Coasting

by Jonathan Raban

  Where would it end? I saw this thin and spotty trail of blood leading back forever—to Anglo-Saxons in mead halls, to helmeted centurions, to naked creatures covered with hair and waving clubs. One day the fossils, the pottery and Colonel William and General Sir Edward would compose an unbroken arc of pure ancestry. Our pedigree family would be back in touch with the first things, waddling on scaly stomachs out of the sea. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, wrote Eliot in The Waste Land, and this great antiquarian truffle hunt was just such a shoring-up job on the fading family fortunes. In England in the 1950s, suddenly exposed to the cold winds of socialism, village atheism and genteel poverty, we needed History, measured by the quire and the ton, to prop us up.

  And now I was at it again. There was no one on the shore except for a matchstick man and a dog in the far distance. With hammer and caulking punch, I chipped at the limestone, knocking my way back into 1952. The rock felt harder than it should have done: the punch slipped and scraped on it. I banged my thumb. There were ammonites there—the gray stone was paisley-patterned with their spiral imprints. But too many people had been here before, and there were no beautiful black ones. It would take a charge of dynamite now to find what I was looking for. When it started to rain I packed up. Not even one lousy belemnite. The wet ledges were treacherously greasy underfoot and the raindrops fell on my bare skull in a steady patter of icy surprises.

  My father looked up from under his ruffled black thatch of hair. Freed for a fortnight from his clerical dog collar, he wore a moss-green terry-cloth shirt open at the neck, and the khaki shorts and army socks in which he had lately chased Rommel across the North African desert. Mallet in one hand, cold chisel in the other, he said in his breezy on-holiday voice: “Giving up the ghost already, old boy? If you can’t learn to stick at a thing once you’ve started it, you’re never going to get any results at all, you know.”

  In Lyme Regis, I bought an ammonite in a souvenir shop. It had been thickly varnished, encased in plastic and made into a novelty key ring. At £3.50 it was History on the cheap, perfectly in keeping with the spring of ’82.

  At low tide John was putting his caulking punch to its proper use on the Whynot, banging strands of tarred hemp into the seams below the waterline. The fat blue trawler, canted over on its side in the dry harbor, looked indecently exposed out of the water. The technical term for the full width of a ship’s stern is the “buttock”; and there was something disturbingly gynecological about the way in which John was studiously absorbed in patching up his boat’s broad nether parts.

  “I got something to show you,” he said from the shadow of the Whynot’s barnacled bottom. We went up the ladder, scaled the steep hill of the deck, hauled ourselves into the wheelhouse and swung our way along from handhold to handhold like monkeys, down into the dark, fish-smelling bowels of the trawler. John shined a torch along the cloister of massive oak frames; I followed him past the engine into the stern, where I hung from a slack rudder chain.

  “See there?”

  The torch beam was dickering about on what looked like a ruined toy theater whose actors and scenery had been gruesomely disfigured by oil and fish scales. It was only just possible to make out what the thing was—a grotto of plastic stalactites and stalagmites, with a haloed six-inch Virgin Mary and a bespattered male puppet in a cloak standing a few steps behind her.

  “He was in here when I bought she—I didn’t like to chuck un out.”

  Inside the shrine there was a bulb and a switch; at the back, there were the furry green remains of a battery.

  “She come from Brittany, original. I reckon they Frenchies, they’d all be Roman Catholics, wouldn’t they?” He pointed the torch at the cloaked man. “Who’s that—Jesus?”

  “I don’t know. It might be Peter, I think … the fisherman.”

  Together we stared ignorantly at this neglected relic. I wiped the Virgin down with a Kleenex.

  “He gives me the creeps sometimes,” John said, “coming down here at night, when you’re at sea …”

  I found it spooky too—the thought of the Breton fishermen on their knees, praying for the tempest to be stilled or for a fine catch of haddock. Their plywood shrine with its grubby statuettes looked like a queer survival from some lost pagan world. Aboard this secular ship it was just the same as an abandoned church in a modern city; a sad thing which stirred memories. You didn’t believe in it, but you couldn’t bring yourself to chuck it out, and sometimes it gave you the creeps in the night.

