by Roger Bax
“Of course, if she were handled right. She’s built to keep the seas.”
I felt suddenly queer. I heard my voice saying, rather distantly, “Joe, I think I’d like to buy her.”
Joe was looking at me strangely. He said: “Are you sure you’re all right? You’ve gone quite white.”
I said: “I’m all right. How much does the old boy want for her?”
“He’s asking a thousand, but he might take less.”
“Do you think I could handle her … ?”
“Well …” Joe began cautiously.
I jumped up. “Come on. Let’s go and have a look at her.”
We took his dinghy and rowed across to Dawn. Joe introduced me to the owner and we were invited aboard. The cutter was very snug inside. There wasn’t a lot of head-room for a tall fellow like me but there were four berths, two in the fo’c’s’le, as well as a small toilet and a galley. She seemed to be fairly well-found. I made some technical inquiries and learned that she had an iron keel and a draught of three-foot six. She had several suits of sails and what looked like a rather ancient pattern of auxiliary motor. I had a hunch, and was eager to buy her. I knew this wasn’t the right way to buy a boat; I knew I was behaving like an idiot and that I should probably regret it when I came to my senses. All the same, I arranged to meet the owner in the Anchor Inn at six o’clock that evening and make him an offer. Then I rowed Joe back to the workshop, without talking. In fact, I avoided his eye. There was something about his expression that I didn’t very much like.
When we got back to the saltings I said: “What’s the matter, Joe? What’s on your mind? She’s a sound boat, isn’t she?”
“Oh yes, she’s sound,” said Joe. He spoke as though soundness were a mere trifle. “Mind you, she’d need a good bit of spending on her. Her engine’s no good. But the hull is first-rate.”
Coming from Joe, that was as good as a survey for me. I said: “Could you get her ready for sea? Quickly?”
Joe wriggled uneasily. It was the first time I had ever seen him really disconcerted. If I’d been suggesting a particularly shady black-market deal he couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable. If I’d known him a bit better I’d have seen that in his unassertive way he was waving a red light as hard as he could.
“I suppose so,” he said. “It would take about a couple of months to do her up properly. There might be a bit of difficulty getting the right engine, but I expect we could pick one up somewhere.”
“Good,” I said. “The job’s yours. Joe, what’s it like sailing a 10-tonner alone?”
I suppose I knew what he really wanted to say as well as he did. If ever honesty struggled with an obvious desire to please, it was doing so now on Joe’s face. But I just didn’t want to hear his real opinion. He knew that too. After an eloquent pause he grinned a bit sheepishly and said, “Well, it’s all right if the weather’s good.”
“I could find someone else to come along too,” I said defensively. “I know a chap who’s in the same boat as I am—matrimonially speaking, I mean. I’m sure he’d come.”
“Does he know anything about sailing?”
“No, but he can learn.”
Joe sighed. “I shall get a commission on this sale,” he said, “but I shouldn’t like you to feel you’d been hurried into it. P’raps you’d better think it over.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “If your sales talk is always like this,” I said, “you’ll never get that new workshop. Of course, I agree it’s a long way to the Baltic …”
“It’s a long way to Southend Pier,” said Joe darkly, “on a bad day.”
I came down to earth then and spoke what was in my mind. It wasn’t a question of heroics, it was a question of having no alternative. I said: “Joe, I’m going to recover my wife. If I can’t, then frankly I’d sooner drown.”
Joe looked worried. “It’s not my business,” he said, “but have you worked it all out? It’ll be very difficult, won’t it?”
“Let’s get the boat first, and we’ll work it out afterwards. All I want to know now is whether this boat, with reasonable luck and skill, will have a fair chance of making a safe passage across the sea.”
“You wouldn’t find a better boat,” said Joe obstinately.
