Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  I have since sat with my own photograph album. I know what she meant. There is such a thing as too much lost fun. There are the children as they were. Me as I was too, but pretty much as I am now; fatter, thinner, different hair cut, dreadful clothes, mistaken moustache, but my daughter Catherine is minute, then cute, then at her most dependent, then funny, but always different. The images are of time irretrievably lost. That holiday in Maine, the working trip to Australia, the walk along that grey beach: George, my son, running on ahead with that stick. But look, his very dimensions mock you (‘My, how you’ve grown’). When did this happen? All that time we were afloat on a river being rushed downstream and we never even noticed.

  For the cost of a small cinema, I got my father’s films transferred to DVD. I remember that we used to watch them now and again, as a family; the projector whirring with that soothing, repetitive chatter, perhaps at Christmases. But that was years ago. I could barely remember the content. Now it was almost too easy I just had to stick the disc in the DVD player and press a button. However, it is not possible to look at home-made films without an element of bullying. I gathered up the children and their cousins, promising entertainment, as if the whole thing was for their benefit. ‘You wait till you see this. This is your mother at your age. They watched and they dutifully sniggered. But it was the adults who sat quietly and stared.

  The film had a pale, washed look, with none of the sudden flares of high colour or pixellated fuzz that you get on video. Sometimes the print was crazed with black cobwebby lines. There was no sound. The figures rushed about as if hidden behind a glass wall.

  The first reel showed a long, developing shot of Gorran Haven in Cornwall, then a street. First my brother and I appeared in matching red tartan trousers and red sweaters clutching buckets and spades. We jeered. Then my sister sat playing on the beach. We ‘ahhed’. There was my mother in slacks, then in a big print dress, throwing a ball for the dog. ‘I remember those red cushions,’ said my sister, and we all remembered the cushions from the Morris Traveller.

  ‘How many holidays did we have in Gorran Haven?’ I asked.

  ‘Only two,’ my mother said briskly ‘Then he got a boat. We had two more holidays in “a sailing hotel” in Dartford where you fell out of a window and had your arm in a sling. And then we spent every single holiday sailing.’

  The children were already bored. But we adults were watching with cold attentive eyes, not recognizing ourselves: the pot-bellied infants with the flat hair and scrunched-up eyes in the flabby high-waisted swimming trunks. We were greedily searching for images that would connect us to the reality of our own memories: the harbour wall, the steps down from the house.

  And there was my mother, in black slacks, with her long dark hair up in a bun, throwing a ball for Bella the dog, or lying against rocks on the beach with Aunty Gwen reading the papers. They looked a glamorous pair.

  We were all watching for that sort of thing, really, waiting to get a hit of direct sensual memory, something that our children couldn’t share at all. And then, towards the end of this short film, there was a fluttering of black, one of those moments where a white line passes shakily across a blank frame and some numbers flicker up and for five seconds my father passed through the film, in a grey suit with carefully brushed hair. His round face was serious. Some colleague had taken this, as an experiment to check how the camera worked. He was slightly off guard. I recognized the look. ‘Be careful with that camera now Are you sure you know how to use it?’ And then he was gone.

  We sat forward and stopped the DVD. We rewound and watched it again. We watched the tiny extract five or six times in a row. We froze it, paused it and stepped it forward. This was the only moment, fleetingly, when a real ghost stepped out of the past.

  Why was that my father so particularly? There were plenty of other photographs, films and videos of him: in the next film, twenty years later, but looking ten years younger, with side-boards, longish hair and stubble, and that louche look that everybody, even Ted Heath, adopted in the seventies and now means the sort of bloke who moves his caravan into your garden. I have a later photo of him swimming across a pool in St Lucia in pursuit of a plastic duck, with his daddy swimming shorts and thin, not thinning, hair in a tuft, delicately paddling on, his legs splayed like a pale frog. This was soon after he had been diagnosed with cancer. But that earlier flickering serious man held us all, because it was my father with all his ambition and purposefulness still in him, caught inside the institution at the age of thirty-six.

