It was an aquatic game of skittles, and I was about to score a perfect strike.
As I called out an apologetic ‘Um … er … hello?’ the instructor and his party looked upstream to see a large yellow dinghy in full sail hurtling sideways down the rapid at them. Newly learnt paddle techniques were abandoned as the pink kayaks struggled to splash out of the way in the turbulent waters and a dozen white-faced eight-year-olds suddenly decided to switch to Pony Trekking elective from now on.
There was nothing at all I could do and, as it turned out, only three of the kayaks capsized, surely an invaluable opportunity for the class to experience a real capsize drill. The instructor was even gracious enough to retrieve my truant oar and return it as I swept on down the next bend, though he need not have hurled it at me quite so vigorously. And for once, the pith helmet didn’t raise even the faintest of smiles.
Stourport came and went. Ever since my limping pensioner at Shrewsbury Weir had told me about his collision with a tanker at Stourport, I had entertained uneasy doubts about the place. I envisaged it as a vast industrial dockland where liners and freighters jostled for position alongside huge concrete wharves, and a small dinghy was likely to come to an untimely end beneath seventy tons of misdirected scrap iron. I was relieved to find that Stourport was nothing more alarming than a little riverside town whose only pretension to the world of shipping was that here the Severn became officially navigable. White cabin cruisers and motor boats now became frequent sights along the riverbanks, as well as a whole host of mysterious signs and noticeboards with alarming amounts of red-for-danger symbols all over them. No doubt I would find out what they all meant in time …
And so the journey rolled on, mile after mile, day after day. Upton-upon-Severn was the next night’s stop, a model village with a Roundhead history and an extraordinary tower called the Pepper-pot, domed in green bronze and almost lighthouse-like in appearance. Next came the abbey town of Tewkesbury, where I lunched in a fish-and-chip shop whose proprietor stood amid all the greasy bustle of his three harassed staff in the kitchen and practised gypsy tunes on his violin. Full of battered fish, I sailed on to a tiny hamlet called Lower Lode where stands a wonderful riverside inn. Here the lawns sweep down to the broad river, horses champ in the cobbled yard behind, and an old ferryman passes the time of day over a mug of tea and talks of eel fishing and tides. For yes, even here, within hearing of the chimes of Tewkesbury Abbey, the river is tidal, though the landscape around looks as rural and land-locked as Shropshire – from this point on I must plan my journeying with the tides in mind.
That night I sit and share my supper with the family Labrador, dine on blackberries picked that day by the innkeeper’s wife and, because the inn is fully booked by fishermen down for a competition, I am put up on a camp bed in the skittle-alley. I cannot think of a much pleasanter place to stay, more homely, more relaxed and unconventional, and life takes on that Elysian tint that I had so looked for when I set out. Jerome K. Jerome is probably sitting at the next table.
In the morning seven fishermen and I sit down at a big scrubbed kitchen table for a breakfast out of a bygone age. There is milk in a big cream jug of blue and white china, steaming hot porridge and amber honey dripping through a comb, catching the morning sunlight in its golden net. There follows a cooked platter of fat sausages nearly bursting their skins, mushrooms dropped sizzling from the pan straight onto the plate, and poached fresh farm eggs on buttered toast, and after that more toast with dark, chunky Oxford marmalade and scalding coffee. The burly fishermen are amused and interested by my trip so far, and wish me luck on the remainder of the voyage. Only one thing my breakfast companions say depresses me. Gloucester is apparently only another day’s journey downstream, and until this moment Gloucester has been the intended finishing point of my journey, the point at which I have been planning to leave Jack de Crow for Philip to pick up, and to rejoin the twentieth century. Gloucester. One more day. A great despondency settles over me and I push away a proffered second helping of toast. I didn’t feel I was ending the voyage; I felt that I’d only just begun.
* I did not make it to Gloucester that night. The wind sprang up from the south-west and drove up the river in a steady head-on gale, so that I was forced to row or tack downstream.
No sailing boat can sail straight into the wind any more than a twig can drift upstream. But with the sails pulled in hard and the centreboard down, a dinghy can sail diagonally into the wind, though no more than 45 degrees. This is called being close hauled, and when the boat zigzags from side to side like a bishop on a chessboard it is said to be tacking or beating.
