“Come on, lad,” Bob said. “That’s a daft bugger, any road. He just got out of bed the wrong side this morning.”
Kind as Bob was trying to be, there was a lot more to it than that.
The long strike achieved nothing. When, on March 3, 1985, nine days short of a year after the beginning of the strike, the miners gave up and went back to work, pickets outside Congress House in London wept when they heard the news. The strike did not seem to soften the heart of the National Coal Board when it came to closing down pits that were failing to show a substantial profit. As I write (in February 1986), the people of Blyth are still pleading with the Coal Board to give Bates’s Colliery a temporary, two-year reprieve. But the regional director of the board has described the pit as “a cancer on the face of the Northumbrian coast,” and Blyth is hoping against hope for something not far short of a miracle. I shall be surprised if this footnote* turns out to be a happy one.
I left Blyth with the chutes still pouring coal into the waiting coasters, and I am afraid of what will happen between the writing of this sentence and the reading of it. As Gosfield Maid slipped out of the curious gray climate which Blyth had created round itself, and emerged into the sun, I found myself already missing the town and trying to remember the tune of “Oh, Geordie’s lost his plinker.” The pit, the rickety straithes, the hugger-mugger dark terraces, were not cancerous; they were a small, proud, embattled bit of serious life in the blue and empty hills of Northumberland. Yet it is the tourist handbook which has become the arbiter on questions like this in modern England, and in the tourist handbook, Blyth doesn’t stand a chance. The Geographia Guide to Northumbria passes a death sentence on the town:
The coast from Blyth to Newbiggin by the Sea has little to offer the visitor, it is partly industrialised.
I sailed on deeper into the same chapter of that book, where the language turns fruity and rhapsodic, north through the Farne Islands to Lindisfarne, where the anchor dropped into water as clear as a block of Lucite. Long puckered fronds of brown kelp waved sleepily thirty feet down, and fleets of blue and gold cuckoo wrasse swam in the shadow of the boat. On a nearby rock, three seals were basking like gray sausages, their lumpy heads breaking clear of their skins. Surrounded by stories of St. Cuthbert and piles of old religious stones, Gosfield Maid might have sat nicely in the foreground of a colored postcard. Paddling ashore, raising a twinkling blaze of phosphorescence with every stroke under a three-quarter moon, I thought I’d never been in any anchorage so beautiful. But it was a cold, too famous beauty; a beauty to be admired, not lived with; a beauty of the kind to whom photographers say “the camera loves you,” meaning that he thinks you’re a spoiled and frozen bitch. In the morning I walked round Holy Island, nodding respectfully at everything I saw, and taking pictures, and thinking beautiful, beautiful, and wanting to move on.
For I was bound now for a mythical city. The ruins of Troy, Byzantium, Samarkand were much like the ruins of Lindisfarne. But to the north there was still a living city whose amazing Renaissance was talked of in places as far away even as London. People spoke of its lordly wealth as if it were the imaginary Dallas of the television serial. Its jeweled inhabitants walked ten feet tall. In the decaying industrial fabric of Britain, the city was a marvel, a promise of the good life to come.
I had been to Aberdeen when I was sixteen. I remembered it for its gray, stony weight; a town of gloomy and genteel arcades, where I waited to catch the Shetland packet from a drizzly quay. It was like spending the day inside a gaunt cathedral, where everyone spoke in the sepulchral voices of church vergers.
Not now, though. Since the discovery of North Sea Oil, Aberdeen had become a boom town. In Hull and Blyth, I had amused myself by imagining Aberdeen as an astounding counterworld to Hull and Blyth. There’d be … there’d be … There’d be all-day, all-night saloons, their granite walls drumming with the amplified sound of Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash. You’d be able to buy Manhattans and Tequila Sunrises in dollars and cents. The deep, ravine-like streets would be solid with low-slung Cougars and Chevys, their chrome faces cast in the contemptuous grin that goes with big bucks. Stetsons … there’d definitely be Stetsons. And girls. In a city of roustabouts and troubleshooters, the girls would drip with diamanté. Even the corner shops would sell Wheaties and Jell-O and the “English muffins” that you can’t buy in England. There’d be rib shacks … hot tamales … burgers-to-go; poker games in basement clubs and doormen in tuxedos packing 38s.
