The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Read online

  We have just hauled up the mainsail and noticed that along its bottom edge is a long, heavy and potentially deadly wooden beam, a boom. This is what swings about in a gale in a sea-faring film and sweeps hero and villain off into the raging seas to battle it out there once the poop-deck fighting has become tedious. At the outer end is a dangling pulley through which a rope, the mainsheet, threads. This then runs through a series of pulleys to end up in the skipper’s hand, allowing him to haul in or let out the mainsail with ease. The only thing you need to know about this is that of all the myriad pieces of tackle and equipment on a sailing boat, this is the one that will jam, tangle or catch at every opportunity and cause imminent death by drowning, strangulation or sheer bloody bad temper.

  Nearly finished. A smaller sail known as the jib runs up the forestay. It is apparently invaluable for sailing into the wind for some mysterious aerodynamic reason. Very soon after setting off , though, I abandoned the additional complexity of a jib, and the relevant Law of Aerodynamics went off in a sulk somewhere and Jack and I got on perfectly well without its pedantic presence. So much for science.

  The rudder, I assume, hardly needs explaining unless, dear Reader, you have grown up as a member of some desert-dwelling tribe without even the scantiest knowledge of boats. Nevertheless I will explain that it is the most vulnerable piece of the dinghy’s equipment, being prone to ploughing into underwater obstacles, crushing against lock walls, jamming against banks and so on. By some divine mystery, however, by the end of the whole trip, it was the single part of the entire boat that had not needed patching, mending, replacing or discarding.

  As opposed to the centreboard, a hefty slab of hardwood that seemed to break at every opportunity, and the last item in this over-technical catalogue. The centreboard is a slim but heavy vane of timber that slots down through the hull and projects like an upside-down shark’s fin several feet below the keel. When down it provides stability and prevents the dinghy drifting sideways in certain sailing conditions. When drawn up and out of the long centreboard case, it lies around, barks your shins and, if you are going fast enough, allows the foamy brine to well up through the case like a bubbling spring and fill half the dinghy with water before you notice what is happening.

  So there you have a Mirror dinghy described. Any questions? (No, not you, Smithers, put your hand down, I don’t want to know. Dismissed.)

  Or rather, that is only one aspect of the Mirror described. In one of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books the children meet a retired star, a silvery old man named Ramandu who has come to rest awhile from the great celestial dance on a remote island. One of the children, on hearing his tale, splutters out in disbelief, ‘But Sir, in our land a star is just a huge flaming ball of gas.’ Ramandu replies, ‘My son, even in your world, that is not what a star is, but only what a star is made of.’

  By the same token, I have told you not what Jack de Crow is, merely what she was made of. To tell you what that gallant little boat is, I must borrow from the poets and the songs of voyagers everywhere. For Jack is all these: a stately Spanish galleon sailing from the isthmus, dipping through the tropics by the palm-green shores – Tom Bombadil’s cockle-boat, otter-nudged and swan-drawn up the Withywindle as the day draws down – a gilded barge bearing King Pellinore to Flanders in Malory’s romance – or the magic flying Viking ship of a forgotten childhood story. He is Madog of the Dead Boat in his dark coracle beneath the shadow of the Welsh Bridge – Captain Cook’s Endeavour sailing into Botany Bay in the bright, banksia-scented sunshine – or even that other little Mirror many years ago in which a small boy sailed between lonely isles on a lake in the Snowy Mountains, dreaming of Doctor Dolittle, treasure maps, pith helmets and the rivers of old England where I knew I would one day voyage.

  * Like the boat’s avian namesake, Jack proved an elusive and tricksy individual from the very start. There was, for example, the question of the vessel’s gender. The name Jack and the original bird were, of course, masculine, even aggressively so at times, but as every sailor knows, ships are always ‘she.’ So which was it to be? He or she? Him or her? Shunning the attractions of an ambiguous and androgynous companion for my trip down the waterways, I soon settled on ‘she,’ and Jack de Crow remains a lady, albeit a rather tomboyish one, to this day.