  From Lyme Regis I set out to find my parents. High Water was at 0923, and at a quarter past Geordie and Ken helped me haul the boat’s head round to face the sea. The wind was blowing from the north, just hard enough to frost the water outside the harbor; the only marks on the blue sky were distant jet trails; the barograph needle was at 1015 millibars and rising slowly. With all sails up and the engine going, Gosfield Maid rumbled off across Lyme Bay as sedately as a tram.

  Stick it up your junta, stick it up your junta, stick it up your junta …

  It would have been nice to silence the engine’s idiot jabber, but with seventy sea miles to go, and the tide to catch, I couldn’t afford to dawdle. For the next five hours, the westgoing tide would be holding the boat back, but in the forty-mile half-moon of Lyme Bay the tidal streams are listless and fainthearted, neither much of a hindrance when you’re against them nor much of a help when you’re riding with them. Farther ahead, though, there were tides of such brute force and speed that Gosfield Maid would be stopped in her tracks if I misread the nautical almanac. So I let the engine rattle away down in the basement.

  No surrender, smash the Argies, stick it up your junta.

  In the meantime I sat up at the chart table, rechecking the courses that I’d laid the night before and studying the showers of small arrows on the tidal diagrams in the almanac. At 1130, Portland Bill showed on the port bow as a low island in the middle of the sea. It was not quite in the right place. A compass reading on its southernmost tip put it more than five degrees too far round to the southeast, or put Gosfield Maid about two miles north of her charted course. From the sea, the land always seems so unreliably fluid that one’s first instinct is to assume that hills, cliffs and cities have deserted their stations since they were last surveyed. However, I set a new course, ten degrees round to the south of the old one, to clear Portland Bill by a safe six miles.

  For the sea off Portland Bill is a famously dreadful spot. Reading about it had made me so scared of going anywhere near it that I’d waited for perfect weather and a neap tide before daring to creep round its outskirts. It had chewed up and swallowed warships, cargo boats, trawlers, yachts, whose submerged wrecks were marked on the chart by an insect swarm of double-dagger signs. Portland Race belongs with the legendary horrors of mythology: it is much bigger, is much more powerful and has claimed many more lives than the piddling whirlpool of Charybdis.

  There is no mystery about it. The Race is simply a product of an unfortunate collision of geographical circumstances.

  On a map, Portland Bill is a pendulous dewdrop hanging from Dorset’s nose. It is a three-mile island of quarried limestone, connected to the mainland by a low and narrow beach of piled shingle. The eddies created by this curious obstruction to the tidal stream cause a continuous southward swirl of current on both sides of the Bill. This current drives at right angles straight into the main flow of the stream which goes east on the flood and west on the ebb. Such a meeting of opposed bodies of water would cause confusion anywhere, but off the Bill the effect is violently exacerbated by a broad, shallow ledge of shingle, coral, stone and broken shells. The tide, finding itself abruptly balked in midstream, pours over the uneven bottom of the ledge at tremendous speed, like water from a hose whose end has been squeezed between forefinger and thumb. When it is further inflamed by a contrary wind, the sea on the ledge turns to boiling milk. Water stands on its end in foaming pillars. It seethes and hisses and growls. It can reach out and grab any boat a
ss enough to be in sight of it.

  The Admiralty Pilot notes:

  Though the greatest observed spring rate of the stream off the Bill is 7.2 knots, at a position of 1.3 miles 160° from the lighthouse, yet stronger streams, possibly up to as much as 10 knots, may be found in the immediate vicinity of, but not necessarily in, the race.

  There are people who will not immediately quake in their boots at the idea of the sea traveling at 7.2 or even at 10 knots; but a comfortable pace for a bicycle is a wild and dangerous speed for a body of ocean water. Seven to 10 knots is as fast as a mountain torrent. If a southwesterly tidal stream of 7.2 knots flowed through the Straits of Dover, a lunatic in a life jacket could walk into the sea on Dover beach, let his arms and legs hang limp, and be cast out, albeit senseless, on the rocks of Cap Gris Nez just two hours later. It would be an eventful two hours, of blocklike waves, whirlpools, boils and loud surf; but it would not begin to rival the terrors of Portland Race, since it would lack both the uneven ledge and the violent impact of one tidal stream crashing into another.

