Coasting

by Jonathan Raban

  In Lyme Regis, Gosfield Maid lay against the Cobb, the stone breakwater which enfolds Old Lyme in the crook of its protective arm. The outgoing tide left the boat high and dry, leaning against the wall, its masts roped to bollards on the quay to keep it from falling over into the harbor. Arriving alone and out of season, I fell into the good company of the fishermen, who found a space for me, took my lines, nursed Gosfield Maid alongside and came aboard to inspect and approve my ship’s carpentry while I stood by, tending bar.

  My visitors were the first people I’d met who were not in the least impressed by the saber-rattling which was going on in newspapers and on television.

  “What’s the point of un?” said John, the owner-skipper of the trawler Whynot. “If the government had of wanted a good war on their hands, they could’ve fought the bloomin’ French. We should have had a war with they, over the seine netting and the fishing limits. But Argentina …” He shook his head over the idiocy of our rulers.

  “They sold we right down the river. First it was Iceland and the cod fishing, they give in over that. Then it’s France and the Common Market. Now they got Russians in Liverpool Bay. In bloody great factory ships.

  “I was up to London, to Parliament. We was all there, from Lyme. Didn’t do no good, though. The politicians, they just give our livelihood away—to the French, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Russians …

  “There’s no fish left, hardly, in England now. You see a Dover today, he’s a shadow of what he used to be, a little-bitty thing of gristle and bone, all head, no flesh to him. That’s seine netting. Or you take sprats. Ten year back, I’ve had this harbor full of blood after the sprat fishing, the water red—even the sand were red. You’d never see that nowadays. The French took they, and they took the fry too, with nets so fine that nothing, not the little babies even, gets away.

  “They lets all that go by on the nod, then they goes off to fight a war with Argentina over they Falkland Islands—lovely job!”

  Nevertheless, John was a fish plutocrat. Jeaned, booted, with gray muttonchop sideburns and Zapata mustache, he was king of the Cobb. He’d begun as a farm laborer, fishing in his spare time for roach and chub in the muddy Somerset rivers. Then he came to Lyme, bought a leaky 9-foot dinghy for £5, and set pots for crab and lobster in all weathers. He’d been laughed at by the locals, who promised him that the next time he took his absurd little cockleshell boat out to sea would be the last.

  “They used to joke about how I were going to turn into bait for the crabs.”

  These ribbing sessions were overheard by a lonely retired man who lived in a cottage above the Cobb and used to sit by himself in the fishermen’s bar.

  “Laughing at a tryer. Old Varnes, he wouldn’t bide that.”

  So Mr. Varnes lent John the £400 he needed to buy a proper boat, an 18-foot launch properly equipped for crabbing. John paid him back with fishing trips and a £10 note every Friday night.

  “We’d go out, with Mr. Varnes sitting up in the front, smoking his cigarettes and eating scallops raw, out of the shell. That’s all he ever did—smoked, and ate his ‘queenies.’ He wouldn’t say a word to me, and I wouldn’t say a word to he, from one end of the day to the other.”

  A year later there was a new boat—a 24-footer. Varnes sat in front, coughing, smoking and sucking scallops out of their shells. John was now the most successful crabber in Lyme Bay, often working in the dark, in seas rough enough to keep everyone else ashore. With Varnes’s help, he bought a 36-foot trawler, from which he was able to shoot strings of pots and fish offshore for whiting, plaice and pollock. When Mr. Varnes died of lung cancer, John was his sole heir. He’d been left £17,000—enough to commission a boatbuilder in Bideford to make him a fine wooden 48-foot beam trawler.

  Now, with the Whynot, a cockle barrow at each end of town, a fishmonger’s shop and a kiosk on the Cobb, he was rich. In Mrs. Thatcher’s England, John was an exemplary figure of self-reliance, industry and business acumen. Coming up past fifty, he still kept that innocent entrancement with the secret watery world of the fish of the boy who had once haunted the riverbank, waiting for his colored-quill float to tremble and go under.

  “With fish as scarce as what they are, you always got to be thinking fish. The others, they’ll go where they caught plaice last week, or last year. That’s not good enough—not now it isn’t. Me, I go out, and I say to meself, ‘Where’s he to, then? If I were a plaice, where’d I be?’ ”

  “So where are the plaice now?”

