How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

  My mother and father are both dead, and Kate’s father died in 1983, when she was just nine years old, so Phoebe has just one grandparent, Kate’s mother. She adores Phoebe, and the feeling is mutual. But when Phoebe was born, I decided for her sake to find out more about the grandmother she would never know but one day would surely ask about.

  I knew my mother had disembarked from the Strathmore at the Port of London on 28 May 1955, that she’d changed her surname to that of my father almost immediately and that I’d been born on 9 October that year, into a world in which life was still available only in black and white. I also knew that my mother had given birth in some kind of maternity home in Croydon, a place in south London to which I assumed she had taken herself to avoid the contemporary stigma of single parenthood. Freshly returned from Suez, five months pregnant, perhaps she planned to tell the neighbours – and even her own mother, perhaps – that her husband and the father of her child was among the hundreds of British soldiers who had been killed during the ‘emergency’ in Egypt.

  Between 1951 and 1955, more than a thousand British soldiers, mostly conscripts, died in the Canal Zone. My father’s regiment, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, alone lost thirty-one men, the last killed in June 1955. Despite the escalating violence, Egypt remained a family posting until the end. That explains why the remains of more than thirty children are buried in the British military cemeteries at Moascar and Fayid. Their ages range from one day to eight years old. The last child also died in June 1955, a month after my pregnant mother returned to England.

  As Phoebe slept soundly on my lap one night and I trawled the internet for clues, I came across an article in the Independent newspaper by journalist and author Maureen Paton, who’d discovered that she too had been born in Croydon, in a maternity home called Birdhurst Lodge. Perhaps as a child I had overheard Nanny or my mother say that name, but it immediately rang a bell with me – this, I had no doubt, was where I too had been born.

  As I read Paton’s account of her detective work, I learnt that the maternity home would have been better characterised as a baby farm. Birdhurst Lodge was a home for unmarried mothers that had been run by the evangelical Christian Mission of Hope since the First World War to supply children to respectable but childless Christian couples. It didn’t close until the late 1960s, when Britain’s moral compass was in the process of being adjusted.

  In this place, Paton’s mother had once let slip, ‘girls . . . cried and cried for weeks after giving up their babies’. A document produced by the London Borough of Croydon, written for the benefit of people who had been adopted from the home and wanted to trace their birth mothers, spells out something of the horror that was Birdhurst Lodge.

  At the time, ‘the “supply” of babies for adoption exceeded demand [and] potential adopters could generally specify the age and gender of a baby’. Naturally, the Mission had opened its doors only to expectant single mothers ‘of otherwise good character, and of respectable antecedents’. After giving birth, the unfortunate ‘inmates’, as they were described, were expected to care for their child until it was taken away by its new parents. This, Paton learnt, was usually up to six weeks after birth, ‘partly to give the mothers a chance to bond with their babies before deciding whether to have them adopted, but also a calculated move to let enough time elapse to make sure the babies were developmentally healthy, since adoptive couples did not want disabled children’.

  Though abortions were both illegal and risky in Britain in the 1950s, I had often wondered why my mother had gone through with her pregnancy. Having me, after all, had ruined her life, as she regularly reminded me. Ultimately, my early life with my mother – who was frequently drunk, usually bitter and often absent, even when actually ‘there’ – led me to the conclusion that her decision to keep her baby had been less about me and more about her pride and obstinacy. She would show the world she didn’t need the help of any man to raise a child. As she’d taken herself off to give birth at Birdhurst Lodge, the idea of giving me away must at the very least have crossed her mind at some point. But perhaps, when the time came, she found she couldn’t do it.

  Gazing down at Phoebe, asleep in my arms, I had no trouble believing that. I would rather suffer all the agonies of Dante’s ninth circle of hell, reserved for the treacherous, than hand her over to the next stranger who walked through the door.

