It needed to be watched with more suspicion than any other domestic British sea. There were plenty of harbors along the coast, but almost none of them were approachable in anything more than a stiffish breeze. It afforded rich opportunities for going aground: miles offshore, well out of sight of land, it was ridged and pale as it foamed over the shoals. I sailed cautiously from buoy to buoy, ticking each one off on the chart as I passed it; I listened to every shipping forecast, and ran for shelter at any mention of a wind of Force 5 or worse. More often than not, the big winds never came, and I’d sit out on a pier end in Lowestoft or Yarmouth, watching lazy waves nuzzling the sand and wishing that I were out at sea and nearer to The North.
The tricky and volatile nature of the water was offset by the extreme modesty of the neighboring land. The flats of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire rarely showed themselves at all by day. In fine weather, they formed a faint line, provisionally penciled in, between the cloud banks and the sea; but they usually came out only at night, as a ribbon of shore lights, suddenly, surprisingly, close at hand.
Although it was deepening into summer, the sails of pleasure craft grew steadily fewer. Trawlers worked around the offshore banks, oil-rig supply vessels were busy gophering between the ports and the rigs and gas platforms, which stood out on the horizon in capitals—T H A A H T … an eccentric way of spelling Money.
Somewhere off the hidden coast of Suffolk, a Dunlin flew in through the open window of the wheelhouse and took up a confidently self-possessed perch on the compass. Plump, long-legged, with a beak like a miniature scythe, it stood placidly watching me while I looked it up in the bird guide and checked its ID. I offered it cake crumbs, which it spurned. Food, said the bird guide: Molluscs, crustaceans, worms, insects and their larvae. No wonder. After fifteen minutes or so, the Dunlin grew bored with my company and flew off in the general direction of Lowestoft.
Farther north, there were puffins: gangs of disreputable dandies who took no care of their appearance and bobbed scruffily about on the top of the water, fighting and fishing by turns. As the sea began to empty of other craft, schools of dolphins homed in on Gosfield Maid and amused themselves with the boat, sometimes for an hour at a time. They skirled in the wake and came corkscrewing under the bows, showing good-humored snouts and serious eyes. Nor was it just the boat they wanted; it was my personal attention. If I stood out in the cockpit, they stayed in the wake; if I moved forward to the bows, the school came too. At night they put up a spectacular show—friendly torpedoes of phosphorescence, streaking brilliantly through the water, leaving zigzag tracks of light behind them in the sea.
In every account of long solitary voyages, from the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” to the books of Francis Chichester and Jacques Moitessier, there is a ritual moment when the voyager makes friends with a gannet, or a pigeon, or a pilot fish or a dolphin. The occasion is both real and symbolic. It signals the departure of the sailor from human society and his magical assumption into the community of Nature. From here on in, he is at one with the birds and the fish, his tie with the land formally severed.
On the North Sea it was easy to understand the importance of that moment. The coast was a mere six or seven miles off, I’d only left the land a few hours before, and I’d return to it in a few hours’ time; but the isolating power of the sea works with astonishing rapidity and strength. You can drop clean out of society in a day and find yourself at the center of a world where the concerns of society are of Martian remoteness compared with the grinning swoop of the bottle-nosed dolphin in your wake.
I heard, now, and tried to think about the news of British ships being sunk in the South Atlantic—Ardent, Antelope, Coventry, Atlantic Conveyor—and battles at Goose Green and Bluff Cove, but all bulletins from the Falklands seemed fictive and theoretical. The television in the saloon had taken to yielding only blare and fuzz lately, and its poor reception seemed to correspond with some failure of the circuitry in my own head. I listened avidly to the weather forecasts on the radio, but drifted off station when the same voice continued from the last report of barometric pressure to the first headline on the news. When I eventually tacked through the loitering bunch of big ships at anchor in the mouth of the Humber, I felt something close to what an astronaut in a satellite must feel when he re-enters the earth’s atmosphere after three weeks in outer space.
