The plan was to go to the Baltic for the summer of 2002.
Michael, the boat builder, had originally promised to return me my boat, Undina, at the beginning of May. I telephoned him in the middle of March. ‘So, anyway, Michael, as I was saying, it would probably be a good idea to take her up to Harwich for some sort of sea trials and then we can go across to Holland.’
‘Yup. And when were you planning this then?’
‘Early May.’
‘Early May!’ He sounded astonished.
‘Yes. You said early May.’
‘Well, she won’t be ready by then.’ There was a distinct admonitory tone to his voice.
‘Well, yes, as I said, I’ll have finished this very important radio project that I’m working on and then I’m free. Free! Free of everything. I really have to do this thing. And it’s up anchor and away.’
‘Yes, but not in early May. Dear me, no.’
‘No. OK. When, then?’
There was a noise like a lorry going round a corner. ‘Eeeeeeeeeee…’ Michael gave a heavy sigh. He grunted. He made little chicken cluckings in the back of his mouth.
‘For safety, say the end of the second week in May, say.’
‘Yes… yes… that’s fine.’ It made no odds. I wouldn’t have finished the very important radio project until then. Not that it was that important really. It was perfectly sound. It had won a Sony award. The authorities were so enthused by having something funny on the radio that they had almost considered the possibility of another series. But it could all wait. I didn’t care. As long as I got to the Baltic by June.
Six months earlier, on a freezing December day, Michael and I had driven down to Cowes to look at Josephine, the sister ship to Undina. She was a near clone, but we were immediately impressed by her fittings.
‘Yes, we had them chromed,’ Josephine’s owner said.
‘They were bronze, though.’
‘Yes. But they would have been chromed originally.’ And he took us below to show us his varnished floor and lavatory arrangements. But my eyes kept returning to the gleaming silver finish.
‘Busy at the moment?’ he asked.
‘What? Yes. Just finished a play.’
‘Any good?’
‘Well the first three hours were excellent. But then the interval came…’
Both boats had been built in the 1950s. There were seven altogether. They were designed by Philip Rhodes, an American, and made of wood by European yards, which must have been cheaper in the immediate post-war period. They were yachting icons of their time – fast, modern, not wooden for sentimental reasons but because wood was light and strong and fibre-glass was still an experiment. They were the Chippendales of boats, neglected as they became unfashionable, but now redolent of the period and era. Dead classy. Though the thought often occurred to me, if you owned a Chippendale escritoire, would you sensibly toss it in the sea?
From the beginning, for me, the relationship was almost wholly one of aesthetics. I was stricken with the boat. I couldn’t walk up a jetty towards it without pausing to admire it. West End musicals, radio series, new translations of creaky French farces, television clip show career opportunities, the finding of another two million for the Hackney Empire (after the builders lost it), the sitcom I had written (which the BBC sports supremo suggested a woman should write), a seat on the committee to decide on the European City of Culture, they all seemed so blisteringly unimportant.
In motor-car terms, the 45-foot boats were like 1950s Maseratis: sleek, low and streamlined. And now there was this chrome. It was a revelation. It defined their classic origins and the slight American raffish glamour. On Josephine that morning, the new covering reflected back a distorted, envious Mr Toad, as I leered admiringly into it.
So we had to have ours chromed. Every stanchion, every cleat, every screw-bolt on the deck was laboriously undone and sent to a man in Romford, who was apparently surprised to find we wanted them back in less than a year. I was surprised, in my turn, at his initial quote.
‘Six thousand pounds!’
‘It’s the polishing. You can have any amount of dipping, it’s the polishing that takes the man hours.’
‘Well yes, but…’
‘How much do you want to spend?’ I hadn’t been asked a question like that since I was in the ‘Carpet Museum’ in Marrakesh. ‘Five thousand, four…?’
‘Yes, four is more like what I had in mind.’
‘We’ll say four, then.’
‘OK.’ Clearly, I had been rash to interject at four. Who knows, he might have gone on down to a quid. Or done it for nothing, if he’d been in a generous mood. I’d never had my fittings chromed before. It was new. It was a new experience. I wasn’t a boat builder, I was a would-be fantasy yachtsman.
‘So why would you be coming down on Monday anyway?’ Michael had asked in late May.
