XVI

THE SAILING BUG

Father’s first novel A High Wind in Jamaica (1928) spanned the interests of old and young alike. It took a great deal of research into the inner workings of children as they really are and not as the Victorian era, into which he was born (by just a year), sentimentally liked to imagine them. Since he was still a young bachelor at the time, he had borrowed a few children from friends, having them to stay for days or weeks and observing them. He told them stories, mining their own imaginations for further stories. I believe he spent a good deal of time with my two eldest siblings, but then the War came. Three more children arrived, then life, society, finances, home were all disrupted and everyone felt deracinated, even if they never left the British Isles and did not lose everything. Things were very different. Father never showed us younger children the same attention or interest that he had shown the pre-war generation of his offspring.

He was always so distant, untouchable, not to be disturbed – until there were other children visiting. Then he would do ‘acrobatics’ with us on the grass, spinning us around and catapulting us in somersaults over his shoulder, head first down his back, to be swung to and fro between his legs. I think I was jealous of these visitors who could elicit such attention from him, I imagined that he gave them more attention than he gave me in these games – though I am quite sure he was scrupulously fair. He even had some acrobatic skills with children in bed. Again they would be initiated when there were visiting kids, we would go to see him, all of us in pyjamas and he would bounce us on his foot while he lay flat on his bed and twirl us around with our back on his raised foot, always with a visitor, never for me alone. My siblings considered I was spoiled, as far as I am concerned, I was raised with his ‘benign neglect’. Then too, there would be his bedtime stories in which he would ask us each to imagine a person, an animal or an object and he would weave a tale around the words we gave him. Later in life, he said that by morning he would have quite forgotten the story, but would go back to the children for their version of it. If it seemed worthwhile to him, he would write it down and many of them were later published in his collections of children’s short stories.

As the youngest, many of my earlier years at home were spent alone. There were no stories for a single child. I would be put to bed and told not to wander about. Sometimes, after I had been told that the black labrador ‘Lanta’ was mine, I would ask for her to sleep in my room. Feeling lonely and sleepless, I would attach a note to her collar, asking for someone to come and say ‘Goodnight’. I knew she would gravitate to the only fire burning in the house, in the dining-living room. The results were poor, since: a) I could not yet write, b) Lanta would inadvertently drop my note, c) the living room door was closed and she took the second-best solution: the warm kitchen range where cooking was already over and being consumed next door. So, I almost never got the attention I demanded and thought I deserved.

Father’s next book was commissioned and was surely for adults only. In Hazard (1938) was also a best seller, to his surprise, even outselling his first, more notorious book. Then, during the War, the life he led in London, working for the Admiralty in a bombproof bunker off Pall Mall, was mostly male and certainly childless. At night, bedtime stories were replaced by rooftop vigils for fires, watching as the German bombers flew in to destroy their targets in London. In between the ‘Jerries’ came flights of wild duck, sweeping in on the lake in Regent’s Park, but of course he could not start hunting them, he would have to wait for that until he moved back to Wales. Even after the War, first there was the pioneering move to North Wales, then back to London on more Admiralty work, then finally writing screen plays until Ealing Studios was sold up in the face of competition from T.V. Of course, with the will to do so, Ealing could have continued; television desperately needed studios, but the business was privately owned and the will was not there.

Small wonder, then, that Father was a changed man after the War, a man I never felt I knew, despite the fact that he was at home writing, gardening, fishing and even taking us sailing.

Yes, he took us sailing. Of course the tide had to be right – on the rise and high enough to float us over the nearest sandbanks. Then there had to be enough wind. After that, rain and even darkness were no deterrent. If you don’t do what you want to do because it’s raining in Wales, you will never do anything at all. For me, this started a lifelong love of sailing.

One night, we were out sailing with a three-quarter moon lighting our way and brilliant phosphorescence swirling behind us in our wake. When we hit a sandbank, he stripped off his trousers, leaving them rolled-up on the boat and jumped over the side. The phosphorescence swirled about again, lighting up his hairy legs like fairy’s dust. We could see the outlines of the mountains and hills around and one bright oil lamp in the window of Mother’s studio to guide us home. The tide was at its peak by now and we were off again, sailing well. The wind had freshened a little. Father was back in the boat, his pipe in his teeth, his beard jutting out and his great paw of a hand on the tiller. Suddenly we stopped again, but it was a different ‘stop’ to hitting a sandbank. He rushed forward, scattering children as he went, and leant over the side to see what the problem was. The next moment, he launched into one of his famous tirades in which he could continue cursing for several minutes on end without once repeating a phrase. He could swear with the rhythmic, inspired cadence of a Welsh preacher using the ‘Hwyl’, his anger and frustration matching the fire and brimstone lyric fury of a Minister’s sermon. He had just sailed right into his own fishing nets! They were torn and a stake had been broken. It was indeed enough to make anyone furious at oneself.

