Across the top of the card are three photographs of my daughter, smiling and holding up the letters D, A and D. It’s cute – even though I’m Daddy, not Dad – but it’s the printed poem underneath, flanked by a set of Phoebe’s footprints, that undoes me.
Now I know that ‘Walk With Me, Daddy’ is one of those generic, go-to saccharine poems that litter the internet for occasions such as this. I know that Phoebe has had no part in choosing it, downloading it or printing it out, and that almost certainly the sentiment it conveys has passed her by. But from the first clunky lines (‘Walk alongside me, Daddy / and hold my little hand. / I have so many things to learn / that I don’t yet understand.’) to the last (‘So walk alongside me, Daddy. / We have a long way to go.’) I’m an emotional train wreck.
I have never been this close to another human being, so utterly focused on their wellbeing and with my own happiness so completely interlocked with theirs. That’s why I haven’t been looking forward to today. Phoebe left this morning with her mother and grandmother for a return four-day visit to Center Parcs. This will be only the second time she and I have spent more than one night apart and I am already missing her and dreading going back to the house and seeing her empty bed. I badly wish I could go too, but I know if I stop now I will never be ready for Ron’s arrival next month for our long-scheduled weekend of steaming in the ribs.
On the plus side, however, today’s the day the boat is finally going to be turned the right way up – I will no longer be under it, but it will be under me; and when Phoebe gets back from her break the thing that Daddy’s been building in the shed will finally be looking a lot like a boat.
Until now it has made sense to work on the planking with the boat upside down – planing bevels on the lands is tough enough without having to do it lying flat on the floor. But now the seventh strakes are on, the sides of the hull are approaching the vertical and the working area is down to about waist height, so over she goes.
Some preparation is necessary. Once the boat is turned she will no longer be standing on the four legs attached to the moulds. Instead her keel will need to be supported about 3ft off the ground and farmer John has just the thing for the job – a couple of old wooden trestles. They’ve seen better days but it doesn’t take long to modify them, trimming off the rotten ends of the legs and screwing on plywood braces.
Hark at me – modifying trestles. Who’d have thought it?
Fabian has come across from Rowhedge to make sure the operation goes smoothly – with seven strakes in place the boat now weighs an awful lot. The old towel I’ve been using to soak planks prior to steaming is rolled into a sausage shape and laid alongside the boat on the floor. The two struts running from the roof beams to the keel are removed and then over she goes – we gently roll the hull onto its side until the keel is sitting square on the floor.
At this point the complex framework of 2×2in lengths of pine timbering that have been keeping the boat rigid and the four carefully braced legs on which it has been standing can all go. Back in March it took ages to put this lot together, but now it takes only a few minutes’ work with the drill to remove all the screws and pile the redundant lengths of pine in the corner of the shed. All that’s left now that isn’t actually boat are the moulds, which are still necessary for bending on the last three strakes, some diagonal bracing to ensure the moulds remain at right-angles to the centreline, and the base board (which is, once again, back above the boat, running from stem to stern).
With some grunting and groaning the two of us lift Swift up and onto the trestles, locating the keel between two sets of tapered wooden blocks. We kick the legs of the trestles until at both ends the keel is tightly held in the blocks. Then we run two pairs of struts from the roof beams down to the base board near the stem and the sternpost. These will hold the boat rigidly in place for the final stages.
I’ve taken the opportunity to rotate the boat through 90 degrees, so she now sits in the middle of the space and, with the double doors open behind her and the sunlight flooding in, she makes a grand sight. This is no longer an ungainly beetle, stranded on its back with its legs in the air.
There are now three more strakes to get on either side of the hull, but it’s already 6pm and I know when to quit. Experience has taught me that when I reach a clear cut-off moment it is folly to press on and attempt one more job. It’s at the end of the day, when tiredness has started to erode concentration, that mistakes are made.
So instead, I make us both a cup of coffee, help myself to some of Fabian’s cake, and lean contentedly against the workbench, taking it in. Until now, with the evolving hull upside down and trapped in its wooden cage, my nose has been too close to the timber, as it were, to see the trees. But now I can see the lines of rivets, tracking faithfully in regimented alignment from plank to plank around the inside of the hull. Now clearer than ever, inside and outside, is the inherent beauty of the clinker planking, fanning out from the centreline in purposeful, more-or-less symmetrical harmony. Each strake has had its own identity, as a difficult, troublesome opponent. But now the whole emerges as much more than the sum of the parts and the pain of having created this thing of elegant, modest beauty is already receding into memory.
Even Fabian seems impressed – or surprised, perhaps. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’s a boat. Are you pleased with it?’
I am. Is he? It’s hard to tell, though even as he smiles I notice his eyes are flicking here and there in swift assessment of this flaw or that. Perhaps because he senses this is a big moment for me he just keeps smiling and says nothing, but of course I know that everything is far from perfect. Inside the boat even I can see many small mistakes in the planking. I can see where, in overcompensating for an ill-fitting overlap, I have taken too much off the edge of one strake, which has caused it to be out of balance with its opposite number on the other side of the boat. It doesn’t matter much – most of the irregularities will be hidden from sight when the floorboards go in. But I realise I’m looking at the evidence of the truth of Fabian’s advice, offered right at the start, that I would have been better off taking on a less complicated design for my first attempt at boatbuilding. I can only hope that those irregularities aren’t the leaky kind.
