Leontyne Read online

  All was well on the descent, a fall of about eighteen feet, and I sank gratefully into bed, forgetting that in tidal terms what goes down must come up. I awoke, about 3.00 a.m., to find that for some reason the porthole in my cabin was covered with water, and I was falling to the bottom of my bed. I soon discovered that the warps had stuck on the pillar and that the barge was being held under as the tide rose swiftly around us. I rushed for the carving knife which, in those days, was still razor sharp. I had only to touch the blade against the bar-tight rope for the whole forty-odd tons of barge to shake itself free and bob up again from its undignified posture. Rattled, I returned to bed, realizing that for all the charm of Reggie’s randomly acquired geographical trivia, I could rely on no one but myself for the safety of the boats.

  The next evening we slipped down to the Thames Barrier and tied up next to the Sir Aubrey, a large river-tug, which had been built when the river was busier for towing long strings of barges. I talked to Ron Sargeant, the doyen of a famous waterman family on that part of the river. His forebears had built up their business a century or so before by rowing down to the mouth of the river, sometimes even as far as the Goodwin Sands, and throwing their grappling hooks on to ships bound for the Thames in order to get the pilotage before anyone else. His grandfather had been present at the disaster of the Princess Alice: a passenger boat full of Victorian families having a day out on the river collided with a small collier on a perfect summer’s afternoon. Many people were drowned, and those who were not choked to death on the effluent that came streaming out from London’s sewers just there. (To this day the largest tributary of the Thames is the treated sewage outlet a little further down the river.) Amongst the victims of this catastrophe had been the owners of the Crown and Anchor at Charlton. Ron Sargeant’s grandfather had bought the pub at once and from then on the Sargeants had become the most powerful family on that part of the river.

  We also spent a jolly day at Tower Bridge with the Keeper, Colonel Dalton, who, quoting V. S. Pritchett, called the bridge ‘a purple passage suitable for the archers at Agincourt’. The origin of the V-sign lay apparently in the fact that the French, when they captured English bowmen, would chop off the index finger on their right hand so that they could not draw a bowstring properly. To frighten the enemy, the English archers would hold up both fingers showing that they were whole. I discovered that the walkway at the top of the bridge between the bascules had been insisted upon by the City Fathers, so that the public would not have to wait to cross while it was opened for passing ships. The bridgemen became very speedy at opening the bridge, however, and nobody could be bothered to climb the stairs and cross over the walkway. Before long it had become a gathering place for ladies of the night and had to be closed. Colonel Dalton also told me that the bridge’s granite stones are merely cosmetic, there to hide the steelwork and make it resemble the Tower of London.

  Tower Bridge, like Blackfriars, Southwark, and London, is owned by the Bridges Trust, a City of London foundation. On the Thames, London Bridge is known simply as ‘The Bridge’, probably dating back to the time when it was the only bridge, and also because it is the point where all the tidal predictions are made for the river traffic. Blackfriars Bridge is supposed to mark the upper reach of the salt water in the Thames. Sea-water birds are carved on the down-river side and fresh-water fowl on the upper. How many bridge builders would have the time, patience or wit to do that in these days?

  On some days we seemed fated to meet lugubrious people. One was a river policeman who chatted for hours about the unfortunates whose bodies he had discovered in the Thames. The tide and the cold were the killers now, no longer the pollution. I suppose it is a métier like everything else, but on such a beautiful sunny morning it seemed strange to hear about the improvements he was trying for body recovery. Apparently it takes about three weeks for the gases to build up in the submerged corpse, which shoot it to the surface, by which time, he said, the limbs were becoming ‘a little loose’. Men and women, contradicting each other to the end, float in opposite ways.

