Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  ‘Take the helm! Take the helm. Keep her heading upstream. Don’t let the tide drag you down on the other boats. Keep the bow up!!’

  Being close to our own buoy (that’s why we were motoring not sailing), we were amongst other sleek vessels whose expensively painted hulls slithered past on either side. My mother would put on a look of determination and grasp the tiller with white knuckles, not something she was ever encouraged to do except in cases of the direst emergency. We knew better than to chatter or play or make smart remarks. And my father, with the urgency of a landing boat commander on D-day, frenziedly wound a knotted cord around a metal spindle on the top of his engine and repeatedly yanked at it. Sometimes the rope whipped up and caught him on the face. Sometimes the engine harrumphed and made wheezy choking noises but inevitably it failed to ignite.

  ‘It’s the plugs. They’ve oiled up again. Keep the bow ahead, ahead!’

  The boat would gradually lose momentum. My mother, completely unscientific about the process of steering, would grip the tiller harder and look about her anxiously, while my father leaned over the red-hot casing and fiddled with a spark plug, his shirt bunched, his face streaked with oil (no pipe, no knotted scarf and definitely no joy), anxiously stealing looks to see whether the boat was going to prang itself on some trim racing vessel.

  ‘Boat hook! Get a boat hook.’ My mother would teeter outboard and try to hook on to another boat with the end of a pole.

  ‘Hold on to a stanchion!’ He knew that other boats’ fancy wires and silvery metal protrusions might easily ping off, or crumple like silver paper. On several occasions, they did. Then my father would hold his head in his hands and give way to gloomy prognostications about insurance premiums. But mostly, after a few moments, the tide would win, the boat hook would slip out of my mother’s grasp, and my father would throw himself into a panic; trying to get some sails hoisted or the lifting keel up, while the stricken vessel drifted quietly and, indeed, imperceptibly on to the mud.

  Nonetheless, we went exploring further out on to the broad estuary itself, bounded by land so flat that all harbours were a surprise (at least to us) and dominated by the twin blocks of the Bradwell nuclear power station. Opposite them, during depressions, shipping companies would anchor redundant ocean-going freighters or tankers, but most of the miles of open water were shallow It was possible when the evening was still and the winds were light to spend a good minute gummed to the bottom before anyone noticed that you had touched.

  ‘We’re aground!’ he would suddenly bellow at the top of his voice.

  ‘Are you sure?’ my mother might venture, helpfully, looking about her.

  ‘Get the plate up!!’

  He would lumber forward, with the energy only granted to overweight doctors at times of imagined distress, to heave at a gnarled nylon rope around a pulley system and try to wrest the lifting keel from the abominable suction.

  Usually it took several others heaving too. And the mud was not the problem. The pulley system was. When it finally gave way with its usual lurch, the team fell backwards into the cockpit, the unattended tiller yawed round, and the boat, now floating again, generally looked after itself.

  Imagine, if you will, a wooden box: twenty foot long by about four foot high, narrowing at both ends. It contains five people, my family, like transported slaves, lying head to foot, on narrow bunks. My head is three or four inches from a gently perspiring ceiling. My father’s legs are ingeniously slotted into a little opening immediately beneath my head.

  My mother is on the other side of a small companionway. My sister lies stretched out forward of her in a separate box, separated by an eighth-of-an-inch plyboard panel and a curtain. My older brother is wedged into the pointed bit, between canvas sacks full of sails and a length of anchor chain. It is nearly one in the morning. We have lain in this way for about an hour, ever since the late-night shipping forecast came to an end. It is dark. Not a twinkle of light pierces the enclosure. We are peering into the blackness and waiting, and we are on holiday in our second boat — Xara.

  The boat is floating in a narrow channel in a gut, in a slick of mud in the middle of saltings some two or three miles from the nearest habitation. Outside there are trickling sounds and a universal, low oozing and plopping. A sea bird mews. Inside there is only the sound of breathing and the occasional rustle of nylon sleeping bag.

  Now, in the infinite blackness, my father starts breathing heavily. Like the steady and remorseless sloughing of a long surf on a gravel beach, a slow in-drawing of breath, followed, one would think almost deliberately by a hesitant pause.

