We’re happy for Phoebe to be a fairy if she wants to be, and we’re happy for her to be a pirate, too, which is just as well, because on the day she accessorises her party dress with a set of pink fairy wings and a skull-and-crossbones eye patch. I know she’s only three, but I like her thinking, and not just because the whole nautical thing seems to be gaining traction.
But the party, a raucous affair, and my enforced break from the shed give me time to step back from boatbuilding and think about what I’m doing. It could be argued that perhaps I ought to have done this before now, but thanks to a passing conversation with another parent at the party I start to wonder about the implications for Phoebe of my placing boats front and centre in our relationship.
‘So what are you going to do if Phoebe doesn’t want anything to do with boats?’ asks the mother of one of the other children from Phoebe’s nursery. ‘Nothing, of course,’ I say, confidently. ‘I don’t want to force her to do anything. I just want her to grow up open to possibilities.’
‘What, such as rowing across the Atlantic? Would you be happy if she did that?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be if she tried to do it in the crappy little boat I’m building,’ I say, laughing.
But inside I’m not laughing. I am genuinely not trying to push Phoebe into boats, or into anything else. But am I being hopelessly naive – or even irresponsible? I know full well how even a throwaway line from an adult can have a profound effect on a child’s thinking. I know exactly why I decided journalism was for me. One day Neil Clayton, my English teacher at Woolverstone Hall – probably the same man who steered Ian McEwan into a career as a novelist – made a cutting remark about something I’d written. You’re not a journalist, he said, so you shouldn’t write like one.
It was a put-down, not a compliment, but I chose to take it as praise because it dovetailed with my certain belief that my mother, whom I tried so hard and repeatedly failed to please, was enamoured of journalists and journalism. She had worked as a secretary in the BBC Radio newsroom at Broadcasting House, London, and in another job had typed up the shorthand notes of Hansard reporters in the House of Commons. Journalists were high on her list of admired professionals.
I’m pretty sure that neither Neil Clayton nor my mother were bothered about whether I went into journalism or not, but as a direct result of something they both said, here I am. Would I rather have been an archaeologist, or an architect? Yes, I would.
Phoebe, I like to think, will be smarter than me and, hopefully blessed with more emotional elbow room, a great deal more capable of coming up with her own life plan. Certainly, all the signs are that we seem to be raising a child stubbornly determined to do her own thing – or, rather, not to do the thing that suits her mummy or daddy. Kate has become much more adept than me at the practice of nudging Phoebe towards a parentally desired outcome through the subtle application of reverse psychology. I, on the other hand, am still deluding myself that direct appeals to reason will persuade a three-year-old to eat her broccoli/put on her Wellington boots/wear a helmet while riding her bike/stop trying to replicate the leaps and tumbles she has learnt in the well-protected environment of the gymnastics club on the altogether less forgiving surfaces of the living room. This fierce independence can, of course, be frustrating, and alarming, but with luck bodes well for the future Phoebe.
Of course I won’t want her to do things just to please me, or her mother – we want to enable her, not control her. So how would I feel if she decided she wanted to row the Atlantic? Petrified, of course, as any parent might. But, I’m afraid, also proud as hell.
As when my son, Adam, joined the Royal Marines. I didn’t want him to, and I certainly didn’t encourage him to take up arms, but when he went ahead and did it anyway and sailed through the tough training course to win his green beret, what else could I feel but pride? And what else could I be but petrified when in February 2003 he and all the other young men in his unit embarked on the deadly wild-goose chase that was the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction? Petrified – but, again, also proud. As I wrote in an article for The Times, ‘I don’t support this looming war, but I support my son and the men in whose hands his life now rests. I could not have marched for peace at the weekend without betraying him; my allegiance is not to Queen or to country, but to him.’
That’s how it has to be for parents, and that’s how it will be with me and Phoebe, whichever course through life she chooses – even if that course leads her to contemplate doing something rash or stupid, such as rowing across the Atlantic.
