The moment the bell sounded at eleven, the school became an Army company. Blancoed and bereted, equipped with rifles salvaged from the Boer War, we drilled on the parade ground in deadly earnest. The Corps was not a game: it was, more effectively than Greek or Latin, an educational foundation stone, a serious preparation for the life that was supposed to lie ahead of boys who went to King’s. The school kept Sandhurst supplied with a steady stream of officer cadets, and to do National Service without winning a commission was regarded as mildly disgraceful.
At thirteen-going-on-fourteen I was a daydreaming academic washout, but I could strip a Bren in sixteen seconds, calculate the trajectory of a bullet, with all due allowance for dead ground, charge a stuffed sack with a bayonet, and interpret an Ordnance Survey map in terms of its possibilities for gunnery and tactical surprise. In the Corps, the slovenly and inattentive child came within a whisker of making the grade. There was a good deal of derision in the Lower Common Room when I was, to my own astonishment, promoted to lance corporal.
Major MacTurk said: “If you didn’t have asthma, Raban, and generally pulled your socks up, one might even begin to think in terms of Sandhurst, but alas—”
He might as well have pinned the Military Cross to my chest. Once a term, on Field Day, I got a taste of what it might feel to be a true Vigornian. We were bused out to Bromyard Down, an undulating land, with a desolate and wretched aspect. Wheezing only a little, I led my section in V-formation through the spiny gorse and made them wriggle on their bellies in single file. The foggy silence was broken every so often by the petulant small bangs of blank .303 cartridges and the loud voices of officers proclaiming the injured and the dead.
The officers had commandeered every bump and knuckle of high ground, from where they ran the war with whistles and enlivened it with thunderclaps. It was an old-fashioned, low-tech war. Fighting was at close quarters, some of it hand-to-hand. From sandy foxholes, covering fire was provided for acts of suicidal heroism. It belonged somewhere between Spion Kop and Mademoiselle from Armentières.
The casualties were carried away on stretchers by the conchies in the Red Cross—day boys whose (mostly Quaker) parents had objected to their compulsory service in the Corps, and who were reckoned to be beneath contempt. The living fought on into the dusk, mounting pincer movements, recce patrols and snatch raids for prisoners, who were frequently tortured during their interrogations.
This enforced military apprenticeship at least produced a fund of metaphor with which to explain and ratify the experience of boarding school. For most of the five years that I spent at King’s, I saw myself as a prisoner of war, detained by Germans in a comfortless Stalag for the duration. The ferocious bullying, the removal of the most basic privacies, the treatment of physical weakness as an offense worth punishing, were simply what one expected to endure at the hands of the gooks.
I knew all about gooks. I escaped into the literature of escape—the paperback memoirs of the British prisoners who had dug tunnels, built wooden horses, gone over the wire in laundry trucks during the War. In the early 1950s, scads of these stories were published every year, and I read every one of them, greedily, lost in the romantic fiction of running away. Many of the most commercially successful of these books were unsatisfactory for my purposes, since they dealt with escape on a mass scale—twenty or thirty men at a time scrabbling their way through the earth to freedom. My interest was in the one-man tunnel, the solitary break planned without reference to the Escapes Officer, and these were so rare that I had to invent most of them for myself.
In the moonlit dormitory I lay half-awake, with bells from the cathedral ringing the quarter-hours. The gooks slept. Working effortlessly, I carried away paper-bagfuls of soft soil, which would later be surreptitiously scattered over the rose beds in the school gardens. I shored up the night’s work with slats of wood torn from a tea chest that I’d spotted earlier that day outside Matron’s door. My nails were broken and I had earth in my hair, but I was already under the first line of wire. Ten yards more, and I’d be under the perimeter fence. Twenty yards beyond that, the pinewood began. The gooks, with their searchlight mounted on the eastern watchtower, would never spot me as I sprinted (asthma miraculously cured) through the trees. Auf Wiedersehen!
