Coasting (19 page)

This was, by field-day standards, surprisingly tame, and was probably a special request of the TV crew: the songs I remembered were all ones of unrelieved dirtiness, like the pathologically fecal “In Mobile.”

The reporter’s voice was as strange as the pictures themselves.
It was an earnest pastiche of the Britain-can-take-it style of Movietone News in the 1940s. It left unnatural dramatic gaps between the words of the script; it was over-loud, as if the reporter were addressing a camp meeting instead of a clip-on mike in his shirtfront; like the singing, it was exaggeratedly
ff
and
allegro con spirito
.

I felt like an eavesdropper watching this bulletin from the task force being transmitted from a secret position somewhere in the Atlantic. The program was, I suspected, not designed to be seen by me or by anyone in the British Isles. It was certainly not news in the ordinary sense, but a form of warfare in its own right. Its targeted audience was Argentinian, and the reporter’s overemphatic delivery was probably intended to make his words more easily translatable to the people to whom he was really speaking—the General, the Admiral and the Brigadier in Buenos Aires.

The first objective of the voyage of the task force was evidently to scare the invaders away from the islands by showing them bloodcurdling television pictures of what was going to happen to them when the ships arrived. This was assault by photomontage, with flags superimposed over phalluses and songs over airplanes, gun muzzles and bayonets. The theme of sexual prowess and conquest was rudely explicit: the Argentine forces and their effete
supremo
were going to be raped by the greater potency of the British.

As we sang on the bus to Bromyard Down—

No one now could accuse the British of lacking balls: the precious objects had been exhibited on television, tastefully wrapped in the national flag.

There was another novelty in the broadcast. Everything was happening in the first person plural. “We” were steaming
south; “we” had declared a two-hundred-mile maritime exclusion zone around the Falkland Islands. The blackface marines were “our boys” (or, as the Prime Minister chose to refer to them, “my boys”). A week before, no anchorman or commentator would have dreamed of risking this cozy pronoun: the State was perceived as a fragile assembly of conflicting parties—Government and Opposition, management and unions, North and South, those with jobs and those without them. But war was working its old black magic, restoring the image of the State as an extension of the self. Britain was beginning to sound exactly like School House.

“We,” said Peter Snow, the housemasterly presenter of the BBC’s
Newsnight
, “are, at a guess, roughly
here
.” He moved some ship models about on a gray plasticine ocean.

Would you be so kind, I thought, as to leave
me
out of this?

Snow’s model ships were already three thousand miles away.
Gosfield Maid
, on a reciprocal course and making five, sometimes six knots, was modestly increasing the distance. The task force became as remote as a legend, and what little news I got of it had the cracked ring of archaic fiction.

When you set up house on a boat, however soft and urban you may be and however crowded the coast you sail past, you soon find yourself turning into Robinson Crusoe. Four things matter: food, water, fire and weather. Inside your timber stockade, you begin to construct your civilization from scratch. You start by keeping warm and end up with do-it-yourself theology.

I was in the early stages. I hoarded charcoal. I fished over the stern. The April mackerel were sad things, with tarnished scales and heads too big for their bodies. I bought blotting paper and mustard and cress seeds and set up a kitchen garden in an old office In tray which I screwed to the wheelhouse roof. Hours leaked away in the search for a quay with a freshwater tap and a hosepipe with which I could fill the fifty-gallon tank under the cockpit.

But it was the weather and the tides that kept me in a
state of dazed preoccupation—the same trancelike absorption that a writer feels in the middle of a book when he finds himself swallowed in his own plot, no longer the author of circumstances but a creature of them. Living in a city, I’d hardly bothered to notice whether it was raining or shining. Weather was something that just
was
, and I couldn’t have been less interested in its whys and wherefores.

Now I studied it as intently as any text that I’d pored over in the past. I watched the Atlantic lows winging their way in from south of Greenland—unstable, whirling cones of disturbed air, filling, deepening, changing track, spawning more depressions in their wake. Spinning against the clock, they brought the powerful, salty southwesterly winds that whipped the sea up into untenantable hills of froth and spume, took slates off roofs and made the water even in sheltered harbors slop and gurgle round the quays, slamming boats into walls and tossing them frivolously about on their moorings.

I learned Buys Ballot’s Law. Face the wind, and you’ll find low pressure to your right and high pressure to your left (the reverse, of course, applies in the Falkland Islands). It was the high pressure to the left of England that I began to dream of wistfully as I’d once dreamed of unattainable girls. Please, God, give me a kindly ridge of it, just from, say, north of the Azores to somewhere a little west of Ireland. The northwest wind would be cold, but it would come from the shore, the sea would be flat and
Gosfield Maid
would whistle up-Channel to the Dover Straits with her sails wide out to starboard.

I watched the drum on the barograph in the saloon revolve at a tenth of an inch an hour, its inked stylus leaving a thin blue line on the paper as the vacuum cylinder swelled and contracted with the changing atmospheric pressure. Very soon I found myself subscribing to a theory of natural magic. On the rare morning when the barograph needle had climbed overnight and was holding steady, so I discovered a buoyancy of spirit in myself, a sudden rush of cheerfulness and hope for the day. As the needle dipped, my
mood darkened in sympathy, and I could feel myself sinking down the inky slope on the graph paper.