Rowing across an ocean is one of the most physically, mentally and emotionally demanding challenges there is. In 1969, while the world was glued to the TV coverage of humankind’s first voyage to the moon, Briton John Fairfax was busy becoming the first person to row solo across an ocean. The world at large might not have paid him much attention, but three men 400,000 miles away, at least, took time out from their lunar schedule to salute his achievement. Fairfax had rowed the 5,342 miles from Gran Canaria to Hollywood Beach, landing the day before Neil Armstrong took his historic small step. Awaiting Fairfax in Florida, where he landed close to where Apollo 11 had blasted off, was a message from Armstrong and his fellow astronauts, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin.
‘We who sail what President Kennedy called “The new ocean of space” pay our respects to the man who, single-handedly, has conquered the still formidable ocean of water,’ it read. ‘Yours was the accomplishment of one resourceful individual, while ours depended upon the help of thousands. As fellow explorers, we salute you on this great occasion.’
Neil and the boys reached their destination in under four days. It had taken Fairfax 180 to reach his.
Not that ocean rowing, or any other kind of adventure, is only about ‘the boys’, as the example of Debra Veal and the dozens of other women who’ve tackled the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in rowing boats demonstrates. In 2004, while the crew of the Pink Lady were sitting around awaiting rescue in their life raft, Frenchwoman Anne Quéméré was successfully crossing the same ocean, in the same direction and solo. Quéméré set off from Cape Cod four weeks before we left St John’s, and reached Ushant off the coast of France three weeks after we were rescued. Her 4,000-mile crossing had taken eighty-seven days.
The pioneer of women’s ocean rowing was Sylvia Cook, a Briton who in 1971 joined John Fairfax for a 6,000-mile double-handed row from San Francisco to Australia. They were at sea for a mind-boggling 361 days.
But the first woman to row solo across any ocean was American Tori Murden, who on 3 December 1999 set foot on Guadeloupe after an eighty-one-day Atlantic crossing from Tenerife. She was followed across in short order by Briton Diana Hoff and Frenchwoman Peggy Bouchet, who set off two months apart and from different places, but arrived at their destinations – Barbados and Martinique – on exactly the same day, 5 January 2000.
Whatever Phoebe chooses to do with her life, I hope she will find inspiration in the stories of women such as these. Of course, there are multiple role models to be found among women who have shattered glass ceilings and successfully challenged stereotypes and gender bias in countless fields of human endeavour, from art and science to business and politics, and girls of Phoebe’s generation owe a debt to them all. But it is only when women enter and triumph in a brutal, physical arena once thought to be the exclusive preserve of men that the redundancy of patriarchy is truly exposed.
A project administrator for the Louisville Development Authority, Murden was a veteran of three bruising encounters with the Atlantic from which she emerged victorious only once, in the process redefining the word ‘determination’. Her first attempt, to cross from east to west in 1997 as part of a two-woman team with Louise Graff, was foiled by sickness, compounded by electrical problems, and lasted just two days and 60 miles. On 14 June the following year she set off alone from Nag’s Head, North Carolina, and rowed into not one, but two hurricanes, one after the other. Her boat, American P
earl, suffered no fewer than eleven traumatic capsizes – once even pitch-poling, in which a boat is flipped stern over bow – and Murden’s shoulder was dislocated. After two days of being battered by Hurricane Danielle, Murden finally reached reluctantly for her emergency beacon and was picked up 950 nautical miles from Brest, her destination. Having covered 3,050 miles in eighty-five days, it was some small consolation that she had set the record for the most miles rowed solo by any American.
Writing later in Louisville Magazine Murden described life on American Pearl at the height of the hurricane, in which ‘my little boat became like a bathtub toy in the hands of an angry two-year-old. The wind howled like a train whistle. My vessel vibrated with its power. As much as that whistle terrified me, the periodic silences were worse. Like ghostly fingers, the quiet moments pointed to the walls of water that marched between my boat and the wind. The lull never lasted long, only the eternity of the few seconds it took for the wall to reach my boat . . .’
