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Published by Michael Joseph 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2005
11
Copyright © Griff Rhys Jones, 2003
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192813-5
For Jo
Thanks to Louise, David, Ness, Claire, Robert, Cat, John and Jo.
Prologue
1 Chromium
2 Mast–up
3 Fraught
4 The London River
5 Dawn Over Kent
6 Dutch Approaches
7 Pornographic Milkmaids
8 Borkum Rift
9 Up the Elbe
10 Love
11 Possession
12 By Canal to the Ostsee
13 The German Race
14 Glowering
15 Schnell, Schnell
16 Back to Unreality
17 Danish Blues
18 Cats and Dogs
19 Maybe, Yes, Bob
20 Mast Height
21 Denmark for Beginners
22 Back to Denmark the Hard Way
23 Cabin Fever
24 Sweden as a Smudge
25 They Went to Sea in a Sieve
26 Half Holiday
27 The Middle Ages
28 In a Baltic State
29 The Wharf
30 Paradise
31 The Wooden Shack
32 Vormsi
33 The Sailing Thing
34 Sex Capital of the North
35 Eels
36 Vlad the Enabler
37 Catherine the Great
38 The Black of the Monster Lagoon
39 Island Hopping
40 Another Beautiful Hut
41 Hunting, Shooting and Fishing
42 Aground
43 A Pecking Order
44 The Islands Were Closed
45 Swedish Neutrality
46 Swedish Manoeuvres
47 The Canal of Doom
48 The Ride Across Lake Vättern
49 Boiled Pony
50 Revenge of the Elk
51 The Cold Box
It was half past ten and it was eventually, even reluctantly, getting dark in Kent. Hulks, rusting engines, trailers, plastic barrels, half-finished cement boats and a 900-year-old tractor – all the dwarfing, ghastly litter of a boatyard melded into a shadow of impenetrable gloom. On the other side of the sea wall, some way below us now, bizarrely, we could see the beckoning light of the only pub for 5 miles. ‘Come back, don’t go. Look! Beer!’
Bob lit a cigarette. He sucked. The red glow briefly rimmed his bald cranium. ‘A neap tide actually means that the water comes to the highest level. Just like springs,’ he said.
‘Oh. Really?’ I replied.
‘Mmm.’
It didn’t sound right to me. I shifted on the hard cockpit bench and went on sorting out ropes. Surely neap tides meant the water didn’t go all the way down the plug.
The darkness hid the dirty mud-grey water, which was now flooding in all around us. Hid the flecks of poisonous-looking yellow foam that always accompanied the rising waters on the east coast. There was a slight movement, a tip of the deck, as Baines walked across it. We were floating.
‘Can you switch on the instrument lights?’
Baines’s bearded face, tinged scarlet by the navigation light, appeared briefly in the hatch. There was a click. ‘There you go.’
Night is the only time to set off in a boat. ‘And the engine.’
Baines switched the key in the ignition and another light glowed red. He depressed one of the two black corrugated rubber buttons on the control console and held it for ten seconds. He let go and pressed both together. The engine coughed and chugged into life. Steam and exhaust smoke rose up through the glow of the stern light in the unseasonably cold June night.
‘I want to warp her round,’ I said. The others looked at me. Baines nodded.
‘Rick, could you let off the stern rope?’
‘What, completely?’
‘Yuh.’
‘OK.’
He fumbled with the ropes on the fishing smack’s foredeck.
‘Just give the stern a push away.’
He did, with his foot. There was a moment of hiatus while the incoming tide caught the back end of the boat and 14½ tons of wood and metal swung slowly out into the channel. As long as the forward rope was tied in place, Undina would simply pivot on it, wouldn’t she?
She did. The last of the flood tide carried her round.
‘Hold out the bow.’ I didn’t want the new paintwork to bang against our host. She bumped back against the side of the smack, and ended up facing the other way, out towards the Swale and the mouth of the Thames and the North Sea.
The plan was to go to the Baltic for the summer of 2002.
Michael, the boat builder, had originally promised to return me my boat, Undina, at the beginning of May. I telephoned him in the middle of March. ‘So, anyway, Michael, as I was saying, it would probably be a good idea to take her up to Harwich for some sort of sea trials and then we can go across to Holland.’
‘Yup. And when were you planning this then?’
‘Early May.’
‘Early May!’ He sounded astonished.
‘Yes. You said early May.’
‘Well, she won’t be ready by then.’ There was a distinct admonitory tone to his voice.
‘Well, yes, as I said, I’ll have finished this very important radio project that I’m working on and then I’m free. Free! Free of everything. I really have to do this thing. And it’s up anchor and away.’
‘Yes, but not in early May. Dear me, no.’
‘No. OK. When, then?’
There was a noise like a lorry going round a corner. ‘Eeeeeeeeeee…’ Michael gave a heavy sigh. He grunted. He made little chicken cluckings in the back of his mouth.
‘For safety, say the end of the second week in May, say.’
‘Yes… yes… that’s fine.’ It made no odds. I wouldn’t have finished the very important radio project until then. Not that it was that important really. It was perfectly sound. It had won a Sony award. The authorities were so enthused by having something funny on the radio that they had almost considered the possibility of another series. But it could all wait. I didn’t care. As long as I got to the Baltic by June.
