In May, 1940, eight months after the start of the Second World War, the armies of Nazi Germany surged across North Western Europe in a surprise Blitzkrieg, driving the British and Allied Forces back towards the coast and encircling them at the French port of Dunkirk.
A desperate plan, code-named Operation Dynamo, was hurriedly concocted in Britain to send as many ships as possible to rescue the trapped troops. Appeals broadcast on the wireless to civilian boat-owners produced a huge response. Together with the big ships of the Royal Navy, an extraordinary and heroic armada composed of craft of all sorts and sizes emerged from the rivers and ports along England’s south and south-eastern coasts and set out across the Channel: paddle-steamers, barges, lifeboats, ferries, fire floats, oyster-dredgers, drifters, motor boats, mud-hoppers, cockle boats, yachts, fishing trawlers, pleasure-excursion launches … some of which had never been to sea before. A number of them were manned by Royal Navy personnel, but many were taken by civilian volunteers and weekend sailors, often with little experience of maritime hazards.
Over the following ten days, under heavy bombardment from the Luftwaffe and with the German army closing in, 338,226 British and French troops were snatched from the port and beaches and transported to England. During most of the period the sea remained, quite uncharacteristically, dead calm. The episode became known as the Miracle of Dunkirk and the ships as the Little Ships.
The bungalow is called Hove-To. It stands alone at the end of a potholed track that peters out near the river. I park the car by the gate and walk up a concrete pathway past a scruffy square of lawn and a bed of straggling petunias. The place seems deserted but when I press the bell at the front door there is a shuffling sound from inside and an amorphous shape looms behind the frosted glass. The door opens.
‘Mr Potter?’ I ask.
He is an old man – in his mid-eighties I judge – and wearing a food-stained cardigan and maroon carpet slippers. He looks at me suspiciously.
‘You collecting for something?’
I shake my head. ‘No.’
‘Because I don’t give any more. You never know where your money’s going. Into other people’s pockets more often than not, I reckon. You one of those Jehovahs?’
‘No.’
‘Blooming nuisance they are. Used to get them where we lived before. You must be selling something, then.’
I can see that he doesn’t believe me. ‘I don’t want insurance. Or double glazing. Nothing like that.’ He starts to shut the door.
I say quickly: ‘I’m not selling anything, Mr Potter, I promise you. On the contrary, I want to buy something.’
He frowns. ‘You’re wasting your time. I’ve got nothing of any value here. No antiques, or anything like that.’ He starts to close the door.
I press on. ‘It’s your boat I’m interested in.’
The frown deepens. ‘My boat? How do you know I’ve got one?’
‘I was told. A fourteen-foot fishing boat called Rose of England.’
‘Well, she’d be no use to you, unless you want her for firewood. She’s a wreck.’
‘Just the same, I’d like to buy her, if you’re willing to sell.’
He looks me up and down, still suspicious. ‘Whatever for? You look like you could afford a lot better than her.’
‘It’s for sentimental reasons … a connection with former owners.’
He grunts. ‘She’s been left out in all weathers for years. Not fit to sail. She wouldn’t be worth buying.’
‘She would to me. Could we talk about it?’
He stared at me for a moment. ‘You sure you’re not selling something.’
‘Quite sure.’
He shrugs. ‘Better come in then, I suppose.’
I step into a narrow hallway and follow him into the living-room. The furnishings are drear, the house stale-smelling, but the view through the large picture window makes up for it. I gaze out at the river Crouch flowing beneath wide and glorious summer skies to meet the North Sea; at great white, puffy clouds piled high against blue; at mud flats glistening and greenish water sparkling; at boats sailing and sea birds flying. The tall, feathery grasses on the banks ripple in the wind. Always the wind, I remember. Always the wind. ‘Wonderful view you have here.’
He grunts again, sits down in an armchair beside the gas fireplace and reaches for the pipe and tobacco pouch on the mantelpiece. ‘You don’t see it any more once you’re used to it. The wife and I bought this place when we sold our shop in Margate and retired twenty years back. That’s when I got the boat. She wasn’t much to look at then but I thought she’d be nice and steady and she was cheap. I always thought the name was a bit daft for something her size. More like for one of those big ones that go across the Channel. I reckoned I’d tidy her up and do a bit of sailing. Nothing fancy – just going up and down the river. I’d done some when I was a nipper and always had a dream of having a boat of my own. Only Molly didn’t take to it. She got seasick first time out and that was that.’
