, they were so secret that the Admiralty would never own up when a man’s gear—thousands of pounds’ worth—was lost to them. Suppose the South Stack had not had time to cut herself free …
There were other theories too—theories which involved piracy, spies, women. Suppose a man wanted to start a new life for himself, in Africa or South America: then wouldn’t a fine trawler like that be the perfect vessel to sail away in into blessed anonymity? And could one discount the IRA?
When I left Pwllheli, still nothing had been found. The Irish Sea had been combed from end to end and side to side and not a scrap of wreckage had been spotted. I double-checked the fittings on my own gas bottles and sniffed the bilges of Gosfield Maid before I sailed. I never heard anyone mention the South Stack again—until last week.
While I was beginning this chapter and describing the arrival of the Nimrod search aircraft, I wrote a letter to the Holyhead Coastguard asking if there’d been any further news. The reply makes sad reading.
The South Stack sailed from Holyhead on a Thursday for two days’ fishing in Liverpool Bay. The three men who were on board were due to show up for a family celebration back in Holyhead on the Saturday evening. When they failed to arrive, their relatives rang the Coastguard, who first put out a PAN broadcast, asking vessels in their area to look out for them, then, on Sunday morning, put out a MAYDAY call.
Nimrod aircraft was on scene and searching at 1340 GMT. Helicopter searching Caernarfon Bay and Moelfre Lifeboat searching North Anglesey coast. Weather on the Sunday was light Northerly wind with slight sea. Search continued until darkness with nothing found. The search was continued at first light the following morning throughout that day until 1700 GMT when practically the whole Irish Sea had been covered with negative results. Broadcast action was carried on for a further 24 hours.
About a week later, a liferaft was found by a yacht on passage from IOM to Holyhead about 17 miles North of the Skerries. The raft was part deflated with flares etc intact. From the finder it appeared to have just surfaced. A sonar search was carried out later in that area by the Trinity House vessel Winston Churchill with again results being negative. It can only be assumed that the South Stack caught her gear in an obstruction and overturned. An enquiry was carried out by the Dept of Transport Marine Survey Office, Liverpool, but as there was no further evidence it was inconclusive.
What the Coastguard is careful to avoid saying is that for such a vessel to overturn as a result of catching her gear in an “obstruction,” the obstruction would have to be moving, and moving very fast.
There was nothing unusual in the disappearance of the South Stack. Every day the seamen’s newspaper, Lloyd’s List, carries hundreds of such entries in its Casualties columns: boats announced as Overdue, then as Missing; boats known to have foundered on rocks; boats presumed lost “due to stress of weather.” Some catch on fire, some spring leaks, some run into hurricanes, and their fates are reduced to a single line of small print. Their names stay posted in the paper for a week or two, then they’re dropped to make way for other, more recent, missing ships.
It is the way they go that makes one shiver. “Results were negative.”
“No further evidence.” First you are steaming along under a blue sky, and then you are sunk. For a few minutes you leave a trail of bursting bubbles—then nothing. Not even bubbles.
CHAPTER 3
AN INSULAR WAR
Seesawing in a swell of grizzled waves, with the tide running hard against us, the boat was marking time. It bucked and rolled, shunting the books about in their fiddled shelves, rattling the saucepans in the galley, making the glass frames of the pictures on the walls snatch and lose the sun. There was a lot of motion in my floating house, but no sense of making headway. Gosfield Maid felt as if she were tethered to the seafloor on a chain.
Yet I could see the land creeping past the wheelhouse window. I shut my left eye and squinted, lining up a coppice of dead elm trees against the steel rigging of the mizzen shrouds. The trees were making definite but slow progress, while the boat stayed still. The land was a limping ship, making just a knot or two through the water, its decks littered with cars, cranes, containers, scaffolding, apartment buildings—a lifetime of accumulated junk. The long low vessel of England looked dreadfully patched and rickety, and I wouldn’t have put a penny on her seaworthiness as she shuffled painfully westward under a charred flag.
This was not a tired hallucination. I had set off in my boat on the assumption that England would have the grace to stay in her charted position. It was Gosfield Maid that was supposed to be making all the running on this trip. But within twenty-four hours of my departure, England decided to go off on a voyage of her own. I was pointing east by north for the Dover Straits; England was headed west and south for the Falkland Islands.
I was two miles out of Fowey when the country disappeared into the mist, and I had no idea what she was getting up to in my absence. Trusting to the compass, I felt my way up-Channel by numbers, marking the chart every fifteen minutes with a cross to show where I reckoned Gosfield Maid must be. On the extreme edge of my world there was the occasional pale silhouette of a passing ship, and sometimes the boat would give a sudden lurch as it hit the wake of something big that was too far away to see.
Six miles on, I met a pair of scallop dredgers working in consort, raking the bottom for shellfish with what looked like antique bedsteads. The fishermen waved as I went by. The sea is a much friendlier place than the land: when you see someone else afloat on it—at least in difficult weather and away from yachting slums like the Solent—you salute them to acknowledge a solitude momentarily brightened for being shared. You take an inordinate pleasure in what little passing company you can find. I warmed to the little black-and-white guillemots, shiny bath toys, that kept on diving ahead of the boat—there one moment, gone the next, leaving a space in the water as cleanly drilled as a bullet hole.
The warships made themselves heard long before I saw them. I was searching the haze for the loom of Rame Head on the west of Plymouth Sound when the VHF radio yielded a sudden harvest of clean-cut naval voices talking in jargon.
“Roger, Long Room … roger … roger and out.”
“Achilles, Achilles, this is Ajax, Ajax
. Do you read, please? Over—”
It was an hour before the warships became actually visible—first as angular shadows, then as gray dirigibles apparently suspended in the sky. Stealing cautiously up on these giants, I felt the walnut-shell littleness of my 32 feet of boat. Slab-sided, beetling, rudely engineered in what looked like bare cement, they made no concessions to the usual curves and frills of marine design. Her Majesty’s Navy was a seaborne industrial estate of displaced tenements and factories: it looked as if Slough, Milton Keynes and Newark had taken to the water for the day.
Each ship had a small forest of radar scanners sluggishly revolving on their stalks. Their huge propellers made the sea behind them boil for half a mile and more. I was scared of letting Gosfield Maid go anywhere near these wakes: caught in that turbid white water, she would be flung about like a dinghy.
I hung back to make way for a monster ahead. Its guns were masked in tarpaulins, clumsily wrapped Christmas presents, and in the deck space between the guns, men in the uniform of the Royal Marines were at drill, jerking and snapping to their orders.
“Slow-hope harms!” I could hear the simultaneous crunch-crunch-crunch of the rifle butts and see the limbs of the men moving stiffly in time. They were boys in sailor suits, with spots on their faces and unformed pudge noses. Poor kids, condemned to compulsory games.
“Pre—wait for it! Scent harms!”
The enormous ship breezed past with flying colors. The white ensign rippling on a jackstaff at the stern gave the thing an incongruous touch of daintiness: a single rambler rose trained on the wall of a high-rise by some optimistic tenant.
Keeping at a safe distance, I followed the Navy down the broad triumphal avenue of Plymouth Sound. Lined with forts, flagstaffs and monuments to the famous dead, the Sound was a place for ceremonial processions and state occasions. A civilian interloper, I sneaked along the edge of the buoyed channel, fearing summary arrest by the policemen of the water. At Drake’s Island the fleet wheeled left for the River Tamar and the naval dockyards; I bore right into the Cattewater, following the antique, but still good, advice of Greenville Collins:
Coasting Page 9
