Coasting

by Jonathan Raban

  This roar of international disapproval, intended to dispirit, succeeded in doing quite the reverse. It worked like a dose of sea air on the government and on the British press. Standing alone in the world was what the British liked to believe that they did best. It brought out the Dunkirk Spirit, which was now being busily rebottled as the Falklands Spirit. It reminded them that they were a beleaguered island people, and reinforced their pride in the heroic solitude of their geography. It brought out, in the British Isles at large, all the crabbiness, the xenophobia, the determination to take the rest of the world down a peg, the hunch-shouldered go-it-alone-ism of the Manx—and of the Falklanders themselves.

  They … Them. Eight miles off Dungeness, with the coast of continental Europe showing as a thread of tinsel on the horizon to the east, the British looked to me like a very peculiar bunch of foreigners, definitely third persons and not first. Sussex Rowan and Gosfield Maid had separated at the Rye Fairway buoy: Nick O’Brien was going west, to a place in Sussex that he’d heard of which didn’t have a harbormaster and didn’t levy dues; I was heading for the Thames and London. I’d promised that I’d be there in two days’ time, but … It would be so easy to quit Britain now. The French shore looked hardly farther away than the English one. I had a passport and a yellow Q flag to hoist on the mizzenmast—a shift of course from 050° to 140°, and I could be dining this evening in Boulogne, the standard hidey-hole for English black sheep, from Victorian bankrupts to Lord Lucan look-alikes. Gosfield Maid would have the wind behind her.… A plate of grilled langoustines at La Matelote—and after that, the exile’s life of day-old papers, the BBC World Service, letters from home and two rubbers of bridge with Mrs. Meiklejohn and the rest of the ex-pats.

  But I had “Dinner, Linda, 8:15” written in my diary, there was a pile of unanswered mail waiting in my flat, and I was in the magnetic field of England’s dense and leaden bulk. I was stuck with my orbit. I could no more alter course for France than I could strike out for Polynesia.

  I sheltered overnight (though “sheltered” was not really the word for it) in Dover Harbour, a square mile of sea, loosely corralled with breakwaters. The boat rolled, the anchor chain growled and muttered in its locker; I slept thinly through a continous program of bad dreams. In the early sun, Vera Lynn’s white cliffs were maculated with grime; drained of color under a ragged fringe of green, they looked much as I felt—not in good shape at all.

  I took the back way round the Goodwin Sands, where the water was river-calm, protected by the line of shoals to seaward. Paul Theroux’s interest in my possible wreckage on the Goodwins was a landsman’s fancy. People on land think of the sea as a void, an emptiness, haunted by mythological hazards. The sea marks the end of things. It is where life stops and the unknown begins. It is a necessary, comforting fiction to conceive of the sea as the residence of gods and monsters—Aeolus, the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, the Goodwins, the Bermuda Triangle. In fact the sea is just an alternative known world. Its topography is as intricate as that of the land, its place names as particular and evocative, its maps and signposts rather more reliable. I made for the Downs, where I breakfasted, rattled through the Gull Stream on a two-knot tide, rounded North Foreland and crossed the boundary between the cold green quartzy water of the Dover Straits and the weak tea, flecked with scum, of the Thames Estuary. The meeting of the two waters was precisely marked by a long diagonal string of lazy eddies. A trail of sea garbage had fetched up along this line: busted fish crates, discarded floats, detergent bottles. Distended plastic bags floated just beneath the surface like a shoal of sickly plaice. On one eddy, a torn car seat was placidly swiveling on its own, as if its occupant had just popped in for a quick dip. A troop of noisy gulls patrolled the frontier, watching out for tasty bits of contraband sewage and long-dead fish and squabbling over the rich, plowed water left behind by Gosfield Maid.