  In the afternoon, I chatted to a gentleman from Trinity House, whose job it is to service the buoys and lighthouses round the coast of Britain. As we were talking he produced a flat piece of lead from his desk drawer. ‘A replica of the lead found in the stomach of the keeper of the Eddystone Rock Lighthouse,’ he said. It seems that this unfortunate lighthouse-keeper was standing on the rocks just below his lighthouse, which was burning fiercely. Looking up aghast, his mouth quite naturally fell open and in dropped the molten lead. Being a tough old boy he rowed ashore and told his unlikely tale which no one believed, but when he died three days later, an autopsy proved his story and the retrieved lead even contained imprints of the carrots he had eaten for his last meal. Apparently lighthouse-keepers became excellent cooks. It’s too bad that all the lighthouses are being replaced by radar beacons. Someone has yet to introduce me to the romance of electronics.

  The night of 13 April was my last night at home. The next day I was to take the noon tide to Erith where I would meet up with Ray. The Leo came alongside Grices Wharf in Rotherhithe, where I live, to take on final provisions, and I said farewell to Reggie. In the morning, I was given a pennant on which was embroidered a lion rampant (representing Leo), which made a proud sight fluttering in the breeze. All the people in the buildings came to give me a rousing send-off. Balloons, streamers, the lot. Captain Christopher Jones had set off from this very spot to collect the Pilgrim Fathers from Plymouth Sound on their historic journey. I bet he didn’t get balloons or streamers. I certainly had a lump in my throat, but the moisture in the eye could well have been due to the biting north-easterly wind. Nautical departures have a strange effect on people. The sadness of leaving is almost immediately replaced by an intense excitement that will surely end with the voyage. My mother used to tell me how interesting eye-to-eye relationships would develop on the P&O ships going to India, even before England had disappeared over the horizon. By the Eddystone Rock the pairings were almost complete.

  Through the Barrier for the last time. ‘Are you inward-or outward-bound, sir?’ the calm voice of the controller inquired. Outward-bound is what we were. Plump and fifty, I was leaving behind a life of pampering the pampered and never having to worry about the washing, never mind the washing-up. From now on, it was to be do it yourself. No more limos and lunches or gossip and gush. The 6.00 a.m. shipping forecast would replace the ‘London Last Night’ column or Variety’s latest roundup of box-office figures.

  *

  I decided that for our first night I would make fast on the buoy at Erith, which is a flat and desolate part of the Thames. I made a real hash of it as I thought that the tide had turned and was coming in, but to my surprise it was still going out (there is a back eddy just there as every waterman knows!). The result was that I shot past the buoy and had to make a ponderous turn to come in again in the right direction. Next morning, early, I took the dinghy and picked up Ray as arranged, from the bottom of the causeway that stretches out over the mudflats at Erith.

  We set off for Gravesend, so called because after Gravesend all bodies were buried at sea. Some say that this was where the bodies from the Great Plague of London were buried but, logistically, that seems too fanciful to me. The tide soon started to run strongly against us and my confidence in the power of our excellent Gardner engine was a mite diminished. We pushed our way on through the stream and finally tied up on a buoy outside Custom House Pier, amongst the big seagoing tugs. Opposite, on Tilbury Pier, lay the new P&O palace, the Sovereign of the Seas. I’m afraid nobody is ever again destined to go by P&O to the land of the cake Parsee. No more fancy dress parties on the penultimate night before arriving in Bombay, when some joker would always come dressed as a baby and another would arrive with a lavatory seat around his neck to be the life and soul of the party. The Queen of Sheba and Nefertiti were, as I recall, favourites amongst the ladies. This elegant ship, however, had been built for the blue-rinse set o
ff Honolulu.

  First thing in the morning we set off, towing the barge to the Medway: we had decided to tow rather than push where there was the chance of getting any sizable waves. As it happened it was a glorious, though misty, morning with a promise of sun later. The air echoed with the mournful calling of the foghorns and we were very excited by the strange beauty of the shipping in the slight morning mist, and of the chimneys burning off the waste petroleum gases at Shellhaven.

  The first landmark to appear on the horizon was the wreck of the Montgomery – an American ammunition ship that went aground in the war and sank. It would be too dangerous to blow it up because apparently, even now, the explosion would shatter all the windows in Southend – some fifteen miles away. It made a melancholy sight with just the masts sticking out of the water and the moan of the marker buoy whistling as it bobbed about in the swell.