There is more evidence that I have overreached myself at the stern, where the strakes end their runs on the transom. Here, as Leather puts it, ‘the ends of each plank have to be sunk into the plank below it either by a bevel on both of them or by a rebate which tapers out on the faces of the plank’. The effect, ‘to achieve a neat appearance’, is very pleasing. Sadly, it’s one I’ve failed to pull off consistently and it is this, above all else, that will betray the amateur status of the builder of Phoebe’s boat.
But I don’t care. I shall wear such cock-ups as a badge of honour and have no intention of being embarrassed by any flaws and errors that might shame a professional. This will be a boat built by a shambling amateur – that’s the whole point. And, if it floats and brings joy and inspiration to a young girl, then the greater the triumph over adversity that it represents.
But we’re not there yet. There are still three more strakes to fit and Ron will be here in under three weeks.
The time passes in a blur. None of the strakes is any easier to fit than the ones that have gone before it – the boat is making a fight of it, right to the end, but I don’t mind any more. By now I’m used to it and certain not only that I am going to go the distance but also that I am going to win.
I’m not completely out of the woods yet. The strakes on one side of the boat are starting to drift off the moulds – this must be the compounding effect of a series of errors I made earlier on. Now I see why it’s so important to have each strake hit every mark on every mould, and to nip any deviation as soon as possible. If you don’t, it gets harder to correct; whereas it’s possible to get away with overcorrecting the next plank by 2mm, it’s much harder to pull the hull back in once the error has magnified to a centimetre or more.
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�s the position I find myself in by the eighth strake. The one on the port side is more or less touching all the moulds where it should, but on the starboard there’s a pronounced gap between the strake and the middle two moulds. This means that the hull won’t be completely symmetrical and will bulge out slightly on the starboard side. I’m not sure what to do about it. Overcompensating by imposing a sharper angle on the next starboard strake will cause more problems when it comes to putting in the ribs – too sudden a turn in the hull will create a sharp bend to which it will be impossible for a rib to conform without breaking.
Then I have a flash of what I choose to characterise as genius. What if I insert a couple of wedges between the moulds and the eighth plank on the port side, pushing it out slightly to match the deviation on the starboard? Providing I maintain the gap on the last two port planks, although the boat will undeniably be a little plumper around the middle than intended, at least the hull won’t be lopsided. Should I check with Fabian? Probably. Do I? No. My confidence has grown along with the boat.
By late on the evening of 27 June it remains only to fix the tenth and final strakes. The tenth is the ‘sheer’ strake, the top edge of which slopes down very gently from the stern before rising elegantly again to its high point at the stem, in so doing defining the profile of the boat. It goes without saying that the sweep of the sheer strake on either side should run clean and in harmony with the other. Perhaps nowhere on a boat is imperfection more readily apparent than in the sheer. Though they might not appreciate why, an instinctive alarm will sound in the soul of even the most casual observer if a sheer line is out of true. On the other hand, many defects in the run of the other strakes can be obscured by the trompe l’œil of a fair sheer.
Fitting and fiddling with the tenth and final strake is no easier or more smoothly accomplished than struggling with the first over two months ago, but in a couple of days it’s finally done and all that remains is to fair the all-important top edges. I know where the sheer line should run – it’s marked, as per the plans, on the stem and the sternpost and on all four moulds in between. The boat has been set up level on the trestles, both side to side and fore and aft. So if I run a batten from the front of the boat to the back on either side, lightly clamped to the plank and passing through all the marked points on the way, the twin sheers should be both fair and level on both sides.
But they’re not. The port side appears to be lower than the starboard – not by much, but enough to notice. As a quick check across the boat with a long spirit level confirms, it’s not an optical illusion. Probably, this is a combination of two factors: my failure months ago to fix the stem and sternpost to the keel absolutely vertically, compounded by some kind of error with the moulds. I’m pretty certain I marked all the plank lines on them correctly, and symmetrically, but in fixing the moulds to the hog, somehow I may have caused one or more of them to tip, ever so slightly, to one side.
But how it happened is academic. All that matters now is that both sheers align perfectly – this is what the eye will see and the visually dominating certainty of that symmetry will, I hope, obscure any other underlying imperfection.
And so I gently tap up the port batten until the spirit level tells me it’s perfectly aligned, along its length, with the starboard. Now it’s a question of having the courage of my convictions – or, rather, of having Fabian confirm those convictions. He’s on hand for the topping-out ceremony of the sheer strake and, emboldened by his presence and approval, I draw a line along the bottom edges of the battens, remove them and begin the (for me) nail-biting business of hacking away the unwanted inch or two along the top edge of the last two planks. To speed things up, Fabian takes one side of the boat, I take the other. I suffer a twinge of guilt, but it’s overwhelmed by the thought that the planking is all but done. A plane won’t do the job until the final millimetres, partly because the moulds are still in place, and in the way, but chiefly because there’s a fair bit of wood to remove. To shift it we wield large chisels. I pick away cautiously, while Fabian peels away great slices in single strokes.