  It was not so much an estuary as a broad sea gulf, thirty miles from jaw to jaw, with the ebb tide turning it to an expanding archipelago as whaleback islands of mud and sand began to ease themselves out into the hazy sunshine. I’d seen the mouth of the Thames from aircraft before—a delta of smooth and gleaming flats, with wrinkled fans of water spilling out from the tiny brooks which divided the islands. Making the most of my last drink, waiting for the sudden dimming of the cabin lights as the engine note changed from a steady purr to the rattletrap growl of a badly loaded washing machine, for the double ping that went with the seat-belt sign and the call to extinguish “all smoking materials,” I had been too anxious on other accounts to take any serious interest in the Thames. Now that I was actually on it, I wished that I’d concentrated a little harder on the view from the plane window; it would have been like looking down from the top floor on a lot of people blundering about inside Hampton Court Maze.

  Lines of buoys stretched out everywhere, and some of the separate channels were so close to each other that it-would be easy to wander out of one and into another, and collide with a sandbank on the way. It was like going blindfold, feeling one’s way from buoy to buoy, marking each one off on the chart as it slid past the boat, setting the compass course for the next, groping along with the needle on the depth-sounder bouncing puckishly from I fathom to 3 and back to I again.

  This thin, pale water didn’t look like sea, nor did the land around it look like land. It was wide-open, flat and boggy, only by a few degrees less liquid in consistency than the stuff which was officially designated as water on the chart. It seemed that the basic entropy of eastern England, its river and its sea, was unusually volatile. Heat the whole lot up a little in a tropic summer, or freeze them in a severe winter, and everything would swap places, with oil tankers cruising placidly through the Kentish swamplands and cricketers hitting sixes down the Edinburgh Channel. Or perhaps they’d simply all combine into primal sludge, a frog heaven with insufficient water to set a walnut shell afloat for long.

  Even flattered by the sun, it was a landscape of spectacular desolation, its empty sweeps of brown and gray occasionally broken by strange, angular pieces of Meccano work. A herd of hammer-headed cranes appeared to have found a watering hole on the northern shore. Pylons marched in line across the marshes. The top-heavy concrete towers of a power station were free-floating in sky. The estuary itself—so far as one could see what was the estuary itself—was dotted about with forts built on tall stilts, left over from old wars. Seen from a distance, they took on a momentary period charm, as old-fashioned plate cameras mounted on their tripods. Off the Isle of Grain—which, in this realm of ambiguous distinctions between sea and soil, was not, of course, an island at all, merely a boggy promontory—the rusty deckworks of the S.S. Richard Montgomery stuck out at a jaunty angle from its graveyard of thick slime. The wreck was ringed around with warning buoys and Keep Off notices. It had been an American supply ship during World War II, with a cargo of ammunition and high explosives. When it went down, it was thought too dangerous to risk trying to salvage the cargo, and it was still intact forty years on. There were rumors that it could blow up at any moment, going off with a bang that would take most of the people of Sheerness and Wallend with it. Once a year it provoked the same Parliamentary question and received the same dusty Parliamentary answer, that it was safest left where it was. But in Sheerness, people race for their cellars whenever a car backfires. Passing it at close quarters, I lowered the engine revs of Gosfield Maid, keen not to become the man who made the vibrations that blew a hefty chunk of urban Kent to muddy smithereens.

  Yet these charmless and forbidding marshes had been the making of London as a world city. London was tucked deep inland, more than sixty miles from the mouth of the delta. It squatted in its lair like one of Freud’s anal-retentive personalities, hoarding itself to itself, protected from the sea by a boggy plain of what looked and smelled like its own excrement. There was nothing to impede the wind across this flatland, and London’s ships could sail from the sea into the city without once losing the wind. Intruders, though, could
be picked off one by one as the river narrowed. London was perfectly immune to siege by an enemy fleet. It was, uniquely among national capitals, both England’s snuggest port and England’s most central market town. Prising my way toward it against the running tide, past sandbank after sandbank and up swatchway after swatchway, I wasn’t sure whether I was approaching the city as a friend or an enemy, but it was clear that had I been in a Viking longboat I would have abandoned the raid long ago.

  I’d steeled myself to maneuver through a great crowd of shipping, but there was a dead, dull Sunday-afternoon air on the estuary. Every so often a slab-sided bulk container would come sliding out from behind the marshes, but there weren’t enough of them to make a crowd, and they didn’t look much like ships. Tall as office buildings, long as boulevards, they pushed down Sea Reach, showing their enormous gross tonnage in the rude way in which they shoved the water aside with their blunt fronts. They certainly didn’t add much light or color to the day.

