‘Yes, darling,’ I said, taking a deep breath and stepping forward to make sure she didn’t hit her head on the baseboard, which was still in place between stem and stern.
‘But why isn’t it pink, Daddy?’
Kate looked at me and smiled. ‘Yes, Daddy, why isn’t it pink? Pirates and fairies and all that . . .’
I had instinctively resisted the idea of a pink boat but then, as I had to keep reminding myself, it wasn’t my boat to colour-coordinate. I’m pretty sure the only pink boat I’ve ever seen is Pink Lady, which I guess is now home to a family of transparent sea cucumbers on the floor of the Atlantic. It would be months yet before I had to think about what colour to paint the boat. But if Phoebe wanted it to be pink, who was I to decree that it should be blue, or green or any other of the traditional, sober colours more commonly seen on the Suffolk waterways? Besides, if she changed her mind as she got older, we could always paint it again . . .
The important thing for me right now was that Phoebe seemed to have forgotten all about the tearful and alarming announcement she’d made shortly after her birthday that she didn’t actually want a boat. It had, it seemed, been only a blip, nothing more than a child’s spontaneous and random rejection of adult expectations.
But, random or not, it had made me think. Of course I hoped that Phoebe would come to share our enthusiasms, but right from the start I understood that sailing and the sea were my things, and would not necessarily become hers. The last thing I wanted to be was a pushy parent – especially one who pushes his daughter into a boat.
Of course, I tried to engage her in the project from the outset. I showed her the plans, let her ‘improve’ them with crayons, talked about what fun we would have, floated toy boats in the bath and the paddling pool, read her stories featuring boats and enthusiastically pointed out the real things every time we went for a walk along one of the local rivers. Whenever we were at Pin Mill, splashing in the magic stream or playing Pooh sticks under the little footbridge, she would happily clamber in and out of the yacht tenders berthed on the green.
Phoebe had taken her first boat trip a few months after her second birthday, in the summer of 2016, crossing the mouth of the Deben on the Bawdsey foot ferry with her two nephews, and she’d loved it. She’d grown inquisitive about the pictures of boats on the walls of Daddy’s office – especially those with Daddy or Mummy in them – and when we were playing together she would often demand that I draw a boat, or fashion her one out of Plasticine or Play-Doh. So all seemed set fair on the boat front.
But then, two days after Phoebe had visited the shed and cavorted happily inside the nearly finished hull, the blip returned, with a vengeance. It had been a normal, happy bedtime, with Phoebe somehow talking Daddy into reading four stories instead of the usual three, and she was settling down to sleep. I’d switched on her star light and was tiptoeing out of the room when suddenly she sat up in bed and started to cry, great big tears rolling down her cheeks.
‘Darling,’ I said, taking her in my arms, ‘what on earth’s the matter?’
Every word of her reply was punctuated with a little sob. ‘Daddy, I, don’t, want, a, boat, please.’
Uh-oh.
‘That’s all right,’ I said, trying to look and sound calm. ‘You don’t have to have a boat if you don’t want one.’
Except, you do. You really, really do.
We hugged for a while and eventually the sobs subsided and she lay down again. Stroking her hair, I had to ask.
‘So why don’t you want a boat, darling?’
Her normal response to this type of interrogation was ‘I just don’t’ or ‘I don’t know’. But this time, and without any hesitation, she said, ‘Because I don’t want to sink to the bottom of the water.’
Perhaps letting her clamber around inside the unfinished boat had been a mistake. I mean, sure, the workmanship wasn’t perfect, but who knew a three-year-old’s capacity for risk assessment could be so well developed?
After she’d finally fallen asleep I racked my brains. What had planted this fear in her mind? Was it something she’d seen on television that, though we carefully restricted what and how much she watched, might have given her a negative perception of boats? The pups of the PAW Patrol were frequently out on the water, usually rescuing the inept Cap’n Turbot from some maritime mishap or other. Yes, his boat the Flounder had had the occasional run-in with rocks, but though the hull had been holed the boat had never actually sunk.