Out on the broad Atlantic, or even on a fair-sized lake, tacking is part of the fun and challenge of sailing. On a river, only the challenge remains. Firstly, the relative narrowness of the river makes it necessary to be tacking every fifty seconds or so, with all the flurry and weight-shifting and sail-flapping that this entails. Secondly, the wind is famously fickle, shifting direction every few yards depending on whether you are out in mid-river or close in to a bank. When the wind is behind you, these slight shifts make no great diff erence, but when tacking, they are maddening. Three times on every tack I found myself pinching the wind because it had swung around a little, or clapped in irons under the lee of a cliff y bank and forced to go through the whole tiller-waggling, sail-shaking process of starting up again.
At times that day the wind became so faint and flighty that I gave up trying to sail and decided to row. So … loosen the main halyard. Lower the gaff and mainsail into the boat, not into the water. Bundle gaff , boom and sail into a long wrapped red sausage. Hold together with two elastic straps. Hoist the whole furled bundle up the mast out of the way. Tie off halyard on the cleat. Haul up centreboard and stow it away on front deck. Pull up the rudder with the drawstring and cleat it. Ship the oars. Start rowing.
No sooner had I done this than the wind would strengthen into a steady, silver gale, smurring the whole reach of the river with pewter ripples and making every oar stroke a futile attempt to hold my position and not be blown upstream.
So I would decide to try sailing again. Then, of course, by the time I had reversed all the above process, the wind would have died down once more.
It was, frankly, heartbreaking. Eventually I pulled in exhausted to a tiny hamlet called Ashlewort. Here a tiny riverside pub nestled next to an ancient grey-steepled church; inside it was cool and quiet, smelling of hassocks and furniture polish and old roses. On the lectern stood a huge spread-eagled Bible open, as I discovered, to Psalm 107. There were the words, ‘And those who go down to the sea in ships, And do business on the great waters, They too see the wonders of the Lord upon the deeps.’
It’s nice to have these Divine promptings occasionally but I was beginning to doubt if I would reach the Lord’s great waters after all – not unless the Lord could bring Himself to fiddle with the isobars a bit and send me a favourable wind, thank you very much.
On the next day, the Lord met me halfway. The wretched southerly died away but was replaced with a flat and cheerless calm, so I rowed the remaining drab miles to Gloucester in a sullen temper. Already the river was clearly tidal, as the mud banks dropped steeply into the turgid waters on either side and roots of osier and willow hung bleached and scum-whitened above a tangle of debris: detergent bottles, polystyrene foam and hairy red waterweed. Beyond Gloucester, the Severn, I had been warned, became utterly unnavigable, running out to sea in a series of wide estuarine loops that were at low tide a maze of mudbanks and shoals or in flood a raging torrent of whirlpools, eddies and maelstroms. In fact, it is the birthplace of one of the oddest tidal phenomena in the world, the Severn Bore. Every year at the spring and autumn tides, the inrush of water up the narrowing bottleneck of the estuary causes a single wave, four feet high, to race up the river, sometimes up to twenty-six miles inland. Spectators gather on the banks to watch this oddity, presumably well equipped with Wellington boots and perhaps even snorkelling gear. I read
of one intrepid chap who took a surf-board down one year and rode the crest of this wave all the way up to Tewkesbury, arriving terrified and exhausted along with logs, smashed punts, a chicken shed and one or two corpses that the wave had picked up along the way.
The imminence of the Severn Bore’s arrival was one reason I could not even dream of going beyond Gloucester on the river. Besides, a large weir below Gloucester made the river impassable even for tiny craft, there being no lock or boat pass. It really did seem that Gloucester was the end of the line and I would not even have the satisfaction of reaching the sea. So much for bumping into Africa …
I rather wished for a better terminus. True, the city’s cathedral is a jewel of design, a glory of honey-coloured stone and fan-vaulted ceilings, but much of the town centre has gone the way of so many other English cities, spoilt by a rash of sixties blocks built by the Public Lavatory School of Architecture. The old wharves area has been resurrected – though whether designer clothes shops and hippy-hoppy burger bars are an improvement on the tarry bustle of cargo ships and barges, ocean-going yachts and busy tugboats is a moot point. As I stood there gazing out over the wharves and warehouses, imagining the days when Gloucester was a busy maritime port, a question suddenly occurred to me: how, if the Severn River has been an impassable, unnavigable channel since the Pleistocene Age, did all these clippers and cutters, these barques and barges, these frigates and freighters ever get here in the first place?