  The speed of the sea off Portland Bill is in the Olympic class. A 7-knot tide is so thunderously fast that only a lunatic would choose to get mixed up with it. But tides of 3 or 4 knots crop up all round the British coast. Wherever a headland sticks out into the stream, or the sea is funneled into a channel, impeded by sandbanks or lent extra weight by a river, the tide quickens. The sea moves at 4 knots in the Dover Straits (and much faster off the entrance to Dover’s artificial harbor), at 3.5 knots off the bulge of East Anglia, at 4.5 knots in the Bristol Channel and in the North Channel between Scotland and Ulster. The figures may look innocent, but the streams themselves are savage; great masses of spooling water which pour over the seafloor and break jaggedly into the wind. There’s nothing you can do with these magnificent and unruly tides except submit to them. If the wind’s in the right quarter, you can hitch a bumpy ride on their backs; otherwise you stay in port, waiting for the moon to shift out of line with the sun and the tides to weaken.

  Nine miles off Portland Bill, the drifting land on the beam began to slow as the boat nosed into the mainstream. There was an odd serrated edge to half the horizon, and the sea in the distance, viewed through binoculars, was peppered with scurf. A few minutes later I could hear the Race in the wind—not a dramatic noise, but the wheezy breathing of a sleeping bronchitic. I meant to keep it that way, and added five more southerly degrees to my course, just in case. It took an age to move the twin lighthouses on the Bill from my bow to my stern as the boat slowly elbowed its way against the dying ebb.

  I was giddy with exhilaration at having got past the Race, a hazard which I had been dreading for days. From now on it was downhill all the way, with an eastgoing tide and the open cockpit full of sunshine. I toasted my luck in whisky and admired the view—a sea of bottle-green corduroy with the boat’s wake stretching behind like a steadily unfastening zip.

  I was too busy playing with metaphors to notice that the literal sea, which was not corduroy at all, had another occupant besides Gosfield Maid. The Cherbourg–Weymouth roll-on-roll-off ferry, originally observed as a dot the size of a distant sea gull, was a quarter of a mile off and bearing down on me at twenty knots. My fault entirely. Had not Commander King drummed it into me that If to starboard red appear, it is your duty to keep clear? The boat’s wheel was locked to the autopilot, and it took a frantic fumble to release it. There was a long abusive whoop from the ferry’s horn.

  “Sorry! Sorry!”

  The rudder grumbled in its chains and Gosfield Maid swung away from the bows of the ferry in dreamlike slow motion.

  “I’m awfully sorry—”

  The ship rolled past, as big as a hospital, its windows full of faces. On the sun deck a party of schoolgirls stood pointing down and laughing. It hadn’t occurred to me before that I was quite such an obvious figure of fun.

  Regardez là-bas! Le petit homme dans le petit bateau!

  I waved. The girls clutched each other, enjoying the absurdity of getting an answering response from the animal in its cage. A helical twist of orange peel fell short of the cockpit and disappeared astern. Food for the monkey. The laughing girls were swept away to England while I tumbled harmlessly in the ferry’s wake. They’d find plenty more to giggle over where they were going.

  I spent the next hour and a half obligingly living up to the girls’ opinion of me as a perfect fool. In all my apprehensive reading-up of Portland Race, I hadn’t taken in the fact that there was another, modestly famous race on the next block. St. Alban’s Head also produced a collision of streams on a shallow ledge. The pilot book had a paragraph about it, and the overfalls were shown on the chart as a cluster of little whorls and wriggly lines. The thing was extremely well advertised, but I failed to read the advance publicity and wandered carelessly into the middle of St. Alban’s Race.

  I took the zigzag tracks of white for a school of porpoises at play. They came threading through the water under the bow, making the sky tilt and the boat slither sideways down the face of a wave. They seemed unusually boisterous for porpoises. A gobbet of foam splashed on the roof and dribbled down the wheelhouse windows. The wheel, after another dash to free it from the autopilot, felt as if it were turning on thin air one moment and in thick glue the next. There was no pattern to the waves: they came in packs, bouncing up and down with their tongues hanging out. Nor was there much force in them. The tidal streams were weak, and there wasn’t enough wind to seriously frustrate them. The race gave the boat a few irritable shakes and tweaks, removed my deck brush as a forfeit, and disgorged us.

