Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  We went to Brightlingsea. It was an afternoon’s sail along the coast of Mersea Island and up into the Coke, the river that runs up to Colchester. I’d done it hundreds of times before. As my father got older (fifty-something) he was happy to leave me in control anyway. He would get the boat out of the harbour, hand over the tiller and go below and sleep. But it wasn’t the crowded anchorage that should have worried him. (I could cope.) It wasn’t the fact that the boat had to be squeezed in somehow between two upright wooden posts with a line attached to each. Although that did cause us problems when the tide changed direction and we let go of the wrong end so we drifted out and blocked most of the passage. (He wouldn’t have liked to see it, but we coped.) No, it was the quantity of pubs in the little town that should have worried him. (‘They’re just low-grade alcoholics, he said of regulars, neatly combining the Lancet with his nonconformist upbringing.)

  We started in the mock-Tudor tavern near the top of the long wide hard that faced on to the river, then went up into the terraced streets, stopping at all the little terraced pubs. We drank bitter at just over two shillings a pint and eventually staggered back to the long jetty in the dark. When we started we had been sober enough to drag the little rowing dinghy right up to the top of the jetty, calculating that when we got back the tide would have reached it. We had been sensible enough in our judgement to get that right. There was the dinghy, sitting in the pitch dark. It was afloat. The water had a smear of street lights on it: squid-ink black and glossy. We were not so drunk that we couldn’t slither down the green weed—covered pier and get to the little boat. It was as we climbed into it that our inexperience, mostly our inexperience with six or seven pints, really showed up. Three got in easily enough.

  The fourth stepped a little too heavily on the coming. It tipped; and the sea slipped in over the side. I remember watching it and thinking how slight a dip we needed, because within seconds we were sitting in the boat, which was sitting on the bottom, and the water had levelled off around our chests.

  Oh Dad, poor Dad. If you had known about that you would never have slept. These days, I do what he would have done, which is imagine the consequences if we’d tipped ourselves those four inches sideways, half-way across instead of next to the jetty. But hey, we didn’t, so who’s to know?

  The next day we went to Clacton. We motored the boat alongside the beaches on a festering hot day, spying on the shore through binoculars and the crowds ranged along the promenades. He would never have done what we did then, which was to take the boat right in close, throw out an anchor and row ashore, but then he was unlikely to have been overcome with an adolescent lust for pursuing bathing beauties. He would have thought about the dangers of an onshore breeze blowing up, the difficulty of holding on the sandy bottom, the possible problems of relenting the dinghy into the waves crashing on the shore. But there weren’t any waves crashing on the shore. It was merely sultry, hot and smelly. We rowed in through the sloppy wavelets between the paddlers, bought hot dogs and thought we’d done something really cheeky, though the two scrubbers sitting on the big, painted iron fence above the south beach weren’t scrubby enough to be tempted aboard our lugger. They clearly weren’t really impressed with our yacht. Somehow we got as far as Aldeburgh because I remember we loitered around a funfair there and drank in the Cross Keys.

  My parents were trading up in various little ways. They bought a cottage in Goldhanger in the late seventies. This was a village off the twisting, looping, track-like road that ran along the north shore of the Blackwater Estuary from Maldon to Mersea, between Roman Heybridge Basin and Tolleshunt D’Arcy. It was to become Jeremy Bamber country. The mass murderer disposed of his entire family just up the road. It was an innocuous slab of nowhere, with a few pretty houses in amongst the chunks of bungalows and the remnants of Essex plotland development. My parents used it as their sailing base and perhaps, we assumed, planned it as their future retirement cottage.