The answer, I found, was a little thing called the Sharpness Canal, and I realised the voyage wasn’t over yet. I might just be joining those Biblical seabound mariners after all.
High Tide to Bristol
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood,
leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
—SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar
The Sharpness Canal runs roughly parallel with the Severn Estuary for sixteen miles from Gloucester to the port of Sharpness on the Bristol Channel. The canal, I was to discover, cuts across flat, wind-bitten fields enlivened only by the occasional lock-keeper’s cottage incongruously decorated with classical Doric porticoes, each one resembling a miniature Greek temple. Once at Sharpness you can be lowered to sea-level in an enormous lock and let loose on the Bristol Channel beyond the worst of the mud-flats and vagaries of the Bore. This then was my route, if only to let Jack de Crow sniff the salt air and retire with the dignity of knowing she had reached the sea. Then, I told myself firmly, I really would have to stop.
I set off from Gloucester on a morning of grey skies and a strong wind that blew unwaveringly from the south-west. After a mile of slogging along through the usual dreary wasteland that fringes every town, between high brick walls, cyclone-wire fences, the backs of warehouses and supermarkets and multiplex cinemas, I had reached the edges of flat fields and pastures – and the point of exhaustion. The wind was too strong to row against. An attempt at hoisting sail had proved what I knew already – that it was far too narrow a canal to make tacking an option. I was on the point of deciding that Ellesmere to Gloucester was a perfectly respectable journey for a small Mirror dinghy to make, and wondering whether trains ran direct to London, when a booming hoot blasted out from astern.
There, steaming down the canal behind me was a huge vessel, a triple-decked party ship on her way down to Sharpness. As I rowed violently to the bank to avoid being run down, the skipper called out, ‘Ahoy! Doctor Livingstone! Need a tow, mate?’
Two minutes later I was aboard, a hot coffee was in my hands and Jack de Crow was bobbing astern riding the white wake like a champion surfer. It seemed we would reach the sea after all. The vessel was called King Arthur (which pleased me), and Terry, the captain, was a black-bearded, twinkly-eyed chap who, had his hair been whiter, would have been advertising Captain Birdseye fish fingers on the telly.
As we ploughed our way along the canal, he regaled me with tales of surly lock-keepers, dopey narrowboat owners and the one-hundred-and-one ways you can die on the inland waterways of Britain. Meanwhile, I was realising a few mistakes of my own. The first was not putting my centreboard down: the speed with which Jack was being towed was causing water to bubble up through the centreboard case like the Trevi Fountain and already the dinghy was half full of water. The second mistake was not stowing the oars properly: I had been in such a hurry to clamber aboard before Terry changed his mind that I had left them in their rowlocks and merely balanced on the gunwales. The swooping and bucketing of the dinghy on the stern wash had dislodged them and now they were trailing in the wake, threatening to drop overboard at any time. The third mistake was in being towed at all.
The first thing that happened was that King Arthur stopped dead with a sticky slurp. We had struck a mudbank in mid-canal. Jack, not concentrating, carried merrily on at her former speed and nose-butted King Arthur’s stern with timber-cracking force. Not only that, but the suddenly slackened towline drooped down into the water and threatened to wrap itself around the churning propellers.
This somehow never happened, and Jack drifted around to a safer position snuggled up alongside her mother ship – safer, that is, until in an attempt to reverse off the mudbank King Arthur’s stern swung heavily in to one side and looked like crushing Jack’s ribs between herself and the bank.
Terry seemed cheerfully unconcerned about the potential damage to his ship or mine. He twiddled the wheel and shoved levers to and fro without abating the flow of amusing disaster stories from all corners of navigable Britain. Meanwhile, King Arthur churned and wallowed and swung about like a mother sow with Jack dangling from her tail. I began to wonder whether Terry had been merely a witness to all these tales of inland shipwreck, or in fact the prime agent of them. They were certainly told in the third person, but then so were Caesar’s Gallic Wars.
