Coasting (26 page)

On each reprise, the couplet sounded slightly more driveling than it had the last time round. You had only to look at Vera Lynn at sixty-five to see that it enshrined a wonderful, vainglorious untruth. But there was a dotty kind of truth in it too. It stated—more nakedly than anyone had dared to do so far—the terms of the daydream in which England was living in 1982.

THE MERRYING OF ENGLAND

I
left Chichester Harbour on a still, dank Thursday. After two days of gales, the 0630 shipping forecast promised winds Variable, Force 3 or Less. The inked needle drooped low on the drum of the barograph, but it had remained steady overnight on 998 millibars, and the depression over southern England had come to a standstill and was said to be filling.

I parked a flask of coffee and a bowl of Trail Mix on the wheelhouse shelf and rumbled off on the falling tide, leaving a wake of spun glass in the water behind. The reedy mudbanks opened into a broad mall of moored yachts, every one rooted to its dull reflection. Padlocked for the week, the yachts were being used by cormorants as fishing platforms. The birds stood fixed on the crosstrees in prehistoric silhouette against the misty gray of the sky, looking a great deal more secure in their commands than the absentee owners of these craft. They kept watch on the tarnished water without moving a muscle.

The sea at the mouth of the harbor was as sluggish as oil.
It sucked languidly at the sand on the channel’s edge. Dead ahead, where the tide ran fast, its surface was engraved with ornamental loops and scrolls. It parted, viscously, round the bows of
Gosfield Maid
, bulged up her sides and shattered in her wake.

The Solent was blessedly empty of sails today. The furred outline of the Isle of Wight looked as far away as France. I should, perhaps, have paid more serious attention than I did to the anvil-shaped cloud which stood over the island, as sharp in its outline as an ink stain on a tablecloth. It was a cloud from which a god might choose to descend in order to get up to some mischief in the world in a ceiling by Tiepolo. But the forecast was Variable, 3 or Less, and I headed complacently out to sea.

To the east, a chain of rocky ledges ran out for several miles from Selsey Bill. There was a lane through the rocks, close inshore, in the Looe Channel, but the tide sprinted through it, and I would have to claw my way up against the ebb stream. It seemed a better idea to take the long way round, going ten miles out to the Owers lightship, then setting a northeast course for Newhaven. In any case, I was tired of hugging the shore. A day’s hike around the Owers, even if it all had to be done under engine, would restore some of the space and solitude of the journey which I’d lost on the Solent: the horizon would be bigger, the perspective less foreshortened; I’d be out of territorial waters and back in the serious business of being alone at sea.

At ten, there was just enough of a breeze blowing out of the northeast to make it worthwhile to get the sails up. At eleven,
Gosfield Maid
began to yield and bend to the gusts, showing her flanks as the whitecaps slapped noisily around the bilges. At half-past eleven, there was a message from the Coastguard on the VHF: Southeasterly, Gale 8, Imminent. The docile depression had shaken off its forecast lethargy. It was deepening fast and haring away in the general direction of Biscay. The Coastguard’s warning seemed a bit superfluous now: the sea was breaking out in lumps all round the boat and rags of foam, torn off the wave tops, were plastering themselves against the wheelhouse window.

Buckled into the safety harness, I went out to get the mainsail down. The twenty feet of narrow deck between the cockpit and the mast turned into a trepid journey on hands and knees. The sea kept on climbing to my level, then plummeting sharply out of sight. It was preferable to avoid watching it. Halfway to the mast, I remembered how I’d once had to get home like this, as a student of eighteen. The best part of a bottle of gin, drunk rapidly from a beer mug, will produce a facsimile of the effects of a Gale Force 8 on the deck of a small boat.

I trapped a bucketful of cold seawater between my jersey and my bare chest, spat salt and wriggled along, taking the seamed teak foot by slippery foot. At least it was smooth. On the morning after my previous passage like this, I’d awakened to find both knees black with clotted blood.

The freed sail came thunderclapping down the mast. Lashing it up to its boom, I was beaten about the head and face with wings of flapping polyester while the masthead went off on an aimless ramble round the sky, and I clung on, wet through but possessed by a sort of manic elation as I bullied the sail into submission. On the slow crawl back to the wheelhouse, I was laughing out loud. None of this experience belonged to me. It felt sublimely ridiculous to be squirming about on one’s tummy in such an unexpected roughhouse brawl.

Back inside, it was necessary to move like a spaceman in a capsule, clumsily swimming from point to point through an atmosphere whose center of gravity was shifting so continuously that one was made effectively weightless. Picking my moment, I swam down the companionway into the saloon to change my sodden jersey. The business of changing took several minutes of lurching trials and errors. Finding my face briefly close to the barograph, I noticed that the needle too was defying gravity. Since leaving Chichester Harbour it had sketched a steep scarp face on the paper, rising seven or eight millibars in less than three hours.

A situation in which there are absolutely no decisions to make is a cause of high spirits in itself—and there were no decisions to make now. I couldn’t go back to Chichester. It
was too far, and the bar at the entrance would be uncrossable. Littlehampton, the nearest port, twelve miles to the north, also had a bar, and there was a firmly deterrent note about it in the pilot: “Entrance dangerous in strong SE winds.” Shoreham earned the same warning. There was nothing at all to do except settle down and enjoy my gale.

It was a fine explosive mixture of air and water, and
Gosfield Maid
jounced about in it as easily as a corked bottle. John, the trawler owner in Lyme Regis, had looked over her ship-sized oak frames and the long curve of the deck toward her massive bows and said, “She’s a real boat, not like they flimsy yachts—she’ll look after you.” For the first time since I’d set out, the boat was looking after me. Her hull had been built originally for service as a fishing boat in the North Sea off Scotland, and this modest Channel gale was well within her range. She fitted herself into the commotion of the sea, every pitch and roll a strategic adjustment to the changing shape of the water. Her timbers creaked and flexed as she arranged the waves around herself like pillows on a bed.