  My father’s decision to move up a size in boats was of far more interest. The search for the right sort of hulk was picky and exhaustive. It was size that I fancied. The yellow-varnished Kestrel was still little more than two sofas and a stick. I liked the miniature sailing barge lying in the mud at Maldon quay. It had a hefty coal stove and room for a party, or at least the sort of parties that I went to, where people crouched in corners and nodded their Afros. But the hippy aspect didn’t appeal much to my father. He found Maurice Griffiths’ first design in the mud dock in Woodbridge, where Frank Knight had refitted it following a fire. I took possession of Windsong almost immediately, staying for a week on my own, in the early spring of gap year, feeling romantic in my cold cabin on the other side of the railway tracks, painting some of the bits that I’d promised I would and drinking in the Captain’s Table or the Olde Bell and Steelyard up the hill of the pretty, close-packed Suffolk market town. I remember admiring Woodbridge the first time we ever went there. It took us a long week, pottering cautiously up the river system. Even the railway station was a stop on a branch line by the boat-builder’s dockyard. I used to wonder what sustained this little town where Edward Fitzgerald once lived. How did this slab of middle England survive so discreetly with its streets of ‘improved’ eighteenth—century terraces, fitted out with imposing door cases and balustrades by army officers stationed there during the Napoleonic wars? Now I know. There are huge numbers of retired people living there. My mother is one of them these days, living in a little cottage I could have seen from the boat where I camped for that cold week in March.

  The regular certainties of my family life had started to slip away once I was sixteen. I became too busy to turn out for them to order, too concerned about the possibility of missing things in Upminster, too resentful of being cut off from the round of parties to go on the four-week jaunt my father awarded himself in the summer. On one last family holiday I struck a bargain half-way through the trip. There was a folk festival at a nearby country house. I had to go. It was my sort of thing. I was on holiday too. What do you mean disruptive? What are you doing? Just drifting around the same old places? Christ, you’re lucky I come at all. None of my friends would do this sort of thing with their parents. So what if we sat in a marina and didn’t move on the same as we always did? Why couldn’t they hang on for me for a change? No, I was going. I didn’t care. They could take the boat further up, I’d find them again.

  My father interrupted his fretfully planned itinerary and they sat tied up to a jetty while I took the bus to Hintlesham Hall over on the other side of Ipswich for the day. He probably thought that the concession would extend the relationship. (‘You know your father can’t really sail the boat on his own.’) He probably hoped it would buy him time and initiate a new contract with his regular unpaid extra hand. But the reeds and the mud were not going to compete with the excitement of Maddy Prior singing ‘All Around My Hat’ in a tent in a field behind a ragged stately home. I skulked about with the slightly self-conscious body language of a single person at a hip event, added Roy Harper to my ‘famous pop stars I’ve seen live’ tally and rejoined the family holiday. sporting more itchiness than before I went. ‘I should have been at the Isle of Wight Festival instead of cooped up in this hulk with you.

  ‘We are so pathetic. Look at us. No sense of adventure at all.’

  Perhaps it was this same holiday that we anchored off Stone Point, round behind Walton-on-the-Naze. A steep spit of sand shelved down to a deep channel that drained all the acres of marsh, island and saltings every tide. It was inaccessible by land, four or five miles from the nearest town and an anchorage for larger boats visiting the backwaters. At weekends the channel could be crowded, but during the week, even in August, there would be no more than three or four yachts there. People fished and walked on the sand. Other people, not us, built extravagant fires and chattered in groups, drinking beers and laughing. ‘Go on, go and say hello.’ My poor desperate father was under constant pressure from my sister and me to open up, get social, meet some of th
ese other people. ‘Look over there. They’ve got children our age! We were seventeen. Nothing means as much as the company of other people who are also seventeen when you are seventeen. But we were too shy to make the running ourselves so we loaded the responsibility on to my poor antisocial father. ‘Ask them over for a drink, or something.’ He even went. He wanted to hold on to his pressed crew so badly that he rowed himself over to other boats and painfully introduced himself, offered to play host to surprised fellow yachtsmen. But I think it was us who approached the owners of the pretty yawl when they were on shore collecting driftwood. Their boat was like a proper version of the boat we had, slim and spoony instead of fat and cumbersome, with an elegant counter and a low profile and ten or so extra feet. Though we never got inside to see her gorgeous interior, she had all the glamour of a proper romantic twenties yacht. We sat around their fire in the evening, and the tall, blonde girl whose family owned it tossed her shaggy locks back and pulled her knitted jacket around her shoulders like an illustration in a Ralph Lauren catalogue. I was a year younger than she was, so I knew my place, which was to sit on the broken shell beach and feel ashamed of my hopeless fat family.