  Departure and Dismay

  Farewell, happy fields,

  Where joy forever dwells; hail, horrors!

  —MILTON, Paradise Lost

  Clop, creak, splosh.

  Clop, creak, splosh.

  Clop, creak, RAM, tangle, splosh.

  I was off .

  It was a mild, golden evening, the second day of September. Some hours earlier I had trailered the good ship Jack de Crow over to the canal at Colemere Woods. Here a little redbrick bridge carries a farm track over the canal where it runs between Yell Wood and a wide field running up to a gentle horizon. In summer this field is a Monet’s palette of scarlet poppies and sky-blue linseed, and one large solitary oak tree tops the rise, a lonely giant against the sky. But this evening fifty or so of my friends and colleagues and a handful of students thronged the bridge, each with a glass in hand, and cheered as my dear friend Debbie officially christened the boat with a bottle of home-made hawthorn brandy. This clear amber liquid I had distilled some years previously from hawthorn blossom, collected one sunny May afternoon on the banks of Whitemere, and it had been from the very start utterly undrinkable. It was good to find an appropriate use for it at last.

  Debbie had dressed superbly for the occasion in an Edwardian outfit and her short speech was touching and apt, but she was clearly unfamiliar with the usual protocol of ship-launching. Instead of the customary shattering of the bottle on the prow, for reasons she has yet adequately to explain, she uncorked the bottle and proceeded to pour the rancid fermenting liquor into the dinghy, liberally scattering it over thwart and deck and rucksack. Three thousand dancing midges dropped like confetti out of the air over a fifty-foot radius, the merry throng on the bridge above us reeled back clutching their throats, and I half expected to see the newly varnished deck start to bubble and peel like frying bacon as the hawthorn brandy got to work on the timbers.

  Nevertheless, Jack de Crow slid down the bank and into the canal and bobbed, a buoyant little vessel impatient to be off. All my farewells had been said, all my worldly goods stowed, the mast and rigging lay in a long neat bundle down one side, the oars were in their rowlocks and the light was fading. It was time to go.

  Clop, creak, splosh.

  Clop, creak, splosh.

  Clop, creak, splosh.

  Clop, creak, splosh.

  And the last the good folk of Ellesmere College saw of me was a small pith-helmeted figure rowing away into the shadowy blue dusk beneath the beech trees, a silver V of ripples at the bow diminishing to nothing until a bend of the woody canal hid me from sight and I was gone.

  The drama of the occasion – the rowing off into the sunset, the gloomy woods and blue shadows, a setting for A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all of this had been exactly as I intended. But as the silence closed about me, I suddenly felt flat and rather tired. A romantic gesture it had been, and I had been playing the star role – but it was a real farewell too, with all that entails. From tonight I was, quite literally, homeless. Nor did I have a new job to go to. I had left behind six years of familiarity and friendship and ease, and I had only the vaguest notion of where I was going. As the dusk deepened to darkness, the water about me became a black mirror etched only with fine silver-point, fine as nettle-hairs. Somewhere an early owl hooted. Under my very bows something turned with a clop and sent rings of light rippling across the canal waters, silver on Indian ink.

  For all the beauty, a sense of desolation seemed to rise like a mist from the waters beneath me and the dark pool of Blakemere on my left. Midges whined in my ears; my hands upon the oars were already slippery with sweat and the dinghy seemed to skid from tangled bank to bank as I made my unsteady progress down the dark tunnel of tr
ees. It also occurred to me, somewhat more prosaically, that in all the glamour of planning for this departure I had forgotten to find out how to row. It is not as easy as it looks, not by a long chalk.

  It was with some relief and feeling a little foolish that I emerged into a clearer stretch of the canal running between two fields. The sky was now fully dark, a lovely deep Prussian blue spangled with warm stars, and as I reached the junction where the short arm turns right towards Ellesmere Town, the main canal wound away to the left, inlaid with the reflecting constellations. All the magic of the crossroads rose up to meet me in the neat foursquare signpost that glimmered white at the junction. ‘The road goes ever on and on,’ I murmured to myself, thinking of Bilbo slipping away to Wilderland in the dusk. It dispelled the last clinging webs of Blakemere’s dark spell, the smell of weed and stagnant water. Happier now and with a sort of calm excitement, I turned my dinghy westward and rowed away into the night.