  It reminds us we are in a box, the reverberative sonority of which Mr Wharfedale would have appreciated.

  Suddenly we are transported into an episode of Doomwatch. We would have clapped our hands to our ears and creased to our knees like Robert Powell, if we weren’t stuck full length in our bunks. A resonating, booming bass note starts somewhere deep in the back of my father’s throat, gargles up through his oesophagus and emerges, half from his mouth and half from his capacious and hairy nostrils. What had been up until that moment a fitful and disturbed attempt at sleep in a damp and unconducive environment is about to become hell in the dark. That first, mucousy gelatinous rattle means my father is about to start snoring.

  At the start of the holiday, we snorted back, coughed or finally lost patience and shouted ‘Please!’ into the darkness. But this was always met with a startled croak as he struggled up from the bottom of some deep well to break the surface.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re snoring.’

  He would smack some moisture into his mouth. Breathe more insistently, normally and tut.

  ‘Oh.’ And then, after a rueful pause, ‘How can I be snoring? I wasn’t even asleep.’

  ‘Well, you were.

  The response was a disappointed sigh and a rustle of his bed nylon. Now we were all awake, lying damp and uncomfortable, the night stretched ahead like an endless sentence and nocturnal birds mocked our imprisonment by wading in the shallows and softly cooing to each other.

  So, after a few days on holiday, we usually let him be. Eventually you fall asleep. And anyway, by the time I was twelve, my brother, three years older than me and destined to grow big and bearded, had already begun to rival my father in the glottal drain-clearing, snot-shovelling, nocturnal trumpeting division. No noise could equal the disgusting broken wheezing of their accursed duet. And yet we seem, eventually, to have slept through it. How, I have no idea.

  Inevitably it became time to venture out on the sea. We had explored Mersea, Goldhanger and Tollesbury and had got as far as Brightlingsea at the mouth of the river. The first time we ventured up the coast, my mother was sent on ahead by car. She diligently drove to the end of every pier and headland and could be seen waving a handkerchief as the little boat slowly ground its way north. Eventually the Suffolk river system opened up ahead, and, exhausted by our mammoth journey, we put into Harwich. This was an error. Harwich was built to take ocean-going cargo ships and cross-channel ferries. We tied up out of the way in Bathgate Bay and tried to get ashore using a teetering vertical ladder covered with green slime that looked about a hundred feet high.

  Having done it once, we did it every year, admittedly in bigger boats. Xara was big enough for all of us to sleep on, as long as my brother didn’t come, which rather suited my brother. He went sailing properly with the Ocean Youth Club instead, and we went exploring the Stour, Orwell, Deben and Alde, much prettier estuaries than the Blackwater, with swelling banks and narrower channels leading to sleepy, appealingly dead towns like Aldeburgh and Woodbridge.

  They were still tidal rivers. Even at famous beauty spots like Pin Mill at low tide, there could be a few feet to negotiate before you got to the hard. The dinghy would have to be rowed as fast as possible for the last few feet, with the oars digging in, bodily pushing the little boat and its passengers up and on to the ooze. Already the mud, like crawling paint, would have worked its w
ay past the hafts of the oars and gobs of the stuff would be flying up and spattering us. And we would arrive at the famous beautiful pub covered from head to foot in stinking goo. Perhaps it wasn’t that deep after all, but nobody ever tested it out. I only discovered you could walk on it by accident when I was sixteen.

  Under the influence of the Incredible String Band my mates and I decided that it was spring and we wanted to spend Easter amongst the flowers. It was early March. The Romantics were wrong. It was freezing. Never mind the blackbird singing in the tall larch, we stayed in the green caravan filled with old Micky Spillane thrillers my father had bought to stay in when the boat had been too small. It sat in a caravan park just below a high sea wall in Maylandsea. There was nothing to do but go for a walk and look at the caravan park from a distance. Eventually we started jumping across the saltings. We discovered that, if you ran at the mud in the shallow areas and kept moving, you didn’t sink. Gradually, we became bolder. We took longer excursions out across the sticky surface. If you stopped, even for a second, you started to go under, but if you ran, you flew, leaving a great trail of putrid black foot steps behind you. It was like discovering flight, or that you could walk on water. What had been terra infirma became, intriguingly, ours. There was nothing to be gained. Even if you got somewhere (to the water’s edge, across to a mooring or over to a boat) you couldn’t stop. You would slide beneath the ooze. It was just the thrill of riding on a deadly crust singing, ‘Hunting gibbons out in India!’ — a Bonzo Dog Dooh Dah Band track —’Hunting gibbons, out in May-land-sea. Out, in, out, in, out in May-land-sea.’