  By the time my mother died, aged seventy-two, in 1993, we’d been estranged for the best part of a decade. Thanks to an old family friend who had cared for her in her last months, I knew she’d been seriously ill but I couldn’t face the prospect of going to see her. After years of trying to accommodate her craziness, of trying to explain her inexplicable and frequently drunken behaviour to a series of shocked partners, I had long ago reached the point where I couldn’t do it any more, where not having her in my life was so much better than having her in it. Only after Phoebe was born did I feel the need to apply for her grandmother’s death certificate. I discovered she’d died on 26 June 1993, at Hither Green Hospital in south London. In addition to her heavy drinking, my mother had been a lifelong smoker. The certificate gave the primary cause of death as ‘chest infection’, but noted she had also suffered a stroke. Her body was cremated.

  Only one photograph of my mother taken in Egypt exists. Undated, it must have been shot during the ’50s – possibly at the height of the Suez ‘emergency’, and certainly before I was born. Beautiful, raven-haired and wearing what appears, improbably, to be a ball gown, she is sitting side-saddle on a camel in front of a pyramid and smiling broadly. I never saw the photograph during her lifetime and when it came into my possession after her death her obvious, radiant happiness, unfamiliar to me as a child or an adult, had come as something of a shock. This laughing, carefree and attractive woman was evidently the person she was supposed to be, and had been before me. If only with me she could have discovered something of the joy and purpose I have found with Phoebe.

  What frame of mind had she been in when she boarded the Strathmore at Port Said, leaving Egypt behind to face her uncertain future? Did she hope that my father would follow her, that they would marry? Or was she already resigned to a life as a single mother – or planning to give me away to a respectable but childless Christian couple? The passenger manifest for her journey, which survives in the British National Archives, shows there were many children on board the Strathmore for that final leg of the ship’s voyage home from Brisbane, via various outposts of empire. A contemporary brochure for the ship includes photographs of the tourist-class nursery, complete with small tables and chairs, a model car and rocking horse and a wall frieze of animals. Did my mother look in and watch the children playing as she tried to decide what to do about the life inside her?

  When the Strathmore was launched at Barrow-in-Furness in 1935 by Elizabeth, Duchess of York – the future Queen Mother – she was the largest ship ever built for P&O. Built for the India empire route, she spent the war years as a troop ship. In 1941, she brought thousands of Canadian soldiers across to Europe from Newfoundland, which meant that sixty-three years later, as Pink Lady put out from St John’s, our tracks had almost certainly crossed. The Strathmore was sold for scrap in 1969 and broken up at La Spezia, in northwest Italy. Nothing remains of her but the ship’s bell, which, impossibly, has found a berth just a few miles up the coast from where I live. Now, with some difficulty, Stephen Wells recovers it from the depths of the display case and places it on the table in front of me. I reach out, take hold of the clapper and ring it. A clear sound, as bright as the day the bell was cast, fills the room. Perhaps my mother heard that same noise as the bell sounded the hours, ticking off the miles as the big ship brought her, and me, to England and our unpredictable destinies.

  Not for the first time in my life, but for the first time in connection with my mother, I experience that sensation in the chest and throat that can be described only as heartache.

  Fitting the ribs in a boat is ‘often regarded
as difficult by amateurs, but it is a simple task if properly approached’. So opines John Leather in the seminal 1973 book Clinker Boatbuilding. Now my friend Ron, who has travelled by train all the way from Frankfurt for the dubious pleasure, is to assist me in testing the proposition.

  Up until this point I’ve been unable to see much beyond the planking, a Herculean task that loomed so large in my life for three months that I never allowed myself to imagine that it could ever be over. At times, I was convinced it never would be. Now it finally is, I face the final substantial hurdle, but at least I shan’t be facing it alone.

