How to Build a Boat Read online

  And so, by way of relatively sane compromise, I decided I would build you a small wooden boat, a thing of beauty and purpose, rooted in the traditions of the east coast where we live, in which you and I might one day set sail on a great little adventure of our own, an unforgettable voyage of discovery to be treasured until the end of our days.

  I’m not sure when we’ll cast off – when you’re four? Five? Mummy will definitely have something to say about that. But whenever it is, as I embark on this quixotic mission to build you a boat (or, possibly, a heavily over-engineered vegetable trug), I know that, like that boy building his clinker-built boat on a shingle beach, I shall be sustained in the months ahead by daydreaming of that magical day.

  2

  VIEW FROM A BRIDGE

  ‘It’s the only thing,’ said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. ‘Believe me, my friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’

  – Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

  24 APRIL 2014

  Only for the very briefest of moments did I doubt the wisdom of becoming a father again at the age of fifty-eight.

  Phoebe Louisa May Gornall was born in Ipswich hospital in the English county of Suffolk on Wednesday, 23 April 2014. Weighing in at 7lb 10oz, she made her debut in the Deben delivery suite, named after the most mysterious of the six rivers that entwine land and sea in an intimate, mystical embrace in this easternmost part of the British Isles.

  Setting sail on the adventure of her life at exactly 3.13pm, she timed her launch well. At the Port of Ipswich on the nearby River Orwell the tide at that moment was almost exactly at mid-flood, which, as any sailor knows, is by far the safest time to embark on an exploration of uncharted waters. If you do run aground, the rising tide will soon lift you off.

  It had been a long, testing labour for my wife, Kate, and, thanks to a devoted midwife who bought her a little more time from a passing consultant obstetrician who was pushing for a Caesarean section, it ended in a natural birth. Watching mother and daughter gazing into each other’s eyes was the most unspeakably moving thing I have ever witnessed.

  The following morning I drove Kate and Phoebe home to our apartment on the south bank of the Stour, the river that defines the boundary between the counties of Suffolk and Essex on its way to the North Sea at Harwich. The thirty-minute journey took us first across the neighbouring Orwell, on the arching concrete bridge that carries the A14 over the river, and that was when it happened.

  The parapets on the bridge are too high to allow the river to be seen from a car and on the approach from the north bank trees mostly obscure the view. But if you know when to glance across to your left, a vantage point opens up fleetingly just as the road rears up to meet the bridge. It grants no more than a single, subliminal frame, but I do know when to look and on this day of days something makes me do so.

  . . . the first of the season’s boats, freed from the purdah of a long winter ashore, back on the water, noses sniffing at the tide and snatching impatiently at their mooring lines . . .

  And then it’s gone. But what the retina misses, mem ory supplies.

  I learnt to sail on the Orwell as an eleven-year-old boy, unexpectedly transported from the postwar bomb site that was Peckham in south London to an experimental boarding school for disadvantaged kids run by the Inner London Education Authority. It was a reversal of fortune that continues to surprise me and for which I have always been profoundly grateful.

  Woolverstone Hall was situated on the Shotley Peninsula, in an eighteenth-century Palladian mansion perched in a commanding position high on the south bank of the Orwell. The peninsula, a stone-age arrowhead of land pointing east towards the North Sea, as though in readiness for the next wave of seaborne invaders, is framed by the Orwell to the north and the Stour to the south. The twin rivers, so different in their characters – one narrow and busy, the other broad and brooding – come together near the sea to separate the modern container port of Felixstowe on the Suffolk shore from the ancient Essex harbour of Harwich.

  After the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and then the Vikings came this way, each in turn tempted to venture up the rivers of the east coast in their shallow-hulled ships. Behind them they left echoes of their lives and their deaths in the language, the culture and the soil.