‘To pick up the boat, Michael, as discussed.’
‘Oh I don’t think that’s possible, because we won’t have the chrome back by then…’
‘But that’s outrageous.’
‘We did ring. But he said he’ll hurry it up and it will be scheduled for next week.’
‘No, Michael. Look, this is nearly June, and we have to be in Flensburg in Germany by the eighth of June. I just have to go.’
‘Do you want me to cancel it, then?’
‘Yes. Er… yes. We’ll forget the chroming.’
‘He’s got them all chemicalized and coated with the stuff, he says. It’s just a question of putting them in the tank.’
‘So if we get them back they’ll all be covered with chemical coating?’
‘I suppose they could wash it off.’
‘What’s the latest you can pick them up?’
Michael made a noise like a small electric drill. ‘Eeeee…’ It was agreed that if we could get a lorry to take delivery of the missing parts, if they all fitted, if we scooted straight up the Dutch coast, if the weather improved, we could get my love to this classic yacht regatta, where I wanted to pimp her around, with at least an hour to spare. It was not the leisurely exploration of the Benelux countries that I had originally planned. It was not the drift into an alternative existence, free of the petty concerns of media trash that I had originally sought, but Michael would have a go.
Two weeks later we spoke again.
‘Well, we do have the chrome bits all back now…’ Michael paused. He had the patient concern of a talking dray horse in his telephone manner again.
‘Right, yes…’
‘… but these fittings were built with imperial measures, not metric. So we can’t source screws to get them back in.’
‘I see.’ I could almost see the pursed lips and the nodding at the other end of the telephone. Was that a bridle jangling? ‘What about the screws that you took out?’
‘They were all too corroded.’
‘Yes, but couldn’t we use them temporarily?’
‘We threw them away. It can all be done, but I think it will take another two weeks, so…’
I walked away from the phone and paced the room, idly tossing the letter offering a tour of As You Like It ‘including Bath’ into the wastepaper bin. I was beginning to get the impression that Michael didn’t actually want to give me back my boat. I knew what this was. He had fallen in love with her himself and was intending to kidnap her and imprison her in his tin shed.
‘It doesn’t seem very likely. He’s doing what he can.’ Bob was sympathetic. ‘But you want to take her this month?’
‘Right. This month.’
‘Well, when did you think we’d be leaving?’
‘I assumed the regatta was in July.’
‘No, no, that’s the whole point. The regatta in Germany is on the weekend of the fourteenth of June.’
‘But that’s only a couple of weeks away.’
‘I know. Are you saying you can’t make it?’
‘No, no. I’ve put the whole summer aside. I’m up for it. Don’t worry about me.’
‘So you can make the departure on Friday? It’s tight.’
‘No, wait a minute. Next Friday?’
‘Michael’s getting a crane and a low-loader and after the chrome stuff is all fitted back on, putting the boat back in the water on the Friday. And then we leave on the Saturday. I told you all this.’
‘No, all I remember is you told me the regatta was going to be in July.’
‘June!’
‘June, then. But if the boat isn’t going to be ready, don’t you think we should wait until the regatta in July.’
‘There isn’t a regatta in July. They don’t have a regatta every month. I’ve booked us in and we have to be there.’
‘But what about the weather?’
I had looked up the long-range forecast and the weather was stable. It was continuously bad. So far, May and June had been notable for being the wettest and coldest May and June for as long as anybody could remember, though, naturally enough, the meteorology office would announce to a shivering, damp nation at the end of the month that the weather had been perfectly normal and not much wetter or colder than the average May or June.
‘It’s fine.’
Bob didn’t sound convinced. In fact he didn’t sound anything. But I took his silence to mean that he wasn’t convinced.
‘If the weather is bad, all we have to do is nip across the Channel, twenty miles from Ramsgate, and then get into the inland waterways and we can get up to Flensburg without ever going out to sea again.’ Neither of us wanted to go out to sea in anything rough. He seemed partially reassured. ‘But we could do with someone to go with us for that bit. I mean I was hoping that George and his mates would come…’ I said.
‘And?’
‘Well it’s his half-term. He’s decided to go drinking in Whitehall instead.’
My son George was seventeen. I thought the trip would toughen him up, but he was already tough enough to refuse to go. I was now reliant on Bob. ‘Didn’t you say that you had a couple of friends who…’
‘Oh yeah. Yes. That’s no problem. There are loads of people.’