‘What a pity.’
He begins to fill his pipe. ‘Life’s full of disappointments, that’s one thing I’ve learned. Things never work out like you’ve planned. We’d all sorts of ideas for our retirement but Molly passed away soon after that and none of them ever happened. I’ve been here on my own ever since. You work hard all your life and in the end it’s for nothing.’ He tamps down the tobacco with his thumb, bitterness in every jab. Finally, he scrapes a match alight and holds it to the pipe bowl, drawing hard on the stem. Clouds of smoke emerge and the tobacco glows red. He leans back, puffing away for a moment. I wait. ‘And what makes you think my Rose is the one you want? Could be another one of the same name. You don’t have to register boats that small.’
‘I don’t think so. I’ve traced all the owners. She’s been bought and sold several times since the late Forties. In fact, the trail went stone-cold and I’d given up hope of finding her. I put advertisements in every newspaper and sailing magazine I could think of and then out of the blue I got an answer from a man who said he’d sold her to you. If she is the same boat I’ll be able to tell for certain when I see her.’
‘How?’
‘Some carving near the bow.’
‘Huh. I’ve never noticed anything like that.’ The pipe is going well now and he puffs away at it, studying me over the bowl. He is trying hard to size me up. ‘Sentimental reasons, you said?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s only an ordinary boat. Not much more than a dinghy. Nothing special.’
I can see I will have to tell him the whole truth, though it will probably raise the price. It might even stop him selling at all. ‘She’s very special, as a matter of fact. She’s one of the Little Ships.’
He takes the pipe out of his mouth, staring. ‘You mean she went to Dunkirk? Rubbish! She can’t’ve done. She’s only fourteen foot and she’s got no power. Just oars and sails. There wouldn’t’ve been any boats as small as that – not on their own. They were steamers, motor yachts, lifeboats, launches, ferries … that sort of thing. We lived at Margate then. We saw a lot of them coming back.’
‘But she did.’
‘Huh!’ He sticks out a slippered foot. ‘Try this one, it’s got bells on it. I told you, they were all much bigger. Molly and I went to the pier to watch the troops coming off the boats. We stood there cheering and Molly cried her eyes out. They’d taken our lads from under the Germans’ very noses. Grabbed them off the beaches and brought them safe home. Hundreds of men packed tight on those decks, not an inch to spare, some of the boats half-sinking with the weight. And the Jerry planes’d been dive-bombing them. God knows how they made it. The sea was dead calm, though: flat as a millpond. It was like a miracle. A bloody miracle.’ He looks off into space for a moment, lost in the past, and then brings himself back to the present with a shake of his head. ‘You’ve got it all wrong.’
‘Well, you see, I know all about what the Rose did – the whole story.’
He says suspiciously: ‘I don’t believe any of this. You’re spinning me some fairy tale. Trying to con me, aren’t you? I don’t know what your game is but I’m not selling you my boat, or anything else, so you can leave now. This very minute.’
I’ve handled things badly. A real con artist would laugh himself silly at the mess I’ve made of it. ‘Would you let me tell you the story? Before you make up your mind?’
He looks at me long and hard again and gives another of his bad-tempered grunts. ‘You can tell it if you want. I doubt I’ll believe it.’
‘It will take some time.’
‘Time’s one thing I’ve plenty of these days.’
He sticks his pipe in his mouth and leans back in his chair, eyeing me sceptically. Since he has never invited me to sit down, I am still standing by the picture window overlooking the estuary. A clinker-built sailing-dinghy with a white sail is tacking to windward, pitching her way along with the spray shooting over her bows. Probably nine foot, or so – about the same size as the Bean Goose. I watch the helmsman alter course, the boom swing over, the three figures in the boat duck. Just kids, all of them.
‘I’m not sure where to start.’
‘The beginning’ll do.’
I lean against the window, still watching the dinghy. I’m not certain from such a distance, but it looks like two boys and a girl. Strange, that. The long arm of coincidence. ‘Well, I suppose you could say it really begins long before the war. Just a mile downstream from here, in fact. In the summer of 1934.’