We were concerned for Bob. He came back from Glastonbury a fan of Roger Waters.
‘No, it was great lying in the dark. All proper guitar stuff, you know. None of this modern rubbish.’
‘I was at the first Glastonbury,’ I told Baines.
‘So was I,’ said Bob.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t meet,’ said Baines.
‘We probably did,’ said Bob. ‘Did you roll naked in the mud?’
‘No, but I watched carefully.’ The difference was that one Glastonbury had been quite enough for me.
Baines went below and put on The Stereophonies.
It was just as grey and damp in the next marina. The town was just as comfortable and neat and featureless. The buses were just as regular. So we went to Odense for the night to see Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. The bus trip into the second city of Denmark, past signs to ‘So Bad’ and ‘Off Toilet’. The sweet shops selling British newspapers. The Irish bar where the barman showed us his T-shirt, which read ‘Odense’ and got him shouted at when he went back to Dublin (‘Hey, Mr O’Dense!’). The noxious tourist restaurant where he recommended we eat. And the subtitled film, where we were left wondering why the incomprehensible gibberish of the evil leader of the Federation, he of the crocodile eyes and lengthy dewlaps, could be subtitled to gales of laughter. (It was subtitled in the original.) It made for a bland visit.
Odense is someone’s future vision of a town. The poor slum, which Hans Christian Andersen escaped, was now prettified and carefully preserved. (Who chooses the lovely colours? Green shutters and grey walls, then pale red with blue windows, then brown and Prussian blue.) The municipal concert hall, modern, big, a celebration of Nielsen, the native composer, was benign, comfortable and anodyne. We were shocked by the sound of a police siren. It was so long since we had heard one. (In Flensburg, every few minutes had been punctuated by the self-advertising clamour.) In the cinema, the only graffiti in the loo was a single line, in black marker, carefully drawn along the grouting. A couple sauntered past in matching purple nylon anoraks. On the corner, an entire family stood with their bicycles wearing red lightweight parkas and matching red shorts. Of course! Denmark was en fête. These were holidaymakers: trapped between the closing of the museums and the opening of the restaurants, waiting in this formless, airbrushed city for something to happen.
We woke in a grey mist of fine drizzle. The hedges of pink roses sheltered a stand of sopping poppies at the side of a grey wooden walkway. There was not a breath of wind. It was like being suspended in wetness.
We motored out from the harbour. The sky was dove grey, the sea a pewter mirror. Porpoises plunged through the glassy water. We saw a seal, had lunch and took it in turns to get completely drenched by stair-rod rain. And then we rounded a cape and headed south to the gargantuan new bridge that straddles the shipping lanes connecting the Baltic to the North Sea and the rest of the world.
Suddenly the radio crackled into Danish: ‘A fledder, harrty brsihkop… gale warning…’
‘Wasn’t that a gale warning?’ asked Jo.
‘Erm, yes. Yes that sounded like a gale warning. Yes. In the navigation channels.’
There were several enormous cargo vessels chugging along to the east of us, some going up, some coming down. This was definitely a navigation channel, and the warning was broadcast from somewhere quite close. Half an hour ago it had been dead calm. Soon it was blowing breezily. In a short while, it was, unexpectedly, a force seven or eight: whistling wind, flapping sails, choppy seas, a heeling and bucking boat, and us, trying to pass under a huge bridge, between a big pylon and the buoyed channel.
The huge green beacons, which, moments before, had seemed like tiny dots on the horizon, suddenly bounced up in front of us, and I clambered between the cabin and the deck, studying the charts, and confirming that the big green post with a green hat on was exactly the post I had expected to come across.
I was half-way up the companion-way ladder when the VHF radio crackled again. ‘English sailing ship… English sailing ship. Contact traffic control on channel eleven.’
We looked foolishly at one another. Undina was bucking, as the mainsail stole the following wind from the foresail and then filled it again with a series of mighty claps. I turned and looked around, there was no other sailing ship visible.
‘Do you think they mean us, then?’ said Baines.
