Coasting (37 page)

“Yes. It seems bigger when you’re inside it.”

“You
sleep
there?”

“There’s a separate cabin, up in front. It’s quite cozy.”

“And read and write? Quite extraordinary. Oh, I
have
enjoyed this—”

His face was frank with pleasure, his laughter a high whoop that echoed in the sheds.
Gosfield Maid
was a joke worthy, even, of Kingsley Amis. I was delighted that it made Larkin laugh.

“Good heavens,” he was dabbing at his mouth with his handkerchief. “It’s like the old woman who lived in a
shoe.”

“Do come down—I’ve got tons to drink on board.”

“How would I
get
down?”

“The ladder there.”

Larkin looked down beyond his feet at the single rusty bar which showed above the wharfside. The rain had given it a slippery gleam.

“It looks a long way, but it’s only seven or eight steps down. I can give you a hand—”

Larkin studied the proposition. There seemed to be a 50–50 chance that he was going to step gloriously out of character—and that it was going to fall to me to ensure that this audacious, purifying move didn’t end in a catastrophic splash.

His head wagged in a slow, considered negative. “No, I couldn’t cope with that—and I’d have to come
up
, too, wouldn’t I? I think I’ve had enough excitement for one evening. Besides, I’m drunk.” He took a last look, and a last laugh, at the boat and went back to his car.

“So where will you be off to next?”

“It depends on the weather. Bridlington, I rather thought.”

“Bridlington. Ah, Bridlington. Yes. You know I once heard Louis Armstrong play in Bridlington?”

I watched him sailing sedately through the puddles on the wharf, the car’s suspension swaying as it floated over the bumps, its taillights making the oily water glow blood-red. He was soon lost behind the sheds, and I kept my fingers crossed for him as he headed back to his safe triangle.

Larkin died three years later in 1985. Until his death, I hadn’t grasped how much he was loved in England. People minded about his dying, and mourned him, in a way that seemed strange for a poet, however admired his work. He had kept himself profoundly to himself. His word-perfect, world-imperfect, poems were as rare to show as famous comets. He wrote of being alone, of private dereliction, of living without love—inconsolable poems, teased and haunted by the beauty, only just out of reach, beyond the window of the railway carriage or the solitary room. The separating glass of windows figures again and again in his work. Yet he showed how such a life (a life from which most people would shrink in panic) could be managed with,
if not quite gaiety, at least great dignity and grace. His poems are heartbreakingly exact. If poems can teach one anything, Larkin’s teach that there is no desolation so bleak that it cannot be made habitable by style. If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.

Late in the evening of Monday 14th June, my fortieth birthday, the Prime Minister announced to the House of Commons that the Argentinian troops had surrendered in Port Stanley.

T
HE
H
OUR OF
O
UR
T
RIUMPH
! said the
Express
. W
HITE
F
LAGS
O
VER
S
TANLEY
! said the
Mail
. W
E’VE
W
ON
! said the
Sun
.

At Ascot, and throughout the land, it was a time for quiet rejoicing on this most British of days;
and W
HOOPEE!
I
T’S
P
ARTY
T
IME IN
P
LYMOUTH!

Nor was this all. Within the week, Princess Diana gave birth to her first child in a London hospital. I
T’S A BOY!
The
Express
billed the event T
HE
C
ROWNING
G
LORY:

I looked for signs of rejoicing on the wharves and in the streets around the Fish Dock, but if people were dancing in Hull, they must have been doing it very quietly, and indoors.

Gosfield Maid
went on sailing north. Past Flamborough Head, six miles offshore, I came upon a floating cache of chip boxes, Pepsi cans and Yugoplastic beach balls, and knew exactly where I was. It was the nearest I had so far come to Polynesian navigation—finding your way by watching the
seaweed and the color of the water. So there, beyond the haze, was the Butlin’s camp at Filey.

In the private-hire taxi business, the summer trips to Butlin’s had been happy outings, with big tips for the driver at the end of the day. We ferried fishing families from the Hessle Road out to the dauntingly fenced perimeter of what appeared to be Stalag Luft VII, and brought them back to Hull after their week or fortnight of knees-ups, singsongs and parades, in which girl Redcoats in bobby sox kept their platoons of tough North Atlantic sailors on their toes from seven in the morning until lights-out at eleven.

