How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

  ‘Home’ was Corners House, a former arts-and-crafts retreat for an order of nuns, designed by Edward Lutyens in 1901 and commandeered as off-campus accommodation for the school. It was about a mile away, across dark fields. Somehow I made it, got back into my dormitory without being discovered by the housemaster, discarded my wet clothes and crept into bed, my body shaking and teeth chattering non-stop. I have a memory of one or other of my dorm mates having a whip-round for blankets and piling them on top of me. All in all, it was the most fun I had had all year.

  4

  RUDDERLESS

  ‘One thing at a time . . . If I had wanted to build all the boat at once, the enormity of the task would have crushed me. I had to put all I had into the hull alone, without thinking about the rest. It would follow . . . with the help of the gods. Sailing non-stop around the world is the same. I do not think anyone has the means of pulling it off – at the start.’

  – Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way

  7 SEPTEMBER 2016

  If I was the frivolous accident that knocked my mother’s life irredeemably off course, Phoebe was the deliberately conceived blessing that finally imbued mine with a sense of meaning.

  Since failing so comprehensively to be anything other than an absent, second-rate airmail dad to Adam, posting him the occasional letter and trinkets collected on my travels, it had never once occurred to me to consider becoming a father again. I just didn’t want to. Once, after a second year-long jaunt to South America, during which I had sent Adam a series of souvenirs, ranging from dried and mounted piranha to a small bow and arrow, I visited my son at the house he shared with his mother in Tenerife. He was about eight years old and the enthusiasm with which he took my hand and pulled me upstairs to see the collection, carefully displayed on the walls of his bedroom, put a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.

  After splitting up with Adam’s mother I couldn’t see any sense in risking earning a second Worst Dad of the Year mug and, besides, I was having too much fun as a single man. But then along came Kate. Circling back round to find each other again after years spent apart, but never quite disconnected, felt like the perfect third-act resolution. And then, quite out of the blue, another magical plot twist suddenly presented itself.

  At thirty-nine, Kate was still young enough to have children, but had never felt she’d wanted them. She also knew my position on the subject and so it was, very nearly, case closed. But then I suddenly realised that my position had changed, by approximately 180 degrees. I couldn’t quite explain why. The seismic impact of true love, maybe. Or perhaps it was the intimation of impending mortality brought on by my brush with violent, chest-cracking surgery, which I guess forced something of a reappraisal of my priorities.

  Part of me likes to think that the life force that would become Phoebe was clamouring in the wings, looking for a way into the world and doing everything she could to get my attention. But whatever the cause, I felt I had to run it by Kate: was she certain she didn’t want children, or, at least, a child?

  She thought about it for a while. Unlike me, Kate thinks carefully about most things and I’ve learnt to wait patiently for her considered responses. But this time I didn’t have to wait very long – about five minutes, in fact.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let’s have a baby.’ And it was as simple as that.

  But not easy. Kate conceived pretty quickly, but it was an ectopic pregnancy. An emergency operation one night in Ipswich hospital seemed to suggest our luck had run out and we’d left it all just a little too late. It was a terrible blow and we were both very sad. But then Kate became pregnant again and, despite our lingering fears, the next nine months proved supremely joyful. We came to think of the first pregnancy and the second as connected. Our baby had been knocked back, but she was a fighter and was having a second bash at breaking through to the other side.

  Girl or boy, it didn’t matter to either of us, but, even before the scan that confirmed our instincts, the pronoun we always used was ‘she’.

  And ‘she’ was Phoebe Louisa May. The last two are family names, and not a deliberate tribute to the author of Little Women, but Phoebe’s first name is all her own. In Greek mythology Phoebe, a name derived from the word for ‘shining’, was one of the Titans, but for us it was simply a traditional name we both liked and appeared at the top of the lists we sat down independently to write. The fact that Phoebe is also the name of one of the moons of Saturn, which it orbits perversely in the opposite direction to the planet’s other satellites, has seemed only more and more appropriate as our daughter’s stubbornness and independence have become ever more apparent. She will, we feel, swim against tides.