  After a couple of hours, and almost out of sight of land, we came upon a fishing boat trawling for Dover sole. We stopped and for ten pounds we bought three splendid fish. It was hard to tell what they weighed because they stubbornly refused to lie still in the scales. Later, I fried them so hard that I set off the smoke alarm, but they were quite delicious.

  That night we moored at Thunderbolt Pier, Chatham, quite a privilege for a ramshackle craft like ours. A few years earlier, whilst the Navy was there, only the most gleaming burnished pinnacles would have been allowed to touch the hallowed jetty. Now the Chatham Dockyards, where the Fighting Temeraire and the Victory had been built, had become a ‘living museum’. At least the great buildings have been preserved but my feeling is that the once proud place is sinking inexorably into the land of the wicker basket.

  I wandered round the ropery, through the yarn-combing and twisting areas, and then down to the main room where the rope is made. This is 220 metres long – 120 fathoms – long enough to make a coil of rope for the Royal Navy, which they have been doing since the end of the eighteenth century. I chatted to the men on the trolley that rolls up and down this long room, twisting the yarn into rope. They talked of better days, of ghosts, and the fact that most of the rope they were making went to Dartmoor prison for the inmates to make doormats with.

  The best hemp comes from Riga in Russia and I decided to buy a length. I thought that Ray would be delighted, but when I presented it he turned up his nose and said hemp was dreadful stuff when it got wet. Perhaps that is what the rest of the boating fraternity say, which would explain why this place is a living museum: everyone now uses ropes made from man-made fibres. Even so, all through the centuries, through hot wars and cold wars, hemp has been finding its way from Riga to Chatham. I am always fascinated by the way that traders manage to rise above politics and continue to trade, in spite of the most enormous national upheavals. Pongees, of Clerkenwell Road in London, continued to get their silks from China right through the Cultural Revolution, and the Long March meant nothing to the tea markets.

  I went to the Flag Loft, a pleasant place boasting lots of faded colour pictures of the Queen with her crown on, and resounding to the modern equivalent of Workers Playtime – the Jimmy Young Show, I suppose. They don’t make White Ensigns any more, just house flags for office buildings. I wanted to buy a Rumanian courtesy flag, not that it would get me very far in that benighted country. A charming young girl said she would make the flags we needed within the hour but that she couldn’t manage Rumania because it had a complicated crest in the middle, and no one went there anyway.

  We left in the early afternoon and made our way to Queensborough at the mouth of the Swale, a river which runs from the Medway to Whitstable and is a sheltered passage for craft like ours. We had been having quite serious vibrations in the area of our propeller and wanted to have a look at the bottom of the Leo before we reached France. There would be no tide in the canals and that meant we would have to get the Leo lifted out by crane, whereas in Queens-borough the tide would do it for us for nothing.

  We found a pontoon, moored up the barge, ran the Leo ashore, dropped two anchors, and waited for the tide to go out. When it did, it revealed that one of the two fins that I had welded on to the rudder some time back, in order to improve the steerage, had come off completely and the other had vibrated so much that it was hanging on by a whisker. The vibration was caused by a slightly loose rudder post and the huge turbulence of the water. With difficulty, we managed to get the portable generator to work and I ground the metal at the joint of the remaining fin until, after a little effort, it came away. Satisfied that we had done what we could we returned to the barge to have some supper, and wait for the tide to come in again. I decided that I should go and collect the Leo when the tide was right, at about 2.00 a.m., by which time she would be afloat.