Six months earlier, on a freezing December day, Michael and I had driven down to Cowes to look at Josephine, the sister ship to Undina. She was a near clone, but we were immediately impressed by her fittings.
‘Yes, we had them chromed,’ Josephine’s owner said.
‘They were bronze, though.’
‘Yes. But they would have been chromed originally.’ And he took us below to show us his varnished floor and lavatory arrangements. But my eyes kept returning to the gleaming silver finish.
‘Busy at the moment?’ he asked.
‘What? Yes. Just finished a play.’
‘Any good?’
‘Well the first three hours were excellent. But then the interval came…’
Both boats had been built in the 1950s. There were seven altogether. They were designed by Philip Rhodes, an American, and made of wood by European yards, which must have been cheaper in the immediate post-war period. They were yachting icons of their time – fast, modern, not wooden for sentimental reasons but because wood was light and strong and fibre-glass was still an experiment. They were the Chippendales of boats, neglected as they became unfashionable, but now redolent of the period and era. Dead classy. Though the thought often occurred to me, if you owned a Chippendale escritoire, would you sensibly toss it in the sea?
From the beginning, for me, the relationship was almost wholly one of aesthetics. I was stricken with the boat. I couldn’t walk up a jetty towards it without pausing to admire it. West End musicals, radio series, new translations of creaky French farces, television clip show career opportunities, the finding of another two million for the Hackney Empire (after the builders lost it), the sitcom I had written (which the BBC sports supremo suggested a woman should write), a seat on the committee to decide on the European City of Culture, they all seemed so blisteringly unimportant.
In motor-car terms, the 45-foot boats were like 1950s Maseratis: sleek, low and streamlined. And now there was this chrome. It was a revelation. It defined their classic origins and the slight American raffish glamour. On Josephine that morning, the new covering reflected back a distorted, envious Mr Toad, as I leered admiringly into it.
So we had to have ours chromed. Every stanchion, every cleat, every screw-bolt on the deck was laboriously undone and sent to a man in Romford, who was apparently surprised to find we wanted them back in less than a year. I was surprised, in my turn, at his initial quote.
‘Six thousand pounds!’
‘It’s the polishing. You can have any amount of dipping, it’s the polishing that takes the man hours.’
‘Well yes, but…’
‘How much do you want to spend?’ I hadn’t been asked a question like that since I was in the ‘Carpet Museum’ in Marrakesh. ‘Five thousand, four…?’
‘Yes, four is more like what I had in mind.’
‘We’ll say four, then.’
‘OK.’ Clearly, I had been rash to interject at four. Who knows, he might have gone on down to a quid. Or done it for nothing, if he’d been in a generous mood. I’d never had my fittings chromed before. It was new. It was a new experience. I wasn’t a boat builder, I was a would-be fantasy yachtsman.
‘So why would you be coming down on Monday anyway?’ Michael had asked in late May.
‘To pick up the boat, Michael, as discussed.’
‘Oh I don’t think that’s possible, because we won’t have the chrome back by then…’
‘But that’s outrageous.’
‘We did ring. But he said he’ll hurry it up and it will be scheduled for next week.’
‘No, Michael. Look, this is nearly June, and we have to be in Flensburg in Germany by the eighth of June. I just have to go.’
‘Do you want me to cancel it, then?’
‘Yes. Er… yes. We’ll forget the chroming.’
‘He’s got them all chemicalized and coated with the stuff, he says. It’s just a question of putting them in the tank.’
‘So if we get them back they’ll all be covered with chemical coating?’
‘I suppose they could wash it off.’
‘What’s the latest you can pick them up?’
Michael made a noise like a small electric drill. ‘Eeeee…’ It was agreed that if we could get a lorry to take delivery of the missing parts, if they all fitted, if we scooted straight up the Dutch coast, if the weather improved, we could get my love to this classic yacht regatta, where I wanted to pimp her around, with at least an hour to spare. It was not the leisurely exploration of the Benelux countries that I had originally planned. It was not the drift into an alternative existence, free of the petty concerns of media trash that I had originally sought, but Michael would have a go.
Two weeks later we spoke again.
‘Well, we do have the chrome bits all back now…’ Michael paused. He had the patient concern of a talking dray horse in his telephone manner again.
‘Right, yes…’
‘… but these fittings were built with imperial measures, not metric. So we can’t source screws to get them back in.’
‘I see.’ I could almost see the pursed lips and the nodding at the other end of the telephone. Was that a bridle jangling? ‘What about the screws that you took out?’
‘They were all too corroded.’
‘Yes, but couldn’t we use them temporarily?’
‘We threw them away. It can all be done, but I think it will take another two weeks, so…’
I walked away from the phone and paced the room, idly tossing the letter offering a tour of As You Like It ‘including Bath’ into the wastepaper bin. I was beginning to get the impression that Michael didn’t actually want to give me back my boat. I knew what this was. He had fallen in love with her himself and was intending to kidnap her and imprison her in his tin shed.
‘It doesn’t seem very likely. He’s doing what he can.’ Bob was sympathetic. ‘But you want to take her this month?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right. This month.’
‘Well, when did you think we’d be leaving?’
‘I assumed the regatta was in July.’
‘No, no, that’s the whole point. The regatta in Germany is on the weekend of the fourteenth of June.’
‘But that’s only a couple of weeks away.’
‘I know. Are you saying you can’t make it?’