A week later, Bob rang me back. He’d arranged for a mate, Baines, to get working on the electrics of the boat as quickly as possible, but Baines had contacted the yard and been told he had the whole weekend or as long as he wanted.
‘No, I don’t think so, we’re leaving on the Saturday.’
‘That’s not what Michael told me.’
‘What?’
Michael was apologetic when I phoned.
‘It’s the Jubilee weekend, Griff.’
Dear me, I had forgotten entirely.
‘We can’t get the driver of the crane to come out over the weekend. The earliest he can do is Monday.’
‘What’s the problem? He’s a monarchist?’
‘No, he’s booked for something else.’
There was nothing to be done. The schedule was, at least, being sort of set down, you know, subject to alteration, of course. Trundle the boat out of the yard on the Monday, stick it in the water on the Tuesday, rig the mast and bend on the sails during the day and leave on the high tide on Tuesday evening: leaving – what? – five days to shoot up the Channel and whisk into the Baltic.
I raged around my study. ‘No, no, I’ve got a better idea. He can deliver it. I’ll just fly up to Flensburg and wait for it.’
Bob was mollifying. ‘But that’s the whole point of the journey, to sail there.’
‘The whole point of the journey is to wander gently through Dutch inland seas and explore the Friesian Islands on a leisurely cruise and sit in reedy shallows smoking pipes.’
Bob and I were cowardly sailors. He, partly because of a limitless inexperience of any practical use and me, because I was a coward. On the telephone the week before, he had become irritatingly confident about the weather. ‘We’ll be all right in June. Should be lovely.’
‘No, no.’
‘No?’
Why did I have to knock back Bob’s infuriating insouciance?
‘June can be terrible!’
Bob raised his eyebrows. Since he was extremely difficult to disconcert, I felt it was my job to he and exaggerate. An hysteric can’t stand cool people being cool about important and life-threatening things (most things), so tend to lean on the fuel supply in order to induce A PROPER SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY. This seldom works, but it makes us feel better.
‘June can be TERRIBLE. There was this bloke, this journalist from the Daily Telegraph. Did you read about him?’ This was a safe, if redundant question. Bob rarely read anything. Not even the instructions on the packet. Especially not the instructions on the packet. ‘He was planning to sail round Britain a couple of summers ago.’ I was conscious that had once been one of our plans, so this would impress him. ‘And he ended up WRECKED, totally SWAMPED in a storm, in mid-June, off the Shetland Islands.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘So the weather will be VITAL. June is NOTORIOUS.’ Perhaps I’d gone too far. Bob was looking suspicious now. Was he worried about the whole trip? ‘But, you know, we’ll get the long-range weather forecast and keep an eye on things and anyway we’re only going to hop across the Channel.’
‘Yess…’
*
Bob arranged for his choice of crew, Baines and Rick, to come to a sort of meet-and-greet at the ‘Welsh Embassy’ (my house), in central London, and then phoned to tell me he would be late himself. This was wholly expected.
The doorbell rang.
Rick!
‘Come on in, Rick. Bob’s not here…’
‘Ha ha. Yeah, well…’ (He obviously knows Bob quite well, then.)
Rick was wearing a leather motorbike caterpillar suit, which he peeled off and left in the hall. He liked my furniture (his uncle ran some sort of furniture restoration business). Rick rolled spectacularly thin cigarettes and would have a glass of wine.
The doorbell rang again.
‘Come on in, Baines. Rick’s here, Baines, but Bob…’
‘Oh ho!’ Baines knows the form too.
Baines was weedy, bearded and thoroughly affable. He was just called Baines. I wanted to call him Baines something or something Baines. But it was just Baines. He did have a real name, and I tried to elicit it, but he was reluctant to give it, not because he was on a witness protection scheme, but because he had been Baines since he was a baby. He had been born in Kenya and, on the way home from the hospital, the doctor had managed to run over his grandmother’s pet ocelot, in the driveway to her farm. The ocelot had been called Baines and the baby was instantly christened Baines by the grandmother and, eventually, by everybody else too.