Ten years later I came across what I took to be the key to this compulsive fictionizing, these sweet dreams of heroic warfare and flight, when I read Vladimir Nabokov’s afterword to a reissue of Lolita. The germ of the novel, Nabokov said, lay in a newspaper clipping about a captive ape in a Californian research institute. Given paints, brushes and paper, the ape spent a year producing indecipherable blobs of color. Electrodes were attached to its brain. Its tormentors tried to encourage it by subjecting the animal to a perpetual exhibition of simple pictures of female apes, bananas, tall trees and other likely objects of fantasy. At last it came up with the goods. Sheet after sheet of paper was painted with shaky black parallel lines. The chimpanzee was drawing the bars of its own cage.
I wasted the greater part of my time at this school in drawing the bars of my cage. I went there at eleven, on a state scholarship, and was mercifully withdrawn from it when I was sixteen.
Now the whole country was out on a field day.
The saloon, lit by the flickering gray moonshine of the TV, rocked comfortably at anchor. Crouched forward, cupping my jawbone in my hands, I was engrossed in the shuffle of bizarre pictures on the screen.
Vertical-takeoff fighters dithered grotesquely aloft, making the air below them boil. Marines with bodybuilders’ muscles and elaborate tattoos were doing physical jerks in an improvised gym. They were naked except for their uniform undershorts, which consisted of two Union Jacks, one fore, one aft. The crux of the frontward flags bulged with impressive genital equipment. More soldiers, their faces menacingly camouflaged with boot polish, or perhaps woad, were at bayonet practice, making horrible noises as they charged the sack. The show came to a climax with a wide-angle shot of another saloon, now an Other Ranks mess, packed with several hundred singing men.
It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go!
It’s a long way to Tipperary, to the sweetest girl I know …
This was, by field-day standards, surprisingly tame, and was probably a special request of the TV crew: the songs I remembered were all ones of unrelieved dirtiness, like the pathologically fecal “In Mobile.”
The reporter’s voice was as strange as the pictures themselves. It was an earnest pastiche of the Britain-can-take-it style of Movietone News in the 1940s. It left unnatural dramatic gaps between the words of the script; it was over-loud, as if the reporter were addressing a camp meeting instead of a clip-on mike in his shirtfront; like the singing, it was exaggeratedly ff and allegro con spirito.
I felt like an eavesdropper watching this bulletin from the task force being transmitted from a secret position somewhere in the Atlantic. The program was, I suspected, not designed to be seen by me or by anyone in the British Isles. It was certainly not news in the ordinary sense, but a form of warfare in its own right. Its targeted audience was Argentinian, and the reporter’s overemphatic delivery was probably intended to make his words more easily translatable to the people to whom he was really speaking—the General, the Admiral and the Brigadier in Buenos Aires.
The first objective of the voyage of the task force was evidently to scare the invaders away from the islands by showing them bloodcurdling television pictures of what was going to happen to them when the ships arrived. This was assault by photomontage, with flags superimposed over phalluses and songs over airplanes, gun muzzles and bayonets. The theme of sexual prowess and conquest was rudely explicit: the Argentine forces and their effete supremo were going to be raped by the greater potency of the British.
As we sang on the bus to Bromyard Down—
Hitler has only got one ball!
His other one’s in Leeds Town Hall;
Himmler
Has something sim’lar,
&n
bsp; But poor old Goebbels
Has no balls
At all!
No one now could accuse the British of lacking balls: the precious objects had been exhibited on television, tastefully wrapped in the national flag.
There was another novelty in the broadcast. Everything was happening in the first person plural. “We” were steaming south; “we” had declared a two-hundred-mile maritime exclusion zone around the Falkland Islands. The blackface marines were “our boys” (or, as the Prime Minister chose to refer to them, “my boys”). A week before, no anchorman or commentator would have dreamed of risking this cozy pronoun: the State was perceived as a fragile assembly of conflicting parties—Government and Opposition, management and unions, North and South, those with jobs and those without them. But war was working its old black magic, restoring the image of the State as an extension of the self. Britain was beginning to sound exactly like School House.