Such a place would also help to balance the plot. After touching on so many failures and disappointments, the story needed a crock of gold somewhere. A few happy-go-lucky riggers in studded leather jackets, snorting lines of coke and putting back six-packs of Budweiser and Michelob, might go some way to dispelling the narrative gloom.
I reached Stonehaven, twelve miles short of Aberdeen. Its single-story gray stone terraces, its solitary Chinese takeaway, its air of having been closed for the duration sharpened my appetite for the city. In Stonehaven harbor I was tied up next to a fishing boat whose owner asked me where I was sailing to.
“Just Aberdeen tomorrow.”
“Aberdeen? You’ll be needing to hang on to your watch when you’re in Aberdeen. And not only your watch, either,” he added, in the cheerful Scottish way that takes an excessive pleasure at the prospect of misfortunes to come.
This seemed to fit nicely too. Aberdeen was not merely the Byzantium of eastern Scotland, it had become its Sodom and its Gomorrah.
I left Stonehaven soon after 0800 on August 5. The wind was coming in feeble dog-breaths off the land, and the sea outside the harbor was riddled with curlicues of morning mist. I set a course of 040° to clear Girdle Ness and waited for the sun to show out of a sky that was evenly luminous from horizon to horizon. It was a pity there wasn’t a mile or two more of visibility; from out here I could so nearly see Aberdeen that several times I thought I spotted its bawdy and licentious outline on the film of mist which hid the hills.
By 0900, with only seven more miles to go, I realized that the boat was swaddled in thick fog. It had happened invisibly, the damp air slowly turning white as if it were aging round me. It was impossible to tell how deep the fog was. Sometimes it seemed to stand like a bright cliff, a mile away across the still water, sometimes the bow of the boat appeared to be gouging a hole for itself in the swirling wall of fog.
Peering, or trying to peer, ahead, I saw the boat’s head slowly swivel round against the lumps and ridges of the fogbank. We were turning in a wide circle. I pulled the wheel round to make the boat point straight again, but then found that the compass was reading 105°—on a heading to somewhere in the Friesian Islands. I brought it back to 040°, and again saw the boat’s bow begin to spin against the fog, while the compass card remained as if glued in its bowl.
In fog, you have to trust your instruments.
I went through the routine that I’d been taught by Commander King. I put on a life jacket, Every two minutes I stepped out into the cockpit and let off a long blurt from the compressed-air horn. I watched the needle on the depth-sounder jittering around the thirty-five-fathom mark. I checked the chart. So long as the needle didn’t start to back round the gauge, the boat would stay at a distance of two to three miles from the shore. So long as I maintained a strict course of 040°, we were on target.
Out in the cockpit, I listened for ships’ engines. Once, a long fold of breaking sea came muscling up on the starboard beam—somebody’s wake, but I couldn’t hear whose, nor could I securely guess in which direction the ship must be traveling. Every time I worked it out, it was going somewhere else.
I had hoped that the first sound of Aberdeen would be the voice of Dolly Parton. It was the faint, but still horrible, moan of the siren on Girdle Ness, followed by the triple bell on Aberdeen North Pier. I prayed that the radar reflector, a boxy polygonal contraption which was rigged to the top of the mizzenmast, was making a fine splash on somebody’s screen, and continued on course into the fog.<
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I did not dare turn and head for the harbor. Its mouth was wide enough, about two hundred and fifty yards between the piers, but it was surrounded by rocks, and the pilot book warned of “continuous” oil traffic inside the harbor. I couldn’t tell now whether visibility was down to ten yards, or a hundred. At a hundred, I’d be safe enough, but at ten, if it was ten, I would at best be in a state of high panic. It seemed a lot safer to squeeze past Aberdeen, keep a mile or two offshore, and anchor as soon as I could pluck up courage to nose into shallow water without taking the risk of going aground on rock.
Several engines were audible now, and every few minutes the water ahead bulged with the wash of an invisible ship. The pier bell rang definitely just astern of Gosfield Maid, and I reckoned that I must have safely crossed the main channel into Aberdeen. From now on, there should be only inshore fishing boats, of Gosfield Maid’s own size and speed, to tangle with.