‘No, no. I’ve put the whole summer aside. I’m up for it. Don’t worry about me.’
‘So you can make the departure on Friday? It’s tight.’
‘No, wait a minute. Next Friday?’
‘Michael’s getting a crane and a low-loader and after the chrome stuff is all fitted back on, putting the boat back in the water on the Friday. And then we leave on the Saturday. I told you all this.’
‘No, all I remember is you told me the regatta was going to be in July.’
‘June!’
‘June, then. But if the boat isn’t going to be ready, don’t you think we should wait until the regatta in July.’
‘There isn’t a regatta in July. They don’t have a regatta every month. I’ve booked us in and we have to be there.’
‘But what about the weather?’
I had looked up the long-range forecast and the weather was stable. It was continuously bad. So far, May and June had been notable for being the wettest and coldest May and June for as long as anybody could remember, though, naturally enough, the meteorology office would announce to a shivering, damp nation at the end of the month that the weather had been perfectly normal and not much wetter or colder than the average May or June.
‘It’s fine.’
Bob didn’t sound convinced. In fact he didn’t sound anything. But I took his silence to mean that he wasn’t convinced.
‘If the weather is bad, all we have to do is nip across the Channel, twenty miles from Ramsgate, and then get into the inland waterways and we can get up to Flensburg without ever going out to sea again.’ Neither of us wanted to go out to sea in anything rough. He seemed partially reassured. ‘But we could do with someone to go with us for that bit. I mean I was hoping that George and his mates would come…’ I said.
‘And?’
‘Well it’s his half-term. He’s decided to go drinking in Whitehall instead.’
My son George was seventeen. I thought the trip would toughen him up, but he was already tough enough to refuse to go. I was now reliant on Bob. ‘Didn’t you say that you had a couple of friends who…’
‘Oh yeah. Yes. That’s no problem. There are loads of people.’
A week later, Bob rang me back. He’d arranged for a mate, Baines, to get working on the electrics of the boat as quickly as possible, but Baines had contacted the yard and been told he had the whole weekend or as long as he wanted.
‘No, I don’t think so, we’re leaving on the Saturday.’
‘That’s not what Michael told me.’
‘What?’
Michael was apologetic when I phoned.
‘It’s the Jubilee weekend, Griff.’
Dear me, I had forgotten entirely.
‘We can’t get the driver of the crane to come out over the weekend. The earliest he can do is Monday.’
‘What’s the problem? He’s a monarchist?’
‘No, he’s booked for something else.’
There was nothing to be done. The schedule was, at least, being sort of set down, you know, subject to alteration, of course. Trundle the boat out of the yard on the Monday, stick it in the water on the Tuesday, rig the mast and bend on the sails during the day and leave on the high tide on Tuesday evening: leaving – what? – five days to shoot up the Channel and whisk into the Baltic.
I raged around my study. ‘No, no, I’ve got a better idea. He can deliver it. I’ll just fly up to Flensburg and wait for it.’
Bob was mollifying. ‘But that’s the whole point of the journey, to sail there.’
‘The whole point of the journey is to wander gently through Dutch inland seas and explore the Friesian Islands on a leisurely cruise and sit in reedy shallows smoking pipes.’
Bob and I were cowardly sailors. He, partly because of a limitless inexperience of any practical use and me, because I was a coward. On the telephone the week before, he had become irritatingly confident about the weather. ‘We’ll be all right in June. Should be lovely.’
‘No, no.’
‘No?’
Why did I have to knock back Bob’s infuriating insouciance?
‘June can be terrible!’
Bob raised his eyebrows. Since he was extremely difficult to disconcert, I felt it was my job to he and exaggerate. An hysteric can’t stand cool people being cool about important and life-threatening things (most things), so tend to lean on the fuel supply in order to induce A PROPER SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY. This seldom works, but it makes us feel better.
‘June can be TERRIBLE. There was this bloke, this journalist from the Daily Telegraph. Did you read about him?’ This was a safe, if redundant question. Bob rarely read anything. Not even the instructions on the packet. Especially not the instructions on the packet. ‘He was planning to sail round Britain a couple of summers ago.’ I was conscious that had once been one of our plans, so this would impress him. ‘And he ended up WRECKED, totally SWAMPED in a storm, in mid-June, off the Shetland Islands.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘So the weather will be VITAL. June is NOTORIOUS.’ Perhaps I’d gone too far. Bob was looking suspicious now. Was he worried about the whole trip? ‘But, you know, we’ll get the long-range weather forecast and keep an eye on things and anyway we’re only going to hop across the Channel.’
‘Yess…’
*
Bob arranged for his choice of crew, Baines and Rick, to come to a sort of meet-and-greet at the ‘Welsh Embassy’ (my house), in central London, and then phoned to tell me he would be late himself. This was wholly expected.
The doorbell rang.
Rick!
‘Come on in, Rick. Bob’s not here…’
‘Ha ha. Yeah, well…’ (He obviously knows Bob quite well, then.)
Rick was wearing a leather motorbike caterpillar suit, which he peeled off and left in the hall. He liked my furniture (his uncle ran some sort of furniture restoration business). Rick rolled spectacularly thin cigarettes and would have a glass of wine.
The doorbell rang again.
‘Come on in, Baines. Rick’s here, Baines, but Bob…’
‘Oh ho!’ Baines knows the form too.