There was one particularly big and taciturn trawler skipper, a man who must have scared the wits out of his deckie learners.

“Go on, love, tell the driver what you won.” His wife was sitting in the back of the car with their son. The enormous skipper sat beside me, his meatball face focused expressionlessly on the dials in the dashboard.

“Nay.” He hunched his shoulders round himself and scowled at the gear stick.

“Go on, Dad,” the boy said.

“Driver don’t want to know nowt like that.”

“Oh, he does. Don’t you, driver?”

“Yes,” I said. “What was it you won?”

A mile of flat fields went by.

“It were a competition,” he grunted.

“And what were it the competition for?” his wife said, speaking with the exaggerated, up-and-down elocution of a teacher in a nursery school.

“It were …” He gazed out over the fields as if he were expecting to find ice floes there. He tried again. “It were … The Grandest Dad and His Lad.” As the full splendor of the title unrolled inside the car, his face involuntarily spread into a smile of pure, pink pride.

“That’s terrific.”

“ ’Twere nowt,” he said, still happily, embarrassedly unmanned.

“Any road, every bugger gets a prize at Butlin’s.”

“ ‘The Grandest Dad and His Lad,’ ” his wife said. “And
we’ve got the trophy in the suitcase. I could show it you when we get home …”

“I’d like that,” I said.

“Oh,
give
over,” the skipper said, trying, and not quite succeeding, to turn back into the North Atlantic Hulk.

I hoped that they still held the competition for the Grandest Dad and His Lad at Filey. The smell in the wheelhouse, of hot car leather, sunburn, fizzy lemonade and Woolworth’s lily-of-the-valley, seemed to come from some age of mythical innocence, like the years before 1914.

North Yorkshire became a surprising line of chalk cliffs, far whiter than those of Dover. The stunted trees on their tops, hunchbacked and bent by the prevailing northeaster-lies, looked like Japanese bonsai. Near the boat, gannets came rocketing straight down out of the sky, Olympic top-boarders, leaving a pencil-thin column of white spray at the point where they pierced the sea.

I stopped over in Whitby Harbour, just long enough to snatch a night’s sleep and climb to the ruined abbey on the headland. I tried lying in the open stone coffin which the monks had used as a chastening
memento mori
, but it was six inches too short for a twentieth-century man, and had changed from a ritual penance to a curious measure of human progress.
Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
In six centuries we had managed just a third of a cubit, which seemed a pretty fair guide to how we’d got on in most other departments of life too.

Out of an afternoon of light winds and unbroken sunshine in a high blue sky, I sailed into the perpetual gray overcast of Blyth in Northumberland. Miles south of the town you could taste coal on your tongue, gritty and sweet. As the air steadily darkened around the boat, Blyth grew out of the sea ahead, a weird, elaborate and puzzlingly beautiful composition in monochrome. The center of the piece was the delicate black crosshatching of the timber staithes, where docks had been built out at angles into a wide, slow-moving, inky river. Wonky railway tracks on stilts ran high over the water, and black elephant-trunk coal chutes hung slackly over the ends of the wharves. Everything
in Blyth was the color of coal: the sable stone terraces, the wood, the water, the faces of the men on the docksides. Blyth seagulls were dingy with coal dust. The cargo ship ahead of me on the river maneuvered in scissored black silhouette. Within minutes of getting my ropes looped round a pair of black bollards in South Harbour, I watched
Gosfield Maid
go chameleon, her white hull fading to gray as she was assimilated into the Blyth picture.

