XVII

NOW HOOKED ON SAILING

When my Parents had lived in South Wales in the thirties, there had also been the Dauntless – an eighteen-foot clinker-built boat that was relatively fast for the time. The mast was stepped too far forward, making her fast to windward, but very liable to ‘sail under’ (basically, to dive) and also to capsize when jibing while running before the wind.

There was a story of how my Parents took Mother’s mother and her second husband out for a sail. He had been commissioned as a commander in the Royal Navy. He insisted on taking the helm from Father, pulling rank on him. Father warned him not to let her jibe when running before the wind, but of course he was ignored as a ‘junior officer’. Jibe they did and immediately capsized some three miles offshore. Picture the 1930s gentry in boating gear of blazers and ties, long white dresses and sunhats, very wet, hatless, sitting on the hull of the upturned boat – Father’s pipe still in his teeth, waving politely to a passing fishing boat which came to their aid. The Dauntless was excommunicated forever by Mother and I never saw more than her dried-up hull in South Wales and a few photographs.

Father, incidentally, would not have been stylishly dressed. Even back in those days, he wore old flannel trousers rolled up to the knee and a heavy cable-knit sweater full of holes. Indeed, in the twenties and thirties, he went to great lengths to ask friends in America to send him pale blue shirts with collars attached. When I childishly pointed out to him that he had said: “Before the War, only cads wore anything but a white shirt,” he just looked at me with that twinkle in his eye that meant: “Make of it what you will.”

The queen of the fleet was the Tern – a 25-foot fully-decked fishing-boat that had been converted into a ‘yacht’. She had brass-framed portholes and standing room below decks for anyone less than 5’0” short. Two berths were also the seats in the saloon, the fo’c’sle was just a sail and chain locker. She was very slow and very seaworthy and, captained by Father in the thirties, had been the only contestant in the Bristol Channel Pilots’ Race to finish – the other contestants fled for port or were dismasted in a gale. The pilot assigned to the Tern was an elderly alcoholic with a mortal fear of heavy weather, who stayed below with the ship’s rum and was of no use whatsoever in the treacherous shoals of the Bristol Channel. The victor’s great silver trophy is still in the family, the date: 1936.

Just before the War, Father brought the Tern up from Laugharne in South Wales to Porthmadog in the North (a couple of hundred miles by sea, not counting tacking). He had his friend and sailing partner Jack Rowlands along as crew. Father, like many Britons, assumed that Hitler’s advance was unstoppable and that once France was defeated, he would not halt at the English Channel, but invade the British Isles as well. Father decided that if that came about, he could hole up with his family in the mountains of North Wales, and having the Tern at hand made complete sense. At a pinch, he could have sailed the family over to Ireland (which remained neutral during what the Irish called ‘The Emergency’). Indeed, he had stocked the old house, Parc, with large quantities of canned and dried food for just such an eventuality. It came in useful after the War, while rationing still continued.

Tern had a full keel and drew 3½ feet, so at low water, she either lay very sadly on her side on the sand or was fitted with ‘crutches’ on either side. It was rare that the tides were high enough to float her. My eldest sister went onboard her in Porthmadog and actually spent the night aboard. Later writing of her lifelong passion for sailing that started at that moment when she peeped out of a porthole and saw the cottages of the town, almost from sea level and felt the gentle rocking as she laid at anchor. My brother recalls arduous days scraping off old paint, caulking between the seams and repainting her. He said she was in a sorry state after being out of water for the duration of the War. I too remember playing on board, both when she was lying over on her side and when she was floating on a very high tide. Finally she went back to Porthmadog and I never saw her again. I never again knew such an intense old smell of tar, nor felt the prickly scratch of either henequen (sisal) or hemp rope as I remember from the Tern. The boats I sailed on ever afterwards had man-made fibre ropes and tar was replaced with epoxy for hulls.

In the mid-1920s, Father had sailed to Ireland on a Porthmadog slate schooner. He told me how, when going about or tacking, he would put the helm hard down, secure it with a twist of rope, go forward to change side on the jib sheets, stop by the galley on the way back to the helm just to stir the soup on the stove and make sure it wasn’t sticking, return in a leisurely manner to the helm, release the rope holding the helm, right her and set the new course according to the set of the sails. Working on a big heavy wooden hulled schooner was not a hurried affair and they were engineered not by theory but by generations of sea-faring practice.