Baines was weedy, bearded and thoroughly affable. He was just called Baines. I wanted to call him Baines something or something Baines. But it was just Baines. He did have a real name, and I tried to elicit it, but he was reluctant to give it, not because he was on a witness protection scheme, but because he had been Baines since he was a baby. He had been born in Kenya and, on the way home from the hospital, the doctor had managed to run over his grandmother’s pet ocelot, in the driveway to her farm. The ocelot had been called Baines and the baby was instantly christened Baines by the grandmother and, eventually, by everybody else too.
Even before Bob himself bothered to arrive, I had gathered that neither Rick nor Baines seemed sporty, clubby or, worst of all, in Bob’s estimation, ‘straight’. We talked. Naturally enough, since he wasn’t there, we talked about Bob, and then about Bob’s planned visit to Glastonbury. Both of them were ardent fans of the Glastonbury Festival, as I was myself, of course. Though I hadn’t actually been there since the very first one, when I had hitch-hiked down to Somerset after A-levels to watch fat girls with no clothes on roll about in the mud: the pinnacle of freak-out sophistication in 1971.
While we waited for Bob, I invited Baines, who I knew was waiting to fix our electrics, to examine our collection of boxes. The week before Bob and I had been on a trip to a basement shop opposite the Saudi Embassy in Mayfair, where I had been overwhelmed by a heady mixture of power, innocence and desperation.
‘OK… right. Obviously I’ve got to have some sort of new GPS system.’
‘Right, OK.’ The salesman nodded slowly.
‘And we thought we should have some sort of iridium phone.’
‘Mmm. Yes.’
Retrospectively I realize that he was thinking, ‘Well that’s two grand already.’ But he gave nothing away, except to adopt the look of a man trying hard to give nothing away.
Come to think of it, he’d probably been through this before. He probably thought that we were going to walk out with a catalogue and a cleaning kit. After all that’s what we’d done to three separate salesmen at the Boat Show in January. But that was January. Now, I was leaving in three days. I was frightened he might not take me seriously.
‘I do need these things quite quickly.’
‘I am confident that can be arranged.’
By the time I left, I’d added a hi-fi set, a German radio and a complete electronic charting system. He was extremely quick to return my calls from then on, and even took back an inverter large enough to power an electric submarine, which I had been convinced I would need, but which turned out to be pure hallucination on my part.
Baines stood in my front room and looked approvingly at my shopping.
‘Yes, well, I wanted to make sure we had the right equipment, you know, for the whole journey. Safety has to be a high priority.’
‘Yes,’ said Baines. ‘Of course. This is a car stereo, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Well we’ll probably want some music too, won’t we?’
‘I should jolly well hope so,’ said Baines. ‘Well done.’
Rick immediately focused on what I was later to discover was his particular and, some might say, all-consuming interest.
‘And charts?’
‘Yes, well, I’ve ordered a computer. It’s a special rugged computer, designed, I believe, for the US army, with a gel thingie inside it that compensates for vibration, and a special waterproof specification, which can run C map, so we’ll have electronic charts…’ Rick’s eyes flickered slightly. ‘… but I do, of course, have paper charts,’ I added quickly. Of course. No sailor worth his salt, or at least one who read any yachting magazine, manual, handbook, pamphlet or prominently displayed notice, would ever rely on electric charts, alone. That word ‘alone’ was the crucial consideration here. Charts could be personally beamed down from a cartographer, licensed by the Royal Hydrographer, hovering in a space capsule directly above your boat, but the proper mariner would always unfold a vast piece of cartridge paper the size of a volleyball field, and set to with bits of see-through plastic and a pair of dividers. God knows, I knew this was sacred law. In fact, I first went on boats when there was no other choice. (Mind you, then, the only affordable way of finding out the depth was throwing a lump of lead on a rope with knots in it over the side, and I’ve done that too.) But having returned to the business of sailing my own boat, after a ten-year lay-off, I was shocked by how easy it had become.
The GPS system is linked to a clutch of satellites, owned and run by the American military. They orbit the earth and beam down directions to anyone with a receiver. It’s the same system that allows an irritating woman to direct mini-cabs down back alleys. In fact, it’s so damn good that everybody is scared to death of it. Barely a week goes by without the yachting press running gruesome fright-stories of boats grounding in the Caribbean or warning that at any moment the United States might go to alert red and switch the lot off. Thunderstorms, electrical interferences, wonky antennae, misreadings and mistaken entries will lead inexorably to maritime disaster. So I had proper charts and a pencil too.
I showed them to Rick. He nodded approvingly.
It was the doorbell.
‘Ah, Bob.’
Bob sauntered in to join Rick, Baines and myself, lit a fag and slumped into a chair in my study. He was full of two things.
The first was a thoroughly irritating smugness. I knew where this was coming from. Bob was a fixer. He had dedicated his life to fixing things so that he had, himself, to do as little as possible, apart, that is, from breed parrots, which had turned into a lucrative if complex pastime. His flat used to be full of cockatoos and macaws and at some point a monkey, which bit off visitors’ ears. But having midwifed several enormous and colourful birds into life in Clapham, he had emerged from nursing eggs in warm flannels to discover that Chelsea had moved across the river towards him. His poky flat was worth a fortune, even more than the cockatoos, which were valued at several thousand pounds each, so he’d loaned his aviary to a parrot farm in Northamptonshire and his flat to a yuppy. He’d moved himself and his huge collection of failed projects (plaster dogs on a wall mount, miniature models of the cast of Coronation Street, sepia-tinted photographs printed on pull-down blinds, garden seats made out of the Chelsea North Stand, dozens of hand-made cds of his band ‘The Long Horns’ and his collection of chicken suits and wigs) up the road and into an empty space above Kebab House.
