How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

  When I went downstairs half an hour later to collect Nanny’s untouched plate she was dead, sitting where I’d left her, in her chair by the fire. When I was a small child she’d bathed me in front of that fire, on which coals always seemed to be glowing, sending playful shadows dancing around the room. I have never forgotten sitting in the plastic tub, transfixed by the golden sparks flying up the chimney, which Nanny assured me were fairies flying off to sleep on the rooftops of the city. In the background, the rented radio was always on. I can’t have been more than four or five, but I can still recall the words of the mournful theme tune to Nanny’s favourite programme: ‘Sing something simple / As cares go by / Sing something simple / Just you and I . . .’

  A post-mortem found she’d suffered a pulmonary embolism, a sudden blockage in an artery that carries blood from the heart to the lungs.

  The loss of her son Ronnie during the war must have been a terrible blow to Nanny, but it also fell heavily on his sister, my mother. She was twenty-one when Ronnie died, aged twenty-three. She had adored him, as Nanny told me, and as I knew all too well. Fast-forward to one Armistice Day during my late teens. Home from college, I find my mother slumped in front of the TV, not unusually drunk and wreathed in cigarette smoke, watching the Remembrance Day parade in Whitehall surrounded by framed photographs of her dead brother. ‘You’ll never be half the man he was,’ she snarls at me, before returning to the TV, her tears and her sherry. It’s a familiar refrain. I’ve never smoked but, oddly enough, I am partial to the occasional Harveys Bristol Cream.

  There was a clear understanding while I was growing up that I had ruined my mother’s life. But, despite her best efforts, she didn’t ruin mine. In fact, her shipboard retreat from Suez aside, I owe my love of the sea and boats to her. There was no direct encouragement, of course – and, to be fair, larking about on boats wasn’t exactly big in postwar Peckham – but in her apparent determination to put distance between us she pushed me to the very edge of the land.

  At seven I was sent away to Canterbury House, a small boarding school in Westgate-on-Sea, a faded nineteenth-century seaside resort on the north Kent shore, about 50 miles from home. I remember no conversation involving me before the decision was made, but I vividly recall being driven down to the school one night by one of my mother’s anonymous male friends. As I lay crying in the back of the car, he and my mother sat in the front, staring dead ahead and ignoring my distress.

  That first night at Canterbury House I found myself sharing a small dormitory with five or six other small boys, all equally shellshocked to find they were no longer wanted at home by their parents. Discovering that each dormitory was named after a place or character from my favourite book, The Wind in the Willows, was not only no comfort but felt like an additional betrayal of some kind. I cried myself to sleep in Toad Hall.

  I missed Nanny dreadfully. One summer evening, watching and waving from the bay window of my dormitory as my mother walked down the street and back towards the station after a rare Sunday visit, I even missed my mother. The school closed a long time ago, but the house is still there, as is that window, wreathed in sadness.

  The best thing about the school was its proximity to the sea, which I explored tentatively at first but came to embrace as a thrilling new environment, untrammelled by the disappointments of the land and brimming with possibilities. The school was run by a Major Bury, a retired cavalry officer who wore plus-fours and a neatly trimmed brush moustache. Once a week we were marched down to the seafront and, whatever the weather or the season, made to swim between two slipways, about a quarter of a mile apart. At seven, it felt like we were being asked to swim across the English Channel. In the winter the water was freezing, in the summer we were stung by jellyfish. Regardless, I went from dreading the weekly outing to looking forward to it. I took to purposefully drifting off course, ignoring the shouts from the promenade and heading out to sea. Well off the shore, out of my depth and treading water, I hung suspended and thrilled at the edge of the vast and seemingly unending body of water.

  At the time I had no idea, but as I rose on the swell off the coast of Kent I was gazing due north across the Thames estuary towards the scene of my next, and most significant encounter with the sea.

  When I left Canterbury House at the age of eleven, my mother sent me away to another boarding school, at Woolverstone on the south bank of the Orwell, and from that moment on blood and saltwater ran through my veins in equal volume.

  Boats had played no part in my time at prep school. Westgate-on-Sea had, of course, the sea to commend it, but for a boy who had grown up truffling for fragments of German-made shrapnel on the rubble heap that was postwar Peckham, the change of scenery, and outlook, at Woolverstone was almost beyond comprehension. I spent most of the first term waiting for the hidden catch to reveal itself. But there was none. I was just a very, very lucky boy.

  Woolverstone Hall was set up in 1951 by the Inner London Education Authority, which took over a large country house near Ipswich, in Suffolk, built for the wealthy Berners family in 1776. The school would close in 1990, the victim of warring political ideologues in Westminster, but in 1966 the experiment offered my single mother the chance to send me away from home again, this time at no cost to her or to whoever had paid for my banishment to prep school. There was some kind of entrance exam, which I took at County Hall in London, though whether its purpose was to weed out no-hopers, or to weed them in, I neither knew nor cared to ask. Either way, one day I found myself in the company of a bunch of other wideeyed boys, clutching our belongings and boarding a coach for the 85-mile journey from London to the Suffolk countryside.

  The national press dubbed Woolverstone Hall ‘the poor man’s Eton’. The locals, on the other hand, were under the impression that the school was some kind of penal colony and, to be fair, some of us kids did little to discourage that belief. The reality was that for almost forty years Woolverstone was actually a rather wonderful social experiment from the Pygmalion school of social engineering, designed to see if potentially wayward children who might otherwise be destined for prison or worse could be turned around by a strict but sensitive regime overseen by well-intentioned Oxbridge types with what by the standards of the time was only a moderate appetite for corporal punishment.

  It worked pretty well. Woolverstone’s benevolent sausage machine churned out successful actors, academics, writers, performing artists, sportsmen and the occasional mild disappointment, who at least managed to stay out of prison. Perhaps the most accomplished old boy was the author Ian McEwan, who I think was in his final year when I arrived for my first term in 1966. In 2016, he told The Times that Woolverstone Hall had been filled with ‘super-bright, working-class kids’, with a few places set aside for the children of servicemen, like him. ‘It was classless, it was cocky, confident, unimpressed,’ he recalled. ‘We were so well-educated, we knew the English canon, we had read our Chaucer. We were groomed in the practical criticism of the I. A. Richards school; we knew our verse, and we showed off like anything.’

  I must have missed that class. But the environment alone at Woolverstone Hall was conducive to self-improvement. It’s hard not to absorb history when it’s taught in a room graced by an Adam fireplace (albeit one encased in Perspex, to protect it from you). And it’s impossible not to see broader horizons from a first-floor classroom blessed with a view over balustraded lawns stretching down to a magical, glittering river, where boats of all kinds offer constant distraction.

  This was most definitely not the outlook from 48 Clayton Road, Peckham.

  Even the sports we played at Woolverstone were designed to mould us. Football, probably the natural pursuit of most of the kids – the ones with fathers, at any rate – was banned. Outside of cricket season I didn’t see a round ball in all the years I was at Woolverstone (though I was once caned after sneaking into town with a couple of other boys to watch Ipswich Town play and being spotted near a corner flag by a teacher watching Match of the Day on
television). Instead, the natural aggression of disadvantaged boys was channelled into rugby, a delightfully brutal game at which we inner-city types proved to be violently adept. As McEwan later put it, ‘We slaughtered all the surrounding private schools.’

  But – and, to me, most importantly, and most amazingly of all – we were also taught to sail. Of all the surprising possibilities that were presented to me at Woolverstone, that’s the one that still takes my breath away, that I still can’t quite believe. To anyone who has never had the opportunity to sail, or those who have always had it and take it for granted, it’s hard to explain the impact of such an experience on an eleven-year-old who, until that moment, has had no concept of the thing, let alone any expectation that it might play a part in his life.

  Even now, I struggle to express the liberation of imagination effected by the simple act of sitting in a sailing boat for the very first time . . . to experience the crazy, dangerous, exhilarating instability, the raw fear and excitement of capsize, the magic of movement generated by nothing but the power of the wind and, ultimately, the realisation that in a boat, on the water, one’s horizons are limited by nothing but a lack of curiosity and courage.