  We stayed glued for the second film. It was the Xara film. This was what we really did on our holidays. (There must be one missing still, the Windsong film, although both are remarkably similar: it’s just the boats that differ.)

  It started with the waterside: West Mersea, in this case, an island at the mouth of the Blackwater estuary. Here we were pulling the dinghy on a trailer. Here was the long jetty.

  Then came a shot taken from the dinghy, a remarkably steady tracking shot, as the little tender, powered by a miniature Seagull engine, slipped through the other boats lucky enough to be moored closer to the shore.

  ‘It was a long way,’ my mother commented.

  ‘We rowed it for years,’ I added. The dinghy was a wooden ‘pram’ with a snubbed end. It manoeuvred beautifully I loved the way it sat like a bowl on the water, and could be turned in a full circle directly on itself with a twist of the wrist, or sculled with one oar on the half-cup hole in the back, a skill I tried and finally mastered. Sometimes if we anchored I would just get in the boat and row around.

  ‘And you know why I did that?’ I said. ‘Because I was bored. There was nothing else to do.’

  ‘How long did we go for?’ asked my sister Wearily.

  ‘Weeks.’

  ‘Oh, he liked to spend at least half the summer on the boat,’ my mother chiming in now, with that slight sing-song of complaint. ‘He’d save up his leave, and take four weeks in one go every year.

  Now the film showed us leaving the harbour, threading through the other yachts to deeper water: the impossibly glamorous, much bigger, comfortable boats like the Twisters and Holmans. The camera lingered on them for far too long, in a fit of boat-envy. They were sleek racing vessels, owned by members of the club who somehow managed to keep a boat, a nice car and a sense of proportion about the activity.

  ‘I used to beg him to let us take a proper holiday,’ my mother said with a slightly wheezy chuckle. ‘No, no, every year, without fail we had to get on that ruddy boat.’

  Now we were charging along, up the coast, to Suffolk. The camera was bounding. There were shots of other boats, particularly admired older, wooden boats sailing near by There were shots of the boat becalmed. The boat at anchor. The boat motoring. The boat sailing. The boat tied to a quay The boat motoring. The boat with just one sail up. The boat with all its sails up.

  ‘Who are they?’ asked one of the children.

  Another boat had passed into view with people on - it. They were becalmed and were smiling and waving.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Didn’t you know them?’

  ‘It would have been most unlikely. Your grandfather’s idea of a holiday was to get as far from the rest of humanity as possible up a dismal wet creek and sit there.’

  ‘Making one of those disgusting meals: a tin of spaghetti, a tin of chopped up spam, and a tin of tomatoes, on the one burner.’ He did love the rituals of all that. He loved the primus. You had to burn the blue meths to make the paraffin turn to gas. He liked oil lamps and trimming wicks.

  In the film my sister emerged through a forward hatch and turned away from the camera. I pulled on some clothes and glowered.

  ‘But it wasn’t just the holidays. It was the weekends too.’ We sat there, mordantly remembering. It had been the boat every weekend, if he could manage it. In the winter we varnished it. That damn wooden pram dinghy with the stringers.

  ‘Well of course, Xara was varnished, said my mother. ‘She was
a lot of work.’

  She was. On a varnished boat, every stained scratch shows through, every nail hole where the water has penetrated goes black if you don’t maintain her carefully enough and probably even if you do. So Xara had to be rubbed down and recoated with varnish, as did the dinghy, and the oars and the mast, and the tiller handle and the rudder, and the top sides and the cleats (fiddly), and the grab rails, thwarts, coamings, doors and separate planks of her clinker-built hull, twice — two coats every year. ‘So we went to West Mersea on cold days throughout the winter too and rubbed and sanded and scrubbed.’

  ‘What we put up with,’ said my sister feelingly.

  In the summer, though, we made our own entertainments. If I was ever in West Mersea when the tide was in I don’t remember it. The water was usually a hundred yards off, down a slimy jetty, wide enough to take a single trailered dinghy, and dipping slowly down to meet the creek at a six-foot-square platform of green planks.

  Everybody swarmed over this to get into their tenders to take them out to their boats. And that was where we stationed ourselves to catch crabs.