  Of course, raising a child at the age of fifty-eight, especially after half a lifetime of insisting that nothing could have been further from my mind, ought to have been an intimidating prospect. In fact, it couldn’t have seemed more natural. Once we’d made the decision I lost no sleep over the details, and nor did I do much excessive worrying after Phoebe arrived. It just all seemed so natural, and right.

  Of course, that isn’t to say that I wasn’t constantly amazed – and still am. Often I find myself staring at her in wonder, thrilled and privileged to think I have played a part in the creation of this strong, independently minded human being. Even when she’s pushing all our buttons and politely but firmly disobeying all direct orders, it’s all still nothing less than amazing.

  Birthdays one and two came and went with all the right boxes ticked, and then some.

  But, having lost no sleep over the crazy decision to embark on fatherhood when most men of my age are thinking about improving their golf game, I’m now spending sleepless nights fretting over the arguably even crazier plan to build my daughter a boat. So is Kate. She’s broadly supportive, but that support does not extend to being woken several times during the night by her husband switching on the bedside lamp and scribbling feverishly in a notebook.

  That notebook is full of questions, but precious few answers. Where will I find the time or, come to that, the money? I haven’t given a moment’s serious thought to the question of finance. Thanks to an ill-fated attempt last year to panel a bath, which in itself boded ill for the project, I knew what a length of tongue-and-groove spruce might set one back at Homebase (£5.27 for 3m, wasted). But beyond a vague faith in oak as the traditional stuff of boats, not only do I have no idea what sort of timber I should be using, but I am also clueless as to where I should get it and what it might cost.

  Not that timber is my most pressing concern. For some reason I’ve promised my wife that if I go ahead with the plan to build a boat, I will either finish it within a year or abandon the whole idea. I will, I announce, start work in January 2017 and have a boat-shaped thing to show for my troubles by December that year.

  ‘Our troubles,’ she corrects me, quietly but firmly.

  In my ignorance I think a year doesn’t sound unreasonable, but then that’s before I know my thwart riser from my deadwood.

  What I do know, however, is that it is already September 2016, my self-imposed start date of January 2017 is fast approaching and as yet I have no idea what I’m going to do, or how or where I’m going to do it.

  Such is my rising sense of panic that the first order of business is, naturally, to put the barge before the horse. For a while I toy with the idea of building ‘the boat’ – and exactly what that boat will be remains uncertain – at home. Shortly after Phoebe was born we moved from our much-loved riverside apartment on the Stour to a far more sensible house in the middle of the peninsula, which we didn’t love but tolerated because it meant our daughter could grow up with a garden. Oh, and to deprive our toddler-to-be of access to a ninth-floor, glass-walled balcony.

  It wasn’t a large garden, but it was at ground level and big enough for a child to find her feet in. And, I now feel certain, large enough to accommodate one of those pop-up PVC workshops I discovered online at 3.30 one morning. Then Kate reminds me that we have, after all, moved
to this house solely to give Phoebe a garden, of which I am now proposing to deprive her for at least a year. And have I considered how the neighbours might feel about the noise?

  No, I haven’t. In fact, such is my ignorance of what lies ahead that until that moment it hasn’t even occurred to me that building a boat might generate antisocial levels of noise.

  Like a ship with a rudder jammed hard over, I am sailing in circles. Faced with so many imponderables, I decide not to ponder them at all – for now, at least. Instead, like a drowning man who has fallen off that circling ship and is now clutching at flotsam, I hold on tightly to the few certainties I possess.

  ‘Certainty One,’ I write in my notebook well before the birds rise one morning. ‘Emotionally and intellectually, I have committed myself to the quest of building a traditional boat.’

  Next:

  ‘Certainty Two,’ I write. ‘The boat will, perhaps, be clinker-built.’

  Now I recognise that the appearance of the word ‘perhaps’ in a list of supposed certainties is somewhat incongruous. But I’m a rank amateur in this field and I need confirmation, from someone who is not, that I am choosing the path of most resistance. Let me explain that. This is more than mere perversity for the sake of masochism. To paraphrase David Johnstone, the man who disappeared in 1966 while rowing across the Atlantic in a wholly unsuitable 15ft open boat, if you are going to attempt something extreme, you might as well do it as extremely as possible – go ‘the penance way’, as he put it, in pursuit of ‘a desirable purity of idea’. Again, Johnstone probably not the best role model under the circumstances.