In the veering wind there was at first no pattern to the water. It heaped up in slabs and collapsed on itself in a loutish show of undirected energy. The shoreline had disappeared. There was just miles of stirred and twisted sea, a mass of meringues. Then, as the hunting wind found its proper strength and direction, the sea began to march in line. Ahead, the waves looked shapeless, each one an indecipherable configuration of ridges and planes; but as they rolled astern, flipping the wheelhouse skyward and making the propellor howl as it came clear of the water for a split second, they revealed themselves as an orderly procession. Behind the boat, the sea was lined with dark troughs; they stretched away out of sight, as closely ruled as harp strings.

Facing the waves, they looked disproportionately small compared with the rearing flights of the boat’s bows as she rode into the continuous wash of foam that dribbled down their faces. They became lordly only when they took their leave of her, giving the odd impression that the sea ahead was far calmer than the sea behind.

For some time I’d caught intermittent glimpses of a cargo ship apparently at anchor. Random bits of it—masts, bows, bridge—would show over the waves for a moment, then get engulfed again. It was, I supposed, waiting for the tide to rise enough for it to get into Littlehampton or Shoreham. It was blotted out by a rain squall, and I lost it for good in the premature blue dusk which followed the rain.

Then, half an hour later, there was another dark squall in the sky, somewhere out to starboard. The squall turned matt black, a new twist in a day full of meteorological curiosities. It was sixty yards off and steaming straight for me when the squall resolved into the coaster, its riveted plates bleeding rust, the twin anchor ports on its bows looking like a bull’s flared nostrils. I passed ahead of the thing by a boat’s length. Neither of us had seen the other in the murk; and it was the coaster which had right of way.

This incident quite failed to dent the mood of placid detachment which had settled on me in the gale. A miss is as good as a mile, I thought, and went on watching waves. It was exactly as if I were very drunk indeed, with the drunkard’s sublime immunity to the hazards of the world. It was not until the wind eased, the sky cleared, the force went out of the sea and the water became suddenly sloppy and innocuous that I came out of the trance.

It was dark now. There were a lot of puddled lights to the north, three or four miles off. Since they all seemed to be winking, it was impossible to tell which were navigation lights and which were neon signs or flashing
Star Wars
machines. Elbowing my way inshore, I picked out a long illuminated promenade and a couple of onion domes at the root of a pier. I had, apparently, discovered Brighton.

Newhaven was another nine miles on. Too far. After the last few days, I’d sworn that I’d avoid marinas for the rest of the trip, and I rounded the pierhead of Brighton marina with a feeling of resentful disappointment. There had been real splendor in the sea outside; but inside the jaws of the marina, the splendor shriveled. What had I been up to all day?
Going boating
.

Below, the saloon looked as if it had been burgled. The
books on the floor had got on intimate terms with a broken jar of marmalade. The casing of the transistor radio had smashed, and the radio was spilling its innards. Someone had been throwing crockery around the place. I sat in the middle of this depressing mess and tried to pour a slug of Scotch into a tumbler. It wouldn’t go. The neck of the bottle wavered, hit the glass, drew back. Whisky splashed over the floor and into the pages of
William the Conqueror
by P. G. Wodehouse. I tried again, and poured some whisky into the ashtray on the table. I gave up and sucked the stuff straight out of the bottle, shaking with all the fright I’d failed to feel at sea.

Land-sick, clinging to the railing and planting my feet in a clumsy waltz step, I was making a rough passage of Brighton promenade, where a torchlight procession was overtaking me. There was a whoop-whooping tremolo echo on the PA system which was booming announcements over the sea.

“The Par-par-par Tridge-tridge-Green … Bom-bom-bom-bonfire-fire-fire … So-so-so-societee-ee-ee!”

The bonfire societies of Sussex went marching past with their bedraggled floats, whose bright poster colors had run in the rain and whose lath-and-tarpaper work had been knocked out of shape by the gale. The torchlights were electric and powered by car batteries aboard the floats. They shone on a bewildering assortment of Ancient Britons, Puritans in tall hats, Aztecs, clowns, Red Indians, Elizabethan courtiers and Victorians in frock coats. Each float in the procession was trying to mount an appropriate musical entertainment, but the combined effect of lutes, bongo drums, saxophones, electric guitars, bagpipe chanters, penny whistles, Jews’ harps, mandolins and bugles was not good. I yearned for earmuffs and aspirin.

As the procession and I reached the center of town, we ran into a cacophony of another kind. The poor weather had kept a lot of people away, but there were still a hundred spectators or so, standing in huddles on the pavements, and for every huddle there was another language—a warble of
Japanese under a lamppost, a snatch of Cockney on the steps of a hotel, a bit of Idaho, a bit of Rouen, a bit of Frankfurt, a bit of Melbourne, a bit of everything. Cameras flashed in the crowd like buoys at sea. A float of rather damp and cold-looking Regency dandies rounded the corner of Old Steyne and made for the floodlit confection of the Royal Pavilion with its fretted facade and gleaming minarets and turban domes.

The bonfire societies could not have hit on a better spot for their parade of make-believe. It was just what modern Brighton had been designed for. When George IV ordered John Nash to revamp his pavilion, he demanded a mixture of the “Chinese” and “Hindu” styles to liven things up around his favorite bathing beach. What he actually got was perceived as a weird seaside mock-up of the Kremlin.
The Guide to Watering Places
, published in 1825, two years after Nash had finished work on the Royal Pavilion, is clearly flummoxed: