Semi-Detached (22 page)

When
did my father let me take the boat off ‘without him? It was a
bold thing
for him to do. Would I even trust my son with my bicycle? But at
some
point in the sixth form, after A levels, perhaps, I took a couple of friends
and we drifted up the coast one hot summer’s week, going around and on into
Brightlingsea. How could he let us? He was nervous. He was always so worried
about safety. I have written calumny about him here, because that’s the side
of him that stuck to me, but he must have been understanding and resolute to do
that.

We went
to Brightlingsea. It was an afternoon’s sail along the coast of Mersea Island
and up into the Coke, the river that runs up to Colchester. I’d done it
hundreds of times before. As my father got older (fifty-something) he was happy
to leave me in control anyway. He would get the boat out of the harbour, hand
over the tiller and go below and sleep. But it wasn’t the crowded anchorage
that should have worried him. (I could cope.) It wasn’t the fact that the boat
had to be squeezed in somehow between two upright wooden posts with a
line
attached to each. Although that did cause us problems when the tide changed
direction and we let go of the wrong end so we drifted out and blocked most of
the passage. (He wouldn’t have liked to see it, but we coped.) No, it was the
quantity of pubs in the little town that should have worried him. (‘They’re
just low-grade alcoholics, he said of regulars, neatly combining the
Lancet
with
his nonconformist upbringing.)

We
started in the mock-Tudor tavern near the top of the long wide hard that faced
on to the river, then went up into the terraced streets, stopping at all the
little terraced pubs. We drank bitter at just over two shillings a
pint
and eventually staggered back to the long jetty in the dark. When we started
we had been sober enough to drag the little rowing dinghy right up to the top
of the jetty, calculating that when we got back the tide would have reached it.
We had been sensible enough in our judgement to get that right. There was the
dinghy, sitting in the pitch dark. It was afloat. The water had a
smear
of street lights on it: squid-ink black and glossy. We were not so drunk that
we couldn’t slither down the green weed—covered pier and get to the little
boat. It was as we climbed into it that our inexperience, mostly our
inexperience with six or seven pints, really showed up. Three got in easily
enough.

The
fourth stepped a little too heavily on the coming. It tipped; and the sea slipped
in over the side. I remember watching it and thinking how slight a
dip
we needed, because within seconds we were sitting in the boat, which was
sitting on the bottom, and the water had levelled off around our chests.

Oh Dad,
poor Dad. If you had known about that you would never have slept. These days, I
do what he would have done, which is imagine the consequences if we’d tipped
ourselves those four inches sideways, half-way across instead of next to the
jetty. But hey, we didn’t, so who’s to know?

The next
day we went to Clacton. We motored the boat alongside the beaches on a
festering
hot day, spying on the shore through binoculars and the crowds ranged along the
promenades. He would never have done what we did then, which was to take the
boat right in close, throw out an anchor and row ashore, but then he was
unlikely to have been overcome with an adolescent lust for pursuing bathing
beauties. He would have thought about the dangers of an onshore breeze blowing
up, the difficulty of holding on the sandy bottom, the possible problems of relenting
the dinghy into the waves crashing on the shore. But there weren’t any waves
crashing on the shore. It was merely sultry, hot and smelly. We rowed in
through the sloppy wavelets between the paddlers, bought hot dogs and thought
we’d done something really cheeky, though the two scrubbers sitting on the big,
painted iron fence above the south beach weren’t scrubby enough to be tempted
aboard our lugger. They clearly weren’t really impressed with our yacht.
Somehow we got as far as Aldeburgh because I remember we loitered around a
funfair
there and drank in the Cross Keys.

My
parents were trading up in various little ways. They bought a
cottage in
Goldhanger in the late seventies. This was a
village off the twisting,
looping, track-like road that ran along the north shore of the Blackwater
Estuary from Maldon to Mersea, between Roman Heybridge Basin and Tolleshunt D’Arcy.
It was to become Jeremy Bamber country. The mass murderer disposed of his
entire family just up the road. It was an innocuous slab of nowhere, with a
few
pretty houses in amongst the chunks of bungalows and the remnants of Essex
plotland development. My parents used it as their sailing base and perhaps, we
assumed, planned it as their future retirement cottage.