Something in one of her books, perhaps? The Wind in the Willows couldn’t be the culprit. Rat and Mole simply mess about in their little clinker boat, in ideal conditions, without shipping so much as a cupful of water, let alone sinking. Likewise, in Bear, Bird and Frog, Bear and Frog row out onto the mirror-calm blue lake for nothing more dramatic than a singsong and a picnic. The Storm Whale in Winter does offer a little more drama – Noi takes to his small (clinker-built) rowing boat to search for his father, missing at sea in a snowstorm – but it all ends happily ever after. And again, no sinking.
Then I remember the shipwreck scene in Frozen.
Like many parents, I harbour a dark suspicion about the Disneyfication of childhood. There’s something a little heartbreaking about watching open-mouthed innocents enraptured by some on-screen Disney princess or other, aligning their three-year-old aspirations with a Rapunzel, Belle, Merida, Elsa or Moana with no concept that their favourite character’s day job is flogging merchandise. But, short of locking up a child in a tower, it can’t be resisted.
But now I think I’ve found a particularly disturbing and personally resonant reason for my Disneyphobia. About ten minutes into Frozen, there’s a crucial and decidedly dark plot twist, when Anna and Elsa’s parents, the king and queen of Arendelle, board a sailing ship.
In a startlingly graphic ten-second sequence, the ship is caught in a violent storm, overwhelmed by towering waves and dragged under.
Small wonder she doesn’t want ‘to sink to the bottom of the water’. Who can blame her? Curse you, Mickey Mouse.
But a few days later, it was Kate who finally got to the bottom of Phoebe’s phobia and, dammit, it turned out that Disney was not to blame. Gently quizzed by Mummy, Phoebe revealed that it wasn’t boats she was afraid of, per se, so much as boats with Daddy in them. ‘Daddy,’ Phoebe whispered in her mummy’s ear, ‘is too heavy and we will sink.’
Of course, Kate finds this hilarious, and I have to be dissuaded from explaining to Phoebe that, at 6ft tall and weighing about 14 stone, I cannot possibly be considered overweight for my height. But I take the point. It is a small boat, designed for a child (and, as I’d hoped, her daddy). But if Phoebe’s maiden voyage has to be under the command of Captain Mummy, then so be it – I’m man enough to sit it out and, thanks to the financially ruinous stress-fest that was the summer of Lucifer, Kate has the necessary skills for the job.
For now, though, decisions about crewing could wait – launch day was still a long way off. True, I’d got to this point with five months of my self-imposed deadline still in hand, but I was very aware that I’d reached what mountaineers call a false summit. There was all that ‘basic carpentry’ still to do, and not much available time in which to do it. The long run of nothing but boatbuilding had drained the coffers and now I had no choice but to return to journalism with a vengeance, to make up for lost earnings. Space for all that woodworking would somehow have to be found in the increasingly narrowing gaps between wordsmithing.
The summer came and the swifts left for Africa. With little time and money to fritter on an overseas vacation, we instead made each weekend a holiday, packed with picnics, days out and trips to the seaside. We built sandcastles and flew kites at Frinton and Southwold, charged up and down the shingle dunes at Aldeburgh, shared our fish and chips with seagulls at Felixstowe and caught bucketloads of crabs at Walberswick (tip: smoked bacon is the best bait). With all of this within an hour of home, the thought of battling through airport security for two weeks abroad seemed
ludicrous.
Weekdays saw me chained to my desk and escaping to the shed whenever possible, which never seemed to be often enough. I’d feared the closing act would be a juddering, unsatisfactory stop-start exercise in piecework, played out in fits and starts over the remaining months, and so it proved to be. The outstanding tasks weren’t difficult – certainly not when compared with the epic business of planking – but they were time-consuming, and not made any easier by the constant interruptions demanded by my ‘real’ work.
Gradually, though, it all came together. By the time autumn had blown through, stripping the trees of leaves and the skies of swallows, the centreboard case was in and the flooring was done. A small clinker dinghy isn’t normally granted the dignity of floorboards, a luxury that demands a complex system of bearers, each of which must be cut along its bottom edge to conform to the steps in the planking. But, Fabian had cautioned, without flooring the hull of a clinker boat faced ‘premature fatigue, loose fastenings, worn and cracked ribs and planks’, and that, for a 14-stone man planning to set sail with his small child, was argument enough for toughening up the Swift. The last thing Daddy wanted to do was scupper Phoebe’s maiden voyage by putting his foot in it.