  The school sailing compound, with its motley fleet of Wayfarers and Enterprises, was close to the Royal Harwich Yacht Club on the River Orwell at Woolverstone, and it was here that I first heard the evocative sound of halyards slapping against masts. It’s an overture that still stirs the blood. But the first memory I have of attempting a maritime adventure of my own involved not a sailing boat but a canoe, borrowed from the school pound late one dark night.

  The starting gun was fired by a book I found in the school library. I had already read We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea and Secret Water, Arthur Ransome’s ripping seafaring yarns, and they’d established the connection in my mind between boats and adventure. But as exciting as the pre-Social Services-era exploits of John, Susan, Titty and Roger were to an eleven-year-old brought up in the city – accidentally sailing across the North Sea or being abandoned on an island in the Walton Backwaters to fend for themselves – I knew this was fiction. Then, when I was about twelve, I discovered A Fighting Chance, an unvarnished account by two paratroopers of their very real attempt to row across the Atlantic in an open boat. It was a book that was to set the course for much of my life and lead me to risk it more than once as an adult. I never returned it to the school library.

  In 1966, Captain John Ridgway and Sergeant Chay Blyth had set out to emulate George Harbo and Frank Samuelson, two nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrants who, struggling to get by as fishermen dredging for oysters and clams off the New Jersey coast, decided in 1896 to improve their fortunes by rowing across the Atlantic. They made it. It took them fifty-five days to row from New York to the pier at St Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly in the Fox, an 18ft clinker-built boat they’d designed themselves.

  It was tough going, as an account in the New York Herald on 21 March 1897 made clear. For three particularly bad days in July 1896, Harbo and Samuelson had fought desperately to stay alive in the teeth of a terrible storm, during which the two men ‘were satisfied merely to hang fast to their boat and exist’. Constant bailing was necessary to remain afloat and they endured seventy-two hours of ‘hardship and danger such as few men ever experience, even on the sea’. The storm culminated in a dramatic night-time capsize, caused by ‘an immense wave [that] towered blackly against the starlit sky, shutting off the sharply marked horizon, creaming at the apex, rushing with the silent speed of an express’.

  Harbo and Samuelson were thrown out but, having taken the precaution of tying themselves to the boat, somehow managed to right it and clamber back in. Despite lacking waterproofs, a change of clothes, shelter or any of the other gear the modern adventurer might regard as ‘essential’, they somehow failed to succumb to hypothermia, picked up the oars (also sensibly lashed on) and simply got on with it.

  Their dreams of the fortune they would earn touring Europe, giving talks and showing off the boat to fascinated crowds, failed to materialise and they returned to America more or less empty-handed and disappointed. In 1897, the Herald reporter asked Harbo if he wanted to try it again. ‘Not much,’ he replied.

  When Ridgway and Blyth tackled the same challenge seventy years later not much had changed in terms of the technology at their disposal. Like the two Norwegians they rowed an open boat, a dory with no sliding seats but benches, they slept under a tarpaulin and, in the days before the invention of reverse-osmosis electric water-makers and satellite navigation systems, carried all their drinking water with them and relied on a chart, dead-reckoning and a sextant for navigation. They ate army rations.

  And, like Harbo and Samuelson, they had the worst possible time of it, as A Fighting Chance makes clear. It took them ninety-one torturous days to make landfall on the west coast of Ireland, three months during which they endured the unwelcome attention of sharks and whales, would have run out of food were it not for a chance resupply from a passing ship and frequently feared that their little boat, English Rose III, was about to be overwhelmed. Praying for their lives, the two men came to a deep understanding of the words inscribed on a small plaque that a Cape Cod fisherman had screwed to their boat: ‘O God, thy sea is great and my boat is so small.’

  At 1am one night, hunkered down during a particularly nightmarish storm, Ridgway and Blyth were shocked awake under their already soaking-wet tarpaulin by a gigantic, ice-cold wave breaking over their open boat. They were in the grip of Hurricane Alma and woke, Ridgway recalled, to find their little boat was ‘alive, the sort of aliveness that you might find in a demented animal crazed by the nearness of death’. English Rose III, a frail refuge just 20ft long and 5ft 4in wide, was ‘bucketing, pitching and rolling in the sea despite the enormous amount of water swilling inside her . . . It was a mad world, a world made up of punishing noise, violent movement.’