“Then let’s buy her,” I said, and we set off for the village. I wanted to do it before I had time to get cold feet. We found the old boy in the pub, and I ordered three pints and offered him eight hundred and fifty pounds. He looked at Joe and knew that was Joe’s figure. He said, “Make it nine hundred.” I said, “Right.” I asked the landlord to find us a sheet of paper, and while the owner wrote out the receipt I wrote out the cheque. Joe provided the stamp and in a couple of minutes the deal was done.
“Well,” I said, lifting my glass, “here’s to Dawn.”
Joe raised his glass with a thin smile, took a drink, and choked.
Chapter Three
Next day I travelled up to town by an early train. There was a letter from Steve saying that he’d got short leave and was planning to spend it in London, but giving no other news of any consequence. I rang up Jack Denny’s lodgings and left a message asking him to come round to my flat in the evening. I hadn’t seen very much of him since my return to England, but we had kept in touch. He was working in a jet-engine factory in Brixton.
I’d done some pretty hard thinking on the way up to town, and the results weren’t very encouraging. I didn’t for a moment regret the impulse which had led me to buy Dawn, but I wasn’t crazy enough to imagine that my project—if you could call it that at such an early stage—had more than an outside chance of success. What I felt was that if I could sell the scheme to the practical and prosaic Denny, I should have moved from the fantastic to the merely improbable.
His very appearance, when at last he sat opposite me in the flat clasping a double whisky, was solid and reassuring. He must have been the only man in England who still wore boots from choice. I asked him for his news of Svetlana, which was negligible, and then I took a deep breath and said, “Denny, I’ve got a proposition to make.”
“Oh?” said Denny noncommittally.
“Yes. I think you and I together could fetch Svetlana and Marya out of Russia.”
Denny took a sip of whisky and put the glass down. Then he took out his pipe, blew through it, filled it, lighted it, and very deliberately put the matches back in his pocket.
“How?” he asked.
“I’ve bought a boat. I think we could sail it to the Baltic and pick them up somewhere on the coast this summer.” I added hopefully that the boat had an engine.
“How big’s the boat?”
“Oh, about twice the length of this room.”
Denny said he couldn’t swim.
I could see he wasn’t taking me very seriously, and I couldn’t blame him. To a man who has never been on anything rougher than the Serpentine and who doesn’t really like the water anyway, the idea of a long sea passage in a small boat can’t be very engaging. I did my best to make the proposition sound rational. I pointed out that I’d done quite a bit of sailing before the war, and that because a boat was small it didn’t mean that it wasn’t seaworthy, and that sailing was perfectly safe if you chose your weather carefully, and that anyway we’d be in sheltered waters for a good part of the time. I drew an idyllic word-picture of the pleasures of summer cruising; I tried to impress him with a lot of technical jargon about anchors and spinnakers and sailing on the wind; I said that in any case we both needed a holiday.
I built up what I thought was an almost irresistible case, and waited anxiously for the reaction. At last Denny said, “I think it would be a lot safer to smuggle them out in a large box.”
I didn’t think he meant it, but he just might have, and that shows how fantastic this whole affair was. One person had tried that method of leaving Moscow, as part of the diplomatic luggage of some country or other. However, Denny was apparently joking about the box. He said, “How would they get to the coast?”
“There aren’t any restrictions on travel inside the country,” I said. “Not for Russians.”
“No,” said Denny, “but there aren’t any spare seats on the trains either. You know what a job it is getting a ticket unless you’re an official.”
“Oh, come, Denny,” I said, “I’m sure they could find a way to get over that.” I felt he was making difficulties.
“There’s another thing,” said Denny. “Suppose they got picked up by the N.K. V.D. while they were hanging about on some beach waiting for us? They wouldn’t have much of a future then.”
“They may not have much of a future anyway if we can’t get them out,” I said.
“M’m.” Denny chewed reflectively on his pipe. You could almost hear the wheels going round in his mind. Presently he said: “I don’t see how you’d manage to do all the arranging—with them, I mean. The timing would have to be very good—practically like a military operation. We’d need continuous contact with them. How would we tell them everything? Write it through the post for the censor to read?”