  It was a stupid, cocksure, quite unnecessary encounter. Given the good weather and the lazy tides, there would have been some point in deliberately steering Gosfield Maid into the race to see how the boat handled in a confused sea. There wasn’t a grain of real danger in these conditions. But to blunder into a tide race by a silly oversight was something to be ashamed of. After an obsessively cautious, heart-in-mouth courtship I had started to take the sea for granted.

  “The sea’s no place for the Walter Mittys of this world,” said the Captain of Dartmouth.

  “The sea’s a job. It’s like accountancy—or writing books,” Commander King said. “Treat it as a proper job and you’ll be all right.”

  The next hour was penitential work. I tightened the shivering genoa sail on the winch. I took compass bearings on every identifiable bump of land and laid them out on the chart until Gosfield Maid was supported by a slowly extending cat’s-cradle of pencil lines strung between Anvil Point, Warren Hill and the smudge of chalk on the western tip of the Isle of Wight. I pricked off each new distance with dividers against the latitude scale on the side of the chart. (One sea mile is a minute of latitude—a flexible measurement, since the miles get shorter and shorter as the earth flattens around the poles.) The flood tide was quickening, and the boat was moving at seven, then eight knots over the seafloor, unraveling the gray thread of land on the beam.

  This low coast was short of marks. Its charted towns and villages—Christchurch, Highcliffe, New Milton, Milford-on-Sea—failed to show on the skyline. The best the binoculars could offer was the intermittent wink of bungalow windows above a crumbled earth-face at the edge of the water. No sign, anywhere, of 1959. Not a single scowling youth on the foreshore. Not even a twist of woodsmoke from an abandoned camp of the Oedipal guerrillas.

  What I was looking for through the glasses was the string of parish halls and Women’s Institutes which you could rent, for immoral purposes, for ten shillings for a Saturday night. Outside each hall was a tangle of piled bicycles; inside, the keen sweet stink of cigarettes and a storm of rock-and-roll.

  The brand names of the cigarettes—Anchor, Strand, Weights, Woodys—had as homely a period ring to them now as Tiffany, Bugatti or Lalique. The rock-and-roll, at tinny full volume, came out of a Dansette gramophone, a year or two before anybody had learned to call the thing a record player.

  Everyone was in uniform. Thei
r toggled duffel coats were heaped on a trestle table. The sweaters of the boys hung in shapeless short skirts above their knees. The fastidious girls, all heels and hairdos, moved as if they had been blown in glass and were liable to a fatal fracture, while the boys shambled and slouched, their antique cigarettes pouched in the corners of their lips, their lids hanging low, their faces cast in the required pose of unillusioned Weltschmerz.

  Even when they were in each other’s arms, the boys and the girls were separated by the Atlantic Ocean. The girls knew exactly where they were—in Harold Macmillan’s England, a bountiful country that would yield, if not next year, then the year after, engagement rings, white weddings, houses with gardens, fridges, spin-dryers, Mother-care smocks, holidays abroad (with a G. B. sticker on the boot of the Rover), lots of jobs for fun and pin money, a green and pleasant future. But the boys were a world elsewhere, in an imaginary America of bums and hoboes, crash-pads and one-night stands.

  Right, you said, Right, when what you meant was “Yes,” and the best sentences all finished with the word man. If you could manage to bring it off (a difficult trick if your voice was still tainted with the braying vowels of boarding school), the proper way of introducing any new remark was to shrug it in with a Like …, followed by a long exhalation of smoke through the nose, followed by the remark itself.

  Like … you want to hitch to Bournemouth, man?

  Right.

  This dream America, discovered in the books of Jack Kerouac and the films of James Dean, was a land exclusively inhabited by rude sons striking their fathers dead. From now on, fathers were finished. God was down already, although the girls persisted in being sentimentally superstitious about him. Mr. Macmillan, waffling, with insufferable paternalism, about how we had never had it so good, was for the chop, along with all the rest of the old fools who ran England as if it were a gentleman’s club in St. James’s. That left only the daily warfare of the breakfast table, the late-night skirmish on the stairs, the old, pitiless and sullen wrangle between real father and real son—a conflict as stylized as a Noh play.