  In the 1990s, I was in my own small boat in a similar Suffolk gut, only we’d left it far too late to get back to the mooring. We were doing an east-coast creep, sneaking up a channel with the water rushing out like an emptying bath, touching the bottom, pushing off with an oar, feeling the way up until we stuck and realized that we weren’t going to get there. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said and threw an anchor over the side. ‘The boat will just sit here until the next tide.’

  ‘What about us?’ someone asked.

  There were three of us. Two writers had come up from London and ‘quite fancied a boat trip’. Even as we anchored, the rest of the water sluiced out. We were sitting in the familiar sea of mud. The shore was fifty yards away. ‘You can run across it,’ I said, ‘as long as you keep moving. Watch.’ I lowered myself over the side. It was years since I’d done it.

  I ran. Gouts of liquid mud flew up as I slapped away, but I stayed up. I reached the sea wall, shouted deliriously and ran back to the boat for good measure. ‘See!’ I said breathlessly, gripping the side to prevent myself being sucked under.

  Andy smiled. ‘OK.’ He stepped over and ran. Splat, splat, splat, splat and he got to the wall. ‘Yes!’

  Henry came next. He was bigger than Andy. Henry was over six foot. It was difficult for him to get out easily and prepare himself, because somehow he was just too gangly. The sides of the boat were too low. Perhaps he was worried about his Musto jacket and new jeans, but he just didn’t seem to overcome the viscosity in the same’ way that short people did.

  Pretty quickly we could see that Henry wasn’t quite gliding. He wasn’t even slapping. Like some giant panic-stricken frog, with each twitch his feet were plunging further into the ooze. So he worked his legs faster. Up and down went his thighs like pistons. Faster and faster went his feet, huger and huger rose the fountain of black sticky mud. Now, like some mad engine, he frenziedly gyrated his limbs until all we could see from the shore was a berserk, thrashing whirlwind of flying black slop which, to our amazement, like something out of Ali Baba, gradually started to move towards us. He made the shore, a slimy zombie, and staggered across the grass. He opened two black and white minstrel eyes. ‘That was quite fun,’ he said.

  6. The Back Route

  ‘Where are we going now?’

  ‘We’re going to go on to Brentwood, the back way,’ I told my mother, driving on up towards Stonnard’s Hill playing field, half-way out of Epping.

  Having the others in the car was just an excuse. I should have walked up the hill, just as I had … how many times? Senior school is a demanding lump of our lives: seven years; three hundred and sixty odd weeks; six days a week. (Leave out the holidays, of course. You can do the maths. It was never my strongest subject.) Yes, six days a week. The blasted school had boarders, so the rest of us had to turn out on a Saturday for their convenience. The school didn’t want the inmates loose in the town at the weekend.

  ‘They wanted you to board originally, said my mother.

  ‘They didn’t?’

  ‘Oh yes. But you wouldn’t have it. So we settled on a year. You were going to be a year as a day boy and then go boarding.’

  This was a fine time to be telling me this. ‘I’ve never heard this before.’

  It wasn’t because the school wanted to clap me to its echoing and smelly bosom. It was because of the distance. Brentwood is twelve miles from Epping. I was well outside the school’s natural catchment area for day boys.

  ‘Well, that’s what they wanted, but you started and they never mentioned it again.’