‘It sounds good, Kebab House, like Badminton or Mansion House, I thought.’
And now he’d fixed two keen and willing members of crew to help us cross the Channel. Clearly, in his eyes, it was at least the equal of getting a boat, charts and a trip organized. So he was sitting, lounging even, drawing hard on his cigarette, smiling broadly and literally putting his feet up.
‘Not on the new electrical equipment please!’
He twisted round and reached into his back pocket. ‘I managed to get this, by the way, from Stanford’s in Covent Garden.’ He pulled out what looked like a street map from his back pocket and began to unfold it. ‘It was ten quid. I was amazed. Ten quid.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a chart of the Dutch and Belgian canal system.’
We put it on the floor and laid it out. This was the other thing he was full of. Baines and Rick looked over our shoulders. ‘Yeah…’ I started. ‘The general thing is that we don’t have a lot of time to get to Flensburg, so we’re going to have to press on. Obviously, if the weather turns bad we won’t want to go out into the German Bight in June…’
‘It can be very stormy in June,’ said Bob. ‘There was this editor of the Sunday Times who was drowned in a hurricane…’
‘Yes, yes. But look, you see…’ I produced a big Admiralty chart of the English Channel and unfolded that too. ‘Whatever the conditions, we can cross here…’ pointing to the narrow area north of the Straits of Dover ‘… get over to, say, Ostend, and swoosh up into the Dutch canal system here… here.’ My finger waved uncertainly over the map. ‘Well definitely here anyway.’ I finally found a way in, through all the dykes and sea walls that had been erected in the last fifty years to effectively close off all but the major port entrances to the Low Countries. ‘And the best way in is certainly almost straight ahead. Vlissingen, or Flushing, barely fifty miles from England, is at the mouth of a huge estuary.’
We transferred our attentions back to Bob’s little map. The estuary was joined to the heartland of Holland by any number of canals. We could have been looking at a road map of the Midlands. Thick blue lines snaked off in every direction. It seemed there was a bewildering choice of land-locked routes. First, we could head north through industrial Holland. Then cross the northernmost bulges of western continental Europe safely inland, passing through Groningen to the Ems, the river that separated the Netherlands from Germany and then… Bob’s map ran out.
We turned to the AA Road Atlas of Europe.
‘This is only temporary,’ I reassured Rick and Baines. ‘We’ll get more detailed maps before we go.’
‘Or up there in Holland somewhere,’ added Bob. He knew that every chandler and shop we had been to so far only had maps and charts of the Solent and routes south. Everybody wanted to head to the sun. It was one of the reasons that Bob and I had decided to go the other way. The other was because we’d done a little of the route already and realized that this was easily the best direction for cowards.
At the end of the season, the year before, Bob and I had set out on our first independent trip in Undina. We sailed the 6 miles down the River Orwell from Ipswich and found ourselves facing the sea at Harwich. By my calculations, our least complicated destination was Holland. You took a ruler and drew a pencil line from Harwich to Ijmuiden and then you sailed along it. Going south was a different matter.
The Thames is a deceptively huge river. It comes as a shock to those who have travelled for several months on Network South-East to discover that they are still in the Thames Estuary. The estuary runs right up the Essex coast and into Suffolk and has dug channels and deposited sandbanks all the way up to Harwich. It’s a tricky business working your way through the Wallet Gut or the Goodwin Channel towards France, particularly at night in an unfamiliar boat.
So a year ago, we had simply avoided the Thames Estuary. We’d sailed straight across the North Sea and popped into Holland down a handy canal (before any change in the weather could challenge our seafaring abilities). And there, at the end of the canal, we’d discovered Amsterdam and tied up behind the railway station.
The prospect of taking a floating bedsit to one of the seamiest cities in the world had an enormous appeal for Bob and myself. In ‘yachtsmen’s harbours’, the marina is the main event. It is like spending a couple of days anchored in a park-and-ride facility. By contrast, the Sixhaven in Amsterdam was next to the Shell petroleum headquarters. It was a marina in someone’s back garden. There were geraniums on the pontoons. A ferry (a metal platform, half bus, half bridge) ran continuously across the Nordzee Canal. We crossed with dozens of bicycles to walk straight into the equivalent of Oxford Street, still dressed in oilskins. The hippy population of Amsterdam probably assumed we were protesting about chemical waste.
The next day we left the brown cafés behind and, about ten minutes from the centre, passed through a narrow lock and out into the muddy brown waters of the Ijsselmeer, with its medieval ports, now cut off from direct contact with the sea. We nearly reached the long, low, flat, sandy, barely visible line of grassy banks that line the north-west coast of Europe and run in a chain out towards the Elbe: the Friesian Islands. They lay just a day’s sail to the north. Riddle of the Sands country.