  “Right inshore. On the rocks. They’re feeding off of these little mussels, see? Building theyselves back up after spawning. Today, now, you got to go in close—closer’n most people like to, till you can feel the bottom under the keel. That’s where the plaice is now. But next week he’ll be gone, back to deep water. Next week, or the week after.”

  Even his holidays were spent fishing. For five weeks each summer, John took his wife to the island of St. Lucia, where he fished for tuna in the hard-drinking company of the Haitian Ambassador.

  It was a Horatio Alger success story, from farm boy to tycoon. It was authentically English and long-shadowed in two essential respects—in the sad, solitary, silent figure of John’s benefactor smoking himself to death in the cuddy, and in the prospect, not far off, of a sea so thoroughly trawled and netted by comeovers that its stock of fish would be exhausted. But in the interval between the death of Mr. Varnes and the death of the Channel as a fishery, John was one of the happiest Englishmen alive.

  I was taken crabbing by Geordie and Ken, who woke me at 0830 hours by bringing a dead squid to my bedside. Geordie was trying to operate the squid like a glove puppet.

  “Wakey, wakey!”

  A day that begins with a face-to-face confrontation with a talking squid can only get better as it goes on.

  “In Italy they eat that,” Geordie said. “It’s what they call a calamari.”

  “Cally-what? Go on—!” Ken said, leaning against the lintel of my bedroom.

  “They do, the Italians. It’s a delicacy, squid is.”

  “I wouldn’t eat nothing like that.”

  Geordie, who had lived in Lyme for thirty years but was still known as the comeover from Newcastle, had a small crab boat with a cramped wheelhouse up in the bows. Ken was his odd-jobbing crew, a man with a vacantly handsome face which came to life only when he talked about emigration. Some day soon, when he’d saved up a bit of money, this year perhaps, but next year certainly, Ken was going to Tasmania. He didn’t seem to know much about Tasmania, but he’d seen an article about it in a magazine, and had decided that Tasmania was his manifest destiny.

  “What are you going to do when you get to Tasmania, Ken?”

  “Sheep. I’ll have a sheep farm—prob’ly.”

  He spent much of his time standing on the end of the Cobb, staring at the sea as if he could see past Australia in it. Anywhere but here … In the saloon of Gosfield Maid Ken discovered a book I had written about Arabia. He didn’t open it but devoted a quarter of an hour to an intense perusal of the photograph on the dust jacket, which showed a many-arched palace with water gardens. I watched Hobart slowly reshaping itself into Abu Dhabi in his eyes, and saw Ken drilling for oil, Ken riding a camel over mountainous dunes of sand, Ken robed in a djellabya, Ken camping out alone under a desert moon. My version of his future seemed as plausible as his own.

  Lyme Bay was windless and misty. Its only landmark was a hillock of limestone called, with more grandeur than it deserved, Goldencap. The crab and lobster pots were all laid out on compass bearings from Goldencap, which kept on fading out, then showing again as a brushstroke of gray in the bright mist. Geordie steered the boat while Ken tended the power winch and baited up the “inkwell” baskets with crucified skate.

  We motored around the bay, hunting for the plastic detergent bottles which buoyed each string of pots. At each stopping place, the boat flopped about in the light swell, the winch moaned and Geordie heaved the pots aboard. He leaned over
the side saying “Not a lot, not a lot,” as another inkwell broke the surface with its bait largely intact and a single fiddler crab crouched in the corner.

  Geordie, with more kindliness than the boy in Sutton Harbour, threw the fiddlers back into the sea with all their legs in working order. “Go home, fiddly!” he said. “Phone your mum!”

  The crabs were brownies, peelers, spiders and fiddlies. Lobsters were just “beautiful black ones.” But there were very few beautiful black ones: many pots came up empty, some had a few inedible fiddlies, and a single brown crab was a good catch.

  After Ken had winched up two strings of empty pots in succession, Geordie said: “Looks like the amateurs have been out.”

  I had come across the “amateurs” before. In the last five years the amateurs had been increasing in number as the unemployment figures rose. They came mostly from well inland, from towns and cities where they scraped by on Social Security. They had turned to the sea as the last place where a man without capital might make an independent living.