“Steve Quillan will be in London soon,” I said. “We could talk to him about that. I believe there’s a way. I haven’t thought it all out—damn it, I only bought the boat last night. Obviously we’ll have to go into all the details, and if we find the idea’s not practicable we’ll just have to drop it. I don’t want to rush you into anything—I just want your help in exploring possibilities. I agree our plans have got to be just about one hundred per cent watertight before we make any serious move.”
“Yes,” said Denny with heavy humour, “and so’s the boat.”
For a while he sat there stolidly smoking. I’ve never seen a man look less convinced. He said, “When would you think of making the attempt—and where?”
“Well,” I said, “it would have to be some time in August or early September. Before then, the nights wouldn’t be long enough. If we left it any later we couldn’t reasonably expect good weather. As for the place, we’d have to go into all that with maps and charts. I should think any quiet spot between Leningrad and Riga would do, provided it were accessible for the girls. There’d be nothing at all unusual in their strolling down to the seashore after dark on a warm summer night. We’d row ashore in a dinghy, pick them up, and be well away from the coast before morning.”
“It sounds easy,” said Danny, “the way you put it. I can’t think why it’s not been done more often. Aren’t you forgetting the guards they’re bound to have on the coast? I remember somebody at the Mission once saying that in 1940, when the Russians took over the Baltic States, there were some bits of the shore where they had a man posted every hundred and fifty yards.”
“I’m sure that was exceptional. That was a time when every second Balt was trying to get to Sweden in a small boat. I don’t suppose they’ve got more than a normal coastguard service these days. We’ll have to find out.”
Denny grinned. “That’s right,” he said. “We’ll take a day trip to Leningrad and walk along the shore and ask the first N.K.V.D. chap we meet to give us the dispositions.”
“There must be other ways,” I said, a bit lamely. “Anyhow, I’m sure you’re exaggerating that particular danger. We might be unlucky, of course, but they can’t possibly watch every inch of that long coastline.”
“They’d get very suspicious,” said Denny, “when they saw your boat stooging about in the Gulf of Finland or wherever it was. They’d probably keep tabs on you the whole time.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s something we can find out only by going there. After all, there wouldn’t be much danger for anyone unless we actually made the rescue attempt and failed. We could perfect our plans and be all ready to carry them out. If at the last minute we weren’t able to turn up, the girls would just have to go back to Moscow. It would be pretty shattering for them, naturally, but they’d be no worse off than before. They’d just have had a short holiday at the seaside.”
“I suppose so,” said Denny dubiously. “Of course, if they did get away in your boat the Russians would take it out of their relatives.”
“I don’t know who they’d find except third cousins,” I said. “Svetlana’s mother and father are dead, and she’s an only child. Marya hasn’t seen anything of her parents since she joined the ballet school—they’re probably dead too. I can’t think of anyone who’d suffer.”
“What about the other wives?” Denny asked. “It wouldn’t do their case much good if we kidnapped Svetlana and Marya.”
I said: “I know. I thought of that. But do you honestly think, Denny, at this stage, that there’s any chance whatever that the Russians will change their minds, however well the wives behave? I don’t. Of course, in ten or fifteen years, if there isn’t a war, the situation may be different, but that’s not going to be much use to anyone. I think we’re justified in getting ours out if we can. Come on, Denny. What about it?”
Denny slowly shook his head. “I don’t feel so completely hopeless as you do about a Russian change of mind,” he said. “You can never tell. And anyway, I just don’t see this plan of yours coming off. I think your boat would be spotted and followed wherever it went, as long as it was anywhere near the Russian coast. I think they’d sound the alarm all over the Baltic. I don’t believe you could count on getting a dinghy to the shore so quietly that no one would notice. There’d probably be a scrap, and all four of us would be shot. And suppose the weather was bad. Think of the lousy summer we had last year—just one storm after another. Of course, I don’t want to dissuade you …”
By that time I’d had about as much as I could take. The trouble was that in Denny’s place I’d have felt the same as he did. There was nothing much to argue about, because we both knew the conditions and the risks. It was really a question of temperament—and on my part, I suppose, of wishful thinking. When my imagination got to work, the difficulties went down like ninepins; when Denny approached them they stood up like Eiffel Towers.