He took us sailing in the daytime as well, when squalls of rain swept across the water, flattening the waves and stinging the face. He told me never to wear a cap, it would stop me feeling the wind. He showed me how to sail with my eyes closed, sensing the wind with my face and my skull. He showed me with amazing simplicity how the wind and sail work, how the sail luffs, or fills, or jibes – the balance of the boat and its sail to the wind, the delicate and perfect relationship created by the helmsman between his machine and the wind. He pointed out how you can watch the squall coming and anticipate its strength. All quietly, subliminally – unless we hit his nets – which we never ever did again! I became at least as passionate about sailing as he.

We had two sixteen-foot, open, clinker-built sailing boats. The old favourite was the (John) Perrot (after the Pembrokeshire, South Wales courtier – who could have been an illegitimate son of Henry VIII and who had six hundred Irish rebels executed in the sixteenth century – to encourage the others?). The other, a slightly faster, but very similar boat was called the Amy. Tradition holds that no boat could ever be renamed, so perhaps Amy was someone’s teenage truelove. They had centreboards of cast iron, which could be lowered and held in place with a rusty nail through a series of holes that allowed adjustment to the depth of the plate. They felt as if they weighed a ton, at the age of seven I could barely drag one into position and hoist the top end so it would drop down the slot, so I did not, at first, use the centreboard when sailing alone… I just had to sail sideways. The iron centreboards were supposed to have handles welded onto them, but they had long since rusted away. Once, when sailing with my ‘sailing’ sister (the eldest), the rusty nail gave way and the centreboard fell through, but not all the way out. The remains of the handle stuck in the casing, thank goodness.

Meanwhile, the centreboard had also dropped into the sandbank beneath us – pinning us to the ground. I must have been quite young, I remember my sister explaining that I had to lift and hold the centreboard while she pushed it up from below. By the time her instructions were over, she was naked and over the side into the cold seawater. Under the boat, in perhaps five feet of water, she grabbed the centreboard and heaved it up again so that I could grab it. No longer pinned to the sandbank, we were off and under way before she was back on board. There was nothing I could do about trimming the gaff sail or our course, I was hanging on to a fifty pound plate of rusty iron with both hands! She leapt aboard, naked as a mermaid, grabbed the tiller as she dressed and we were on our way. We found another nail to hold up the centre-board and carried on as if nothing had happened. The sailing lesson was evident: act immediately, logically, whatever the discomfort – just do it now!

There was also a small, but heavy, ten-foot rowing dinghy used for fishing, rowing lessons and as an occasional rescue craft – if only for sheep stranded by a rising tide. All these boats had oars and oarlocks – rowlocks, as we called them. Sheep are extremely stupid and we were forever having to rescue them from the rising tide – just as mountain farmers are always having to rescue them from tiny ledges on precipices.

Often, after these mountain rescues, the sheep are slaughtered, because they only remember how sweet the grass on that impossible cliff-ledge was and go right back for it and get stuck again. I am sure they never learned about tides either and would get caught again, but I never heard of the local farmers slaughtering them after these sea rescues.

The highest, or ‘spring’ tides come two or three days after the full moon (thus monthly). Then the rise and fall was at its greatest. There were secondary spring tides after the new moon, but they would be at least four feet lower. The spring tides waned to ‘neap’ tides where the rise and fall was at its minimum. The vernal and autumnal equinoxes added an extra few feet to the highest tides, as did a heavy south-west gale. Tidal waves or tsunamis were probably caused by offshore seismic activity – there had been one in 1933. As for the timing of the twice-daily tides, spring tides rose about 35 minutes later each time and neap tides about 50 minutes later. Thus there is a continual progression in time as well as in height… forever changing like the seasons and the sun’s rising and setting. All chronicled to within a minute in the precious Tide Tables.