  All the plant they needed could be had for less than £l,000—the secondhand inflatable boat, outboard motor, pots, buoys and nylon nets. The amateurs started up in business just like John of the Whynot; but where he had begun in flush times, when there was room on the sea for everyone, they were coming too late, to a sea which was rivaling the land in making men who worked on it redundant.

  On the south coast, the amateurs laid pots. On the northeast of the island, off Blyth, Alnmouth and Berwick, they netted the mouths of the rivers for salmon. The professional fishermen, already squeezed by falling stocks, hated the amateurs. An empty pot was clear evidence that an amateur had stolen a beautiful black one out of it. The professionals, like robins, had intricate territories of a kind that no landsman would understand. Everyone had his own private patch of sea, marked out by compass bearings and transits of tree-over-church and rock-under-chimney. The amateurs saw the sea as a featureless free-for-all, and ignored all the consecrated boundaries.

  I felt for the amateurs. They had, after all, behaved exactly as they had been exhorted to by the British government. They had got on their bikes. They had set themselves up in legal private enterprise. Because their boats were terribly inferior to those of the professionals (they were sometimes just stripy beach toys), and lacked professional gear like diesel winches and depth-sounders, their job was absurdly difficult and dangerous. Knowing little about the sea, they were easily caught by tricks of tide and weather. Instead of being taken in hand as innocents, they were treated as enemies and pirates. Their boats were sabotaged. While professional pots were always “stolen,” amateur pots, when found, were righteously “confiscated.” To the puzzled amateur who had resorted to the sea, much as I had done myself, because it looked like freedom, it must have been a heartbreaking business. If even the sea was a closed shop of fiercely guarded jobs and rigid demarcation lines, where else was left? Tasmania. A picture of open country and blue skies seen in a magazine.

  Ken was an out-of-work plasterer. He was lucky to have been taken on, for pin money, by Geordie. In any case, he lacked the kind of practical-mindedness that was needed to go into business as an amateur. Ken didn’t make things happen; they happened to him—like his first marriage. He’d had a safe, safely institutionalized job as a deckhand in the merchant navy until “I got pissed one night and got a bird in the club.” Now, with his second wife, two children and a council house, he was encumbered with a world too big, too expensive, too complicated for him to understand, let alone control. Twice he said to me, “I’m only thirty-eight,” in a voice full of grievance and bewilderment.

  Tailing the rope from the winch, he eyed the water moodily. Gorged jellyfish, tasseled like lampshades, colored pink and violet, drifted past the side of the boat. “Fucking jellies,” Ken said. Then, “I got to write off for the papers.”

  “Papers?”

  “For Tasmania. There’s a lot of forms to fill in. Bureaucracy.”

  We were close inshore, between Charmouth and Lyme, where ledges of soft blue-gray rock slipped into the water at such a shallow angle that it was hard to make out where the rock ended and the sea began. All over the bay, more ledges were surfacing as the tide sank away from them, and I was almost certain that I’d spotted the place I’d been looking for—a depression in the low cliff where the layers of rock had split apart as they were squashed into a soup-bowl curve. The big shoulder of limestone on the Charmouth side, the shale-falls, the sagging fringe of overhanging turf—nothing had changed, except that it was now all on a smaller scale that it had seemed then.

  “I used to come here thirty years ago,” I said. “When I was nine or ten, with my parents, collecting fossils.”

  “Fossils—” Ken spoke of them in the same tone that he used for jellyfish. “They sell them up in the town, to the tourists. There’s more money in fossiling now, I reckon, that what there is in crabbing.”

  Geordie headed the boat back to Lyme. The long morning’s work for two men had produced one bucket of brown crabs and four lobsters. Geordie would get about £20 for the entire haul.

  “Not a lot,” he said. “Not a lot.”

  I felt like a burglar. I found a hammer and a caulking punch in the tool locker, hid them in my overcoat pockets, and left the boat to go for a raid on the ancient past. But the present obtruded: in the newsdealer’s where I stopped for a tin of tobacco, the headlines on the papers were deep and bold.

  STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA!

