by Julia Jones
The holiday week arrived and we began with a trip up the Orwell to Ipswich to buy copies of the final instalment of Harry Potter. The wind was force 6, a yachtsman’s gale, and as we went scorching through Pin Mill anchorage we noticed that Nancy Blackett (Arthur Ransome’s Goblin) had decided against joining the old Gaffers’ Association passage race across the North Sea. Later I was sad to learn that Jon Wainwright, author of Only So Many Tides, had died of a heart attack while taking part. he was so kind as well as enthusiastic and had done his best to encourage us to participate. There’d been another sad loss earlier that year when flags in the Woodbridge boatyards were flown at half-mast to mark the death of Christine Knights. I’d known Christine all my life and will always be grateful to her for telephoning us when Peter Duck returned to the River Deben from Russia.
But there was no sadness on board when we left the Orwell the following morning with Oostende, Zeebrugge or Calais in our sights. The forecast was ominous but the day started bright and fresh, the colour of the water between the deeps was especially beautiful and we watched gannets fishing with the sun on their wings. By teatime the weather had worsened so dramatically that we abandoned all our foreign plans and fled back to Ramsgate with the propeller rolling out of the water.
And that was it. Late the following day we took advantage of a quieter evening, ignored the strong winds warning and sailed for Dover where we spent the rest of our holiday week trapped by gales and eating Chinese takeaways. We weren’t alone. “Even the Dutch won’t go in this,” said the marina manager comfortingly as we traipsed up to his office for yet another version of the same impossible weather report. The sail home to the Deben on our final day was one of the loveliest I can remember, marred only by distant glimpses of the unreachable white cliffs of France.
I wrote the first version of Ghosting Home over that summer and autumn then put it away for some years. The logbook reminds me of other events that may have fed into its story – my brother Ned presenting Peter Duck with a new kettle, some happy days at Stone Point, the birth of my first grandchild – but it is all fiction.
Richard Woodman, author (among many other volumes) of the Nathaniel Drinkwater adventure series, was the person who told me that the red-and-white schooner moored off Shotley had been built in the 1950s as a naval patrol boat. her name was HMS Beckford. She never served in the South China Sea, however. That was her sister ship, HMS Ickford, who operated out of Singapore during the Confrontation with Indonesia in the mid 1960s. Anyone who is any good at geography will have noticed that my fictional HMS Beckfoot is patrolling far too far south to be playing any effective part in the defence of Malaysia at that time. That’s because she has strayed into Ransome-land.
My friend Andrew Craig-Bennett helpfully made the link between Ransome’s fictional Missee Lee and the real 1920s pirate Lai Choi San who terrorised shipping around Macao. In I sailed with Chinese Pirates, the American adventurer Alecko E Lilius described Lai Choi San as the Queen of the Macao pirates. “So many stories centre about her that it is almost impossible to tell where truth ends and legend begins [...] She is said to be both ruthless and cruel. When her ships are merely doing patrol duty she does not bother to accompany them, but when she goes out ‘on business’ she attends to it personally. When she climbs aboard any of her ships there is an ill-wind blowing for someone.” My Li Choi San has also moved much further south, closer to Missee Lee’s un-mapped Three Islands.
Neither Peter Duck nor I have ventured so far east. I learned a great deal about modern China from Leslie Chang’s book Factory Girls and Deborah Fallows’ Dreaming in Chinese as well as additional details from my Cantonese friend Karen Lee. I am particularly grateful to Neville Lam, who lives in Shanghai but is a native of Xiamen, for allowing himself to be volunteered into reading an early draft of the manuscript. Any mistakes that have crept in since are all mine.
I’m also grateful to Dr Jane Mounty for telling me about her work for the asylum seeker charity, Medical Justice, which seeks basic rights for detainees.
The logbook tells me that 2007 was the year I met Claudia Myatt. I’d like to thank Claudia for being such a supportive reader as well as the perfect illustrator. My son Frank Thorogood is also wonderfully perceptive and helpful. I’m lucky that David Smith agreed to act as editor once again and that Megan Trudell took on the typesetting and design. It is a pleasure to work with Matti Gardner, John Skermer, Signature Books and Biddles printers. My friends Peter Dowden, Ros Elias Jones and Peter Willis are brilliant confidence-givers in the final stages and I’d particularly like to thank Amanda Craig, Christina Hardyment, Heidi Carhart and Jan Needle for their consistent encouragement. Love and gratitude to all my family, especially Francis.
This is the end of the Strong Winds Trilogy. I know as little as Donny about what, if anything, happens next. Like him I’ve discovered my private passion – for Donny it’s sailing, for me it’s writing stories. Also like him I’ve made some marvellous friends: members of the Nancy Blackett Trust and the Arthur Ransome Society, fellow writers at Authors Electric, children at Kessingland C of E Primary School and all the readers who have taken the trouble either to write to me or post reviews.
And, finally, without Peter Duck’s kind and expert friends at the Woodbridge Boatyard (Everson’s) there would be no nautical adventuring at all. So, special thanks to them.
Julia Jones, April 2012
Maps
Donny’s adventures have taken him a little further in each book. Here are the maps he’s been drawing.
The Salt-Stained Book
A Ravelled Flag
Ghosting Home
Books by Julia Jones
The Strong Winds Trilogy:
Volume I The Salt-Stained Book
Volume II A Ravelled Flag
Volume III Ghosting Home
The Allingham Biography series:
The Adventures of Margery Allingham
Cheapjack by Philip Allingham (edited
with Francis Wheen)
The Oaken Heart: the story of an English village at war by Margery Allingham (edited with Lesley Simpson)
Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory: the working life of Herbert Allingham
(forthcoming 2012)
Julia has ideas for a new series of stories but no titles yet. Please keep in touch via Golden Duck — either using the website www.golden-duck.co.uk, the facebook page or our Essex address.
Books by Claudia Myatt
RYA Go Sailing: a practical guide for young people
RYA Go Sailing Activity Book
RYA Go Cruising: a young crew’s guide to sailing and motor cruisers
RYA Go Cruising Activity Book
RYA Go Inland: a young person’s guide to Inland Waterways
RYA Go Green: a young person’s guide to the blue planet
RYA Go Windsurfing (forthcoming)
Log Book for Children (new edition)
Buttercup’s Diary and other tales
Claudia is an illustrator, an author and an artist. Visit her website www.claudiamyatt.co.uk to discover more about her work.
Table of Contents
Contents
People you may have met already...
Boats you may have met already...
Rural China, January 2007
Homework
A New Year’s Luck
Muddy Trousers
Scouting
Tiger on the Prowl
An Empty Lair
City Lights
Man Overboard
Reality Check
Mayday!
The Winch-Man
Gateway
Oostende
Hoi Fung
Defoe
Buddha Jumps Over the Wall
The Desolate Shores
Signals or Trophies?
The Eyes of Pauguk
Hazards to Navigation
Point Horror
Donny Draws a Map
HMS Beckfoot
Crossing
the Bar
Dead Men Don’t Move Boats
Sanctuary
The Return of the Campfire Kettle
From the Chart Table
Maps