Like a mini starship travelling at warp speed and hurtling towards a mystery planet, we heard for the first time a message from intelligent life attempting to contact us. It was a moment worthy of a space shanty from the pen of Robert A. Heinlein.
I grasped the radio handset in my trembling hand. ‘This is English yacht Undina… this is English yacht Undina calling bridge… calling bridge.’ The boat pitched up on a stern-breaking roller. ‘This is yacht Undina. Did you have an inquiry? Over.’
‘Yes. What are your intentions?’
What did he think we were about to do? Crash our sailboat into his pylon and bring down the bridge?
‘We intend to pass under the bridge to the west of the starboard hand buoys and proceed for about a mile before turning across the channel for…’ Damn. I had been doing very well too. I took my finger off the handset. ‘What’s the name of the bloody place we’re going?’
‘Korsør!’
‘Korsør.’
‘OK, watch for southbound traffic.’ And then he was gone. No ‘over and out’, not even the customary click as the handset was switched off. I switched off my own.
It was a small exchange, but a strangely comforting one. We had established our little place in the traffic of the Sjaelborg Sound. As we drove under the bridge at 7 knots we looked up at the giant ‘H’ masts towering against the rushing atmosphere, three great halogen lamps on each of them, flashing intermittently through the gathering gloom, and tried to work out where he might be, this traffic policeman, watching all the ships pass back and forth under his roadway, but the bridge was smooth and impersonal and gave nothing away. In a few moments we were underneath, and rushing down to the far buoys and our turning point; to make a run across the lanes, and into port, ahead of the gathering storm.
The harbour, when we finally spotted it in the confused grey smudge ahead, was marked by a mole: a heap of blackened rocks piled into a barrier against the waves, and as we sluiced over towards it we could see that the seas were swelling up and falling back in a broken rush at the entrance. At the last second, we swung the helm around and shot through the narrow gap into the marina. A party of ducks was crouched down, sheltering from the wind on a little spit of sand just inside and below the mole. We turned into an empty berth in the lee of a fishing boat. Bob threw a line to a man stooping against the wind on the pontoon, who promptly dropped it. Our bow, caught by the wind, swung out across the berth. Bob threw again. The man caught it this time and he and a companion, and Bob, hauled the bow of the boat round against what was now a furious blast, struggling hard until they got the rope around a bollard.
Our helper was a stout, pop-eyed man with a beard and close-cropped head. ‘We saw you coming in and thought hey! Yeah, you were rocking in the entrance, yes?’
We tried to look as if we came into small harbours with a following storm every day. ‘It was pretty blowy,’ we shouted back.
‘Yes. We saw another boat come in about an hour ago and thought that was the last.’
In fact, we weren’t the last either. Another, smaller, boat came in when the dark really fell, and we could see her mast-head light waggling obscenely back and forth, as she bounded through the mole. But by then we were sitting in the restaurant in the marina, chatting to Yvonne, and eating authentic Danish food (a national cuisine seemingly invented after a late night in the pub): meat balls, and a mess of beef cubes and fried potatoes with a fried egg on top. Yvonne was married to an Englishman.
‘He won’t eat any of this stuff,’ she told us.
‘Het my Jet,’ Bob said to her.
She looked at him. ‘What?’
‘It’s Danish, isn’t it?’
She laughed. ‘No.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Bob. ‘It means “you show me”.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It was in Star Wars.’
She shook her head. She spoke excellent English. Bob pointed this out.
‘I have to. My husband won’t learn any Danish and still can’t understand what my friends are saying.’
‘When did you meet him?’
‘We got married nine years ago,’ she said. And she pronounced the nine ‘noin’. Her husband was from Norwich and had come over to work on the bridge.
‘Ah.’ Baines leaned in with a look of patriotic pride. ‘So the bridge was actually built by the English.’
She laughed. ‘English, Germans, Italians. Most of them were Dutch.’
The next morning in the harbour master’s office, as I paid nothing for our berth, I noticed there was something peculiar about the day. The wind was still fresh but the puddles were shining. Denmark was glistening, under the bright, hard, unfamiliar glare of the sun.