Coasting

by Jonathan Raban

  Catwater is a good Place. There is a Place within the Cittadel and Barbigan, called Sutton Pool, where Ships lye aground on soft ooze at low-water, by the Keys side before the Town of Plymouth.

  In Sutton Pool I tied up alongside the trawlers by the fish market. I climbed a slippery ladder, a rope end in my teeth; stepped ashore and learned that war had broken out.

  Even when you’ve spent just a few hours at sea, it is always a bit difficult to learn to walk on land. After water, earth is a sick-makingly unstable element. Your feet keep on encountering thin air where there ought to be paving stones; you have to crouch forward, raising your arms and bending your knees like a toddler, to balance yourself against the lurching street.

  At first I took the news of the war as another symptom of this general topsy-turviness of things on land. I didn’t trust it, any more than I trusted the scaly cobbles of the fish market or its green filigree roof, which was swaying dangerously overhead. It seemed beyond belief.

  It had begun six weeks before as a silly diplomatic comedy: a bunch of scrap-metal merchants had cheekily raised the Argentine flag over their campsite on the island of South Georgia. I had rather enjoyed the exploits of these jingoistic rag-and-bone men, and thought the questions raised about them in Parliament had sounded unnecessarily indignant and pompous.

  Yet in the short time that I’d been away from land the thing had turned from trifling farce to a drama of the most frighteningly serious kind. Argentinian troops had invaded the Falklands, and the Governor of the islands had surrendered in Port Stanley after a short skirmish between a detachment of British marines and the Argentinians. Diplomatic relations with Buenos Aires had been broken off; a naval task force was about to sail from England to the South Atlantic to reclaim the colony.

  No wonder that the warehouses and shops of Plymouth were pitching in a tricky sea. There were far too many wars in the world already—too many bangs and flashes and screams and unattended bodies in suburban streets. Beirut and Belfast were at least explicable: those miserable twin cities were built on enmities so old and loggerheaded that it would have taken a miracle for them not to break out sometime into a state of open warfare. But this Falklands business, as far as I could understand it, was perfectly gratuitous. Two governments were preparing to kill each other’s soldiers, to go widow-making, for no better reason than that the exercise would be good for national pride or, perhaps, that it would create a handy distraction from the unhappy tangle of affairs at home.

  I sat in a bar full of trawlermen trying to watch television. In dreadful color, behind snow showers of interference, the British Foreign and Defence Secretaries were holding a press conference. They were both speaking in the same unnaturally slow voice; that studied bass, bulging with gravitas, which politicians habitually use when they think they’re making History. The badly tuned television set gave them the faces of giant goldfish swimming behind the glass, and the lips of Lord Carrington went on slowly opening and closing, opening and closing, as if he were masticating ants’ eggs rather than words—soft, fatty abstractions like Sovereignty, Integrity, Responsibility, Allegiance.

  I trailed out through the darkening city; on Plymouth Hoe I found a joyful hubbub in the Royal Western Yacht Club of England.

  “Well, it’s four thousand miles at … what? Fourteen knots?” The man beside me frowned at his wristwatch as if it were about to come up with the answer.

  “It’s more than that, Jack. It’s more like nine.”

  “What, knots?”

  “No—miles. Nine thousand miles.”

  “Well, then. Nine thousand miles at fourteen knots …”

  “It’s going to be three weeks at least, maybe four, even.”

  “No—you could do it in ten days. Easily. Those Type 21s go at one hell of a lick. Thirty knots plus.”

  “Yes, but what about Charlie Slowcoach? It’s the landing ships you’ve got to think of—”

  Pink gins on silver trays were moving as fast as Type 21s. Men in dinner jackets and black ties, on the leeside of some formal binge, stood in an important group in front of the fire. Wives in long frocks sat out at separate tables, leaving their husbands free to run the coming war. The men were grizzled and pink. They shared the same old school of the Navy, and were of an age to have served in North Atlantic convoys and seen the beaches of Dunkirk. They were the corvette captains forty years on, and today’s news was working on them like a powerful injection of caffeine. They were alight with it. Their voices caroled.