It was almost Christmas before the seats, or ‘thwarts’, were finished and fixed in place on risers riveted to the hull – one amidships, flush with the top of the centreboard case, another just forward of this, with a hole through which the mast would pass on its way to the mast step, and a bench at the stern. Other details – such as the quarter knees and breasthook, bracing the three inside corners of the boat – fell into place on odd days over the next few weeks.
From the amount of time I’d spent prepping and priming the inside of the boat before the ribs went in, I should have known that painting the hull was going to be a long job, but just how long I couldn’t have imagined. In addition to sanding down every plank, and rounding off every sharp edge to improve paint adhesion, each single countersunk nail hole had to be filled and smoothed flush with the hull before the first brush-load of primer could be applied. It was also a struggle to get the temperature in the shed up to the necessary minimum of five degrees centigrade for painting. My little electric fan heater wasn’t going to cut it, so in the end I hired a propane-fired space heater.
With interruptions, overnight drying times and sanding down between coats, it was almost four more weeks before the last of the three topcoats went on. Unable to find pink paint in my local chandlery, I opted for white inside, and pale blue outside – the colour scheme for Rat’s boat in The Wind in the Willows. For a while I did consider letting Phoebe loose with a brush for a few strokes, but then common sense prevailed. Cleaning high-durability, marine-quality gloss paint off brushes and rollers was one thing (and, a tip: don’t – just throw them away); dipping my daughter in industrial-strength paint cleaner was quite another. Besides, the next time Phoebe saw it, I wanted the Swift to be finished and in the water off the hard at Pin Mill.
The mast, boom, spar, centreboard and rudder could wait – if push came to shove I could borrow these when the time came for Swift’s maiden voyage, and that wasn’t going to happen until spring saw the peninsula’s woodlands carpeted with bluebells once again. On the River Orwell most of the yachts were long gone, lifted out for winter berths on dry land, leaving the river to the flocks of oystercatchers, redshanks and turnstones and the few hardy all-weather sailors whose boats remained swinging defiantly on their moorings. Even I could see that introducing Phoebe to her boat on the hard at Pin Mill in the depths of a freezing-cold winter would be commando-parenting in the extreme, 1930s style of Ransome’s Commander Ted Walker, who in Secret Water happily maroons his four young children on an island.
But with a pair of rowlocks fixed to the gunwales, Swift is finally ready to be rowed, and that means there is only one more thing to be done: simply add water.
There are two foolproof ways to find out if a newly built wooden boat is watertight. One is to put it in the water and see if it sinks. The other is to keep it on dry land, pour water in it and see if it leaks.
Which is why I am now standing here, heart in mouth, hosepipe in hand . . .
But I can’t do it. It just doesn’t feel right. I know that neither Gus nor Fabian would ever think of doing such a thing, and neither, presumably, would the Norse boatbuilders who left their riveted timbers in the Suffolk soil fourteen centuries ago. I can’t say I’m a boatbuilder, but I have built a boat, and in so doing feel I have allied myself, no matter how superficially or incompetently, to an ancient guild with a sacred code of practice.
To stand here outside the shed in which this boat was born and slosh water inside her rather than test her, and myself, in the time-honoured fashion would be to disrespect, dishonour and betray the skills I have tried to emulate, and the bond that has been forged between us.
It’s then that I notice the raven, perched on the fence at the back of the shed and fixing me with its black, gimlet eyes. After a few seconds it utters a single ‘Kraa!’ before launching itself across the paddock and, with a few beats of its large wings, disappearing into the tree line.
That settles it. I put down the hose, haul the trailer back inside the shed and close the two sliding doors. Damn the torpedoes.
EPILOGUE
1 APRIL 2018
Even out on the open water of Butterman’s Bay, the light breeze barely troubled the skull and crossbones at the masthead. Here, in the lee of the wooded cliff, it has all but petered out, so I lower the tan lugsail and reach for the oars. But Swift, as if determined to find her own way home, requires no mortal assistance and rides the last of the flood back towards Pin Mill unaided.