  I was too late to find the Thames as I remembered it—a great concourse of waterborne traffic, the flat surrounding landscape exotically forested with masts, flags, derricks, funnels, spars, bridgehouses. The container ships had killed all that twenty years ago. In the early 1960s, about 1,800 ships used to sail in and out of the Port of London every week. The average cargo ship then was a 5,000-tonner, and the London docks were packed with them. Their loading and unloading kept 35,000 dockers in work. Places like Bermondsey, Wapping and the Isle of Dogs were rich in ship-business, their streets rank with cargo smells, their pubs jammed to the doors. At twenty, I thought Wapping one of the most dangerous and exciting spots on earth.

  Then the container ships came. Five and more times bigger than the old cargo boats, they couldn’t fit into the docks, so they berthed at a string of new wharfside “terminals” downriver. Their roll-on, roll-off system of loading required very few dockers. By the 1980s, instead of 1,800 ships a week, there were 240; instead of the 35,000 men working in the docks there were 2,000; instead of 66 million tons of cargo a year, there were 45 million. The decline in overall trade was undramatic, but there were so many jobs gone, ships gone, docks filled-in, that the loss of life, in every sense of that phrase, was on a scale one might expect of a medium sized war.

  The land, such as it was, stole imperceptibly in on either side round Gosfield Maid; blackened timber stakes and piles, scallop-shaped clifflets of gleaming mud. Past Mucking Creek, the Thames abruptly turned into a recognizable river, confined and disciplined by walls, fences, jetties, piers. Its color and texture changed too. Glossy with oil, darkened with blue clay, the water resembled a rich and meaty consommé. I had been barely holding my own against the river before, but as the flood tide got under way the boat began to pick up speed through Tilbury and Gravesend, Dartford and Rainham, a long industrial ribbon of ships, trucks and cranes, with the hands-in-pockets crew of solitary men on wharves doing nothing except watch the soupy water spool under their feet, bulging against the piles and streaming out in feather patterns as it went swelling on inland. You could spend whole days doing that, as I knew. It made you feel giddy and soft-headed and induced fine daydreams. Watching water move is a much sweeter and less unpredictable way of altering the mind than inhaling the smoke of marijuana.

  There was one unexpected splash of beauty, in the Thames Barrier at Woolwich. Its silver cowls, ranged across the river like the helmets of giant knights, seemed like a freak instance of our century actually enriching the landscape instead of impoverishing it. The flood barrier itself would save London from drowning. Its massive hydraulics, its guillotines of rust-red steel, its shining and armorial piers made the entry to the city into something like a Roman triumph. The Thames barrier, as Gosfield Maid slid through Span C, promised something very big and very glorious around the next bend.

  Indeed the next bend yielded the formal brief prettiness of Greenwich, then, after that, the wasteland. Brick dust blew across the river from the ruins of the Surrey Docks, which showed as miles of corrugated iron and slag piles, with earthmovers standing idle on tips of spoil, and toppling pyramids of crushed cars letting in cracks of sky through their wrecked innards. This was a weekday afternoon, still within working hours, but there wasn’t a human being in sight. It looked as if the great work of destruction had been set in train years ago, then suddenly abandoned on a whim. A large blue notice at the entrance to what had once been a dock announced that a “WATERSPORTS COMPLEX” was to be built here, but the paint had peeled and the lettering rendered almost completely illegible by a rash of little scabs left on it by vagrant air-gun pellets.

  By another lock, someone brave had set up a tiny farm with one cow, two sheep, a pig, a goat and some hens fenced in behind an improvised stockade of chicken wire and rusty bedsteads. The broken high wall behind the farm had been overpainted with a wildy optimistic mural of blue sky, green fields, oak trees, flowers, a rustic gate. The farm project was meant to give young children an introduction to nature: in this miserable acreage of scrap which was Rotherhithe, it looked like an act of doomed saintliness.