  If your particular existential crisis urges you to climb a mountain, the chances are you’ll head for Everest. Likewise, if it’s long-distance solo rowing that floats your boat, you’ll probably set course for the Atlantic. And, should you decide to defy a complete lack of skills, and aptitude, to build a traditional wooden boat, then going clinker really is your only option.

  Because here’s the thing about clinker: there is no boatbuilding technique so respectably ancient, so historically resonant, so seductively beautiful and so bloody difficult. Building a boat from glass fibre, or sheets of glued plywood, is to clinker boatbuilding what assembling an IKEA shelving unit is to creating an eighteenth-century Chippendale sideboard.

  Admittedly, on paper it doesn’t sound too bad. Clinker/ clenched lap/lapstrake (depending where in the world you live) is the process of building up the hull of a boat with a series of strakes, a strake being composed of one or more planks, joined together end to end. Each strake is slightly overlapped by the one above and fastened to it with iron or copper nails driven through the overlap at regular intervals. On the inside of the overlap the ends of the nails are hammered down over a circular washer, or rove, which pulls the planks tightly together. Ta-dah!

  Sounds pretty easy, right? But you and I – as of September 2016, at least – have absolutely no idea. None at all.

  As I kid myself I’m weighing the pros and cons of tackling clinker, in truth all I am doing is mooning over the sheer beauty and romance of the thing. And such romance. You might not even know the words ‘clinker’ or ‘lapstrake’, but you will instinctively recognise the boat that’s built this way, because from the east coast of England to the east coast of America it’s the one drawn up on the beach that turns your head, makes you reach for your camera and wish you could paint. Or build boats.

  In 1973, English ship surveyor and fabled maritime author John Leather offered a poetic eulogy to the form and the part it has played in history. ‘Much seafaring history has been made in clinker boats,’ he wrote in his seminal work, Clinker Boatbuilding. A clinker-built Norse longship had ‘probably made the first voyage of discovery to North America, and centuries later clinker-built ships’ boats first ran the keels of the western world on beaches of remote continents and islands’.

  By the eighteenth century, the lightness and strength of clinker had made it ‘a desirable construction for fast sailing craft. Cutters carried fleet despatches home from famous or disastrous actions, their roaring wake matched by the stealthy speed of a big smuggling lugger pursued by an equally large, clench-built cutter of His Majesty’s revenue service.’ Meanwhile, ‘the Falmouth packets tumbled across Atlantic seas to bring news of the troubled American colonies, staggering under pyramids of sail rivalling the fruit cutters standing home from Spain with cases of fragrant oranges chocked off in the holds for the London market . . .’

  For generations, he added, ‘the American emigrants’ farewell was the English pilot dropping into his clinker-built boarding boat to return to the cruising cutter, and the first contact with the New World was the lapstrake yawl boat pulling alongside from the lee of the Sandy Hook pilot schooner, perhaps 300 miles from the American coast’.

  Dazzled by such stirring stuff, it is easy to overlook the terms and conditions buried deep within Leather’s prose: ‘The men who built most of these boats,’ he points out, ‘were skilled craftsmen backed by generations of tradition and experience . . .’ (my italics).

  Here’s another seductive thing about clinker: it’s not just a pretty face. Over time, most technology evolves, or vanishes altogether, as improvements are made. The spear gave way to the bow and arrow, which in turn was replaced by the crossbow, which yielded to the first crude firearm, and so on. Today, barely a month goes by when the chip, the engine at the heart of our digital age, is not improved. But, aside from local variations and the occasional tweak here and there, clinker boatbuilding has evolved barely at all since it emerged from the mists of north European mythology 2,000 years ago – which, to anyone of an even faintly romantic disposition, surely suggests at the very least something rather magical at work.