  Barring the bulge of Norfolk, protruding rump-like into the North Sea, this is about as far east in the UK as it is possible to go. Denmark, just 350 miles away, is closer to Harwich than the north of Scotland. About 8 miles long and, at its widest, no more than 5 miles across, the peninsula is a quiet place, generally untroubled by the sound and fury of the modern world. Unless they come by sea, as in summer descendants of the Norsemen occasionally do, in yachts flying Danish or Norwegian flags, people do not generally stumble upon the peninsula by accident.

  All my boats, dreams and adventures were launched on the Shotley Peninsula, and this is where I now live with Kate and Phoebe.

  At the turn of the millennium I was lucky enough to find a cottage to rent on the water’s edge at Pin Mill, a small village on the south bank of the Orwell well known to generations of sailors, from the crews of the large ocean-going grain ships that dropped anchor here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, transferring their cargoes to Thames sailing barges bound upriver for Ipswich, to the yachtsmen for whom this place remains a place of pilgrimage, steeped in history.

  Here in the 1930s the English children’s author Arthur Ransome, creator of the Swallows and Amazons stories, had two yachts built at Harry King’s, a boatyard that is still in business today. Here, too, was the jumping-off point for Ransome’s fictional children’s adventures, Secret Water and We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. I, on the other hand, most certainly did mean to and it was here that I laid my plans to row across the Atlantic.

  Pin Mill was also where I moored Sea Beatrice. The modest but beautiful 24ft clinker-hulled sloop-rigged Finesse had been built in 1979 in a yard in Thundersley, Essex, which had long since closed its doors. Sea Beatrice and I spent a summer in the late 1990s exploring the east coast and a maritime history that told the story of seaborne adventure and exploration, from the coming of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings to the departure of the Mayflower and its captain Christopher Jones, both born in Harwich, at the confluence of the Stour and Orwell.

  On summer evenings at Pin Mill, sitting on the brick steps leading down from the garden of the cottage to the river’s edge and watching Sea Beatrice swing eagerly round on her mooring to face the new flood was to sense the call of the river’s infinite promise. That way, downstream, lay everything, and everywhere. Who could resist that siren song and the numberless possibilities of which it sang?

  Not me. That was why, in 2011, after four years spent working in tax-free exile in Dubai to raise funds, I had planned to scale back my career as a journalist, abandon shore-based living for good and invest my modest gains in a small but sea-friendly wooden boat – another Finesse, perhaps, if I could find one. Like most of my grand plans, it was poorly thought through. Nevertheless, I fondly imagined myself pottering endlessly and aimlessly around the coast of Britain, an increasingly ancient mariner exploring isolated coves and rivers, putting in to picturesque harbours and quaysides to buy supplies and writing the occasional article to pay for them. After that? Something, as Wilkins Micawber always insisted, would turn up.

  Thankfully, life, love and serendipity intervened and that theory never had to be tested. By chance I became reacquainted with Kate, a past love, and suddenly we could find no good reason not to take up where we’d left off many years before. In August 2012 we were married in the Pier Hotel at Harwich and, twenty months later, here we are, driving over the Orwell Bridge with the one-day-old Phoebe Louisa May on the backseat.

  The subliminal message I take from that brief, freeze-framed view from a bridge is that my previous life, and all my other plans, are suddenly and irrevocably behind me
. I know I will never return to unfinished business in the Atlantic, that I will probably never own another yacht and that almost certainly my dream of circumnavigating the British Isles lies dead in the water. But, glancing in the mirror at Kate, one arm stretched protectively across the small miracle in the car seat alongside her, I also realise that I couldn’t care less about any of that.

  The beautiful, exhausting and exhilarating late-life surprise who overnight has become the captain of my ship is my grand adventure now, and one that will prove to be more challenging than anything I have ever contemplated.

  Well, almost anything.

  3

  A RETREAT FROM SUEZ

  ‘There became attached to the whole Suez story, especially in British minds, a suggestion of deceit – something shady about it, something false and secretive.’

