Only now, watching you energetically commanding centre-stage in that same tableau, is it clear what the canvas of my life lacked.
Finally, lazily, Swift has swung round to face downstream, but now the mooring line between bow and buoy hangs limp. This spring tide, as mighty as it has been, has nothing more to offer. We are in slack water.
I am impatient to row ashore to introduce you to your boat, but the past sixteen months have been such a frantic white-water ride that part of me is reluctant to disturb this blissful moment of suspended animation. I am free of my self-imposed exile in the shed, free of all the doubt and anxiety, free of the all-consuming soundtrack of sawing, planing, hammering, chiselling and riveting. Now here I am, perfectly weightless at the very apex of the roller-coaster, poised in that magical moment before gravity reasserts its dominion, and it’s an unexpectedly heady sensation.
Before I left the house this morning, sneaking out nervously to confront the truth of my labours, I caught sight of the linocut that set me on this path over three years ago. ‘Could you do this?’ Boy Building A Boat had inquired. I picked up the slim volume and smiled. I guess we’re about to find out . . .
Yes, I had reassembled the component parts of several trees into something resembling a boat. Yet, in the spirit of Edmund Hillary’s observation that getting to the summit of Everest was one thing, but being able to claim that one had ‘knocked the bastard off’ was quite another, and wholly dependent upon getting back down again alive, I recognised that building a boat that doesn’t float is not to have built a boat at all.
On reflection, perhaps All Fools’ Day wasn’t the most auspicious occasion on which to introduce a newly built wooden boat to the water, even for the sort of plucky, audacious, damn-the-torpedoes type of swashbuckling adventurer one aspires to be. But, in the event, the only price I paid for tempting fate was to lose a boot in the stinking, sucking mud.
As any fool who plans to go boating hereabouts should know – especially a fool who once lived on this very spot, and whose life was synchronised with the rhythm of the ebb and flow – there is a grand, celestial predictability to the coming and going of the tides. I live a few miles inland now, of course, and that is my excuse for having neglected to pay sufficiently close attention to the fact that today, of all days, the alignment of sun, earth and moon was such that the tide would rise much higher, and fall correspondingly lower, than usual. That spring tide accounted for the long walk I had down the hard this morning to find the water’s edge. By the time I had reached it, the act of sliding Swift off her trolley and into the river at its muddiest edge had become little more than a brusquely conducted formality, stripped of all ceremony.
I pushed her off and scrambled in, scrabbling for the oars to get her free of the mud. It was only when we were drifting in clear water that it struck me . . .
She floated – and, what’s more, she floated with Daddy in her. Apprehensively, I lifted one of the floorboards. A clinker-hulled wooden boat can be expected to let in water here and there before its planks swell a little and seal any minor imperfections. But, to my surprise, the bilge was all but dry – such water as I could see had almost certainly come into the boat via my surviving boot. Even the centreboard case, which I’d feared would leak like a sieve, appeared to be watertight.
This seemed barely credible. I was painfully aware of the many cock-ups I had made, the fact that not one strake had gone on entirely to my satisfaction, that far too many rivets had been hammered home more in hope than in expectation of a proper fit. I’d been fully braced to carry out remedial repairs, to haul Swift ashore after a short and damp maiden voyage and stuff any leaky gaps between planks with filler, but, incredibly, it seemed there might be no need.
This could mean only one of two things. Either the whole ancient clinker process was a lot more forgiving than its champions let on, or . . . I had – improbably, impossibly – knocked the bastard off.
Perhaps us denizens of the modern, digital world aren’t quite as helpless and impractical as we fear and, when push comes to shove, our soft hands can be turned to rough work. Maybe the transgenerational faith of my League of Dead Experts had not been so misplaced after all.
Of course, I’m not fooling myself – or anyone else. I know that while I may have built a boat, I am by no stretch of the imagination a boat-builder. While Swift would win no prizes in a beauty contest – not that I would submit her to the indignity of such a thing – she is, I have little doubt, both tough enough to handle a wave-driven crash-landing on an east-coast shingle beach and sufficiently stable to protect a little girl who’s learning to become a pirate.
But, I freely concede, Swift is a charming collaboration of imperfections, as anyone even faintly au fait with the art and craft of boat-building could tell at a glance. I don’t mind. I’m as proud of those mistakes as a warrior of his battle scars. They attest to the fact that this boat – this boat that actually floats, for heaven’s sake – came into being despite all the odds. It is a symbol of the triumph of determination over ignorance and incompetence, and that, of course, is one of the purposes it exists to serve. I can only hope that, on balance, the trees that contributed towards Swift’s existence don’t feel too cheated of their destiny.