It was exciting to be back here at last. I found the needlepoint spire of Patrington Church, an old friend, and the stubby towers of Ottringham and Easington. The sky was huge and rinsed of color, the land below it flat, lonely, Mongolian in its level, sandy emptiness. A file of telegraph poles, a chicken farm, a collapsing barn of rusty corrugated iron were friendly human intrusions here. They had both the pathos and the assertiveness of homesteaders’ gimcrack buildings on the Frontier. The brown river, so much more weighty and substantial than the land around it, flooded through, busy, broken, showing its fangs as it raced over the flats and rampaged in the deeps with muddy rips and whirlpools. Humber was a good name for it, with its echoes of umber and somber—a shady, sullen, lowering, earthy, gloomy river. It was hard to steer a clean course on it, and I could hear things falling about downstairs as the Humber got hold of the boat and gave it a few warning cuffs and clouts. With a westerly wind blowing into a fast westgoing tide, the river was in a very surly mood even by its own blunt standards of good manners. Gosfield Maid rolled and splashed upchannel, her decks awash in somber Humber water, collecting gobbets of brown cotton candy in her rigging as she went.
It was like trying to repair one’s relationship with an old family dog which has been stricken with amnesia. Down, Humber, down! Stop snarling! Perhaps it was just the boat that the river didn’t recognize. For I was idiotically pleased to see the Humber.
I’d lived for nearly five years on the river’s edge. Mrs. Jackson, my landlady, had warned me when I arrived on my first afternoon as a freshman at the university, “They say Hull’s a sight easier to get to than it is to get away from. There’s many more as comes here than as what leaves by Paragon Station. There’s a lot as only leaves this city in their coffins, love. How d’you like your tea? Sugar?”
I had hung on after graduation. I’d taught for a term in a Hull secondary school. I’d started a doctorate, reading a dozen novels a week, making desultory notes, playing poker in the evenings, getting married and unmarried, and generally kept myself in the way of the idle occupation that passed for “doing research.” The doctoral dissertation got as far as a rather short first chapter—a chapter so good that it seemed a shame to spoil it by making additions. In the easy academic climate of the 1960s I left Hull, undoctored, unmastered even, to lecture at another university.
But it was in the vacations, and in term-time evenings, that I fell in love with the city. I moonlighted from my studies as a private-hire taxi driver and roamed the dark streets in a radio-controlled Vauxhall Velox. We were a scruffy fleet whose official slogan was “No. 1 for Weddings, Funerals, Functions.” It must have been under the heading of Functions that most of our business came our way: we smuggled duty-free cigarettes and whisky out of the docks in hidden compartments under the back seats. The cargo skippers who were our “fares” on these trips took care of the policemen at the dock gates. We went on all-night crawls of the pubs and clubs, the cars full of fishermen just home from a month on the Icelandic cod grounds. The clubs were smoky halls, full of trestle tables and rich with the smell of spilled Tetley’s Ale, where Whispering Willie cuddled the microphone close to his lips and confided to it a stream of homely filth about mothers-in-law and outdoor lavs, then surrendered it to the platinum blonde who sang “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and “Red Sails in the Sunset” in a curiously seamless blend of movie-American and flatvoweled Hull. We stopped by the Continental, a surviving music hall where arthritic unicyclists made painful circuits of the stage and jugglers dropped their batons into the laps of the audience. The star performers at these places were invariably billed by the compère as havin
g come “all the way from Leeds,” our local Vegas.
The function we were most often called on to perform, though, was to effect introductions. For two of my years in the city, I was Hull’s Miss Lonelyhearts, bringing a little warmth and light into the lives of speechless deep-sea trawlermen from Iceland, Norway, Poland and Denmark. They would collapse into the seat beside me, radiant with schnapps, and produce their one essential word of English. “Girrrl!”
I’d been given The List along with my official license to ply for private hire within the city limits. It was soon more impressively adorned with footnotes than the single chapter of my dissertation—“Fat blonde, won’t have Icelanders, ring three times, then quick double-ring”; “Old, skinny, likes Danes, tips”; “Lah-di-dah, picky, £7—10—0.”
All the girls were older than I was; many of them were much the same age as my mother. They were friendly, treating me as a colleague in their business and serving me cups of Nescafé in the front rooms of their furnished flats off the Beverley Road. When they had to pay the cab fare of their slumberous charges, they said, “How’d you like it, love, cash or kind?”