In 1897 Erskine Childers and his brother had discovered almost exactly the same thing as us. They got to the end of the Nordzee Canal in their boat Vixen and decided that if the wind blew south they’d go home, if it blew north they’d explore the Friesian Islands. It blew north and, as a result, Childers wrote his one novel, The Riddle of the Sands, A MOST IMPORTANT BOOK for the small boat sailor. The paranoid story about German naval intentions is a little preposterous, but the boating descriptions are excellent.
But why stop there? I remember peering at our charts and thinking how simple it would be to go on further. I liked sailing in coastal inlets and shallow waters. The boat had its protective centreboard. The shoals held no particular fear for us. Hamburg, Lübeck and Copenhagen were up there somewhere. Real cities with sex shows and crazy nightlife. Not simply whitewashed holiday destinations, but proper ancient ports and, surely, we could slip behind those islands, couldn’t we? We need never venture far from shelter.
Closer examination revealed more islands and more hidden passages. I had never taken the trouble to think about the Baltic. But even the most cursory examination showed you could island-hop through Denmark. It was an archipelago.
The coast of Sweden looked boring to begin with, but, beyond Öland, there were more archipelagos. Uncountable separate dots of land covered the chart for hundreds of miles and, up there, beyond Sweden, beyond Helsinki, right at the top of the Gulf of Finland, where the map takes a right turn into a narrowing funnel, there was St Petersburg. St Petersburg: a place so romantic, so utterly remote, so exotic and yet so potentially packed with live sex shows that it seemed incredible that it was possible to visit it by boat from England, and by a route that would only require only two 30-mile crossings.
I was hardly the first person to notice this. Cumbersome lighters called cogs had been transporting furs, illegal immigrants and Russian dolls down through the river systems for centuries. The Vikings had set up trading posts which had developed into towns, now ancient and impressively preserved, like Tallinn or Visby. This was all based on the sensible principle of getting south without going out into the cold and blowy North Sea. With careful planning we could head out into the far Nordic regions without ever really getting wet.
Mind you, it wasn’t strictly fear of the high waves that influenced us. We were far more terrified by the prospect of boredom. Tracy Edwards and Sir Francis Chichester notwithstanding, the only time anything actually happens on a long sea passage is when something goes disastrously wrong. That’s why the hairy-arsed bohos who sail from Rio to Portsmouth love it when the mast snaps in two and they have to make a new one out of a spare oar and a tea towel. Otherwise it’s just sea. It can be big sea. Huge sea sometimes. Sometimes a flat, sullen, miserable, grey, gently rolling slab of a sea. But mostly just an ordinary stretch of water and a course that consists of an imaginary line, as straight as possible, right through the tedious middle of it.
For us, the shore was the attraction. We could enter the system at Delft. Explore Utrecht. Take a detour to The Hague. Linger in Amsterdam. Sit and listen to the curlew in a ditch near Groningen. It became an ambition to make a real escape into a timeless world of petty incident.
Back at my house, Bob smoothed the map. He reached over and twisted the desk light round towards him. It came off in his hands.
‘Just put it down over there.’ I switched another light on. Bob took a pencil and began to trace a series of loops and tailbacks, twisting across the Netherlands.
‘It’s not entirely straightforward,’ he said. ‘We have to go through locks.’
‘And under bridges.’
‘There must be a mast–up route,’ Bob said.
‘Why?’ I asked.
Bob was a Panglossian optimist. He was convinced that most obstacles could be overcome and, if not, would probably dissolve at his approach. ‘They must have a route that allows boats to get through.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’ I countered. I was an Eeyorean pessimist. Obstacles would rise up and stop us whatever happened. ‘Maybe they don’t make provisions for sailing boats to drive through the middle of Utrecht.’
‘It’s easy,’ Bob continued. This was the sort of statement that was guaranteed to irritate me. ‘You just go up here…’ He was marking the route with a blunt pencil, which was obliterating most of the chart information, ‘ooops… can’t get through there…’ he traced a loop which took us roughly back to the beginning. ‘… round the outside of there…’ Now we were heading 20 miles inland. ‘… and back through this way.’ He sat back and admired his work. We would certainly comprehensively explore most of the hinterland of the Benelux countries, and visit Alsace too.
‘Just a minute…’ Rick took up the pencil. He leaned in closely. ‘Look just here.’ He pointed. ‘Is that part of the name or a swing bridge?’
‘A bridge, I should think.’
‘You’re not even looking at it, Bob.’
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘We can’t just go wandering all over the canal system looking for high enough bridges.’
‘Hold on,’ Rick was applying himself. He twisted the map round. ‘We could get through that way, couldn’t we?’ He started to trace an alternative route, taking us further north. It was becoming like a maze in a puzzle book.
‘Yes, but what’s the significance of the smaller blue lines?’
Bob lit another cigarette. ‘What lines?’
‘Well some of them are thick and some of them are narrow.’
Baines was leaning in now. He turned the map over. There was a box explaining the symbols on the back.
‘There’s an explanation of symbols here.’
‘Good.’
‘It’s in Dutch.’ Bob exhaled through his nose.
‘Dutch or not we can probably make sense of it.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, some are… do you think bruckke means bridge?’
‘Probably.’
‘So what’s a brikke?’
I reached for the bigger chart. ‘I mean with the best will in the world, we’ll have to allow a day for the Kiel Canal and then another day from Kiel to Flensburg.’
Bob looked perplexed. ‘I don’t think as much as that.’