  First we got string. Then we searched amongst the stones at the top of the harbour beyond the dinghy park for an abandoned rusty bolt or a stone with a hole in it, big enough to sink. Then we got meat. Bacon was best because we could poke a hole though the fat and tie it on the string.

  There wasn’t much point in sticking to one line, because you had to let it sink and lie. So we had six or seven lines strategically dangled into the murk close to the posts where the crabs lived. A bucket, half full of water, was kept standing by, but it had to be moved out of the way of fat men in blazers complaining and slipping on the ooze, or pale-faced women fussing as their husband’s outboard motors passed over our heads and tripping over us anyway as we lay flat out on the jetty.

  The trick was to pull up slowly. With their one free claw waving about like maddened mini-pliers, we had to flick the crabs off the bacon and into the bucket. None of them were huge. They could be anything from three inches across down to house spider size and green (though the bigger ones sometimes had a tinge of red around the claws and were especially prized because they looked more like proper crabs from a fishmonger) but all of them could pinch hard. The tenacious ones could only be induced to let go by crab-wrangling —grasping with a thumb and forefinger just behind the big front claws, where the edges of the shell have armoured sharp points. If we missed and it fell on the jetty. the angered crab scurried off backwards with both pincers raised, and we had to show off to any girl spectators standing by and squealing with awe.

  By half tide, six or seven kids with six or seven lines each, several buckets seething with catch (which might also be tipped half over so that little girls could squeal some more at the crustacean mat), orders being shouted and boys lurching to get hold of the biggies comprehensively occupied the entire jetty and constituted a constant’ and efficient public nuisance. The day was rounded off by ceremoniously up-ending the bucket over the quay and admiring the particularly big ones running off for home, sometimes with the front legs of one of their neighbours clutched in their claw.

  But all this had to be fitted in between the real business of being at the boat. My father’s second joke went like this. ‘Saintly Dai arrives in Hell.’ (They were all dredged from some folk memory of a Cardiff swamp.) ‘What are you doing here, Dai?’ asks Pugh. ‘Didn’t you go to heaven?’

  ‘Oh yes. And there’s lovely heaven was: all fluffy clouds and blue skies. And I go to St Peter. I say, “What shall we do today?” And St Peter says, “Well, Dai, I thought we’d do a little harping.” So I play the harp all day. And the next day I go to St Peter and I say, “That was lovely. What shall we do today, then?” And St Peter says, “Well, Dai, today. I thought we’d do a little harping.” So I picked up my harp and played it all day. And the next day, I went to St Peter. I said, “What shall we do today?” He said, “Well, Dai, today, I thought (pause for effect) … we’d do a little harping.” I said, “To hell with harping, and here I am.”‘

  ‘What shall we do today, Daddy?’

  Daddy, with a little smile, puffing up the sails on his boat: ‘I thought we’d better do a little harping.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice, if just for a change, we spent the day on the beach?’

  My father, reaching for a halyard, ‘Don’t be silly. This is great sailing weather.’ Or, ‘We have to press on.’ Or, ‘We have to make the tide by five o’clock.’ Or, ‘It’s bound to improve by the afternoon.’ Or, ‘Let’s stick the sails up and see what happens.’ Or, ‘We don’t want to sit here in this noisy harbour all day.’ Or, ‘You went ashore last week.’

  So we went sailing. The implication was that, somehow, it was the boat itself that would mope if we didn’t.

  Very occasionally, if a torrential downpour combined with a freak Essex tornado and if the boat were in some very safe harbour (‘You cannot leave it unattended at anchor in this weather!’) my father could be constrained to take a day off from harping. Even then, he would linger on the slippery quay to gaze longingly back at her, while the rest of us charged hurriedly out through the rain to take the bus to nearby Ipswich. Here he retained his full coxswain’s outfit: sea boots, - Breton fisherman’s cap and barnacle-encrusted oyster-dredger’s smock. Wrapped in a capacious yellow ‘oily’, he shuffled through shopping centres, periodically holding up a wetted finger as if he half-expected a flare to bang above Dorothy Perkins and summon him back to the vessel. We hid in shop doors to disassociate ourselves from him.