  ‘Do you know what they do on Christmas Day? They don’t sit around and watch the television at all. They live on a farm or something and they come for a huge ten-mile walk across the marshes here. On Christmas Day.’

  ‘Yes, darling. Well, you could go for a walk on Christmas Day if you wanted to, but last Christmas we had trouble getting you out of bed at all in the morning.’

  ‘That’s because we’re so bourgeois. We’re so flabby. We’re so normal.’

  The blonde with the boat became my benchmark. That’s what proper exciting people who lived on farms and had lots of money and lovely boats that didn’t leak did. They went for a long walk on Christmas Day, when they weren’t making impromptu barbecues in out-of-the-way places, of course.

  But then I was always a sucker for pretty, unattainable girls bigging up their families.

  Why do these things stick? These tiny burrs that catch on the coat of experience. ‘Don’t sit on the radiators, they’ll give you piles.’ ‘A gentleman has rugs on his floors, not fitted carpets.’ Rugs, rugs, rugs. Who’s to say the man was right? I don’t belong in that place or this. I will have to learn what to do to enjoy myself properly and become an exciting person. I went to Cambridge to get out. And now I have lots of rugs.

  Windsong was almost entirely flat-bottomed; though thirty feet long she drew no more than two and half feet. One evening, we crept up the Butley River. It was a creek around behind an island at the mouth of the Ore, and no more than twenty feet across for most of its surprising length. It could be described as little more than a drain, in a wide expanse of utterly flat marsh — not a reedy exotic marsh, but a sharp grassed, unforgiving matted expanse of half-land, crazed with runnels like a larger version of a baked mud puddle. We could not see this. The boat sat low between the banks. We motored slowly forward for two, perhaps three miles, twisting onwards. There wasn’t room to pass another boat, but we wouldn’t meet another boat. No boats came up there any more, though half-way up we passed a red-brick quay where, until the Second World War, Thames barges, mammoth sixty-foot wherries with tan sails, would have tied up to take hay to London. Here the land began. The tidal river unexpectedly widened. The bank built up on the northern side into a twenty-foot-high cliff which met a sea wall snaking in from somewhere towards Orford. We anchored, probably in the middle of an oyster bed.

  In the last of the light I rowed away from the boat. When water is completely calm the oars break mirrors. The rowlocks squeak and rattle as if being recorded in a studio. The dinghy and the rower seem to be overpowered, scooting into glassy motion at the slightest tug. I pulled up on the shore and climbed up the sandy cliff and sat under some crouched trees, which seemed to mark the beginnings of liveable land. Away on the other side of the sea wall was a low cottage with a single light in a window. Ahead to the south and west, the Suffolk fields rolled up and out towards Bentley woods where I knew there was a priory, originally served by the river. I couldn’t see it. It was dusk. What I could see was miles of fading, almost medieval landscape. I waited there as it got dark under the blackening trees, an oil lamp on the boat reflecting on the water like a connecting thread. I can hardly think of any other moment in my life which has encompassed such perfection: the solitude, the beauty, the sense of the journey made and the simplicity of the place. I got back in the dinghy. pulled the thread in and rowed back to the intimacy of the little cabin. It was what my father wanted from it all. He gave that to me.

  Thirty-five years on, I went to take a look at Windsong while they were laying her up at the end of the 2004 season. It was a difficult yard to get to, upriver of the tide mill in Woodbridge, crossed by a railway line, and dirt tracks, where the Suffolk Heritage Coast dumped its chair manufacturers, plant storage and sausage makers. The place for a beating-up in a low-budget cop show. The winter facilities were little more than a couple of sheds and a crane, in a field full of boats on sticks.