Finally we fix the gunwales, or rubbing bands, to the outside of the sheer strakes. These two 25×20mm lengths of oak, which run from the stem to the stern, bend without the need for steaming and are first clamped and then screwed and glued flush to the top edge of the sheer strake. Their purpose is to add rigidity to the hull and to protect the tops of the ribs and, when the ribs have been fixed in position, the gunwales will be matched on the inside of the boat by inwales. The top ends of the ribs will be sandwiched between the two and large copper nails will pass through all four elements – gunwale, plank, rib and inwale – clenching them all tightly together.
But that’s for when the ribs are in place. I now have three days before my cheap foreign labour arrives and, before the ribs can go in, I have to prepare the inside of the hull. The first step is to remove the moulds, and what a step it is – with them gone and piled in the corner of the shed, I am looking at a boat freed like a Houdini from its chains. With her internal lines clear of obstructions she looks much larger than she has seemed until now. All that remains that isn’t actual boat is the base board, still attached to stem and sternpost, and connected via the four struts to the ceiling beams.
It takes me two days to sand and paint the inside of the hull, rounding off the sharp edges of the planks and the hog and coating them three or four times with primer-undercoat in a fetching shade of grey. I’m not sure grey will make the final colour palette (especially if Phoebe – still heavily pro-pink, curse you Disney – has her way) but the paint job gives a good sense of how stunning this boat might end up looking.
And then, with a whole day to spare, it’s done. I pull up the solitary folding chair and sit and stare at the boat. I shuffle over to one side, so I’m facing the bow from the port quarter, with my eyes in line with the third plank down. From here the familial likeness with Red Boat is unmistakable. According to James Dodds, the man whose artwork set me off on this long road, this is the classic perspective from which best to appreciate and admire the lines of a clinker boat.
The grand sweep of the sheer lines is particularly breath-taking. Follow the course of the top edge of the hull, from the stem to the transom and then back up the far side of the boat, and what you have traced with your eye is the shape of the symbol for infinity.
Ron arrives from Germany on Friday, the day after tomorrow. His train gets in late, and we’ll start work on the ribs first thing Saturday morning. The past few weeks, especially, have been a whirlwind of activity, a race against time to prepare for his arrival and the final push to complete the hull. There are a couple of jobs remaining – preparing the ribs and drilling all 380 holes in the hull through which the rivets will be driven to hold them in place – but I reckon that’s no more than a day’s work, which will keep until Friday. So right now, for the first time in months, I have absolutely nothing to do; no boat work, no articles to write and file – nothing.
It’s a strangely melancholic feeling, midway between liberation and a loss of purpose. But tomorrow Kate will be at work and Phoebe will be in nursery, so I decide I’m going to treat myself to a day at the seaside. And, at the same time, I’m going to deal with some unfinished business that has haunted me, on and off, for most of my life.
21
A RETURN TO SUEZ
‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.’
– T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
Earlier this year, while struggling with some now-forgotten detail of the build, I decided to clear the sawdust clogging my brain with a bracing stroll along the front at Southwold. The excuse I manufactured for my conscience was that I needed to see the remains of the Bittern, a boat built in 1890 and the last, and by repute the fastest, of the beach yawls that once took to the waves from this Suffolk seaside town.
At some point in the 1920s, when the Bittern’s sailing days were done, she was abandoned without sentimentality and left to rot on the beach. Only the rudder remains, but a good idea of the Viking heritage of the double-ended giant can be had from a scale model mounted in a glass case in the Sailors’ Reading Room.
It was while I was studying this that my attention drifted to the large display case to the left that occupies almost the whole of one wall of the room. At one end of the case, almost lost from view behind a clutter of nautical bric-a-brac, was a large black-and-white photograph of a ship passing under Sydney Harbour Bridge. In a roomful of memorabilia otherwise dedicated to the maritime past of a small seaside fishing town on England’s east coast, it seemed incongruous. Then, below the photograph, I spotted a ship’s bell.
Big enough to cover a man’s head, and mounted in a simple metal frame, it was positioned in such a way that I could make out only a few of the letters cast into its surface and picked out in red paint: ‘Strath’.
Surely not? I peered more closely at the photograph to read the caption. Yes. The ship pictured passing under the Sydney Harbour Bridge was indeed the SS Strathmore, the ship on board which my mother, with me inside her, had returned to England from Egypt in 1955. This hardly seemed credible. There was no more to be seen, and no one in the place to ask, and only now have I been able to get back to Southwold. In the meantime, I made contact with Stephen Wells, one of the directors of the reading-room trust, and now he is waiting for me on the seafront with the key to the cabinet.
At first, no one could recall how the bell came to be there – clearly there was no direct connection between Southwold and P&O, let alone the 23,500-ton Strathmore. But after a bit of digging Stephen found out that when the big ship was decommissioned in 1963 its last skipper, Captain E. Lee, had retired to Southwold to live with his sister. With him he’d brought the photograph, his sea chest and the ship’s bell, all of which his sister had donated to the reading room upon his death.
How to Build a Boat Page 24