It has been a long and occasionally stormy voyage of discovery. Am I glad I embarked upon it? Inexpressibly so. I have discovered that, despite my self-doubt and life experience to the contrary, I really am able to see things through when they matter. I have also gained vast respect for those who practise the skills handed down unchanged for the best part of two millennia and an understanding that the past does not lie dead and buried in the soil or imprisoned in a lifeless museum display case, but is alive and well in the hands of men like Fabian Bush and Gus Curtis. The Vikings are among us still.
Most crucially of all, I have created a vessel for a father’s love, a gift to inspire his daughter and remind her of the limitless horizons that are hers to explore. In the process, I have also come to an understanding that, if it is to be truly fulfilling for all concerned, parenthood demands the willing letting-go of one’s own small, self-serving ambitions in the unconditional service of the new life for which one has volunteered to become wholly and joyfully responsible.
Better late than never, I suppose, but I regret that I so comprehensively failed to figure this out the first time around. I can only hope that, as the process of building this boat has finally granted me a more sympathetic perspective on my mother’s troubled passage through life, so Adam, Phoebe’s half-brother, will find a way to forgive his father’s hopelessness and know that I love him.
Would I build another boat? Absolutely not. Unless, perhaps, someone offered me an irresistibly substantial amount of money to do so. Upfront. Even then, I would feel honour-bound to advise such a someone that their money would be far better invested in a proper boat-builder, such as Fabian.
It isn’t quite over – I still have work to do and John won’t be getting his shed back just yet. Out of time, I had to borrow the mast, rig and tiller from a friend of Fabian’s. But the confidence with which I contemplate making those parts now would have utterly surprised the man who hesitantly cut out his first piece of oak some fourteen months ago – oak that is now the freshly water-beaded stem of a pretty blue-and-white boat, whose introduction to her new owner is overdue.
I drop the mooring line back into the river, slip the oars into the rowlocks and pull towards the shore. As I settle into the old, familiar rhythm, I revisit the daydream that got me through so many of the long days of self-imposed exile in the shed.
One glorious summer’s afternoon – this year, perhaps, or maybe next – you and I will board Swift and push off from the hard for a great little adventure, which we will remember to the end of our days.
I take up the oars to get us away while you handle the tiller. You steer us out to the barge posts and then point the bow downstream, past the slumbering colony of beached barges and the boneyard of wrecks. As we c
lear the shadow of the wooded cliffs, the soft southeasterly breeze that has been rippling the river ahead of us finally ruffles your golden hair. It’s time to stow the oars, haul up the sail and let the wind and the last hour of the ebbing tide carry us downstream. At peninsula’s end, we give the vast container terminal at Felixstowe a respectfully wide berth and bear away, paying out the boom and slipping into the timeless tranquillity of the Stour. The tide has turned and carries us upriver with it.
Somewhere along the wide waterway’s deserted north bank, we stop for the night, hauling Swift onto a sandy beach. We lower the Jolly Roger and fly it from an oar, driven into the sand. ‘We claim this land.’ I pitch our small tent on the scrubby grass above the waterline while you scavenge for high-and-dry driftwood and we cook our supper over an open fire – a stew, followed by marshmallows toasted on sticks.
As the moon rises, we retreat to our sleeping bags and gaze up at the North Star, whose unwavering light has guided explorers since the first human beings took to the sea. We watch the stars cartwheel across the sky and you fall asleep before you manage to count them all . . .
One hundred yards to go. Swift rows well.
In a black-and-white photograph taken at this very spot during the summer of 1908, a young girl in a stiff white dress stands as close to the water’s edge as she dares to go without risking the ruin of her best pair of shoes. Two boys, meanwhile, about her age, are up to their knees in the water, having great fun and apparently doing their best to make off with a small boat tethered to a wooden post. The girl, buttoned up in her Sunday best, can only look on enviously.
I glance over my shoulder at you, beginning to explore your unlimited world in the very spot where, a century ago, another little girl was discovering only the limitations of hers. You have timed your arrival in this world well.
Mummy’s pointing now, trying to draw your attention away from whatever it is you’ve discovered in the mud, and you look up just as Swift’s keel glides to a halt a few yards away. It takes a moment, but then recognition and wonder flood in and your face breaks into a broad smile.
‘Daddy!’ you shout, splashing through the water towards me. ‘Is that my boat?’
It is, my captain.
You stand on the shore of the unsailed sea that is your life. May you sail it with courage, compassion, grace and joy.
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2018
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Jonathan Gornall, 2018
The right of Jonathan Gornall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
www.simonandschuster.com.au
www.simonandschuster.co.in
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-6478-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-6480-4
Typeset in the UK by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd are committed to sourcing paper that is made from wood grown in sustainable forests and support the Forest Stewardship Council, the leading international forest certification organisation. Our books displaying the FSC logo are printed on FSC certified paper.
How to Build a Boat Page 28