‘It’s another fifty or so miles up the coast.’
‘Is it? Where is it then, Flensburg?’
‘It’s here!’ I stabbed at the map. ‘On the border between Germany and Denmark.’
‘But that’s up in the Baltic!’
‘Yes! That’s where we’re going.’
Bob was staring at the chart with renewed interest.
‘I didn’t think we got that far that early. That’s Denmark there, is it?’
‘Yes!’
‘Oh, I thought we were trying to get down here somewhere.’
Bob waved an index finger over the lower Friesian Islands and then nodded sagely. I noticed Rick had pursed his lips and was frowning slightly. Was Bob quite the navigator that he claimed? The same thought had occurred to me several times.
The next morning my mother wanted to know about the plans. She couldn’t remember how far up towards Amsterdam my father had taken his boat on our family holidays and neither could I.
‘You go into these locks with these huge barges and you have to be quick about it…’
‘Yes, yes, I know.’
‘Your father used to get so cross.’
‘Yes. We must have gone via Williamstad into the Maas.’
‘Well, it was all so long ago.’
‘But did you go into the canal system at Dordrecht?’
‘Oh now. Dordrecht. Yes. I remember Dordrecht. We spent most of the afternoon waiting for some man to come and open the railway bridge. And you know what your father was like. Are you going to go through the canals, then?’
‘Yes.’ I was only half listening. If it took six hours to negotiate one set of bridges, we might get about as far as Rotterdam by the time we were intending to be in Flensburg. ‘But only if the weather makes it absolutely necessary.’
‘Well, it’s not very good at the moment.’
It wasn’t. It was dreadful. Squadrons of low-pressure system bombers had been sweeping across England, dropping payloads on a demoralized population. There were gales and high winds creeping across the Atlantic even as we spoke.
Later that afternoon, I drove three times around the one-way system in Limehouse Docks, trying to get to the Cruising Association clubhouse, missing turnings because of the water sluicing down around me, my windscreen wipers thrashing in a frenzy of ineffectuality.
I parked my car in a small pond. I sat brooding. The whole vehicle drummed and rocked under the onslaught of the monsoon. Bad weather always irritates me. It always seems absurd. It might as well be good weather as bad weather. It might as well stop. Eventually, I gave up waiting and gingerly stepped out. It was dusk-dark at five in the afternoon. The raindrops smashed into the pavement and threw up a hedge of water. My shoes filled instantly. I capered down the road, leaping through torrents of water streaming off the bridge. It was like running through a car wash.
I sheltered, sopping, under the porch of the Cruising Association’s latest London base. My father had been a member. I had joined about a week ago. I had nurtured the memory of a long, low, wood-panelled room lit by yellow lamps; of polished mahogany; of discreet desks and book-filled walls; of ship models and sepia photographs of distinguished members with big moustaches like Arthur Ransome. All that had gone. The new headquarters looked like a hall of residence at Essex University. The scuffed vestibule was hung with notice boards announcing courses in weather watching and competent crew certificates.
The library was on the first floor. Steaming slightly, I approached the desk. ‘I’m looking for details on European inland waterways.’
‘Righto.’ The librarian looked the sort of bloke who enjoyed a challenge. I wish I’d been able to ask him about navigating the lakes of the Andes. Now he led me down the room and up to a bulging stack. ‘Which area in particular?’
‘Um, Holland, Belgium and the North German regions.’
‘OK.’ He tensed in front of the shelf and suddenly shot out an arm. His fingers whisked out a bulging file and with a practised swing he cradled it into the palm of the other hand. ‘This should help.’ I turned the marbled grey cardboard cover. It was a loose-leaf binder. Hundreds of papers and letters had been holed and slipped into place. Some were complete logs, some just warnings and advice. Some were typed on old yellowing paper in the undulations of ancient typewriters, some were scrawled in an annotated fashion.
‘I don’t know if this might be of any use.’ The librarian put a folded map beside my file. It was a complete chart of the Northern European waterways and on it was marked, in lurid pink, the mast–up route. It followed exactly the same route that we had so painstakingly worked out on our own map.
Scrabbling around in the flimsies I finally discovered advice from some other helpful coward who had been coming back the other way. If stuck in Hamburg and scared to death of the north-westerlies that habitually lashed this coast, you could get to the Dutch canals via Hanover. You had to take down the mast and drive about a hundred miles inland, but you need never actually see the grim North Sea at all until you finally debouched opposite Ramsgate.
If we were that desperate, we could stick the boat on the back of a lorry and drive the whole way to St Petersburg. Had I become so terrified of the sea that I needed to go by land? At some point we would have to face the German Ocean. If the weather was that bad then we weren’t going to make it anyway.
I thought I had been patient with Michael, the boat builder. Some long silences, perhaps, on the telephone. A heavy sigh, now and again. But I understood where he was coming from. He just had craftsman’s warp. Craftsmen don’t notice time passing. This is the basis of basket weaving and vegetable patch therapy, after all. It was what I wanted to discover for myself: to drift into timelessness, to float back into an unscheduled adolescence of the early 1970s.
But I was not feeling totally calm when I finally stood on the quay and looked down at the boat. The chrome was in place. The hull was beautifully smooth and freshly painted. The boot top line, the scarlet flash just above the waterline, was neatly done. The name had been painted across the stern in gold paint. But the deck tops were unpainted. The varnish work, on the dog-house sides, was the same varnish work that had been there last year.