I felt the noise in my spine before I heard it—a hysterical jabbering, like a rioting crowd in a Middle Eastern city. It was a noise to run from, a noise that summoned images of abandoned bodies sprawled in streets, and running people, and the muffled popping of machine-gun fire.
In fog, you have to trust your instruments.
Then I saw what it was. The closed circle of sea round the boat was water no longer—it was a solid mass of skidding, flapping, wriggling birds. Ragged puffins were apparently mating with herring gulls, kittiwakes, guillemots and terns. The birds were beyond counting. There were thousands of them—as many birds as there were citizens of Aberdeen, yawping and screaming in joy as they fought and plunged and beat their rivals off with their wings. I had planned on scenes of pretty wild dissipation, but not on this crazed and deafening orgy.
Gosfield Maid had managed, in thick fog, to locate the city’s main sewage outfall. The stuff was bubbling up from the seabed. The few spots of water which the birds had left visible were stained dark with excrement—and the birds were in heaven. Jostling their neighbors, stabbing into the sludge with their beaks, they were behaving exactly like people who’ve hit a crock of gold. The still air smelled foul. I motored out of the cacophony with a handkerchief pressed against my nose.
But I had missed Aberdeen. A mile or two farther on, groping through the fog, listening, watching the instruments, waiting, heart-in-mouth, for a nasty surprise to loom suddenly on the beam, I thought, at least this feels more like real life than my imaginary boom town, and if a boom town is essential to this story, won’t the birds do just as well?
* March 15: It is not. The N.C.B. has closed Bates’s Colliery despite recommendation of the independent review body that they maintain it.
CHAPTER 7
ENVOI: A PECULIAR PEOPLE
This house is full of noises. The cornstalk rustle of the sea makes itself heard from a mile away across the flat and hedgeless fields. There are mice behind the baseboards, and the oak frames of the house creak like a boat’s. The four rooms are as low and small as cabins, the lath-and-plaster walls give off a hollow drumming sound when the wind gets up, and at night the house feels as if it’s afloat, pitching gently on its mooring among the owls and foxes.
I’ve been keeping a close eye on the wind. Three months ago I put up a fine black cast-iron weathercock above the chimney pots, but it buckled in the first gale, and the second gale tore the cockerel clean off its perch at the legs. Now the vane spins free in its greased socket and the broken cockerel is going to rust in the uncut grass.
This is not the weather for casting off: not yet. A stubborn mountain of high pressure is centered over Latvia and a deep Atlantic low is poised just south of Iceland, ready to swing in across the British Isles. There are southeasterly gales in the Channel and the North Sea, and from the bedroom window you can see yellow surf breaking far out on the flats. Last week’s snow lies in panes of bubbled ice on the lawn. I’ve been feeding the sparrows with scraps: puffed-out and bloated with cold, they scratch and bicker in the frozen dirt around the back door. I work at keeping the fires going overnight and leave a spoor of mud, twigs and elm bark on the carpets. There are two of us now, and weatherbound in an anchored house, we fret our time away as ships’ crews do, waiting for the rumble of the chain on the winch and the inspiriting busywork of making a departure.
In May 1985 I sailed Gosfield Maid across the mouth of the Thames Estuary and into the River Blackwater in Essex. On my first circuit of the islands, three years before, I’d steered clear of this meager and featureless coast as too untrustworthy to do business with. The sea lathered over its maze of offshore sandbars; church towers marked on the chart were lost among trees that looked like lines of crouching mangroves in a swamp; I’d investigated the narrow swatch-ways leading inshore through the sands, and headed north for the broad, safe channel into Harwich.
It was different now: I could watch the serpentine pattern of the place unfold on a radar screen. Essex had hardly any vertical dimension at all; its character lay in voluptuous horizontals—the looping seawalls, the crescent sandbars, the curving throats of the river mouths. Painted in anfractuous splashes of light on the glass, it formed an abstract composition which kept on reassembling itself around the boat as I moved deeper into the picture.