  The two men screamed at each other to bail, a life-or-death task to which they stuck for seven hours. Seven hours – as long as my school day!

  ‘We hung on to life grimly,’ Ridgway wrote later. ‘If only I could express the misery of it all.’ To his credit, he had a go. ‘I wondered why we went on,’ he added. ‘Why did we not just sit down and call it a day? Death would be peace, all peace, from this agony . . .’

  Well, it’s not the sort of talk you expect to hear from a para. Sod Chaucer and the English canon, this was the sort of stuff that the twelve-year-old me couldn’t get enough of. I don’t even remember being put off by the short postscript at the end of the book, which noted that shortly before it had gone to print a rival boat that had been attempting the same crossing had been found mid-Atlantic, upside down and minus its crew.

  David Johnstone and John Hoare, both journalists, had set off two weeks earlier than Ridgway and Blyth. Their 15ft plywood boat, the Puffin, was found on the afternoon of 14 October 1966 by the Chaudière, a Canadian warship. The two men had last been seen alive on 11 August by the crew of the US Coast Guard cutter Duane. The final entry in Johnstone’s logbook, recovered from the upturned Puffin by divers from the Chaudière, had been made on 3 September. That was the two men’s 106th day at sea, at which point they had travelled about 1,430 miles. They are assumed to have died that day or the next, when Hurricane Faith passed through the area. It was the same day that Ridgway and Blyth had reached Ireland.

  Inspired by Ridgway and Blyth – when perhaps I might have been better guided by the experience of Johnstone and Hoare – one night I borrowed one of the school’s canoes and attempted to paddle to the opposite bank of the Orwell. Was it in winter? My memory of the water temperature tells me yes, but I can’t be sure. It wasn’t far, about half a mile across, and the Orwell wasn’t a busy river, especially at night, but very occasionally a large ship would make its way upstream from the sea, heading for the small port of Ipswich.

  As luck would have it, one such ship made an unfortunately timed appearance that very night. My tiny canoe and thi
s floating block of flats were the only moving vessels around, but doubtless I was invisible to the pilot and helmsman on the bridge. I misjudged my speed, and his, and thought I could cut across ahead of the ship. A beginner’s error, as it turned out. He was almost upon me, mid-channel, by the time I realised my mistake, turned and paddled back furiously the way I had come.

  I remember thinking at that moment that perhaps it might have been a good idea to have borrowed a lifejacket along with the canoe.

  The ship itself didn’t hit me, but the canoe was lifted bodily, pushed violently sideways and then rolled over by the bow wave. As I was churning around helplessly under water, I could both hear and feel the throb of the engine and fully expected to be chopped to pieces by the ship’s propeller at any moment. When I surfaced, gasping for air but miraculously still in one piece, I was astern of the ship, which was pounding its way upstream none the wiser. I was safe, for now, but suddenly the river felt impossibly deep and wide and I had to fight down a rising sense of panic that had been strangely absent until this moment.

  ‘You are out of immediate danger,’ I lectured myself. ‘All you have to do now is get back to the shore.’ Luckily, ‘controlled me’ won the day. Years later, I would be grateful to meet him again. Treading water, I looked around briefly for the canoe, but in the confusion of lights from the shore and the navigation buoys in the river, and with my eyes only an inch above water, it was nowhere to be seen so I set off for the bank. I have no idea where the canoe ended up.

  Thanks to the gallons of adrenaline pumping through my system I hadn’t noticed the cold before, but now I did. I was a strong swimmer for my age but for a while the journey back to the south bank of the Orwell, battling across an ebbing tide that was picking up the pace, was touch and go. When I finally felt the concrete slipway beneath my feet I briefly lost the willpower that had brought me ashore and started to cry, but the self-pitying didn’t last long. I was freezing cold and shaking uncontrollably – part shock, part onset of hypothermia, I suppose. I had to get home.