  I sat on the blue-covered bench seats, my father’s upholstery wearing dramatically well, and as I looked around and praised aloud the cosy ergonomics of the neatly arranged shallow interior, I was thinking that I had libelled my own father in the cause of filial mockery. He hadn’t loaded the boat with woodwork until it sank beneath his carpentry. His additions, like the little book case, and the ‘tidy’, were positioned with a good eye and discreetly made in dark mahogany. They looked good. It was good that the boat that he lavished such attention on was going to continue. It was good that what seemed to matter most to him, his claustrophobic, neat cabin, where he liked to ‘get a fug up’ and hide from the world, retained his stamp. Out on deck again under scudding clouds I paused for a second. I could see down to the bend in the river where, fifteen years ago, we had gone out in a boat and scattered his ashes.

  10. The Wake Arms

  Six miles below Epping, in the middle of the forest, I parked my car and walked into the ‘Olde Orleans Eatery, a Taste of the Deep South’. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. A fat couple and a baby were eating plates of chips under a fake Tiffany lamp, but the rest of the pine-clad multi-levels were empty. I could enjoy my familiar neurotic dilemma choosing a place to sit.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked the manager.

  ‘Oh, ten years now. We’re due for a refurbishment.’

  It all looked perfectly new to me. ‘What happened to the pub?’

  ‘Way before my time.’

  On the way to the cloakroom I peered at the photographs on the wall. They were of jazz combos: Coleman Hawkins, Bix Beiderbecke and a young Louis Armstrong, nursing their trumpets and staring out from sepia reproductions. To most of the customers they might as well have been the Siberian Accordion Stars. They were a ‘theme’, chosen almost at random by a marketing man. But the chip-eaters would have heard of David Bowie, or Pink Floyd, or Black Sabbath, and all of these monsters of guitar-twiddling had actually played this place. Or not this place, but a sweaty box with black walls, round the back of a biker pub that used to be on this site, called the Wake Arms. The ‘Olde Progressive Music Eatery’ must have been rejected as being uncommercial.

  There had always been pop music at home. We had a Dansette like everybody else. My father carted its nice, gluey, fresh plastic smell home when we were in rompers. The first forty-five we bought was ‘Multiplication’ (‘that’s the name of the game’).

  The fanciful plot of my dad’s famous puppet show was based around his experimental musical purchases. There was an elopement scene (‘James, James, Hold The Ladder Steady’ by Susan Maugham) . There was a shipwreck (a bit of the ‘March Of The Valkyrie’, off a Selections From Wagner EP). And an octopus fandango (‘Do The Mambo Jambo’, a bossa nova by God-knows-who, on an old seventy-eight). My father actually got hold of a huge quantity of ancient platters from a hospital social club clear-out (including some rare No�
�l Coward and Gertie Lawrence sketches, which I’m afraid we thought were risible and made into plant pots. Our forty-fives included selections from The Boy Friend and extracts from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers.

  When I went back to Epping on my nostalgic daytrip in 2005, the little shop ‘Chew and Osbourne’s’ was still operating. It had largely determined our ‘collection’ (since my father just marched in and bought a handful of what was to hand, to see how his player worked), though I was sorry to see that the booths with the white holey board, where you could solemnly listen to your choice before taking it home, had gone.

  By the time we were ten we had become more discriminating. Woolworths used to do cheap cover versions: extended players with three tracks on each sides, ‘indistinguishable from the real thing’, except that they were on red plastic. A vinyl warning: ‘This is not a real record’. Nobody much cared who recorded the originals of ‘Venus In Blue Jeans’ (‘She’s everything I hoped she’d be’) or ‘Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey’. But ‘Love Me Do’ was different. Even we could tell it was a bit gormless to have the cover version of that.

  The Beatles singles came into the house on the original discs, in the weeks that they were released. ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was particularly significant. It was mine. I bought it with my birthday money. We were Beatles people, then. My mother watched the Stones on Top of the Pops, and fretted about the unhygienic nature of their hair. At thirteen we rather agreed with her. They were too noisy and had aggressive lips. The records we had in our wooden box with the lifting lid (which my father had knocked up for us) with its natty sixties red-and-white washable gingham-print vinyl sticky-backed cover, were all sing-alongs.