Even before Bob himself bothered to arrive, I had gathered that neither Rick nor Baines seemed sporty, clubby or, worst of all, in Bob’s estimation, ‘straight’. We talked. Naturally enough, since he wasn’t there, we talked about Bob, and then about Bob’s planned visit to Glastonbury. Both of them were ardent fans of the Glastonbury Festival, as I was myself, of course. Though I hadn’t actually been there since the very first one, when I had hitch-hiked down to Somerset after A-levels to watch fat girls with no clothes on roll about in the mud: the pinnacle of freak-out sophistication in 1971.
While we waited for Bob, I invited Baines, who I knew was waiting to fix our electrics, to examine our collection of boxes. The week before Bob and I had been on a trip to a basement shop opposite the Saudi Embassy in Mayfair, where I had been overwhelmed by a heady mixture of power, innocence and desperation.
‘OK… right. Obviously I’ve got to have some sort of new GPS system.’
‘Right, OK.’ The salesman nodded slowly.
‘And we thought we should have some sort of iridium phone.’
‘Mmm. Yes.’
Retrospectively I realize that he was thinking, ‘Well that’s two grand already.’ But he gave nothing away, except to adopt the look of a man trying hard to give nothing away.
Come to think of it, he’d probably been through this before. He probably thought that we were going to walk out with a catalogue and a cleaning kit. After all that’s what we’d done to three separate salesmen at the Boat Show in January. But that was January. Now, I was leaving in three days. I was frightened he might not take me seriously.
‘I do need these things quite quickly.’
‘I am confident that can be arranged.’
By the time I left, I’d added a hi-fi set, a German radio and a complete electronic charting system. He was extremely quick to return my calls from then on, and even took back an inverter large enough to power an electric submarine, which I had been convinced I would need, but which turned out to be pure hallucination on my part.
Baines stood in my front room and looked approvingly at my shopping.
‘Yes, well, I wanted to make sure we had the right equipment, you know, for the whole journey. Safety has to be a high priority.’
‘Yes,’ said Baines. ‘Of course. This is a car stereo, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Well we’ll probably want some music too, won’t we?’
‘I should jolly well hope so,’ said Baines. ‘Well done.’
Rick immediately focused on what I was later to discover was his particular and, some might say, all-consuming interest.
‘And charts?’
‘Yes, well, I’ve ordered a computer. It’s a special rugged computer, designed, I believe, for the US army, with a gel thingie inside it that compensates for vibration, and a special waterproof specification, which can run C map, so we’ll have electronic charts…’ Rick’s eyes flickered slightly. ‘… but I do, of course, have paper charts,’ I added quickly. Of course. No sailor worth his salt, or at least one who read any yachting magazine, manual, handbook, pamphlet or prominently displayed notice, would ever rely on electric charts, alone. That word ‘alone’ was the crucial consideration here. Charts could be personally beamed down from a cartographer, licensed by the Royal Hydrographer, hovering in a space capsule directly above your boat, but the proper mariner would always unfold a vast piece of cartridge paper the size of a volleyball field, and set to with bits of see-through plastic and a pair of dividers. God knows, I knew this was sacred law. In fact, I first went on boats when there was no other choice. (Mind you, then, the only affordable way of finding out the depth was throwing a lump of lead on a rope with knots in it over the side, and I’ve done that too.) But having returned to the business of sailing my own boat, after a ten-year lay-off, I was shocked by how easy it had become.
The GPS system is linked to a clutch of satellites, owned and run by the American military. They orbit the earth and beam down directions to anyone with a receiver. It’s the same system that allows an irritating woman to direct mini-cabs down back alleys. In fact, it’s so damn good that everybody is scared to death of it. Barely a week goes by without the yachting press running gruesome fright-stories of boats grounding in the Caribbean or warning that at any moment the United States might go to alert red and switch the lot off. Thunderstorms, electrical interferences, wonky antennae, misreadings and mistaken entries will lead inexorably to maritime disaster. So I had proper charts and a pencil too.
I showed them to Rick. He nodded approvingly.
‘Ah, Bob.’
Bob sauntered in to join Rick, Baines and myself, lit a fag and slumped into a chair in my study. He was full of two things.