“Uh—cash, please, thank you.”
“Well, you know where to come if you want a bit of the other, don’t you, love? Ta-ta, dear.”
“Ta-ta.”
“Oh, and remember. He’s got to be back on his ship by eight. Get a car round here for seven in the morning, will you, love?”
Even as I was delivering the latest glazed Icelander to the bed of one of these tolerant women, I found it hard to think of their trade as “prostitution.” It was so flat and easygoing, so lacking in vicious glamour; it was a domestic service, like home nursing, as profoundly unsexy as the administering of bedpans and catheters.
I crisscrossed the city until it became a matter of pride never to need to ask for directions to any street, however short and tucked away. Taxi drivers share with gangsters and policemen an arcane urban knowledge which is deliberately kept hidden from the ordinary citizen. I knew where you could buy a bottle of whisky at 4 A.M., whom to go to for an abortion, which chemist still stocked Benzedrine long after the stuff had been officially outlawed; I knew one or two things that I mustn’t write now, twenty years later, because they might still interest Hull’s Chief Constable. Nor was this knowledge confined to the lawless underside of the city’s life. I was part of the before-dawn stir in the fish docks, with the fog standing thick round the deckhouses of the trawlers, the “bobbers” piling crates of cod on the flagstones of the market, working under blurred and yellowed arc lights, the tea stalls, painted up in bright circus lettering, the strolling Owners, in vicuña coats and bowler hats, the trawler skippers, grand as kings, standing on bollards armed with whistles, raising a scratch crew for a voyage. My private-hire license was a sedentary man’s ticket of entry to the strange, dangerous, smelly culture of The Fishing.
It was a world that was romantic even to those who lived inside it. Trying to teach English to fifteen-year-olds from Hessle, the trawlermen’s suburb of the city, I had a tough time for my first week or two. My Anglican curate’s voice gave girls fits of the giggles every time I spoke. Their satchel flaps were biroed, in enormous loving letters, with the names of John, Paul, Ringo and George. They were all looking forward to brief and flighty careers in Woolworth’s and Birds Eye Foods. But every boy had a serious faraway look in his eye. He was “going to make a deckie learner”—to be an apprentice deckhand on one of the boats in the distant-water fleet.
Neither girls nor boys made much headway with the reading I set them. They failed to thrill to “Adlestrop” by Edward Thomas, were indifferent to the animal poems of Ted Hughes, stared blankly when I roared out Vachel Lindsay’s ballad of Simon Legree, and picked their noses through the most exciting bits of my dramatized readings from Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights.
They liked writing, though. From the girls I commissioned stories based on a day in the life of John/Paul/Ringo/George, and received a pile of loopy epics in which the life of a pop star was presented as a round of unmitigated luxury and indulgence, soured only by the absence of the love of a good woman. From the boys, I asked for essays on the theme of “Where I’ll Be This Time Next Year.” The essays came in misspelled, mispunctuated, big letters jumbled up with small ones, blotted, food-stained, often illegible, but vivid and passionate in a way that none of the girls’ efforts came anywhere near matching.
In the boys’ writing, frozen decks soared and plunged in black waves high as houses. Nets, throbbing with fish, were winched in under floodlights. Wild formations of ice grew on every shred of rigging, and had to be hacked off to save the trawler from growing top-heavy and turning turtle. Just before the winchman’s leg was amputated by a loop of flying chain, the deckie learner sprang to the rescue. Down in the saloon, Skip himself poured the boy’s tot: “I knew thee for a good lad,” he said. “Thee’ll do right enough.” Outside the wind roared and the waves, tall as houses before, were as big as blocks of council flats, as the trawler wallowed home to Hull and Mother.
Every sentence was salted with technical jargon. The boys knew the raw material of their world better than most novelists do. Their fathers and brothers were all in The Fishing, and a few lucky ones were already “down for a boat” as, elsewhere in England, one might be “down” for Winchester or Eton. The ones who were down for “beamers” jeered at “sterners” as the softie’s option, while the “sterners” ridiculed “beamers” for being as risibly old-fashioned as coracles.