  – Jan Morris of The Guardian

  On 28 May 1955, my mother, Joyce Kathleen Johnston, disembarked at the Port of London after a week-long voyage from Port Said, Egypt, on board the once grand but now slightly faded P&O liner Strathmore. When it was launched in 1935 to serve the Britain–India–Australia run, the 665ft-long ship was the largest and the plushest in the P&O fleet, boasting sports decks, bars, a dance hall, swimming pools and even a couple of nurseries (for first- and second-class children). By 1955, however, it had become a metaphor for the empire it had been built to serve – past its prime and shortly to be broken up.

  For my mother, the grandmother Phoebe would never know, the voyage home was no pleasure cruise. Just one year before Britain would suffer humiliation at the hands of America for its ill-advised attempt to snatch back control of the Suez Canal, my mother was in the throes of her own Suez crisis. Single, thirty-four and four months pregnant with me, she was retreating in disgrace from Egypt after a dalliance with a British soldier as ill-judged as her country’s imminent adventure in post-imperial gunboat diplomacy.

  Technically, this was my first nautical adventure, and I like to think the experience accounts for my general immunity to seasickness, and perhaps even for my affection for the sea. It could, indirectly, even be credited with my son’s choice of career. Forty-eight years after my mother embarked at Port Said, my son Adam, in 2003 a twenty-one-year-old Royal Marine travelling through the Suez Canal on board the landing ship RFA Sir Percivale on his way to invade Iraq, would unwittingly pass the spot where his father had been conceived.

  My mother hardly ever spoke to me about those days, or about anything else much, so I don’t know what she was doing in Egypt, or how long she was there. But I do know that at about the same time that she fell for the charms of one William Gornall, a soldier in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, she had been due to follow her boss to a new posting, in Japan.

  I saw my father only once, when I was about six or seven, and my mother and I travelled 230 miles overnight by bus from London to Preston, the former cotton-mill town in Lancashire that my father’s side of the family calls home. I think we were there for my parents to sign some sort of financial agreement. I remember sitting on a chair outside an office, wearing shorts and swinging my legs, as the man who my mother later told me was my father walked past. He glanced at me, but said nothing. But then, what could he say?

  I was born on 9 October 1955. Looking at the dates, it seems possible that my parents celebrated New Year’s Eve in Egypt in 1954 just a little too enthusiastically and, instead of heading to Tokyo, my pregnant mother found herself retreating to the postwar greyness of Peckham in south London to move back in with her widowed mother. By anyone’s standards, that was a steep price to pay for a night of passion in the desert.

  Whether for my sake or hers, for as long as she lived my mother maintained the fiction that she and Mr Gornall had been married, though the archived manifest of passengers who stepped ashore that May day in 1955 shows she sailed home to England under her maiden name, Johnston. It was only twenty years after my mother’s death in 1993 that I unearthed conclusive evidence, written in her own hand, that she and my father had never married.

  I found it in the margin of the entry for burial plot 9731 in the Register for Purchased Vaults and Graves at Camberwell New Cemetery, south London, where my grandfather was buried in 1948, and where my lovely grandmother’s ashes were scattered in 1969. The register listed my mother as the owner of the plot and I immediately recognised the handwriting alongside the entry as hers. In the register her maiden name had been crossed out, and above it she had written ‘By Statutory Declaration name changed to Joyce Kathleen Gornall’. So that was that. I was, in the hard-edged terminology of the times, officially a bastard.

  I grew up living with my mother and grandmother, Kate Louisa Johnston, in Peckham, south London, in the same small rented house the family had occupied since the First World War. It was one of the few surviving Victorian terrace houses in Clayton Road, much of which had been subjected to high-explosive slum clearance by the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War, and it retained many original architectural features, including no bath, an outside toilet, an earth-covered Anderson bomb shelter and a brick garden path my grandfather had constructed from the rubble of the blitzed house to the rear.