‘I don’t understand.’
The boat looked half-finished. Everything was yellow and peeling.
‘Well, I can see you’re disappointed. Yes, we haven’t done the varnish. Yes, the interiors haven’t been painted. Yes, we haven’t dealt with the cabin roof.’
‘Have you fitted the anemometer?’
‘Yes, we haven’t fitted the anemometer, but we have done all the important work.’
‘You haven’t varnished the cabin sole.’
‘But we’ve replaced the broken boards.’ By the navigation station there was one freshly varnished, spanking new set of floorboards, mocking the tired, foot-worn look of the others. I stood and glared at my boat. I was taking this boat to a regatta in Germany, which had been especially convened so that the owners of classic boats could show off their bright-work to each other.
Michael avoided my eye. I sighed.
‘Well, we’ll leave on the high tide. It’s at eleven isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but…’ He made a wry face.
‘What? We can leave?’
‘Well…’ He shrugged now. Obviously I should have been aware of this. ‘… it’s neaps.’
‘So…’ I knew the answer.
‘So…’ He looked hopeful on my behalf. ‘She may float.’ And he cocked his head to one side. ‘It depends on whether there’s an on-shore wind or not.’
Time and tide wait for no man. It also, apparently, makes an appearance and does its wet, floating stuff for no man, neither. The creek where the boatyard lay was a muddy gut at the far end of a tidal system, miles inland.
‘I’ve arranged for the local tug to turn out,’ Michael said. ‘She may be able to pull her off, through the mud and into the deep channel. But…’ He looked mournfully down the river where a couple of Thames barges sat, up to their lee boards in the soft stinking grey fudge. ‘… I’m not very hopeful.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘OK, well let me tell you,’I found myself saying. ‘I intend to leave tomorrow, Michael! As soon as she floats at midday! We will drag her off, and we will leave.’ It was the sort of announcement a hysterical thirteen-year-old midshipman might make to his bosun, when left in charge of a battlecruiser – utterly mad.
Michael looked for some sort of inspiration in the dust. He scratched his beard. ‘We won’t have fitted the sails by then.’
‘You won’t have fitted the sails…’ Good Lord, I was actively spluttering. ‘Well fit them, then!’
Michael turned and looked at the boat sitting in the mud below us. ‘To what?’ he asked.
Undina’s mast lay on a couple of trestles in the shed. First thing in the morning, the crane would be employed to lower the 18½-metre wooden spar into the boat. The rigger would rig the stays and the shrouds, and then in the afternoon the sail maker would bend on her new mainsail. The sun would rise, the night would come, the tide would ebb, birds would fly south and Michael’s boatyard would do things in the proper order dictated by tradition and tea-breaks. And I would grind my teeth in impotent frustration.
‘I need to fill her up with diesel. Is there a pump?’
There was the sound of laughter somewhere in the shed. ‘Pump?’
I was directed to a petrol station 2 miles away. I went off to buy some big plastic jerry cans.
There was no point in stumping up and down the quayside in a bad mood. I could be in a bad mood in the supermarket, amongst the refugee asylum seekers, buying boxes of tinned food, in a bad mood in the chandlers buying rope and torches, I could be in a bad mood just sitting in the back of the car tapping my fingers and waiting to see if the sea would grace us with an appearance.
I had to hand it to Michael. Throughout all this, he retained a calm and blissful imperturbability and an apparent pride in a job well done. There was a good reason for this. It was a job well done.
I was blind to his achievements. Just forward of the main cabin, to take an example from many, he had built a beautiful wooden cabinet to hold the gas bottles. It was minor thing, a box, but folded to the line of the dog house and so beautifully made that, later, I had to get used to other visiting wooden boat owners nodding and jutting a protuberant bottom lip, as they caressed the slight curve to the lids and the beautiful dove-tailed joints. It was perfectly in keeping, so were the new anchor chain arrangements, the mahogany lockers (panelled with interlocking rattan fronts) and the refashioned cockpit locker lids with teak-planked panels.
The hull had been repaired and cosseted until it was a mirror-smooth dark blue. The deck brought up to russet perfection. I just couldn’t see it, because I wanted the whole thing finished, and now I was late. I was incapable of seeing that I was, paradoxically, late for the experience that was intended to make lateness and punctuality and clock-watching utterly redundant, but perhaps that would come later.
By half past ten the following morning the waters had risen quite considerably around the boat, and a small, black, period tug came chugging around the corner.
‘Righto lads.’
For the time being, a tow-rope was triumphantly produced from a back locker, tied around the mast, the strongest point on the boat, and then everybody went for tea. I stood goggle-eyed, the townie aghast, the man in the Bateman cartoon, fuming helplessly. Tea! Tea! At a time like this! My mouth was opening and shutting, wordlessly. After a while, I noticed that the tug captain was waving at me.
‘I think that’s about the height of the tide,’ he shouted. ‘She’s going out now.’
‘They’ve all gone for tea!’ I called back.
‘Well I’d better give her a pull now anyway.’
I ran shouting towards the shed. Michael and his men came running out, clutching their mugs and we leaped down on to the deck. Tugboat Ted leaned into his little cabin and there was a dirty churning at his stern. The tow-rope tightened and without a murmur Undina slid straight out into the channel.