The first was a thoroughly irritating smugness. I knew where this was coming from. Bob was a fixer. He had dedicated his life to fixing things so that he had, himself, to do as little as possible, apart, that is, from breed parrots, which had turned into a lucrative if complex pastime. His flat used to be full of cockatoos and macaws and at some point a monkey, which bit off visitors’ ears. But having midwifed several enormous and colourful birds into life in Clapham, he had emerged from nursing eggs in warm flannels to discover that Chelsea had moved across the river towards him. His poky flat was worth a fortune, even more than the cockatoos, which were valued at several thousand pounds each, so he’d loaned his aviary to a parrot farm in Northamptonshire and his flat to a yuppy. He’d moved himself and his huge collection of failed projects (plaster dogs on a wall mount, miniature models of the cast of Coronation Street, sepia-tinted photographs printed on pull-down blinds, garden seats made out of the Chelsea North Stand, dozens of hand-made cds of his band ‘The Long Horns’ and his collection of chicken suits and wigs) up the road and into an empty space above Kebab House.
‘It sounds good, Kebab House, like Badminton or Mansion House, I thought.’
And now he’d fixed two keen and willing members of crew to help us cross the Channel. Clearly, in his eyes, it was at least the equal of getting a boat, charts and a trip organized. So he was sitting, lounging even, drawing hard on his cigarette, smiling broadly and literally putting his feet up.
‘Not on the new electrical equipment please!’
He twisted round and reached into his back pocket. ‘I managed to get this, by the way, from Stanford’s in Covent Garden.’ He pulled out what looked like a street map from his back pocket and began to unfold it. ‘It was ten quid. I was amazed. Ten quid.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a chart of the Dutch and Belgian canal system.’
We put it on the floor and laid it out. This was the other thing he was full of. Baines and Rick looked over our shoulders. ‘Yeah…’ I started. ‘The general thing is that we don’t have a lot of time to get to Flensburg, so we’re going to have to press on. Obviously, if the weather turns bad we won’t want to go out into the German Bight in June…’
‘It can be very stormy in June,’ said Bob. ‘There was this editor of the Sunday Times who was drowned in a hurricane…’
‘Yes, yes. But look, you see…’ I produced a big Admiralty chart of the English Channel and unfolded that too. ‘Whatever the conditions, we can cross here…’ pointing to the narrow area north of the Straits of Dover ‘… get over to, say, Ostend, and swoosh up into the Dutch canal system here… here.’ My finger waved uncertainly over the map. ‘Well definitely here anyway.’ I finally found a way in, through all the dykes and sea walls that had been erected in the last fifty years to effectively close off all but the major port entrances to the Low Countries. ‘And the best way in is certainly almost straight ahead. Vlissingen, or Flushing, barely fifty miles from England, is at the mouth of a huge estuary.’
We transferred our attentions back to Bob’s little map. The estuary was joined to the heartland of Holland by any number of canals. We could have been looking at a road map of the Midlands. Thick blue lines snaked off in every direction. It seemed there was a bewildering choice of land-locked routes. First, we could head north through industrial Holland. Then cross the northernmost bulges of western continental Europe safely inland, passing through Groningen to the Ems, the river that separated the Netherlands from Germany and then… Bob’s map ran out.
We turned to the AA Road Atlas of Europe.
‘This is only temporary,’ I reassured Rick and Baines. ‘We’ll get more detailed maps before we go.’
‘Or up there in Holland somewhere,’ added Bob. He knew that every chandler and shop we had been to so far only had maps and charts of the Solent and routes south. Everybody wanted to head to the sun. It was one of the reasons that Bob and I had decided to go the other way. The other was because we’d done a little of the route already and realized that this was easily the best direction for cowards.
At the end of the season, the year before, Bob and I had set out on our first independent trip in Undina. We sailed the 6 miles down the River Orwell from Ipswich and found ourselves facing the sea at Harwich. By my calculations, our least complicated destination was Holland. You took a ruler and drew a pencil line from Harwich to Ijmuiden and then you sailed along it. Going south was a different matter.
The Thames is a deceptively huge river. It comes as a shock to those who have travelled for several months on Network South-East to discover that they are still in the Thames Estuary. The estuary runs right up the Essex coast and into Suffolk and has dug channels and deposited sandbanks all the way up to Harwich. It’s a tricky business working your way through the Wallet Gut or the Goodwin Channel towards France, particularly at night in an unfamiliar boat.