  Bancroft’s in Woodford, which also seemed miles away at the time, was probably first choice, but I must have flunked the exam. There was talk of Chigwell Grammar or Merchant Taylors or Haberdashers Aske’s (maybe that was a department store). Most of these ‘good’ suburban grammar schools were founded by City Guilds or self-aggrandizing potentates in the Tudor age, to take the place of the monks seen off by the Reformation. They served the same purpose: churning out well-mannered bureaucrats. Sparsely dotted around the green belt, in the late 1960s they encircled London with good A-level prospects. I didn’t know then that many of my future adult friends, like Clive Anderson and Geoffrey Perkins, were banged up in similar establishments further on around what is now the M25 in suburbs like Stanmore. My wife was at a place in Ealing. This was the ‘direct grant grammar school’ era.

  I don’t believe that my father ever seriously considered any sort of public school. He was from Welsh high-academic-performance state-school stock himself. So I went for an exam in the Bean Library and an interview with the chiselled Mr Tarrant, a Mount Rushmore of a geography teacher, and I was admitted to the imposing place with ‘the old red wall’. It would take fifty-five minutes to get home by bus every afternoon, but I got a lift in the morning from Robert Dickenson’s father, who worked in the labs at Ilford Films.

  He would pick me up opposite a big housing estate of mock-Georgian terraces, built in the grounds of what must have been some important suburban mansion.

  ‘I don’t recognize any of this.’

  ‘Yes, you do. We came this way thousands of times. It was the way we came to avoid the - main roads.’

  ‘Not this way.’

  ‘Yes! This way! It was this way.

  How many times, then? Of course, I have to leave out the Saturdays, because Mr Dickenson didn’t work Saturdays, so I had to get the bus. And holidays. So five days a week, forty weeks a year for six years. Leaving out sick days and other arrangements, I must have made this journey at least a thousand times.

  I got us lost almost immediately, but in peaceful countryside: copses, river valleys and high hedges, less manicured than its equivalent in Surrey. I had never noticed it all before. I was too busy wittering on at Mr Dickenson, a nice, quiet man with glasses, about why cars should be designed more racily and what was happening in last night’s episode of Ironside, the show with the disabled detective.’

  My mother and I gawped at the route now, as if for the first time.

  ‘We used to go through Ongar.’

  ‘No, we didn’t. You must remember; there was terrible fog sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, I remember the fog. We once had to ring the headmaster, because we couldn’t get through to pick you up after a play rehearsal and he had to put you up. He wasn’t happy about that.’

  Wasn’t he? I remembered only the amused conde
scension. It had seemed a huge joke to him and an awful disaster to me. But then we boys always seemed funny to Mr Sale. With his hooded eyes and wispy smile he came across like Dennis Price after a particularly ingenious murder. All headmasters have an act. His was very successful, if a little cold. I remember my uneasy sense of intrusion that night when Sale, who never seemed to stoop for anything, stalked into the rehearsal and led me off to his very own house. It was over on the other side of the school where we day-boys never went; a large Georgian pile, fronting on the green. His wife was Italian, but I had never met her before either. None of the parties seemed that keen to associate off duty. He marched me up to the top of the house, through upper corridors of sharp-green limo, to a cold bed. I can still hear the ghastly ancient plumbing in the frozen lavatory. Still feel the horrible sense of breaking all the rules. In the morning, I was dispatched to the dining hall to eat a breakfast of squishy tomatoes and paper bacon with the boarders. What on earth was my mother doing, presuming on the headmaster, as if he were just an ordinary human being? I would rather have walked the fifteen miles home in the darkness through the fog, pushing the car.

  It was later made clear that overnight accommodation was not part of the service. When, the following year, I was given a bigger role in the school play, as Lady Macbeth, a coded message must have been passed to Mr Baron, the head of English. In mid-rehearsal, I was suddenly demoted to third witch. That twelve-mile journey was the beginning of the end of my school theatrical career.

  ‘I never intended to be an actor anyway.

  This wasn’t strictly true. I certainly intended to be an actor at the age of six, when I wrote in my big, childish hand (which, rather irritatingly, I still have) that I would like to grow up to be Charlie Drake. This was after a Christmas trip to the Palladium to see him say ‘Hello, my darlings’ to a row of dancing green monsters from Mars. To be honest I would have been perfectly interested in being one of the dancing green monsters too.