I had expected nothing special of Blyth, had thought of it only as a useful stopping point on the way to the Farne Islands and Scotland. But as soon as I was inside the harbor, I felt my spirits rise at finding a berth in this serious, dark, angular place. Almost at the very end of England, Blyth looked more reassuringly like Home than anywhere that I had sailed to so far. I warmed to the dumpy, coal-faced, Pictish man who sang “Oh, Geordie’s lost his plinker!” as he helped me run out breastropes and springs to the wharf. Well-seasoned in my dislike of yacht clubs, with their yo-ho-ho voices and their enervatingly bright sportiness, I had a contented evening aboard the blackened old lightship which served as the floating clubhouse of the Royal Northumberland. When I woke the next morning with coal in my throat, I knew I was going to stay on in Blyth despite the gentle forecast and the silvering of filtered sunlight on the staithes.

The whole port was rumbling softly across the water. Long strings of coal wagons were shunting slowly across the trelliswork viaducts. As each wagon reached the mouth of the chute, it flipped sideways and the coal poured, in a continuous low growl, into the cargo hold of the waiting ship, fifty or sixty feet below. Even from a perch on top of the chute, it was hard to see what was going on down in the holds. The gangs of dockers were so completely black that the black cargo seemed to have taken on a sort of wriggly, animal life of its own. As the men leveled and spread the coal in the bottom of the ship, all one could clearly see was the wink and flash of their heart-shaped shovels as they caught the sun.

In the early 1960s, more coal had been shipped from
Blyth than from any other port in Europe. The trade had halved since then, from seven million tons a year to three, but it still made a rich noise, tumbling through the chutes, the wagons swaying and clanking over the water. All this shoveling, bumping, groaning and roaring was a vast improvement on the mincing tones of fiberglass quarter-boys, and I happily watched my own skin turn Sri Lankan, then pale Nubian, as I rubbernecked on the scenic fringe of the coal industry.

“What’s wi’ you, then, hinny?” An amiable coal-Negro with a thermos flask came out from behind the chute.

“Nothing. Just looking.”

“Ye’ll get awful mucky, sitting there like that—”

“It won’t make much difference, I’m so mucky already—” He stared at me for a moment and disappeared behind the chute. Like the Fish Dock in Hull, the coal staithes in Blyth had attracted their first tourist.

I took a shower on the Royal Northumberland’s lightship and walked up into the town. After the noise of the docks, there was a palpable hush in the streets, which seemed too wide, too long, for the few people who were abroad in them. There was a gappy look to the newish shopping parade; display windows blinded with whitewash, the lettering above the shops full of blanks, like an uncompleted crossword. BO TIQ E. NEW GENT. WILK N ON. F OR ST. The tooth-pulling had been done in such a piecemeal way that it was hard to guess what Blyth’s face might have looked like in the days when it had a full set of snappers.

There was one shop where things were humming, where, in this unnaturally quiet and empty town, I had to stand in line for fifteen minutes before I was served. It was a bakery, and it looked like no bakery that I’d ever seen in England. The loaves in the window had been laid out on a pyramid of glass trays, and they had been arranged as if they were as precious as antiques. All the window dressers’ craft of suggestive enticement had been lavished on them; they peeked tantalizingly at one from behind the glass … loaves like plump thatched cottages, loaves molded in twists and spirals and hoops and disks like Frisbees. Something
special had been done in their baking, and their teak-colored crusts, cunningly lit from below, looked varnished. The baker’s window was designed to give one a glimpse of a life of luxurious abundance. Only in the northeast, with its long history of hard times, could anyone have made so much out of bread, the symbolic staple of life itself. Elsewhere in England, the symbolism had been drained of real meaning long ago; but not here in Blyth. The stuff in the window was the stuff you prayed for in the Lord’s Prayer—the stuff that went with circuses in Latin, and with jugs of wine and Thou in Persian. Bread meant Plenty.

When my turn came, I pointed at the shelves. “What are those? And those?”

“Them’s stotties, and them’s fadge.”

I took the cowardly, southerly way out and came away with a conventional small brown.

The dusty silence, the spaces between the people were the outward and visible signs of the fact that in the center of Blyth, one man in three was out of a job.

Unemployment had never shown itself quite like this before—had never been so quiet and unobtrusive in its manners. The number of people without work in Britain now (about three and a quarter million) was almost exactly the same as in the Great Depression in 1931–32. Roughly the same number, therefore (say seven million), were, in one way or another, “living on the dole.”