All the same, I got a couple of concessions out of him before we dropped the subject. He said he’d give the idea more thought, and he also said he’d come sailing with me in Wayfarer the next week-end—‘without prejudice’. For the time being we left it at that.
I felt very dashed as I travelled down to Southfleet with another week’s rations in my rucksack. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d made a tactical error in not working out a plan in greater detail before approaching Denny. As an engineer, he’d have liked to see a working model or at least a blueprint. All I’d offered him was a pretty bedtime story.
Belatedly, I began in my mind to clothe the bare skeleton of the idea with a little flesh. I imagined us setting out from Southfleet in Dawn at about the end of May or in early June. We should have a long and tricky passage to Gothenburg in Sweden—three or four hundred miles of open water. That would mean several nights at sea, and would require that each of us should be able to handle the boat in order to relieve the other. It would obviously be impossible for Denny to learn more than the rudiments of sailing in so short a time, and it would therefore be a further condition of success that the weather should be absolutely perfect. That wasn’t as unreasonable as it sounded, because within limits we could wait for a fair spell.
Once we reached Sweden we could make our way to the Baltic at our own pace through the Gota Canal, as I’d once thought of doing by steamer on a pre-war holiday. We should be in sheltered waters all the time, and perfectly safe. The real snag was the Baltic itself. The ideal thing would be to dash into the Gulf of Finland and dash out again, but sailing-boats—even with auxiliary engines—aren’t equipped for that sort of operation. They’re just about the slowest things on earth. However harmless our expedition appeared—and ostensibly of course it would be just a case of two mad Englishmen on a slightly risky holiday cruise—Denny was certainly right in thinking we shouldn’t be allowed to poke our noses deep inside the Finnish Gulf without being watched. And that seemed to rule out any place as far east as the approache
s to Leningrad—it would take altogether too long to get in and get out again. Probably the Russians would claim all the sea around there as territorial waters anyway, and would insist on putting someone aboard us for inspection. I doubted if any foreign yacht had been in those parts since the Revolution. From the point of view of Denny and myself, somewhere much farther to the west, like Riga, was more promising, for a night’s sail from there would see us well on the high seas and on our way to Sweden. On the other hand, the girls would have much more difficulty in getting to Riga than to Leningrad.
I tried to visualize the actual escape, and the scene my imagination conjured up wasn’t very comforting. Dawn, whether she went in under sail or engine, would obviously have to anchor a good way off the coast to avoid the risk of being seen or heard. That meant that one of us would have to stay with her, while the other would have to row the dinghy to the shore and back again. It would be a very exhausting row, even if everything else went smoothly. And then, as Denny had pointed out, however carefully one studied the topography of the place beforehand there was no guarantee that the dinghy wouldn’t touch down on a bit of coast that happened to be guarded that night. Someone might hear it as it came close in. And how would the rower make certain of finding the right bit of shore in the dark?
By the time I reached Southfleet I had thought myself back into a state of inspissated gloom. I won’t say I was thinking of abandoning the project, because that wouldn’t be true. I was in the mood for any risks, providing they didn’t unreasonably involve the safety of Marya. But the physical difficulties were certainly formidable.
The sight of Joe hard at work on Dawn cheered me a lot. He had brought her over to our side of the creek on the night tide and she was dried out on the mud just opposite the workshop. I was soon helping him to scrub her free of weed and barnacles and for the time being I forgot some of my worries. Joe had put aside most of his other jobs and for the next few days we worked on her from morning till night. It was a rewarding task, fitting her out, for she was in splendid condition in all essentials. Joe told me that he’d begun to put out some feelers locally for a suitable engine, but he didn’t say another word about my projected trip. There was something ominous about the way he avoided the subject—he was like a Victorian father steering a conversation round the fringe of the family skeleton.