  Fitting the thirty-eight oak ribs in Phoebe’s boat is the one task that really can’t be managed single-handed. Unlike the long-drawn-out business of planking, however, it promises to be a short, sharp shock, compressed into a single weekend of furious activity, in which each rib has to be softened by steaming, coaxed into following the shape of the hull and then riveted in place before the timber hardens up again. The weekend is also a chance to catch up with my oldest friend and, after half a year of labouring on the boat in almost solitary confinement, I’m really looking forward to having some company in the shed.

  We Skype and call occasionally, but these days I don’t see a great deal of Ron, who in 2007 followed his heart and moved to Germany, where he got married for the third time. I’m sure that if he were still living in England we’d see more of each other, despite The Mortifying Incident at Willen Lake, after which he vowed never to get in a boat with me, ever again. Strictly speaking, of course, I haven’t asked him to actually get in this boat, but it isn’t hard to see how the traumatic events of 1985 might have left him ill-disposed towards any venture involving both me and a vessel of any kind.

  And yet, here he is, which is just as well. Curiously, two other friends much nearer to home whom I approached for help with the job were mysteriously otherwise engaged for much of the foreseeable future. This would have been a great project to tackle with my son, Adam, of course, but he’s working overseas.

  The Mortifying Incident? Back in 1985, I persuaded Ron, a confirmed landlubber, to come sailing with me on a manmade lake in Milton Keynes. He did so, though very much against his better judgement. It was a particularly windy day and my desire to impress him with my nautical skills blinded me to two facts that normally would have awarded discretion the benefit of the doubt over valour. For one thing, not another soul was on the water – all the hire dinghies were tied up alongside the pontoon and bucking like nervous thoroughbreds. A few would-be sailors who’d thought better of it were clustered on benches in the shelter of the sailing centre, sipping hot chocolate from plastic cups. Somehow, I also managed to miss the significance of the fact that, although Willen Lake was 85 miles from the nearest coastline, the waves racing across its surface would not have been out of place off a storm-lashed North Sea beach.

  Undeterred even by the sceptical faces of the staff, who clearly didn’t believe my insistence that yes, thanks very much, I have sailed before and yes, good of you to ask, but don’t worry, I do know what I’m doing, I rented us two buoyancy aids, one of the otherwise entirely unoccupied fleet of dinghies and sixty minutes on the water.

  To cut short a long story from which I do not emerge with any credit, we hurtled out of control across the lake until, facing certain collision with the stone-edged opposite bank, I executed a crash gybe that capsized us in spectacular fashion. It was entirely my fault, not unrelated to the fact that I hadn’t bothered to reef the sails or brief Ron on the duties of crew.

  As we trod water, awaiting the arrival of the incandescent man in the rescue boat but protected from the worst of the waves by the upturned hull of the dinghy, Ron didn’t speak. He just stared at me, like a trusting spaniel who suddenly realises his owner has brought him to the vet not to have his nails clipped – bad enough, in the eyes of a spaniel – but to be neutered. I was banned from Willen Lake for life and Ron banned himself, for a similar period of time, from any boat skippered by me.

  Fortunately for me, however, we remain good friends – the best, in fact. I’ve never been very good at making, or keeping, male friends and consequently can count the ones I do have on the fingers of one hand. I’m not entirely sure why this is. I’m quite happy to blame my lack of a father, and the absence of any male influence in my early life beyond authoritarian teacher figures. But despite – or, perhaps, because of – being an enforced member of all-male communities from the age of seven, by the time I left school at eighteen I had pretty much had enough of being around farting, burping blokes and their traditional tribal pastimes, from football to pubs.

  I met Ron within weeks of starting my first job, as a junior reporter on the Milton Keynes Gazette. Three years older than me, he was the boyfriend of one of my new colleagues and one of the first men I had met who failed to conform to any of the narrow stereotypes that had been presented to me as approved templates for masculinity. The son of a Welsh coal miner who had lost two fingers in an accident underground and a German-Jewish mother who had fled Nazi Germany for Britain in 1938, Ron had transcended his unpromising origins to become the first and only member of his family to go to university. There he studied German and philosophy, a potentially maudlin combination that nevertheless informed an upbeat outlook on life both thoughtful and humorous, and perhaps best characterised by his favourite expression, ‘One door closes, another one shuts.’