Years later I crewed on a Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter of 40 tons, built in the late nineteenth century, from Dover to Amsterdam and back. At fourteen, I could handle her alone on the night shifts, tacking and all. I felt tremendously empowered to be driving this beautiful old machine across the ocean. She was designed exactly for that: a teenage boy could manage her by himself in most situations, foresails and all.

Around that time (in the mid-20s) after Father had sailed to Ireland on that slate boat, he went down to the dock in Porthmadog to see off another slate schooner. He had almost signed on with her, but then thought there would be many more occasions on other ships to do so. However, she was the last slate ship to leave the dock. She had a figurehead of a young girl in a navy blue tunic school uniform. The ‘model’ for the schoolgirl was there on the dock to see her off too – by then she was a heavy, matronly grandmother! The good ship was gone three years and finally ended her days three miles inshore after a hurricane in the tropics, having crisscrossed the ocean trading hither and yon. He had lost his opportunity to crew on the last ship out of Porthmadog. You can talk of 20-20 hindsight, but it would be more productive to speak of seizing the day. Besides, even if he didn’t stay on board until the hurricane finally destroyed her, he could easily have been lost overboard in the interim – it happened all the time. In which case, neither I nor my siblings nor his novels would have seen the light of day.

The watershed occasion, as far as sailing was concerned, was the first time I went sailing by myself. There was a little wind and the tide was very high. I asked Mother if I might go. She asked Father. I think I overheard him say: “Why not? He ought to know what he’s doing by now. It’s time he started learning on his own.” Of course the ‘why not’ could also have been ‘why now?’ These boats were extremely heavy and a child of seven or eight could never push one off a sandbank. But it was never said. Even raising the gaff sail was very hard work for me, and the centreboard very nearly beyond my powers (even with a new nail to hold it in place). I became adept at jumping overboard the instant I touched bottom and hauling her about, to sail off the bank. That way, I avoided the need for the brute force that I did not have. I don’t know what age I was, but it was an extraordinary lesson in managing something far heavier and more powerful than myself. It could have been a racehorse or a high-powered car, but it was an old sailing boat. I was addicted. It seemed such a wonderful machine to me, powered as it was by the wind.

Father was mostly very calm and laconic. He did not praise, but if he approved of something one did, he would look a little to the side with a twinkle in his eyes, as if a little embarrassed to acknowledge something well done. Mother, on the other hand, remains a highly colourful character in my mind, but I don’t believe I was close to her either. That I remained their only unmarried child through the 60s and came home regularly was through a sense of duty that had become ingrained in me. Not, I believe, because of filial love. I have been told by my siblings that she doted on me and spoiled me. She may well have doted on me, but she also ignored me. She would praise me and then rub in how much more brilliant they were. Eccentric and scatter-brained, she could be over-protective and yet forget I existed completely.

I sought desperately to please my Parents and adventuresome travel was certainly one way of impressing them. Not that they ever remarked much upon my wanderings. It would be much later that I revolted and then, because I was older, the revolt was all the stronger. I recall referring to my Parents as ‘the Fossils’, though such disdain was skin-deep. Like them or not, my respect for them was unquestionable...

I could scarcely have had more liberty, yet I always knew that I could come home to a bed (not always a warm or particularly dry one) and a square meal. We children were neglected to do as we liked – and what a choice we had – yet the ‘benign’ element was always there. I was twenty six when, for the first time ever, I cabled Father to borrow £10, in Sweden, because I had nothing left to pay for petrol in order to return the car I had borrowed from a friend in France. Naturally I repaid him, but he was astonished that I even had to ask him, after the tens of thousands of miles I had already covered without going broke. Being responsible for a car is an expensive proposition. A person may go without food or lodging, but a car will just go no further when the tank is empty. His surprise was the greatest compliment he had ever indulged in me.