The new-born boat, at the very beginning of her life’s voyage, drifts in reverential silence past the graveyard of derelict, mud-bound hulks and the neighbouring colony of wrecks-in-waiting. Redundant barges, pressed into last-gasp service as houseboats, top-heavy with the indignity of sheds, garden decks and other ‘improvements’, are moored stern-to, bows straining towards the promise of the open sea as if in the hope that their sailing days are not yet done. The higgledy-piggledy life support of gangplanks, water pipes and electricity cables that connects each one umbilically to the land suggests a gloomier prognosis. Now the little boat is clear and gliding slowly past the bottom end of the hard, where the tall scrubbing posts are all but submerged beneath the spring tide. The riverside village comes into view and that’s when I catch sight of you, playing at the distant water’s edge with Mummy.
In three weeks, you will be four years old. Sometimes it feels as though you have always been in my life – the sheer vitality of your all-consuming presence overshadows all that went before. At other times, such as now, the simple, startling fact of your existence takes me utterly by surprise.
On this bleak, uninviting Easter Sunday, few people have ventured down to Pin Mill, which suits me and my last-minute decision to launch the Swift this morning just fine. Braving a proper launch is one thing. No one said there had to be multiple witnesses.
Out here on the river, three or four yachts, all canvas aloft but barely ghosting up and down between the red and green channel markers, are the vanguard of a fair-weather fleet that is mostly still ashore, undergoing final preparations for the new season.
On the shore, a few hardy types, huddled around the usually busy tables outside the Butt and Oyster, are braving an overcast All Fool’s Day to gaze at the slate-grey beauty of the riverscape. A handful of dog-walkers, surprised by the extreme high tide and temporarily cut off from the pub, loiter on the common, watching their charges gleefully splashing about in the foot-deep water that now covers the riverside road.
Not that a crowd of any size would prevent me spotting you across the 300 yards or so that separate us. Your every movement and mannerism are now imprinted on my brain in such a way that I’m certain I couldn’t fail to recognise you if the distance between us were 300 miles.
I reach over the side and take hold of o
ne of the many vacant mooring buoys, laid for grander craft but happy enough on this slow spring day to grant temporary sanctuary to an impudent little pretender. I loop the end of the slimy rope over Swift’s stem and a tangle of aromatic green seaweed slops into the boat, contrasting vividly with the white floorboards. It’s an apt, if slightly smelly, baptism.
Safely moored, for a while we just hang there, Swift and I, suspended in time and space. With perhaps ten minutes to go until high water, there is barely enough energy left in the failing tide to carry us beyond the buoy and swing the bow around to face downstream.
Neither you nor Mummy has spotted us yet. You aren’t expecting to – as far as you know, Daddy is in the shed, working on your boat, as he has been most weekends this past year. The plan, cooked up with Mummy at short notice this very morning, is to surprise you. Given your frequently expressed desire not to board a boat with Daddy for fear that he is ‘too heavy and we will sink’, I thought a demonstration to the contrary might work wonders and, if all goes to plan, I shall shortly run Swift’s keel ashore at your feet. For the moment, at least, you are too busy throwing your sandwiches at a pair of hissing swans to look up, and Kate is preoccupied with the usual full-time task of keeping you out of harm’s way.
When I lived at Pin Mill and kept Sea Beatrice on one of these buoys – this very one, perhaps, for all my memory knows – occasionally I would row out in the tender to spend the night on board, rocked gently to sleep in a hammock slung the length of her cabin. Sitting in the cockpit as the sun went down, watching stars appear and sky and water leach colour into one another until it was no longer possible to tell them apart, I felt I was at the centre of my own small but perfectly formed universe. Ashore lay Pin Mill and the waterfront cottage, which felt like my first true home. Upriver, half a mile to the west, stood Woolverstone Hall and its life-shaping experiences; 7 miles to the east, the open sea and its unbounded promise. From where I was sitting, the picture appeared perfectly composed.
How to Build a Boat Page 27