So a year ago, we had simply avoided the Thames Estuary. We’d sailed straight across the North Sea and popped into Holland down a handy canal (before any change in the weather could challenge our seafaring abilities). And there, at the end of the canal, we’d discovered Amsterdam and tied up behind the railway station.
The prospect of taking a floating bedsit to one of the seamiest cities in the world had an enormous appeal for Bob and myself. In ‘yachtsmen’s harbours’, the marina is the main event. It is like spending a couple of days anchored in a park-and-ride facility. By contrast, the Sixhaven in Amsterdam was next to the Shell petroleum headquarters. It was a marina in someone’s back garden. There were geraniums on the pontoons. A ferry (a metal platform, half bus, half bridge) ran continuously across the Nordzee Canal. We crossed with dozens of bicycles to walk straight into the equivalent of Oxford Street, still dressed in oilskins. The hippy population of Amsterdam probably assumed we were protesting about chemical waste.
The next day we left the brown cafés behind and, about ten minutes from the centre, passed through a narrow lock and out into the muddy brown waters of the Ijsselmeer, with its medieval ports, now cut off from direct contact with the sea. We nearly reached the long, low, flat, sandy, barely visible line of grassy banks that line the north-west coast of Europe and run in a chain out towards the Elbe: the Friesian Islands. They lay just a day’s sail to the north. Riddle of the Sands country.
In 1897 Erskine Childers and his brother had discovered almost exactly the same thing as us. They got to the end of the Nordzee Canal in their boat Vixen and decided that if the wind blew south they’d go home, if it blew north they’d explore the Friesian Islands. It blew north and, as a result, Childers wrote his one novel, The Riddle of the Sands, A MOST IMPORTANT BOOK for the small boat sailor. The paranoid story about German naval intentions is a little preposterous, but the boating descriptions are excellent.
But why stop there? I remember peering at our charts and thinking how simple it would be to go on further. I liked sailing in coastal inlets and shallow waters. The boat had its protective centreboard. The shoals held no particular fear for us. Hamburg, Lübeck and Copenhagen were up there somewhere. Real cities with sex shows and crazy nightlife. Not simply whitewashed holiday destinations, but proper ancient ports and, surely, we could slip behind those islands, couldn’t we? We need never venture far from shelter.
Closer examination revealed more islands and more hidden passages. I had never taken the trouble to think about the Baltic. But even the most cursory examination showed you could island-hop through Denmark. It was an archipelago.
The coast of Sweden looked boring to begin with, but, beyond Öland, there were more archipelagos. Uncountable separate dots of land covered the chart for hundreds of miles and, up there, beyond Sweden, beyond Helsinki, right at the top of the Gulf of Finland, where the map takes a right turn into a narrowing funnel, there was St Petersburg. St Petersburg: a place so romantic, so utterly remote, so exotic and yet so potentially packed with live sex shows that it seemed incredible that it was possible to visit it by boat from England, and by a route that would only require only two 30-mile crossings.
I was hardly the first person to notice this. Cumbersome lighters called cogs had been transporting furs, illegal immigrants and Russian dolls down through the river systems for centuries. The Vikings had set up trading posts which had developed into towns, now ancient and impressively preserved, like Tallinn or Visby. This was all based on the sensible principle of getting south without going out into the cold and blowy North Sea. With careful planning we could head out into the far Nordic regions without ever really getting wet.
Mind you, it wasn’t strictly fear of the high waves that influenced us. We were far more terrified by the prospect of boredom. Tracy Edwards and Sir Francis Chichester notwithstanding, the only time anything actually happens on a long sea passage is when something goes disastrously wrong. That’s why the hairy-arsed bohos who sail from Rio to Portsmouth love it when the mast snaps in two and they have to make a new one out of a spare oar and a tea towel. Otherwise it’s just sea. It can be big sea. Huge sea sometimes. Sometimes a flat, sullen, miserable, grey, gently rolling slab of a sea. But mostly just an ordinary stretch of water and a course that consists of an imaginary line, as straight as possible, right through the tedious middle of it.
For us, the shore was the attraction. We could enter the system at Delft. Explore Utrecht. Take a detour to The Hague. Linger in Amsterdam. Sit and listen to the curlew in a ditch near Groningen. It became an ambition to make a real escape into a timeless world of petty incident.