My
father’s decision to move up a size in boats was of far more interest. The
search for the right sort of hulk was picky and exhaustive. It was size that I
fancied. The yellow-varnished Kestrel was still little more than two sofas and a
stick. I liked the miniature sailing barge lying in the mud at
Maldon
quay. It had a
hefty coal stove and room for a
party, or at least
the sort of parties that I went to, where people crouched in corners and nodded
their Afros. But the hippy aspect didn’t appeal much to my father. He found
Maurice Griffiths’ first design in the mud dock in Woodbridge, where Frank
Knight had refitted it following a fire. I took possession of
Windsong
almost
immediately, staying for a
week on my own, in the early spring of gap year,
feeling romantic in my cold cabin on the other side of the railway tracks,
painting some of the bits that I’d promised I would and drinking in the
Captain’s Table or the Olde Bell and Steelyard up the hill of the pretty,
close-packed Suffolk market town. I remember admiring Woodbridge the first
time we ever went there. It took us a
long week, pottering cautiously up
the river system. Even the railway station was a
stop on a branch line
by the boat-builder’s dockyard. I used to wonder what sustained this little
town where Edward Fitzgerald once lived. How did this slab of middle England
survive so discreetly with its streets of ‘improved’ eighteenth—century
terraces, fitted out with imposing door cases and balustrades by army officers
stationed there during the Napoleonic wars? Now I know. There are huge numbers
of retired people living there. My mother is one of them these days, living in
a little cottage I could have seen from the boat where I camped for that cold
week in March.

The
regular certainties of my family life had started to slip away once I was
sixteen. I became too busy to turn out for them to order, too concerned about
the possibility of missing things in Upminster, too resentful of being cut off
from the round of parties to go on the four-week jaunt my father awarded
himself in the summer. On one last family holiday I struck a
bargain
half-way through the trip. There was a folk festival at a nearby country house.
I had to go. It was my sort of thing. I was on holiday too. What do you mean disruptive?
What are you doing? Just drifting around the same old places? Christ, you’re
lucky I come at all. None of my friends would do this sort of thing with their
parents. So what if we sat in a
marina and didn’t move on the same as we
always did? Why couldn’t they hang on for me for a change? No, I was going. I
didn’t care. They could take the boat further up, I’d find them again.

My
father interrupted his fretfully planned itinerary and they sat tied up to a
jetty while I took the bus to Hintlesham Hall over on the other side of
Ipswich for the day. He probably thought that
the concession would
extend the relationship. (‘You know your father can’t really sail the boat on
his own.’) He probably hoped it would buy him time and initiate a new contract
with his regular unpaid extra hand. But the reeds and the mud were not going to
compete with the excitement of Maddy Prior singing ‘All Around My Hat’ in a
tent
in a
field behind a
ragged stately home. I skulked about with the
slightly self-conscious body language of a single person at a hip event, added
Roy Harper to my ‘famous pop stars I’ve seen live’ tally and rejoined the
family holiday. sporting more itchiness than before I went. ‘I should have been
at the Isle of Wight Festival instead of cooped up in this hulk with you.

‘We are
so pathetic. Look at us. No sense of adventure at all.’

Perhaps
it was this same holiday that we anchored off Stone Point, round behind
Walton-on-the-Naze. A steep spit of sand shelved down to a
deep channel
that drained all the acres of marsh, island and saltings every tide. It was
inaccessible by land, four or five miles from the nearest town and an
anchorage for larger boats visiting the backwaters. At weekends the channel
could be crowded, but during the week, even in August, there would be no more
than three or four yachts there. People fished and walked on the sand. Other
people, not us, built extravagant fires and chattered in groups, drinking beers
and laughing. ‘Go on, go and say hello.’ My poor desperate father was under
constant pressure from my sister and me to open up, get social, meet some of
these other people. ‘Look over there. They’ve got children our age! We were
seventeen. Nothing means as much as the company of other people who are also
seventeen when you are seventeen. But we were too shy to make the running ourselves
so we loaded the responsibility on to my poor antisocial father. ‘Ask them
over for a drink, or something.’ He even went. He wanted to hold on to his
pressed crew so badly that he rowed himself over to other boats and painfully
introduced himself, offered to play host to surprised fellow yachtsmen. But I
think it was us who approached the owners of the pretty yawl when they were on
shore collecting driftwood. Their boat was like a proper version of the boat
we had, slim and spoony instead of fat and cumbersome, with an elegant counter
and a low profile and ten or so extra feet. Though we never got inside to see
her gorgeous interior, she had all the glamour of a
proper romantic
twenties yacht. We sat around their fire in the evening, and the tall, blonde
girl whose family owned it tossed her shaggy locks back and pulled her knitted
jacket around her shoulders like an illustration in a
Ralph Lauren
catalogue. I was a year younger than she was, so I knew my place, which was to
sit on the broken shell beach and feel ashamed of my hopeless fat family.