  “They’ve cancelled all leave—”

  “They’re coming down from Wales—”

  “They’re sailing from Gib already—”

  “Endurance is still down there—”

  It was an evening to make old men feel young again. There was pure pleasure in their indignation at what Argentina had done.

  The man at my elbow was saying: “It’s exactly as if Russia had come over and occupied the Isle of Wight without a by-your-leave. Exactly.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Exactly the same. No difference at all. It’s British soil.”

  “Well, is it, quite?”

  “Of course it is. Sovereign territory. British soil. The Falklanders are as English as I am. To a man.”

  As the gins piled up on the bar, the talk spiraled in volume and excitement. We were on to the requisitioning of civilian ships now.

  “Trawlers from Hull are going.”

  “And Brixham too.”

  “They’re going to need cross-Channel ferries—”

  “And the QE 2.”

  “I’d take my tub out there at the drop of a hat,” one man said, and opened a floodgate of happy fantasy. Could there, just conceivably, be a place for all of us in England’s great adventure? Supposing we set off tonight … The catamarans, at least, could make it almost as fast as the warships … And someone had a ketch down in the Med—wasn’t that almost halfway to Port Stanley? Imagine the astonishment and terror of General Galtieri’s gang when they saw, approaching them over the horizon, not an armada but an epic regatta: it would be Cowes Week and Henley and Burnham rolled majestically into one. The Argentinians would take fright at the sight of the picnic hampers alone.

  “I’d go.”

  “So would I, Jack, if they’d have me.”

  “I’m still on the Reserve.”

  “They’ll have to call up the Reserve.”

  “What about our friend here? Would you go?”

  “Good God, no,” I said, then remembered where I was. “I only do six knots. I wouldn’t get to the Falklands until about this time next year.”

  The picture window at the end of the bar framed Plymouth Sound—the pinprick lights of winking buoys, the bulky blue shadows of ships on the move. Whisky and the din of the war talk had gone to my head. I’d lost half the words, but it was a night made for the rollicking sentimental chauvinism of Sir Henry Newbolt and the poem that every small boy in England used to be forced to recite at school:

  Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come.

  (Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)

  Slung atween the roundshot, listenin’ for the drum,

  An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.

  Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,

  Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;

  Where the old trade’s plyin’ and the old flag’s flyin’

  They shall find him ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago!

  At least there was no chivalry in the fish business. I was awakened in the dark by sudden arc lights and a voice talking through loudspeakers.

  “… six fifty … seven … seven fifty … eight. Any more on eight? Eight, eight, eight, eight—Wemmidge.”

  Maneuvering trawlers were stirring up the water of the dock, and Gosfield Maid rolled and crunched against the harbor wall. Crapulous and underslept, I did my best to nurse the charcoal embers which were still just glowing in the stove in the s
aloon. The whistle of the kettle in the galley, six feet away, injured something vital in my skull. Moving too fast to shut off the noise, I bruised my shin on the first step of the companionway to the wheelhouse. A small boat never seems smaller than when you have a hangover. It is all obstacles and sharp corners. Its drumskin interior magnifies every sound.

  “… whang, whang, whang, whang—Jorkins.”

  Shaved and necktied, I pulled the broad brim of my felt hat low down over my forehead to hide my bloody eyes and went out to make a brave breakfast of a hot dog and a paper cup of tea from the stall in the market. The predawn auction under the lights was the stuff of which really first-class hangovers are made. It was odd, boring, much too vivid, mildly repulsive and perfectly in keeping with my mood.

  The auctioneer, dressed in a white coat like a medical attendant and carrying a microphone on a long lead, was working his way steadily down a line of buckets and trays of dead fish. A dozen fish merchants in raincoats and Tyrolean hats with feathers, their hands deep in their pockets, shuffled along behind him. Every bucket and tray had what looked like a bumper sticker lying on top of it, showing the name of the trawler which had landed the catch. Our Tracey. Semper Allegro. Jayne Anne. Maaleesh.