  I can measure the progress of my adolescent life by my father’s boats. Where other suburban dads might have fulfilled their status anxieties with bigger, newer, shinier, faster cars, Elwyn went for ever-larger, dumpier, more impractical barques.

  They were hardly yachts. The home-made Enterprise dinghy was abandoned in Itchenor and replaced by a ‘Yachting Monthly Senior’ called Dunlin, after the dull bird that sits on the mud. It had a pale-blue hull, retro portholes and a cabin, which was quite an achievement in a boat which wasn’t much longer than an open dinghy. You opened the doors, pushed back the hatch, and, like some floating pup tent, there were two berths slap on the floor, separated only by the wooden slab of the centreboard case. Being nine, I could just about stand up in the well. Adults crouched and cursed. There was enough room for my mother to squat, giggling, over a bucket.

  Oh dear. To a sensitive Epping boy, unwonted glimpses of the white pudding of his mother’s bottom, wedged on a plastic bucket, were the stuff of nightmares. My father, in particular, seemed to delight in inflicting his morning ‘ablutions’ on us. The boats did get bigger. The groins, pumps, cocks and gurgling mechanisms got more Heath-Robinsonesque. But fifteen feet, twenty-four feet or twenty-nine feet — what did it matter anyway? There was nowhere to run to. My parent’s carefree, hospital—trained frankness was met with concentrated adolescent disgust. We bonded as a family, in the most intimate, revolting way conceivable to an adolescent. Sometimes I had to wait days to get the boat to myself for a crap. And did they care? They laughed.

  He kept Dunlin off the Harlow Sailing Club, which owned a patch of agricultural land by a creek in Maylandsea. It took an hour chugging across John Betjeman’s favourite county to get to this outpost. Even when we were ‘nearly there yet’, we still seemingly had miles of bleak flat-lands to cross before the car pulled off the main road and lolloped down the track to the water’s edge. Not that the water was often around. The sea struggled to reach this far.

  My father would match his screeching to the car’s as it scraped its sump across the potholed track. Harlow Sailing Club itself was no more finished than the rest of Maylandsea: one of those small-holder plot-lands, linked by unmade roads and then abandoned to the whims of the owners. Caravans, black sheds and Californian ranch bungalows were haphazardly jostled together. We left scrupulously planed Harlow to come to desperately unplanned Maylandsea.

  At the age of eight I sat in the car eating egg
sandwiches, while my father helped manoeuvre massive tubes of concrete into muddy holes to build the clubhouse. We played rolling games on the sea wall when they went to dig moorings. Three or four men pushed a boat out across the mud, holding on to the sides to stop themselves sliding under, and sprayed filth everywhere, trying to get a three-foot-diameter concrete pill with a chain on the end of it dug into the bottom. Dunlin was anchored to one of those.

  Once he had done his bit, my father never really went near the place again. ‘They’re only interested in dinghy racing,’ he said dismissively. He wanted to go harping. We used the little boat to go off to explore the mud and slept in a caravan he had bought, in a field near by.

  Opposite the end of the two-mile creek was Osea Island. It had been a refuge for alcoholics. To begin with we rarely went further than its steep shingle beaches overlooked by massive elms topped with heron’s nests, from where you could look across at what we were reliably informed was Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s country estate.

  We always seemed to be coming back late on the ebb tide, probably leaving it until the last possible moment. Even the tiny Dunlin had to feel its way up the gut. It was powered by a hot and dangerous-looking Seagull outboard engine, with its unprotected flywheel and a battered fuel tank. This latter was decorated with a picture of a jaunty yachtsman in a striped shirt. He had the whole engine lifted on to his broad shoulders and with his knotted scarf and a pipe, looked as if it brought him nothing but joy.

  As likely as not, our own Seagull would fail at a critical moment. Time was short, the tide was in danger of leaving our mooring dry and the thing would sputter to a halt. The boat would continue to sweep serenely forward, but the extreme silence following the raucous clatter was broken by the natural sounds of the gurgling water, the swishing of a bow wave and the hysterical shouting of my father.