  I don’t remember having much to do with my mother while I was growing up, beyond learning to steer clear of her when she’d been drinking. In those days shops sold sherry from barrels and I was frequently despatched to the nearby off-licence to fill up my mother’s empties. She was often away, had little to say to me when she was home and generally left childcare duties to my grandmother. Everyone knew my grandmother as Kitty, but to me she was Nanny, and it was Nanny who taught me to read and write, helped me to learn my times-tables and wiped away my tears and dabbed TCP on my wounds when I fell off my bike (which my mother got rid of when she discovered I’d been riding it on the roads between our home and the park).

  It was Nanny who took me to the Tower of London, just 2 miles from Peckham as the raven flies, and introduced me to one of the Yeoman Warders, whom she seemed to know. I was about six or seven and this giant of a Beefeater knew his audience, sparing no gory detail as he showed me the Traitor’s Gate, through which condemned prisoners had once been brought to meet their grisly end, and the spot where they’d met it, under the executioner’s axe. He also told me the story of the tower’s ravens, and the legend that if they ever abandoned it, both the White Tower and the nation would fall.

  Nanny had several part-time jobs as a cleaner and sometimes she would take me with her, which was always a big adventure. A favourite destination was Jones & Higgins, a department store with a large clock tower in Rye Lane, Peckham, where I would explore the silent, darkened floors, playing among the mannequins with an unbeatable blend of fear and excitement. But even that was topped when one day she took me to her cleaning job at the Bank of England, a thrilling ride to the north side of the Thames in a red double-decker bus. Inside the bank, where I had to sit quietly and behave myself, it was boring. But the real treat came later, outside on Threadneedle Street. Holding Nanny’s hand, I watched wide-eyed as the peace of the after-hours City was broken by the crunch-crunch-crunch of the boots of the armed military guard, bayonets fixed and resplendent in their red tunics and busbies, arriving for the nightly duty of protecting the nation’s gold reserves.

  From Nanny I learnt that my mother had driven ambulances in London during the Second World War. I also learnt that the war had robbed Nanny of her son and my mother of her beloved elder brother. Ronnie had joined The Buffs, the Royal East Kent Regiment, in July 1940 and drowned in the Thames in Oxfordshire in 1943 while recovering from a serious head wound.

  Nanny had had a rough couple of world wars. In the first, her husband had been away in France for five long years. Bert’s service record shows he was a seventeen-year-old butcher’s assistant when he joined the Royal Field Artillery as a gunner in 1914. It took him a while to adjust to army discipline. In August 1915 he was given seven days’ field punishment for ‘using obscene and improper langua
ge to an NCO’. But by the time he was demobbed in 1919 he had risen to the rank of sergeant, having fought at the Somme, Loos, Albert, Vimy Ridge and Arras, and been wounded at least twice, once with a gunshot wound to the head.

  Bert, who suffered a cardiac arrest caused by a coronary thrombosis in 1948, would outlive his boy by only five years, but Nanny would live on with her memories and black-and-white photographs until 1969. She kept both men’s army cap badges and her husband’s campaign medals in a small box in a drawer, which from time to time she would take out and show me.

  I loved my nanny and couldn’t understand why my mother, her daughter, always seemed to be so impatient and even angry with her. I guess the truth was that, after losing her husband and her son in the service of her nation’s armed conflicts, in the postwar mess that was Suez Nanny had also lost her daughter.

  On the day Nanny died, my mother wasn’t talking to her and sent me downstairs with her lunch on a tray. I was fourteen and bewildered by my role as a go-between. Nanny was seventy-four. She looked very frail, and very sad, and hadn’t felt well for a few days. A doctor had come round – in those days they actually made home visits – but had found nothing wrong.

  As I set her lunch tray on the table at her side, Nanny’s last words to me – and to anyone on this earth – were, ‘Darling, what have I done to upset your mother this time?’ For the first time in my life I experienced that tightening sensation in the chest and throat that can be described only as heartache. I kissed her on the paper-thin skin of her right cheek, told her it was nothing to worry about and tried not to cry as I went back upstairs to my mother’s kitchen.