  The group assembled round a tray of bleary-eyed Dover soles, fish and men regarding each other with exactly the same indifferent stare.

  “Nine fifty, ten, ten fifty—”

  Two merchants were bidding against each other. Both had pipes—one a meerschaum, the other a briar. To bid, each man wagged his pipe a fraction of an inch with his teeth. Meerschaum, briar, meerschaum, briar. Neither was alight. The bowls tittupped along in an easy fox-trot rhythm until the briar went doggo at sixteen pounds.

  “Sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen—Wemmidge.”

  The men trooped on, hunch-shouldered, to perform the last rites over a bucket of yawning ling.

  Soon after daybreak I found an open corner shop with the morning’s papers stacked in bundles on the floor. The huge headlines looked like schoolboy whoops and yells. There was no fun, apparently, quite like the fun of going to war, and the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and the Sun had announced the Falklands expedition as if a national holiday, with fireworks and free beer, had been declared. There were pictures of the Argentine dictator smiling broadly and making a thumbs-up sign; the message of the headline writers was that nothing would give the British more satisfaction than to wipe that smile off Galtieri’s face and crack the joints of both those thumbs. I bought a Guardian, which was striking a discordant note of sanity in the middle of all the heady bombast. Its editorial listed the bungled efforts at diplomacy and the bungled collection of intelligence that had led to the crisis. It went on to observe flatly that:

  The Falkland Islands do not represent any strategic or commercial British interest worth fighting over (unless one believes reports of crude oil under its off-shore waters).

  This remark—a plain-enough fact, even if insufficiently varnished with the right amount of topical valor—was to be denounced later that day in Parliament by the Liberal Member for Inverness as an outrage that fell only a foot or two short of downright high treason.

  Wanting to clear my head at sea for a while, I untied the boat from the quay at nine o’clock and gentled it out through the pack of trawlers. Three small boys were fishing for crabs at the dock-end with lumps of raw meat knotted to pieces of string. One fair-haired child, his face as void of malice as a carton of yogurt, was holding a large live crab in one hand and pulling its legs off, one by one, with the other.

  “She loves me—” He pulled a leg out of its socket. “Loves me not. Loves me—”

  When he’d run out of legs, he sent the carcass of the crab spinning far out over the water. It was the graceful flick of a Frisbee expert. The crab hit the surface, bounced, bounced again, and sank, leaving a faint dribble of guts to mark where it went down.

  The boy saw me watching him. He nodded pleasantly at the splash. “Bloody fiddly.”

  “What did you say?”

  “He were only a bloody fiddly,” he said, and went on with his fishing.

  Ahead, the world was monochrome, like a smudged charcoal drawing—gray sky, gray sea, gray ships, gray breakwaters, gray cliffs, gray everything. A swell from the far south, relic of someone else’s gale, made the oily-smooth water bulge steeply, although there was no wind at all. It heaved and sucked around the long breakwater in the middle of the entrance to the Sound; it broke in an ash-blond fringe around the Mewstone. It was nice to ride this swell out slowly, under engine: its soothing rockabye motion came as a blessed relief after the violent corkscrew rolling of the land.

  The evening before, with the retired commanders, I hadn’t cared to let on that I didn’t actually know where exactly the Falklands were. Later, I’d looked them up in the inky-fingered school atlas in my floating library. They showed as a rash of heat spots off the coast of Argentina, picked out in British imperial pink. By a funny twist of chance, they occupied precisely the same latitude in their hemisphere as the British Isles did in theirs: at 51°46’ S, Port Stanley was the Hemel Hempstead of the southern world.

  More than that, the Falklands stood anchored off the coast of South America very much as Britain stood anchored off the coast of Europe. You had only to look at the atlas to see that the identity of the Falklanders, like that of the British, was bound up in endless aggressive assertions of their differences from the continental giant across the water.