  Dismissive of physical pursuits in favour of intellectual, he rejected the rugby of his forefathers and instead embraced poetry and music, studying piano and becoming equally proficient at jazz, blues and classical forms. When Ron’s first wife, my former colleague, left him at the same time as my first wife and I separated, Ron and I ended up sharing a house in Newport Pagnell – an unprepossessing suburb of the Buckinghamshire new town of Milton Keynes – for several months.

  We were without doubt an odd couple, returning from expeditions to local pubs and bars to discuss the evening’s events over wine and cheese, while Ron donned a Noël Coward-style smoking jacket (though he never smoked) and tickled the ivories. On the odd occasion when we persuaded women we had just met to come home with us, to my frustration Ron declined to vary this routine, leading to some interesting misunderstandings.

  Over the years, women came and went in both our lives, but our unlikely Jack Lemmon–Walter Matthau friendship stayed the course, through highs and lows. We would, as one of us would remind the other at the height of some passing domestic crisis, always have Newport Pagnell.

  Against all this, The Mortifying Incident at Willen Lake had been but a storm in a teacup, but one that, more than thirty years on, is nevertheless the first topic of conversation when Ron arrives at the shed after his eight-hour train journey from Frankfurt and claps eyes on the boat for the first time.

  ‘You do remember that I won’t be getting in that thing with you at any point, under any circumstances?’ he says, gazing upon the freshly planked hull. I keep it to myself, but I have a feeling that by the time we are done here, Ron might willingly trade a wild ride in a runaway dinghy for the intense weekend that lies ahead of us.

  We have two days to get this done and it promises to be a tough task, made considerably harder by the fact that neither of us has much idea about what we are doing. When it comes to DIY and man-about-the-houseness, Ron is at least my equal, which is to say not the first chap to turn to if you need a picture hung on a wall or a shelf putting up. However, if you urgently require a swift translation of Friedrich Nietzsche (Ron’s favourite nihilist) from the original German, he’s your man.

  I at least have had the benefit of several hours of intensive, if distressing, late-night YouTube viewing. I have also watched two amateur boatbuilders attempting to fit ribs at the Nottage Institute in Wivenhoe, and came away with an impression of uncontrolled chaos, a race against time punctuated by many and imaginative profanities, shrieks of pain and frequent mutual recriminations. Last and most certainly not least, I have had a quick crash course from
Fabian. That explains the presence of the solitary perfectly positioned rib fixed in the centre of the boat. It appears to taunt us, and what it senses instinctively will be our pathetic efforts to emulate its perfection.

  Steaming ribs into clinker-built boats is a relatively recent development and, like the use of moulds, one that would not have been recognised by the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. The boats they built were also strengthened by the insertion of ribs after the strakes had been finished. But these were solid, V-shaped timbers, lashed to the planks with rope or fixed to them with wooden pegs or iron rivets. The seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship is thought to have had twenty-six such ribs.

  According to research carried out in the ’70s by Basil Greenhill, director of the UK’s National Maritime Museum, the steaming of ribs was not introduced until the mid-nineteenth century and, although quite how it first came about remains unclear, the theory is that it probably had something to do with same decline in the availability of suitable trees that had led to shorter, narrower planks and the evolution of scarfing. This was certainly a problem that confronted Norwegian boatbuilders in 2010 when they attempted to build a replica of the Oseberg ship, using materials and techniques as close as possible to how the Vikings would have used them. The 70ft-long ship, unearthed in 1904 and dated to about AD 800, had seventeen massive ribs and the modern shipwrights found it ‘extremely difficult’ to find suitable oak trees, with thick branches growing at the correct angle off the trunk, to form the large V-shaped frames.