“We,” said Peter Snow, the housemasterly presenter of the BBC’s Newsnight, “are, at a guess, roughly here.” He moved some ship models about on a gray plasticine ocean.
Would you be so kind, I thought, as to leave me out of this?
Snow’s model ships were already three thousand miles away. Gosfield Maid, on a reciprocal course and making five, sometimes six knots, was modestly increasing the distance. The task force became as remote as a legend, and what little news I got of it had the cracked ring of archaic fiction.
When you set up house on a boat, however soft and urban you may be and however crowded the coast you sail past, you soon find yourself turning into Robinson Crusoe. Four things matter: food, water, fire and weather. Inside your timber stockade, you begin to construct your civilization from scratch. You start by keeping warm and end up with do-it-yourself theology.
I was in the early stages. I hoarded charcoal. I fished over the stern. The April mackerel were sad things, with tarnished scales and heads too big for their bodies. I bought blotting paper and mustard and cress seeds and set up a kitchen garden in an old office In tray which I screwed to the wheelhouse roof. Hours leaked away in the search for a quay with a freshwater tap and a hosepipe with which I could fill the fifty-gallon tank under the cockpit.
But it was the weather and the tides that kept me in a state of dazed preoccupation—the same trancelike absorption that a writer feels in the middle of a book when he finds himself swallowed in his own plot, no longer the author of circumstances but a creature of them. Living in a city, I’d hardly bothered to notice whether it was raining or shining. Weather was something that just was, and I couldn’t have been less interested in its whys and wherefores.
Now I studied it as intently as any text that I’d pored over in the past. I watched the Atlantic lows winging their way in from south of Greenland—unstable, whirling cones of disturbed air, filling, deepening, changing track, spawning more depressions in their wake. Spinning against the clock, they brought the powerful, salty southwesterly winds that whipped the sea up into untenantable hills of froth and spume, took slates off roofs and made the water even in sheltered harbors slop and gurgle round the quays, slamming boats into walls and tossing them frivolously about on their moorings.
I learned Buys Ballot’s Law. Face the wind, and you’ll find low pressure to your right and high pressure to your left (the reverse, of course, applies in the Falkland Islands). It was the high pressure to the left of England that I began to dream of wistfully as I’d once dreamed of unattainable girls. Please, God, give me a kindly ridge of it, just from, say, north of the Azores to somewhere a little west of Ireland. The northwest wind would be cold, but it would come from the shore, the sea would be flat and Gosfield Maid would whistle up-Channel to the Dover Straits with her sails wide out to starboard.
I watched the drum on the barograph in the saloon revolve at a tenth of an inch an hour, its inked stylus leaving a thin blue line on the paper as the vacuum cylinder swelled and contracted with the changing atmospheric pressure. Very soon I found myself subscribing to a theory of natural magic. On the rare morning when the barograph needle had climbed overnight and was holding steady, so I discovered a buoyancy of spirit in myself, a sudden rush of cheerfulness and hope for the day. As the needle dipped, my mood darkened in sympathy, and I could feel myself sinking down the inky slope on the graph paper.
Galebound at 995 millibars and falling, I sat up in the wheelhouse under a sky of heaped slag and asphalt, lost in the small print of Reed’s Nautical Almanac. The boat was parked in the busy middle of Brixham harbor, but Brixham itself was no more than a pale frieze of terraces in scabious pastel on the extreme periphery of things. I was more concerned with the moon.