This fishy culture had settled deep into the brickwork of the city. When the wind blew from the south, one breathed dead fish from miles away. Fish got into the drawer of socks and shirts, permeated one’s books, clung to the thin curtains of the bed-sitter. On hot summer afternoons, the reek of cod was so thick in the air that one could have bottled it and sold it for fish manure. No stranger, stepping off the train at Paragon, could possibly have been stupid enough to ask what Hull “did.” Hull went fishing.
Now, cruising up to it at midmorning on the river, I felt a surge of high elation. The town had been hideously bombed (people said “flattened”) during World War II, but from the water it still looked old—a weathered fringe of domes, spires and warehouses, straddling the junction of the enormous Humber and the piddling River Hull. I had arranged by radiotelephone to be at the entrance to the Albert Dock at 1215, close on High Water, and for the best part of an hour I loafed slowly along the wharves, already home, nodding familiarly at the Victoria Pier where one used to catch the ferry to New Holland (you could drink all day as long as you stayed aboard the boat), at painted names like Rix and Marr and Parkes and Boyd, at Holy Trinity Church, at the bird-shitty cupola of City Hall.
I had known that The Fishing was dead—had been dead for nearly ten years now, killed by Britain’s losing to Iceland in the Cod Wars. But when the lock opened to let Gosfield Maid, and only Gosfield Maid, inside the Albert Dock, I wasn’t equipped to take in the enormous empty hole which the death of The Fishing had left behind.
“Where shall I go?” I called to the lockkeeper.
“Anywhere you like. Anywhere you see a ladder.”
The Albert Dock was nearly a mile long and nearly two hundred yards wide. No one used its proper name. It was just the Fish Dock. You could walk from side to side and end to end across the decks of the boats—as I knew from having once had to lug, with the help of two amiable Danes, the sack of a twenty-stone Norwegian back to his quarters after a happy night on Hessle Road. It was a self-contained city of ships, with a city’s non-stop lamplit clamor.
It was just water. From the open lock gate it yawned ahead, colors marbling on its oily surface. There wasn’t even a herring gull in sight.
No, that was not quite true. Once my eyes had got adjusted to the shock, I found: to port, one trawler flying the blue cross of Norway and apparently unloading a catch; to starboard, a square-rigged sail-training vessel with a troop of kids swarming up in the yards, and another big tr
awler, a 200-footer, flying no ensign and bare of visible crew. That was it. In this huge dock, the four of us appeared to be here for the same reason that stage directors order a warble of birdsong to accentuate a long dramatic silence: we turned the emptiness of Albert Dock into a spectacle.
It looked unbelievably lonely, more than enough to make one sob for want of company. I tucked Gosfield Maid under the stern of the sail-training schooner, and my ropes were expertly taken in charge by two of Hull’s many unemployed teenage boys. It occurred to me that these boys’ mothers might have George, Paul, Ringo or John written inside the flaps of their old school satchels—a thought which brought on an unpleasant twinge of vertigo.
I said: “It’s amazing. When I was last here this dock was packed solid with trawlers. It was … nearly twenty years ago.”
To someone of sixteen, twenty years might as well be a hundred. The boys looked down at Rip Van Winkle. “Ay,” one said indifferently, “The Fishing’s long gone now, mister,” as if he were speaking of the slave trade.
This was how wounds healed in a civilization. Almost as soon as they were inflicted they became part of History—the deadly pleasure indulged in by old men blathering on with stories that make young men yawn. The Fishing now was just part of gaffers’ talk, and the boys steered clear of me, fearing me as a carrier of further anesthetic reminiscences.
I walked the mile-long wharf. The flagstones were beginning to tilt and split, losing the battle to the creeping greenery of ground elder, thistle, willow herb and cow parsley. Rusty hawsers and piles of old fishnets had been swallowed by the vegetation. Ahead of me, a nervous rabbit nibbled and scarpered, nibbled and scarpered, as if it weren’t sure whether the wharf was now a legitimate meadow for a rabbit to browse in.
At the end of the dock there were the low, crooked lanes where the riggers, chandlers and compass-makers had their shops, where you could buy cheap jerseys, thermal socks, gutting aprons, smocks and sea boots. All shut, all gone. Their windows were frosted over with a cake of oily dust and there were padlocks on every door.
Coasting Page 26