Galebound at 995 millibars and falling, I sat up in the wheelhouse under a sky of heaped slag and asphalt, lost in the small print of
Reed’s Nautical Almanac
. The boat was parked in the busy middle of Brixham harbor, but Brixham itself was no more than a pale frieze of terraces in scabious pastel on the extreme periphery of things. I was more concerned with the moon.

It had been a full moon last night, so with sun and moon in direct line, the tides were running strongly, surging past headlands, then slowing up as they swerved in to fill the bays. High Water Dover was at 0204 and 1420 hours on April 12; the stream ran north and east into Lyme Bay from six hours after until an hour before HWD, so I could ride on a fair tide from 0804 to 1320. But suppose, suppose … Lyme Regis was thirty miles along the bay, anything between five and seven hours by boat, and with High Water Lyme at 0949, the harbor there would be a gully of dry sand long before I reached it on that tide. Think again. Try working the next lunar bulge … Leave Brixham at 1500, breast the steadily weakening tide until it turns in my favor at 2020, and make Lyme in time for High Water at 2203, with the harbor brimming and plenty of depth and space in which to swing the unwieldy bulk of
Gosfield Maid
. Two flashing red leading lights mark the route in between the piers; sixteen miles to the west, a red light flashes every ten seconds on Straight Point …

My notebook turned into a tangled bird’s-nest of prophecies and speculations as I tried to fit my own life into these great movements of air and water. I logged the shifting barometric contours, the speed and direction of the winds, the phases of the moon, tidal heights and tidal streams. It was not a scientific exercise. It was more like Hindu astrology, a search for the single auspicious moment when you and the universe are in perfect conjunction and fortune smiles. But my stars were out of sync. When the air was right, the water was wrong; when the water was right, the air was wrong. The boat skulked in dock on its chain,
growing slimy green maidenhair under its bilges. I consulted the arcane books, made more prophecies, and tended the mustard and cress on the wheelhouse roof, waiting for the break.

Happy conjunctions were rare, and lasted for the six-hour length of a single tide at most. I learned to trust and seize them when they came. The wind blew off the hills to the north. The sun slid temporarily free of the banks of sullen cloud and put on a display of alchemy, transmuting the sea from lead to chased silver. All sails up, the boat slogged ahead, leaning a little away from the wind. I sat up in front on the hatchway over my bedroom, listening to the log-fire crackle of the breaking foam on the bow wave and watching out for the old bleach and fabric-softener bottles with which the crab and lobster fishermen marked their pots. Properly afloat again, I was up to 1024 millibars and steady.

In this mood, England was as far away as the task force. I was running my ship, and I left Mrs. Thatcher to run hers as she pleased. Immersed in the business of ship’s husbandry, I barely noticed what was going on, even when I was on shore. The previous day in Brixham I’d noticed a freshly spray-gunned graffito on a wall at the end of a street. In letters six feet high it said SMASH ARGENTINA! For a second or two I took it for a football slogan, before I remembered.

Two messages from the period.

One was a postcard addressed to me in London. The front was a photograph of the Saint-Gaudens monument to Colonel Shaw and his doomed regiment of black soldiers which stands in front of the State House at the top of Boston Common. The wife of a Harvard professor wrote:

HUNTING FOR FOSSILS

T
he coastline of southern England softens steadily from west to east. Angular blocks of granite, intransigent in the face of sea and weather, give way to outcrops of soft sandstone. A couple of distant ice cream scoops of chalk mark the point where Devonshire begins to peter out into Dorset. Then it’s limestone country. Smoothly curving hills lie low on the horizon. The bare rock—porous, friable stuff, like badly fired pottery—is the color of storm clouds. It dissolves in the rain. Watercourses eat into it like acid, their branch patterns standing out on the landscape. The Jurassic Lias is full of remains, as thickly packed as a common grave with skeletons of creatures that used to live in the sea.

This is England’s vulnerable underbelly where people scare themselves to sleep with dreams of strangers and invasions. Here in Dorset a pet monkey swam ashore, the lone survivor of a wrecked ship. The local vigilantes put it to death because they thought it was a French spy (though that story is part of insular mythology—I heard it again in
Northumberland, where the monkey was a Spaniard). Sixty miles away from Europe is just far enough, and near enough, to foster belief in monsters aboard.

In Lyme Regis,
Gosfield Maid
lay against the Cobb, the stone breakwater which enfolds Old Lyme in the crook of its protective arm. The outgoing tide left the boat high and dry, leaning against the wall, its masts roped to bollards on the quay to keep it from falling over into the harbor. Arriving alone and out of season, I fell into the good company of the fishermen, who found a space for me, took my lines, nursed
Gosfield Maid
alongside and came aboard to inspect and approve my ship’s carpentry while I stood by, tending bar.

My visitors were the first people I’d met who were not in the least impressed by the saber-rattling which was going on in newspapers and on television.

“What’s the point of un?” said John, the owner-skipper of the trawler
Whynot
. “If the government had of wanted a
good
war on their hands, they could’ve fought the bloomin’ French. We should have had a war with
they
, over the seine netting and the fishing limits. But
Argentina
 …” He shook his head over the idiocy of our rulers.

“They sold we right down the river. First it was Iceland and the cod fishing, they give in over that. Then it’s France and the Common Market. Now they got Russians in Liverpool Bay. In bloody great factory ships.