It may seem strange that my family remains faceless and nameless. We all went away to boarding school as early as possible (in my case, seven). My brother is exactly eleven years my senior, so he was an almost grown-up, angry young man in my eyes during that fifties era of the ‘Angry Young Men’ like John Osborne. My next older sibling, a sister, is three and a half years older than I. There are two more older sisters in between. We sometimes crossed each other’s paths during holidays, but for most of those first they, then I, were away from home. We were working or just staying with one or other of our extended family. Yes, I went on a riding trip with the sister closest to me in age, but she had much more in common with our next older sister. My eldest sister was closer to our brother (the eldest of all) and anyway, all five of us were encouraged to be independent. Nowadays, they have indeed become my friends, very special, close friends. But it took retirement and old age to get to know them.

Father left us in our own ‘benign neglect’, while Mother seemed quite bemused by her role. Clearly, she far preferred to cook a dinner for interesting adults than prepare fuel for children. She did take some interest in us once we could talk and discuss things – babies were of little interest to her. Nor could she remember our names; she often called me Crumbface for my messy eating habits as a toddler. Not that I think such amnesia is rare amongst harassed mothers, but she was especially, extraordinarily forgetful…

Thus, my memories are of solitude, endless solitude, solitude alone, solitude in a crowd, even solitude with one other person. I would never learn to feel that I understood what made other people tick. After some forty years of marriage (on and off), I know in an uncanny way what my spouse is thinking at any one moment… but I have not a clue why she is thinking that way, nor why indeed I have come to the same thought myself.

Oh yes, I have some happy memories of when most or all of my siblings and our Parents did something together. I do remember being crammed into the back of that tiny Willys Army Jeep with my four siblings. We were all dressed as Cowboys and Red Indians. The Jeep had been painted with scenes of the Wild West (which remained for many years to come…) and we were on the way to a nearby carnival. Once there, we children climbed on the roof and bonnet or hood of the Jeep, uttering fearsome war cries in our high voices, while our Parents drove us sedately in the parade.

There was the time when my brother had just returned from his first trip to Bavaria (to improve his German) and brought me a little pair of Lederhosen in which I nevertheless floated. Luckily, Lederhosen have braces or suspenders, so they didn’t fall to the ground. Two of my lovely sisters decided that the true test of Lederhosen would be…. To be swung by my arms and legs higher and higher and then cast onto the top of a gorse bush – gorse being famous for being a mass of thorns, except just where they bloom, when beautiful little deep yellow blossoms are added to the spikes. Oh yes, the Lederhosen were impeccable in their protection of those parts they protected. Beyond that frontier, my martyrdom was far more general than a mere crown of thorns.

Another time a whole crowd of us (perhaps not all my siblings, but house guests as well) celebrated two of my sisters’ birthdays, besides our Father’s, on Puffin Island, also named Saint Tudwel’s Island West. A fisherman took us out from Abersoch to the tiny rock crowned with a lighthouse that we could enter. We ate our picnic on the circular balcony that ringed the tower just below the light. Built in 1877, there were lighthouse keepers’ cottages besides the lighthouse itself. At that time, the cottages were abandoned, for the light had been converted to electricity and was controlled from the land.

A nearby island, Saint Tudwal’s Island East, has a priory on it dating from the sixth century (much the same date as the monastery on Bardsey Island (516 AD) and was used for bombing practice during World War II.

Looking down from the lighthouse parapet, it seemed that there was almost no island around us, we looked almost straight down to the rocks and waves. The rocks were covered in seals that were fascinated by our intrusion, looking inquisitively at us and loudly discussing us with each other. There were rabbit warrens in the shallow earth but most of the rabbits had been evicted by nesting puffins. We were sternly warned not to put our hands down the burrows to look for puffins’ eggs – the bite of the puffin’s parrot-like beak could sever your finger.

At the end of the picnic, the birthday cake appeared and it was then that we realised we had forgotten to bring candles. Resourceful as ever, Mother produced some bananas – what did the quantity matter at a time like this? She peeled them and stuck them unceremoniously into the cake, then a match stick in the top of each from Father’s pipe tobacco pouch, the whole shielded from the wind by rain ponchos… and voila! We had candles after all. Blowing them out in one puff was greatly facilitated by the removal of the ponchos.