  When my alarm went off, I went up on deck and turned on the searchlight, swinging it this way and that, but to my consternation the Leo had completely disappeared. Really alarmed by now, I called Ray and we jumped into the dinghy. The outboard wouldn’t start, which is the way with all outboards. As I struggled with the motor, I thought what a terrible mess it would be if I had really lost the Leo. At last the motor fired. I stood in the bows of the dinghy anxiously sweeping the horizon with a flashlight for a sign of our stubby little mast amongst the swaying masts and halyards of the yachts. Suddenly, at the very end of a row of boats, I saw the Leo. As the water had risen, she must have dragged her anchor and floated on the tide with her anchors trailing below her. When she reached the trots, the submerged chains to which the boats were moored, the anchors must have caught, and as long as the tide continued to flood, she would have been held in this position. As we came alongside and started to free the anchors, I looked over my shoulder and saw to my horror that we had drifted into the middle of the very narrow channel and that a huge sandboat was rushing up towards us. I leapt into the cabin, switching on all the navigation lights and the engine at the same moment. We’ve had it, I thought, unless we get out of the way very sharply indeed: there was no possibility that the approaching monster, towering sixty feet above us, ablaze with lights and weighing at least ten thousand tons, would ever have been able to stop. Mercifully the engine fired and we shot out of the way, our anchors dragging on the bottom. With the sandboat past, we crept thankfully back to the barge and to bed.

  We set out for Oare Creek, at the other end of the Swale River from where we were lying. I wanted to call there to see what the creeks round the Thames Estuary must have been like in the old days, when there were smugglers and excise men abroad. A special kind of Thames boot was invented by the smugglers, with a kind of snow-shoe or tennis-racquet shape strapped to its sole, so that the wearer didn’t sink into the mud. Smuggling brandy for the parson and baccy for the clerk somehow seemed a good deal more romantic and socially acceptable than lugging a cardboard suitcase with a false bottom full of drugs through one of our lovelier airports.

  We slipped down the Swale, which flows through lovely unspoiled marshes, until we passed a small blue launch which was just packing up its gear after taking some samples of water for pollution checks. As we passed they set off, and as soon as their backs were turned the waste pipe of an enormous factory started vomiting out a dark purplish liquid.

  Oare Creek is a small tributary of Faversham Creek and at its junction, next to the Shipwright’s Arms, the only other building for miles around, Laurie Tester and Don Grover have a wonderful, ramshackle boatyard. Laurie was brought up in the family that owned the Greenhithe Lighterage Company. It went out of business when the docks on the Thames closed, but Laurie, who had already purchased the land at Oare Creek, bought a tug from the liquidator and went into business with Don Grover. Laurie is very particular about describing the place as a boatyard rather than as a marina. Marinas, he said, were full of men in white overalls, and the expense of these gentlemen would have put Tom, Dick and Harry off from bringing their boats to him at Oare Creek.

  Laurie and Don have a passion for racing Thames sailing barges round the Thames Estuary in the summer month
s. They skipper one each, and theirs is a deadly rivalry which in the past has caused broken bowsprits, so close do they steer to each other when rounding a buoy. I spent many hours chatting to them. As they told of storms and close shaves, with the precision of men who have really been there, they were both privately occupied in planning how they could best each other in the summer races round the estuary – a contest where only experience counts.

  Laurie and Don promised to escort us on the tide to Whitstable the next day. I was getting very fearful about towing the barge in any kind of sea. The barge itself was fine, but the tug, Leo, was low in the water. She was very buoyant, and on her own could manage seas up to force five without much difficulty, but when she was towing the barge, she laboured a good deal in the slightest swell. I thought that with the expertise of Ray, who was, God bless him, game for anything, and with these two old salts in another tug, I should be able to get a pretty objective view of our chances of making the crossing to Calais.

  We left soon after noon, down Faversham Creek into the Swale. It was the best kind of spring day, with beautiful clear air and a smart little breeze. Ray and I were so busy watching the towrope that we ran aground on a spit of sand when we got into the Swale. It wasn’t a serious blunder and we were able to stumble off it in a few minutes, but we both felt very embarrassed under the unflappable gaze of Laurie and Don, who had correctly assessed us as amiable but inexperienced in the estuary. In an hour we arrived at Whitstable Harbour, which has a tricky entrance. With the wind blowing against the tide, we were quite seriously tossed about and were very glad when we got into the harbour, which isn’t normally available to anything but small coasters, sandboats and fishing boats.