  No one knows exactly when the first clinker boat was built, of course, but the archaeological record tells us that the technique was already a going concern by AD 190. Dendrochronology – the science of dating and even sourcing the place of origin of timber by comparing growth-ring patterns with examples on an international database – tells us that the oldest known intact clinker boat, unearthed by archaeologists in a bog near the small Danish town of Øster Sottrup between 1859 and 1863, was built between AD 310 and 320. Astonishingly well preserved, the oak Nydam boat can be seen today in all its glory at Gottorf Castle in northern Germany. But more recently the same site has yielded fragments of clinker planking dated to the second century after Christ.

  It was on such boats that the Anglo-Saxons crossed the North Sea to Britain in the fifth century and, 300 years later, that the Vikings came west from Scandinavia, first to raid and pillage, and then to settle, farm, rule and tax (a more reliable and much less labour-intensive version of pillaging). In our age of air travel, it is difficult to comprehend the impact of a technology that now seems only quaint. But as the Danish historian Johannes Brøndsted, writing in 1925, put it, the ships of the Vikings, ‘were the supreme achievement of their technical skill . . . the foundation of their power, their delight, and their most treasured possession’. What the temple was to the Greeks, he wrote, ‘the ship was to the Vikings; the complete and harmonious expression of a rare ability’.

  That rare ability ensured that the sound of the keel of a Viking ship grounding on some long-forgotten British east coast beach was the overture to the very first voyage to the Americas by Europeans – a good 500 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic and stumbled upon Cuba and the Bahamas.

  Clinker was not an exclusively Viking technology – it predates what we now choose to call the Viking age, which ran from the late eighth to the mid-eleventh century, and maritime archaeologists prefer to talk of a ‘Nordic clinker tradition’. In 1939, when archaeologists opened the main Anglo-Saxon burial mound at Sutton Hoo, just up the coast from where we live, they found a ghost ship that has since been dated using the coins and other treasures it contained to about AD 600. None of the timbers survived, but the acidic soil still bore the clear impression of the planking of a 90ft-long boat, which
remains the oldest example of a clinker-built vessel found in Britain. The iron rivets that once fastened the oak planks together lay where they had fallen after the timber around them had disintegrated.

  Such was the distinguished heritage into which I would be tapping if I took the ‘penance way’, opting to build a clinker boat whose antecedents stretched back to the dawn of European exploration.

  One afternoon in early September, in an attempt to break the deadlock of indecision, I bunk off, jump in the car and drive up the coast to the nearby Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh.

  Aldeburgh has become a favourite destination for Phoebe. Of course, she likes it when we go to Frinton, a seaside town in Essex that boasts our nearest ‘proper’ beach, all sand and gaily painted beach huts. But she quickly tires of building sandcastles and chasing small fish trapped in pools by the outgoing tide. She much prefers the physical challenge of Aldeburgh’s steep shingle beach, delighting in storming up and sliding down the shifting hills that leave her mummy and daddy drained but never seem quite to sap her energy.

  Aldeburgh’s days as a simple fishing village are long behind it, but one of its other attractions to which Phoebe is drawn are the few fishing boats that can still be found drawn up on the shingle beach. One such boat is the Viking, and she’s here today. She is, naturally, clinker-built, and tough to boot. About 18ft long, she’s sturdy and clearly capable of enduring repeated wave-driven beachings on the unforgiving shingle. I take the obligatory photograph and crunch my way back towards the car. As signs go, I feel, this one is pretty heavy-handed. Go clinker, it seems to say. But, in case I’ve missed the significance, chance has another card to play, and it’s an ace.

  I can seldom walk past a second-hand bookshop without a brief rummage through the boxes outside and this day is no exception. As I stand there thumbing my way through the dog-eared romance novels, outdated maps, old comic-book annuals and ghost-written autobiographies of largely forgotten ‘celebrities’, I suddenly freeze. A fellow browser, immediately to my right and rifling through the neighbouring box, already has several books tucked under his left arm. But it’s the thin volume he holds in his right hand, with the title Clenched Lap or Clinker, that claims my attention. On the cover is a drawing of a delightful little boat.