It’s rare to read of horrors such as Murden endured, because few who encounter such conditions live to tell the tale. And, as I know, it’s the kind of tale that can take some living with. The moment she pushed the panic button on her Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, ‘I . . . turned my eyes inward to watch failure dance across the stage of my brain. I felt so ashamed.’
Her ‘shame’ was short-lived. Her boat, none the worse for the experience, was spotted and recovered just 40 miles off the coast of Portugal by the crew of the Mediterranean, an American tanker bound for Le Havre. The very next year, 1999, Murden and American Pearl went back for more and this time successfully crossed 3,333 miles of the Atlantic alone, from east to west, in eighty-one days.
Phoebe’s party has degenerated into the sort of cake-fuelled chaos that all good children’s parties should, and I have to raise my voice to be heard.
‘Would I be happy if the grown-up Phoebe announced she was going to row across the Atlantic?’ I bellow in the parent’s ear. ‘No, of course not – I’m not mad, I’m her daddy. Do I want her to go through that sort of hell, to feel that she has to prove herself – to herself or to anyone else – in that fashion? Absolutely not.’
But do I want her to take inspiration from women like Tori Murden, or Debra Veal, who stuck it out solo on the Atlantic in 2001 while I buckled and quit? Absolutely.
I notice a small tide of parents surging anxiously towards the raised stage at the far end of the village hall. Predictably, Phoebe has led a contingent of party-goers up the steps at the side and now child after child is leaping off the stage, lemming-like, and onto the wooden floor. As parents scramble to catch their charges, the ringleader, her pink wings decidedly the worse for wear, wanders over to me and announces she has had enough now and wants to go home.
Well, it is her party. It remains only to dish out the party bags, which I know for a fact the three-year-old pirate-fairy has already looted for the best bits.
A few weeks later, in the interests of family life I put both boat and journalism on hold and the three of us head off to north Suffolk to spend four days at one of the Center Parcs holiday villages. With our own little cabin, surrounded by trees, deer and squirrels, we have a great time. Now Phoebe is three there are many new things she can do, and she tries her hand at activities including skating, archery, pony riding and even junior jet-skiing in the Subtropical Swimming Paradise, where she spends much time fearlessly mastering the flumes.
Then, on the last day but one, comes the moment I’ve really been looking forward to. Fondly envisioning the day when I will place a set of oars in my daughter’s hands and teach her how to row, I’ve booked half an hour in a boat on the water-sports lake.
There’s no sign of trouble as we collect our life preservers and put them on, and Phoebe appears perfectly happy as we head down the pontoon towards our boat, pausing en route only for her to scatter a group of ducks. We even get her in the boat without a protest. Kate and Phoebe sit on the back seat as Daddy, master of (some of) the Atlantic, casts off and takes up the oars. I’ve made no more than half a dozen strokes before Phoebe starts to cry. Actually, it’s more of a sob than a mere cry and it doesn’t moderate until we are back on dry land, to which I return as quickly as I can. ‘Daddy,’ Phoebe announces, with the tears still streaming down her face, ‘I don’t want a boat – please.’
‘Please’ is a word she usually deploys only if she really, really wants something – or really, really doesn’t.
I am, of course, accustomed to Phoebe’s fickle toddler’s ways. Many is the soft toy whose reign as top dog/bunny/kitten/lamb/monkey has suddenly and inexplicably been cut short in favour of another. Books that have to be read at bedtime every night, sometimes for weeks on end, are abruptly remaindered, without explanation. I find it impossible to keep track of her rotating cast of ‘best friends’ at nursery, an appointment that seems to come with little in the way of job security.
But I can’t help worrying that this is more than just a blip. What if she really, really doesn’t want a boat? She is, of course, barely three years old, and by this time next year a boat might be the most important thing in her life. I tell myself that our job as parents isn’t to map out her life, but to equip her with the skills she’ll need to make her own way. But in building this boat, am I already in effect becoming a pushy parent?