For another family picnic, we went to a cottage that my brother had rented for a summer holiday, so he could study in peace, with a few friends from his public school (Eton). He paid the rent out of his salary of two pounds a week as editor of the school newspaper. He was walking in the footsteps of our Father, who himself had moved out of his mother’s house in southeast England and rented a one-room cottage in Wales, quite near where we now lived. My brother’s cottage was only accessible by the then defunct Ffestiniog Railway. We drove to the nearest station, Tan-y-Bwlch (then occupied as a holiday cottage), with its cast-iron bridge nearby dated 1854. There we took the small railway wagon that came with the cottage. Some adults walked, the babies like myself were piled on the wagon with the picnic. The dogs followed panting in the heat of the day. One adult pushed the wagon to get it rolling uphill and then jumped on board and poled it along with ease, using a broomstick.

Below the station, the vegetation is still lush to this day, thick with forests of rhododendron under a mixture of huge, mature deciduous trees (oak, ash and beech), but from the station on up, the landscape turns suddenly to bare heath, with rocks, heather and occasional bracken. So my brother’s rented house was in rough upland summer grazing for sheep.

The 60 cm gauge track for this railway was built with a constant 1:80 grade all the way from Porthmadog, the harbour on the coast, up to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where the slate quarries thrived. First used in 1844, ponies pulled the empty wagons up to the quarries (13½ miles) and then rode back down in a small horsebox (munching from their hay nets) with the loaded train, powered by gravity alone. In 1863, steam engines were introduced and the ponies retired. Two years later, passenger coaches were introduced to transport workers, but soon farmers and their wives joined them as well for shopping expeditions to Porthmadog. In 1939, with the onset of War, the railway closed down and stayed closed throughout my childhood. Now it has been restored as a tourist attraction, and a spectacular ride it is.

Porthmadog remained the main shopping town of my youth, and I remember the two old sisters who still drove into town once a week in the car they had bought brand new in 1929. They were a little hard of hearing, but shared a beautiful old ‘hearing’ horn. It was black and bound with silver bands… perhaps it was the horn of a buffalo or a cow – but they took it in turns to hold the sharp end to their better ear, so a friend could shout the latest scandal down the broad end. Everyone within three blocks could hear what was said, and then heard it again when the other sister put the horn to her ear.

Then, there was also David Lloyd George’s younger brother William, who had taken over his illustrious brother’s law practice in 1887 and still insisted (at age ninety-nine) on going to the office every day – throwing the whole place into chaos by asking for files that had been settled half a century before (or so it was said).

We reached the cottage and explored its somewhat barren interior. It had been sparsely furnished, though I think my brother must have borrowed a few more pieces of furniture. Once, while rummaging in some drawers and closets, he came upon some private, handwritten letters, addressed to Kim Philby, one of the ‘Cambridge Five’: Philby, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and perhaps John Cairncross. They were Russian spies who had been Marxists at Cambridge in the 1930s, and some of them defected to Russia (when their covers had been blown) between 1951 and ’63. One of them was related to us by marriage, though he did not defect and avoided prosecution, probably through ‘good gay connections’ – disgrace was harder to evade. Mother complained that he had been an intellectual snob as a young man and refused to dance with young flappers like herself. She had not noticed at the time that he was homosexual, which could well have explained how choosey he was with his dancing partners.

Then, Father had been close friends with Sir Dick White (who probably came to some of those parties at Carlton Mews), first Head of MI5 and then MI6, who probably ordered the diver Captain Crabb to investigate the propeller of the Soviet cruiser that brought Khrushchev to Britain (he disappeared, either defected, shot by the Soviet sailors on board or killed by his diving partner because he knew too politics and East-West espionage had reached even this far into this remote cottage on a hot summer’s day in North Wales… James Bond never deigned to visit the area, but his real-life colleagues most certainly did!

The honey bees buzzed lazily in the heather flowers amongst the rocks and the scent of dry herbs hung in the heat as we dozed lazily after lunch and before the trek back down the railway line to the station where the jeep was parked. Downhill, the wagon coasted by itself; it no longer had brakes so stopping its gentle progress took some adult strength.