  In Bermondsey, the spice warehouses were being torn down. Their backs were gone, but big iron hooks still hung from the pulleys which were cantilevered out from under their eaves, and there was a stubborn residual scent of cinnamon in the air, like a stain. On a lone atoll of redevelopment, where some yellow brickwork was rising behind scaffolding on a wharf, the natives had left prominent messages for the visitors: SOD OFF L.D.D.C. (this addressed to the London Docklands Development Corporation); THESE ARE OUR BACK GARDENS NOT YOURS; WE WANT HOUSES FOR LOCAL PEOPLE, NOT PALACES FOR PLAYBOYS.

  There was very little traffic on the river now. The few barges and lighters were well outnumbered by the glassed-in excursion boats taking tourists to Greenwich and back, their P.A. systems booming. I heard Gosfield Maid pointed out as “one of the many yachts now to be seen sailing on the London River.”

  On the north bank, the warehouses were doing rather better out of the decade than the blitzed shambles on the other side. Gutted and repointed, their sooty brickwork scoured by pressure hoses, they were being converted into flats and offices, with salads of real estate agents’ signs advertising luxury river-view penthouses to any millionaires who happened to be passing. One sign said STUDIO APARTMENTS FROM £85,000. For a bed-sit, even for a bedsit with a view, the price seemed steep, particularly considering what the view was actually of—a little water and an infinity of dust, rubble, chain-link fencing and heaps of junked cars like so many squashed blowflies. £85,000? For that?

  Below Tower Bridge, half a dozen yachts had gathered round the entrance to St. Katherine’s Dock, waiting for high tide and the opening of the lock gates. Two were flying German ensigns, one was Dutch, and the foreign visitors were volubly approving all they saw—the evening light on the water, the handsome drawbridge, the fulsome stone battlements of the Tower behind it. Elated and shaky with the adventure of their two- and three-day passages across the North Sea, they’d arrived at a destination worthy of the excitement that they’d had in reaching it. In twenty minutes, now ten, now five, London would open to them like a treasure chest. I kept out of the talk on the jetty, the questions, the consulting of watches. I envied them their city. It sounded, even in languages I couldn’t understand, like a marvelous place, but it didn’t sound at all like the London I could see.

  The lock gates opened, and we rafted into a pool overhung with faces and cameras. I searched the faces and found my own friend there, conspicuous as the only person in the crowd who was not dressed in bright pastel holiday gear. When I waved, she didn’t see, but I was answered by smiles and waves from several families of polite Japanese.

  Alone among the London docks, St. Katherine’s had—not so much survived as been mysteriously transmogrified. Gosfield Maid, with two on board now, motored into a sort of marine stage set, full of restored Thames barges, their red sails furled on their spars, historic steamships, yachts and motor cruisers. At the center of things, a wh
ite-painted clapboard pub called the Charles Dickens struck the requisite note of spanking new old-world. The warehouses had been quarried out into a pedestrian shopping mall of oil-lamp-lit boutiques. We squeaked past the gilded figurehead of a barge, and pleased though I was to see my friend, I thought, this looks like a wasted journey, to have sailed a hundred and twenty-five sea miles only to arrive back at the Rye Town Model.

  She drove at a terrifying speed. Lighted hoardings flashed by over our heads, far too fast for me to read what they said. Giant packs of cigarettes, bottles of beer, airplanes, faces—the images sped past, but I had no time to grasp whose images they were. Nor did I remember Linda as a demon driver. Crouched low in my seat, with the safety harness buckled tight around my chest, I wondered what on earth had happened to her character in my absence.

  “Please slow down—”

  “I’m only doing thirty.”

  “You can’t be.”

  “Look at the clock.”

  “I suppose it’s me. Six knots is my top speed.”

  I tried to adjust back to a city that felt like a fireworks display of rockets and whizzbangs. It was too fast, too bright, too loud to take in. We shot through an underpass and came out at the other end like a bullet.

  “You know about the Sheffield?” Linda said.

  “Sheffield? No—”

  “The Argentinians have sunk it with an Exocet.”

  “Were many people killed?”

  “I don’t think so. Twenty—something like that. Not like the Belgrano.”

  “I suppose it might sober Thatcher up. Do you hear people talking about the war much?”

  “Not much. It’s just something else that’s on the TV.”