If I am, she’s showing every sign of pushing back, which, I suppose, can only be a good thing. And, also in the plus column, if she really does end up turning her back on the sea at least I shan’t have to worry about her wanting to row the Atlantic.
Balancing part-time boatbuilding with the full-time demands of a mortgage and family life is, I discover, a perilous, high-wire business. I’m not quite sure why this didn’t occur to me at the outset, but I suppose that’s the point of being swept away by a romantic adventure – full ahead both, and damn the torpedoes.
But now those fish are in the water and tracking in my direction.
I’ve been keeping up my end of the bargain on the home front, more or less, making Phoebe’s breakfast while Mummy gets ready for work and being on hand in the evening to take my turn giving her a bath or reading bedtime stories. I love every minute of this and I’m determined to keep it all up.
But here’s the problem. It’s becoming increasingly clear that there isn’t enough time in any one week to build a boat, be a decent parent and earn enough money to pay the mortgage.
It’s exactly one month since I started planking and so far I have managed to complete only three strakes a side. That means there are fourteen still to do. Partly this is because the boatbuilding thing is being constantly interrupted by the article-writing thing, and partly because I am not very good at the boatbuilding thing. I might, of course, speed up a little as things go on, although as yet there has been little sign of that happening. But at a worst-case rate of just one strake a week, that means I’m looking at roughly four more months of tortuous progress before the hull is finished.
I know I said I wouldn’t indulge in that kind of Nostradamus-style prophesying, but there you are.
Besides, I don’t have four months to spare. Quite apart from the mental strain that planking for one whole third of a year would entail, I have a deadline – self-imposed, true, but a deadline nonetheless. Like a pre-Brexit English farmer reliant on cheap European labour to get in his summer fruit crop, I have invited Ron, my oldest friend, to come over from Germany in July to give me a hand with putting in the ribs, thirty-eight transverse batons of oak that will add internal strength to the completed hull. This is the one part of building this boat that requires two people – and it can’t be done until the planking is finished.
So, for a while at least, I’m going to give up my day job.
Obviously, there are advantages to working from home as a freelance journalist. I can pick my hours and, if necessary, work at night, which I often do. In fact, thinking about it, unless you consider having the freedom to sit around in your smalls all day a
lifestyle plus, that’s the only advantage and, in reality, it’s a disadvantage in thin disguise. All it means is that what ought to be downtime – leisure hours spent reading the paper, catching up with friends, going for a run or shouting at the TV – is filled instead with work.
For the freelancer, throwing a sickie – or, heaven forbid, actually falling ill – is simply not an option. Sometimes when a deadline looms, even going to the loo slides down the list of priorities and there have been days when I’ve just not bothered to shower or get dressed. Delivery drivers are pretty used to seeing me unshaven and in tartan pyjamas at 3pm during the working week. I try to appear breezy and chatty, but to be honest I think it comes over a little manic and probably only helps to compound the impression, which I can read in their eyes, that this guy must have had some kind of breakdown.
If only I had the time for a breakdown. Any time I take off for any reason at all is, of course, unpaid and, consequently, for me even holidays are more stressful than relaxing.
Another problem is that it’s possible to wait up to two or even three months to be paid for an article, which means that if you do decide to take time off – say, to build a boat – it’s necessary to plan far ahead and work extra hard to ensure there will be enough money coming in to service the mortgage a couple of months down the line.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of months – stepping on the gas and churning out a bewildering array of articles for my two main clients, the health section of the Daily Mail and The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, snatching days away from the boat shed or burning the midnight oil in the process.
Now, after an intensive period of mortgage-banking, I’m calling a halt to the journalism for a month or two. I have to. It’s becoming increasingly clear that if I don’t start putting in some long hours in the shed, Phoebe’s boat will never make it off the stocks.
How to Build a Boat Page 22