It had been a full moon last night, so with sun and moon in direct line, the tides were running strongly, surging past headlands, then slowing up as they swerved in to fill the bays. High Water Dover was at 0204 and 1420 hours on April 12; the stream ran north and east into Lyme Bay from six hours after until an hour before HWD, so I could ride on a fair tide from 0804 to 1320. But suppose, suppose … Lyme Regis was thirty miles along the bay, anything between five and seven hours by boat, and with High Water Lyme at 0949, the harbor there would be a gully of dry sand long before I reached it on that tide. Think again. Try working the next lunar bulge … Leave Brixham at 1500, breast the steadily weakening tide until it turns in my favor at 2020, and make Lyme in time for High Water at 2203, with the harbor brimming and plenty of depth and space in which to swing the unwieldy bulk of Gosfield Maid. Two flashing red leading lights mark the route in between the piers; sixteen miles to the west, a red light flashes every ten seconds on Straight Point …
My notebook turned into a tangled bird’s-nest of prophecies and speculations as I tried to fit my own life into these great movements of air and water. I logged the shifting barometric contours, the speed and direction of the winds, the phases of the moon, tidal heights and tidal streams. It was not a scientific exercise. It was more like Hindu astrology, a search for the single auspicious moment when you and the universe are in perfect conjunction and fortune smiles. But my stars were out of sync. When the air was right, the water was wrong; when the water was right, the air was wrong. The boat skulked in dock on its chain, growing slimy green maidenhair under its bilges. I consulted the arcane books, made more prophecies, and tended the mustard and cress on the wheelhouse roof, waiting for the break.
Happy conjunctions were rare, and lasted for the six-hour length of a single tide at most. I learned to trust and seize them when they came. The wind blew off the hills to the north. The sun slid temporarily free of the banks of sullen cloud and put on a display of alchemy, transmuting the sea from lead to chased silver. All sails up, the boat slogged ahead, leaning a little away from the wind. I sat up in front on the hatchway over my bedroom, listening to the log-fire crackle of the breaking foam on the bow wave and watching out for the old bleach and fabric-softener bottles with which the crab and lobster fishermen marked their pots. Properly afloat again, I was up to 1024 millibars and steady.
In this mood, England was as far away as the task force. I was running my ship, and I left Mrs. Thatcher to run hers as she pleased. Immersed in the business of ship’s husbandry, I barely noticed what was going on, even when I was on shore. The previous day in Brixham I’d noticed a freshly spray-gunned graffito on a wall at the end of a street. In letters six feet high it said SMASH ARGENTINA! For a second or two I took it for a football slogan, before I remembered.
Two messages from the period.
One was a postcard addressed to me in London. The front was a photograph of the Saint-Gaudens monument to Colonel Shaw and his doomed regiment of black soldiers which stands in front of the State House at the top of Boston Common. The wife of a Harvard professor wrote:
When are you next coming over? Maybe you’d better emigrate—people here think your country has lost its wits.
The other is the first letter home from the QE 2, written by the young Welsh Guards subaltern to his mother. In his l
ast paragraph he looks forward to his arrival at the task-force rendezvous, Ascension Island, where his mail will be waiting:
No doubt I will pick up Colonel Sinclair’s knife in Ascension Island—how many Germans did he kill with it?
CHAPTER 4
HUNTING FOR FOSSILS
The coastline of southern England softens steadily from west to east. Angular blocks of granite, intransigent in the face of sea and weather, give way to outcrops of soft sandstone. A couple of distant ice cream scoops of chalk mark the point where Devonshire begins to peter out into Dorset. Then it’s limestone country. Smoothly curving hills lie low on the horizon. The bare rock—porous, friable stuff, like badly fired pottery—is the color of storm clouds. It dissolves in the rain. Watercourses eat into it like acid, their branch patterns standing out on the landscape. The Jurassic Lias is full of remains, as thickly packed as a common grave with skeletons of creatures that used to live in the sea.
This is England’s vulnerable underbelly where people scare themselves to sleep with dreams of strangers and invasions. Here in Dorset a pet monkey swam ashore, the lone survivor of a wrecked ship. The local vigilantes put it to death because they thought it was a French spy (though that story is part of insular mythology—I heard it again in Northumberland, where the monkey was a Spaniard). Sixty miles away from Europe is just far enough, and near enough, to foster belief in monsters aboard.
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