wet feet
My mother had been born to a naval family in Devonport, her father an Engine Room Artificer in the Navy, and her grandfather a Tyneside shipbuilder. In the 1940s she worked in commissioning materials that built the Mulberry Harbours for the Normandy landings. My father spent his entire career at Portsmouth Dockyard with related secondments to the Portland and Faslane bases. For my brother and me, coastal visits were a big part of our childhood. Mysteriously every time we went to the promenade at Southsea, an uncle happened to be on the stony beach tending his clinker-built fishing boat “Seaspray”. I never saw it in the water. We were entertained and appalled by the Dickensian otherness of the “mudlarks” begging and diving for pennies in the treacly mud of Portsmouth harbour.
Not a clinker in sight, just sheets of plywood stuck together became the Mirror sailing dinghy. Its simple pram-shape hull had been designed by that “Father of DIY”, Barry Bucknell, in 1962. Over 70 thousand were built. I helped (maybe hindered) a friend and his father build one in their garage. I went along as they towed it all the way to Poole harbour for its maiden voyage. Why Poole and not on their doorstep, I’ll never know. Were they embarrassed to be seen in it in a Portsmouth harbour? In any case, the experience memorably set me up for a lifetime of mal-de-mer. I never learned my lesson. I would be ill for evermore when sailing in anything smaller than the Isle of Wight ferry, canal boats excepted.
The Nab Tower lighthouse, a well known navigational aid off the Isle of Wight, guards the eastern entrance to the Solent. As a teenager I visited it on a naval launch accompanying my father on an official inspection of groynes and piles. Or something. I wasn’t sure precisely what he was doing, and don’t think he was particularly clear either. Later, while “temping” at the then Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, a staff fishing trip took an open boat past the tower. Needless to say, the choppy waters of the English Channel combined with crates of refreshment did their worst, as I lay groaning in the bilges.
I groaned again in mid Atlantic on a 20 mile sailing trip from Madeira to Islas Desertas. I was desperate for the reprieve of a brief landing, despite tarantulas being the rocky island’s only inhabitants. The Irish Sea and the North Sea have played their part in similar fashion.
My ambivalence to the life affirming sea, in its awesome power and ever-changing majesty, is in the psyche. If I enter its domain casually, it has the last word. But the lure of coastal vistas and island hopping is as strong as ever. Not just me of course, it's fairly universal. Rebecca Solnit considers the blue of the sea as emblematic of the relationship between our origins and as yet unknowable future. There is a meditative quality of timelessness. Waves rolling ashore seemingly sing tidings from afar. I too relate to the transformative effect of being “at sea”, confused or vacantly bewildered, just as my father seemed to have been at the Nab Tower. Keenly aware of the tension today, perhaps my mal-de-mer had a psychosomatic cause. I wrote this while awaiting an inflatable boat ride around the Kyles of Bute. Surviving the choppy loch, I evaded emesis for the first time. Maybe I’ve exorcised the demons of the deep.
Once I overheard someone ask at a railway station “Does this train stop at Portsmouth Harbour?”. The ticket collector replied “You’ll get your feet wet if it doesn't, mate”.
Links
SOR North Wales - Project Seagrass
Dain tain for 'alf a crain (cambriancrumbs.blogspot.com
A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit on How We Find Ourselves – The Marginalian
Comments
Post a Comment
I look forward to your comments. Also it would be nice to know where you are in the world. Thanks for reading.