  This was the Sun’s illuminating ray, cast on the peacemaking efforts of the American Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, who had spent the last week shuttling between London, Washington and Buenos Aires. It was the tabloid newspapers’ view that the United States was now behaving like a soppy spoilsport. The editorial writers had a best-selling war on their hands, and they were not going to be cheated out of it by a sleight of yellow-bellied diplomacy. They had launched a series of patriotic competitions. Readers were invited to submit “Argie” jokes and to “Sponsor a Sidewinder.”

  I had encountered bloodthirstiness and bigotry before. In Syria I had made friends with a man who kept under his bed the rotting remains of the head of an Israeli soldier whom he had killed on the Golan Heights. In Tennessee, I had had it patiently, solemnly explained to me that the Negro was a penance, created by God to remind the white man of his Original Sin. Both these were confidences, told in private, in eccentric foreign parts. In Lyme Regis, I saw hatred mass-produced, bigotry put up for sale under the benign eye of the government whose cause the bigotry was designed to serve. It was, on the whole, rather less attractive in prospect than the Jew’s head in a sack which I declined to view, although I told Ibrahim that I felt privileged to be offered such an opportunity. It was no privilege at all to see the Sun, the Mail and the Express gloating over the bloodbath to come.

  The strangeness of the country was made stranger by the fact that, although every footstep here was a footstep I had taken thirty years ago, I couldn’t quite remember whether I actually remembered it. I crossed the half-moon of sand in front of the beach huts and the public lavatories. I left big, sloppy prints on the edge of the water, which was sluggish and purple with weed. In the sea air, slightly sweetened by a tincture of stale urine, I thought I smelled egg sandwiches, orange peel and fizzy lemonade, though the beach was deserted. Maybe lavatories for me were what madeleines were for Proust.

  Then the ledges of rock began—long, slippery tongues of stone, with threadlike pools of sea between each ledge. You could take them at a steady lope, on tiptoe in sandshoes, skipping from ledge to ledge, flying high over the starfish, sea anemones and rock blennies. You could, once. But frightened of breaking something, I clambered, skidded, got my feet wet and didn’t dare to jump. The ten-year-old raced on ahead; the thirty-nine-year-old plodded behind, trying to remember the way.

  I found the depression in the cliff. My father had parked the Bradford Jowett a mile inland, at the end of a rutted track. We carried our picnic
stuff, the cardboard boxes, the mallets and stonemason’s chisels across two fields down to the shore.

  Rock Drill. The fossils embedded in the limestone had Old Testament names. Then the Ammonites together with the Belemnites did rise up against the Trilobites and they slew them. They were beautiful things. When you split the rock right, it swung open on its secret like an unlocked door, revealing inside a whorled ammonite with the metallic luster of a casting in bronze. Then you had to ease it out with delicate surgery, tapping, prising, tapping again, until the mummified shell came cleanly away in your hand, in mint condition after fifty million years, according to Fossils for Beginners. Trilobites, a sort of giant sea wood louse as big as a side plate, were a lot harder to extract. They usually shattered at the first tap, going from flesh to dust in a couple of seconds. The bullet-headed belemnites simply dropped out of the rock, came by the dozen and were thought too boring to bother with.

  We filled the cardboard boxes with ammonites, gently swaddled in old pages from The Times and with promising chunks of rock which would be operated on later at the parsonage. Boxes on heads, the family chain gang toiled back up the hill to the car, stumbling under the weight of their prehistory.

  Every summer holiday we trekked from site to site, digging up more of the past—fossils from Charmouth, shards of pottery from plowed fields near Roman villas, the brittle and yellowed pages of old parish registers in county record offices. In search of more ancestors, we peeled the moss off the lettering of tombstones in country churchyards, uncovering dead Bakers, Buncombes, Cockburns and Rabans—forebears hardly less remote in time than the ammonites and the trilobites. My father, searching for the buried roots of the family tree, worked his way patiently through the sedimentary layers of the eighteenth century, passed 1700 and headed for the Restoration and the Civil War. Tapping out his pipe on the broken base of an Etruscan pot salvaged from a gravel pit, using ammonites as paperweights, he stayed up into the small hours annotating and collating his summer research.