  They were visibly, audibly, our kith and kin. A family of Falklanders, holidaying in Britain, had been exhibited on television. Even by wintry English standards, they were white. It was the way they spoke, though, that made them so evidently worth fighting for. Their voices had a tinny quality, as if they were being played through a gramophone needle with dust on it, but their accent was loudly Home Counties. They all talked in the voice which, heard across the distance of a souk, or a patch of jungle, in some remote quarter of the world, puts you instantly and depressingly in mind of gin-and-tonic, cavalry twill, the next monthly mortgage payment, brussels sprouts, tea cozies, Journey’s End at the amateur dramatic society, the Magimix in the kitchen and the Queen’s head on the stamp.

  The Falklanders were us, but they were us in looking-glass reverse. Our spring was their autumn. Their Atlantic depressions came to them from the east, spinning round clockwise; ours came at us from the west, spinning counterclockwise. On the same principle, their bathwater ran out of the plughole in the opposite direction from ours; and if we stood upright on the earth, the Falklanders must have been standing upside down and clinging by their boot soles through the power of suction.

  In this miniature inverted cluster, the British had hit by accident on a perfect symbol of themselves. The Falklands held a mirror up to our own islands, and it reflected, in brilliantly sharp focus, all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood. As for the Argentinians, they were the last word in Comeovers from Across. They’d got monstrously above themselves, and, as Comeovers deserve, they were going to be given their Come Uppance.

  I had on board a copy of E. Keble Chatterton’s The Yachtsman’s Pilot of 1933, whch had belonged to my sailing grandfather. It described the approach to the river Yealm, nine sea miles east of Plymouth: a fussy business which involved lining up a succession of marks to make a dog’s-leg course avoiding the rocks to starboard and the shoaling sands to port. Not to be attempted in strong onshore winds … care must be exercised … Chatterton’s last line on the place, though, was irresistible: “You are now in one of the most secluded and lovely spots to be found in Southern England.” In search of loveliness and seclusion, I motored east through the gray swell and found Chatterton’s first set of marks—a church spire followed by a pair of white-painted wooden triangles on posts, one on the shore inside the estuary mouth, the other high up on a hill behind. So far, so good.

  I waited while the triangle on the shore moved slowly rightward to join the
triangle on the hill, then swung the boat round and squeezed it by within feet of Yealm Head, where the sea slopped and piled on the rocks, blackening the lichens and leaving the exposed granite looking like wet moleskin. The course zigzagged through high bluffs of trees and bracken, going east, then northeast, then southeast, then northeast again, then finally northwest into a deep wooded cleft containing a mile-long pool of dark water like a secret lake. A Victorian hotel stood on a sandy point, half hidden in pines. A dozen early season yachts swung on their moorings. The noise of my engine, echoing in the hollow, disturbed a wading heron, which flapped off up into the woods on boxy wings.

  After several minutes of panicky mismanagement, I got the upper hand of Gosfield Maid, which had seemed to grow to the size of a cargo ship the moment that she entered the river, and I tethered the boat between two buoys in midstream. In drizzly soft focus, the Yealm was exquisite, just as the late Mr. Chatterton had promised, with its thick country silence, its steep terraces of dripping evergreens and its glassy water, scrolled by the tide and current with loops and whorls of teasingly near-legible sham Arabic.

  Below, the saloon was snug and full of comfortable noises: barbecue charcoal wheezed and crackled in the stove, the river muttered companionably in the bilges. Even in this flattest of calm waters, the room felt afloat: the floor shimmied slightly underfoot, the ceiling, walls and furniture had a palpable absence of specific gravity. It was like living inside a soap bubble, suspended, sustained, by a contradictory harmony of tensions. It brought the weightlessness and detachment that are usually confined only to sweet dreams.

  Floating, I switched on the wireless in time to catch the beginning of the great Westminster debate. For the first time since the Suez crisis of 1956, the House of Commons was sitting on a Saturday, and the chamber was honoring the occasion with an ominous, unnatural hush. There were none of the usual feeding-trough noises of Parliament in session; just the hiss and rustle of order papers, like static.