‘Do you
know what they do on Christmas Day? They don’t sit around and watch the
television at
all. They live on a
farm or something and they come
for a huge ten-mile walk across the marshes here. On Christmas Day.’

‘Yes,
darling. Well, you could go for a
walk on Christmas Day if you wanted
to, but last Christmas we had trouble getting you out of bed at all in the
morning.’

‘That’s
because we’re so bourgeois. We’re so flabby. We’re so normal.’

The
blonde with the boat became my benchmark. That’s what proper exciting people
who lived on farms and had lots of money and lovely boats that didn’t leak did.
They went for a
long walk on Christmas Day, when they weren’t making
impromptu barbecues in out-of-the-way places, of course.

But
then I was always a
sucker for pretty, unattainable girls bigging up
their families.

Why do
these things stick? These tiny burrs that catch on the coat of experience. ‘Don’t
sit on the radiators, they’ll give you piles.’ ‘A gentleman has rugs on his
floors, not fitted carpets.’ Rugs, rugs, rugs. Who’s to say the man was right?
I don’t belong in that place or this. I will have to learn what to do to enjoy
myself properly and become an exciting person. I went to Cambridge to get out.
And now I have lots of rugs.

Windsong
was almost entirely flat-bottomed; though thirty
feet long she drew no more than two and half feet. One evening, we crept up the
Butley River. It was a creek around behind an island at the mouth of the Ore,
and no more than twenty feet across for most of its surprising length. It could
be described as little more than a drain, in a wide expanse of utterly flat
marsh — not a
reedy exotic marsh, but a sharp grassed, unforgiving
matted expanse of half-land, crazed with runnels like a
larger version
of a
baked mud puddle. We could not see this. The boat sat low between
the banks. We motored slowly forward for two, perhaps three miles, twisting
onwards. There wasn’t room to pass another boat, but we wouldn’t meet another
boat. No boats came up there any more, though half-way up we passed a
red-brick
quay where, until the Second World War, Thames barges, mammoth sixty-foot
wherries with tan sails, would have tied up to take hay to London. Here the
land began. The tidal river unexpectedly widened. The bank built up on the
northern side into a twenty-foot-high cliff which met a sea wall snaking in
from somewhere towards Orford. We anchored, probably in the middle of an oyster
bed.

In the
last of the light I rowed away from the boat. When water is completely calm the
oars break mirrors. The rowlocks squeak and rattle as if being recorded in a
studio. The dinghy and the rower seem to be overpowered, scooting into glassy
motion at the slightest tug. I pulled up on the shore and climbed up the sandy
cliff and sat under some crouched trees, which seemed to mark the beginnings of
liveable land. Away on the other side of the sea wall was a low cottage with a
single light in a
window. Ahead to the south and west, the Suffolk
fields rolled up and out towards Bentley woods where I knew there was a
priory,
originally served by the river. I couldn’t see it. It was dusk. What I could
see was miles of fading, almost medieval landscape. I waited there as it got
dark under the blackening trees, an oil lamp on the boat reflecting on the
water like a connecting thread. I can hardly think of any other moment in my
life which has encompassed such perfection: the solitude, the beauty, the sense
of the journey made and the simplicity of the place. I got back in the dinghy. pulled
the thread in and rowed back to the intimacy of the little cabin. It was what
my father wanted from it all. He gave that to me.