I need not have worried. Terry was as competent as he was kindly, and soon we were on our way again. However, the exercise had been a neat little demonstration of the Dangers of Being Towed, and had covered, I felt, all areas of concern.
One other thing Terry did for me was to turn my two-week jaunt into a year of major voyaging. ‘You’ll be going through the Channel then to Bristol, I suppose?’ he asked breezily.
‘What?! Oh no … I mean … well, you can’t, can you?’
‘Don’t see why not. Good little boat like that, no problem. You’d have to pick your tide, of course, and your weather, but you’d be alright.’
At first I thought he was joking. Then I wondered if this was how he had acquired so many hilarious boating disasters in his repertoire: by prompting gullible fools like myself to acts of idiocy and then standing back quietly to take notes. (‘Yes, the best way of opening the lock gates is to ram them hard. Standard practice, honestly … Bristol Channel in a Mirror dinghy? Easy-peasy! Let me get your name spelt correctly for the obituary column.’) Was he a sort of Iago of the Waterways, encouraging all comers to rash acts of folly while he himself stood neutrally aside? But when we arrived at Sharpness and I said my thanks and farewells, he seemed so confident in my likelihood of going on, so matter-of-fact about the dangers and the ways to minimise them, that before I’d cast off and rowed three strokes, I knew my sights were now set on Bristol.
Sharpness is a place of contrasts. On the one hand there are the docks, a huge area of concrete basins, giant steel cranes, hangars and warehouses and ocean-going tankers, all as bleak and grey and businesslike as shipping ports the world over. But, just around the corner from all this, one branch of the canal ends in a secluded basin tucked beneath a gentle hill that shelters it from the salty winds off the Bristol Channel. Here in the clear depths grow waterlilies and globeflowers, and black moorhens dabble about the bankside reeds. A fleet of swans sails on the ruffled blue surface and a dilapidated row of pontoons holds a motley collection of small craft: old motor launches, small yachts, dinghies and punts with fading paintwork.
The hillside above is a rich tangle of blackberry brambles and windswept trees with here and there a cottage nestled deep in a garden bright with autumn flowers: dahlias, marigolds, chrysanthemums, all in seasonal burgundies and golds.
At the head of this basin is a thick concrete pier wall, and stepping onto this I was surprised to find that the other side dropped a sheer forty feet onto the sands of the Severn Estuary. The tide was out. Standing there one could look out across a mile of tawny sandbanks and shoals and the curling silver ribbons of water to the opposite shore where rose the green pastures of Wales. To my right, the estuary narrowed into the blueness of distant hills, and to the left, broadened into a sea of sandy waters stretching limitlessly to the southern horizon; a faint smudge of shadow down there was all that could be seen of the two Severn bridges.
I stood for a while gazing at the purple weed tumbled against the foot of the wall forty feet below me, a pair of herring gulls wrangling over a fishy morsel on a nearby pontoon, and at the vast glimmering hazy brightness of air and sea and sand before me … then turned to go and find someone to talk me out of my newly grown and perfectly idiotic ambition.
The running of an important shipping port like Sharpness is a serious business, demanding organisation, a military severity of discipline and an almost Teutonic respect for the Rules. Captain Horatio Eggersley was just the man for the job. His short, plump figure and baby face with a wisp of red hair tufting out on top were belied by the steely-eyed manner in which he tackled his job as Harbourmaster. Thousand-ton grain ships from the Argentine and rusting freighters from Russia were moved about with the tactical precision of chess pieces. Cranes and derricks swung to and fro in a balletic dance at his choreographic command, and the tides rose and fell to within a centimetre of his carefully computed calculations. The very gulls fly in formation within the precincts of Sharpness Harbour.
His reaction to my suggestion that I might take my Mirror dinghy down the Bristol Channel was not entirely unexpected. He fixed me with a long stare to assess my mental state before reaching behind him and pulling from an orderly file a sheaf of documents. We were in his office perched high above the harbour basin. Computer screens blinked and glowed, charts and timetables covered the walls stuck with little colour-coded pins and the afternoon sunlight glinted on the braid and brass buttons of his uniform. I found myself struggling not to address him as ‘Admiral.’
The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Page 7