The outlying shoals had turned the area of sea around the mouth of the Blackwater into a series of calm, marsh-fringed lagoons. Big ships holed up here in temporary retirement—out-of-work oil tankers, Panamanian coasters under Customs arrest, bulk container vessels waiting to pick up a cargo at Tilbury or Felixstowe. Nearly a dozen of them swung to their anchors, deep in farmland, with no one apparently on board, growing rust stains on their plates and weed on their chains. In mercantile-marine circles, the Blackwater was reckoned one of the cheapest places to put a redundant ship out to grass.
I found a mud berth for Gosfield Maid. For ten hours out of every twelve, the boat was lodged, shoulder-deep, in soft ooze. At the top of each tide she floated clear with a tremendous peptic exhibition of farts and gurgles. Her library was carted off by dinghy in boxfuls, and she was colonized as rent-free accommodation by the gulls and the cormorants. By June, her decks and wheelhouse were caked in white guano, while the saloon smelled of must and desertion.
I found a mud berth for myself too, taking a cottage in the Dengie Marshes. It had been built to house a farm laborer sometime in the seventeenth century, and its cambered beams had probably been salvaged from a ship wrecked on the sands. In this part of Essex, wreckage was the most freely available of all building materials. Houses had been cobbled together out of bits of old ship, and they were fashioned to look like ships, with clinker-built topsides of white weatherboarding and curved mansard roofs.
This architectural absentmindedness about what properly belonged to the sea and what to the land was just one symptom of the general elemental confusion here on this boggy fringe of things, where England petered out into water and water petered out into England. Land and sea were constantly changing places. As the tide shrank away through the culverts between banks of cord grass, it left large islands of shining mud, looking more liquid than the ruffled water round their shores. When the sea came back, flooding in over the salt marshes, drowning the islands and opening sandy footpaths to navigation, it was arrested only by the ancient earthwork of the seawall: at high tide, an arbitrary frontier of piled rubble separated the North Sea from the waist-high corn which stood twenty yards inside the wall. Left to itself, on a spring tide the sea would lap at the cottage door and turn the Tudor farmhouse into an offshore atoll.
There used to be malaria in these marshes. When Defoe visited the area in 1722, he found it settled by a hardy tribe of bog people. The men of Dengie told him that it was customary for them to marry up to fourteen or fifteen wives in a lifetime:
The reason … was this; that [the men] being bred in the marshes themselves and seasoned to the place, did pretty well with it; but that they always went up to the hilly country, or to speak in their own language the uplands for a wife: that when
they took the young lasses out of the wholesome and fresh air, they were healthy, fresh and clear, and well; but when they came out of their native air into the marshes among the fogs and damps, there they presently changed their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held it above half a year, or a year at most; and then, said he, we go to the uplands again, and fetch another.
The marshes were unhealthy but rich. The Dengie people made a lot of money on a small scale, working from a single boat or a plot of drained swamp, selling salt, butter, cheese, corn, fish and timber to London merchants.
With no great houses and no powerful county families, the marshes lay happily outside the usual class arrangements of rural England. They were cultivated by small farmers who were more like European peasants or American settlers than the general run of cap-doffing English tenants. The flat landscape with its mephitic air was no place for trespassing gentlemen; the nearby sea had no bathing beaches; the marshes were difficult to cross, with narrow lanes twisting round the maze of dikes and drains. The people of Dengie were left largely to their own smelly and profitable devices. When the culture of London spread out far beyond the city, and overran counties like Buckinghamshire, Middlesex and Kent, it kept clear of Dengie. Nor did the Scandinavian name of the place add to its charm: its suggestions of dinginess and dung made the marshes sound like a very undesirable address.
When I moved in, it was like finding a neglected loophole in the English system. It was wide-open country. The silence of the place was thick and palpable; the level sweep of fields under a giant sky made it feel oddly suspended and provisional, a shimmering trick of the light. I liked its absences. There were no braying gentry voices, no taint of dry sherry in the air after church on Sunday morning, none of the squashed and deferential manners which I had thought inseparable from English village life. I warmed to the gaunt tabernacle on the village’s single street—The Chapel of the Peculiar People (All Welcome). The sect had taken their name from the First Epistle General of Saint Peter: “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people …”
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