  That evening I rowed only another mile or so and curled up on the towpath under a little humpbacked bridge carrying a disused farm lane between two fields. Snug in my sleeping bag and my head pillowed on a fleecy jacket, I lay awake awhile listening to the night noises around me: the breezy rustle of dry leaves in the sloe hedge, the distant bark of a dogfox, the cough of a nearby cow.

  Just beyond that far hedge were the playing fields of the College, and just up the hill my friends were settling down for the night in their cosy apartments, high in some redbrick tower or grey-gabled wing. In ten short minutes I could walk there and knock on any of a dozen doors for a late-night whisky or mug of coffee. I could even beg a bed for the night instead of this damp and lonely towpath. Perhaps I will, I thought. One more night. One more evening of warmth and companionship. They’ll understand. I’ve had three farewell parties already, so a fourth won’t matter, surely. That cow is coming closer. I don’t want cow-cough all over me. Better start tomorrow. Debbie could christen the boat with something a little less noxious this time. Properly.

  Cough, cough … Rustle … Snore.

  I woke with a start. The sky was an early morning grey, a brambling was singing in the hedge above me, and the grass was pearled over with dew. In the next field a flock of blackheaded gulls was pecking over the newly ploughed soil, occasionally rising into the air in a swirling, white-flaked cloud before settling again further on. Now, looking back on that scene, can I recall a bulkier shape among them, perhaps? A different bill? No …? No … it’s no good. If there was an albatross among those gulls, I never noticed it. There was certainly nothing whatsoever to indicate that the next eighteen hours were to be the most disastrous of my life.

  My plan, as far as I had one, was this. On consulting the Shrewsbury Ordnance Survey Map (OS 126) a few days earlier, I had been pleased to note that the Shropshire Union Canal that ran past Ellesmere wound its way westward for a few miles and then forked. The right-hand branch turned northward towards Llangollen via a spectacular aqueduct and several long tunnels, but the southern branch lolloped along in a less dramatic fashion towards Welshpool and the Breidden Hills. There at Welshpool, the canal ran parallel to the upper reaches of the River Severn, separated only by a strip of road. Once I had made it to there (two hours? three hours?), it would surely be the work of a minute to commandeer some loitering youths, the yeomanry of Welshpool, and haul Jack de Crow the twenty feet or so between the canal and the river. As I saw it, that would be the only major obstacle between me and the Bristol Channel. Once on the broad bosom of the rolling Severn, I’d probably be in Bristol by tea-time the next day.

  I had been sitting in the White Lion Antique Shop and Tea Rooms the previous day, my OS map spread before me, cheerfully telling anyone who would listen of my proposed route, when a grubby figure slurping tea in the corner spoke up.

  ‘Ellesmere to Welshpool, ye say, young maister? Along that theer thicky canal? Ee, but ye’ll ’ave a deal o’ moither gittin’ a boat beyond Maesbury on that bit o’ water, that ye will. Arrr.’

  A little miffed at this interruption to what had been turning into a splendid account of the coming voyage to a group of admiring customers (as long as I kept talking, they kept buying me cinnamon tea-cakes), I turned and replied in the sort of confident tones that Phineas Fogg himself might have used to address a doubting crony in the Athenaeum.

  ‘My good man, we’re not talking about a common barge or motor launch here. Though you may be right in pointing out the limitations of such craft, my Jack de Crow can go anywhere, Sir. La! She is a pioneering vessel, Sir, a feather-light, flat-bottomed skiff whose very delight is those winding waterways, those reedy backwaters closed to the world and its dog. I think you need not worry on that account, Sir!’

  ‘Ahrr well,’ said the rustic cynic in the corner. ‘Suit yerself. All Oi knows is that Oi graze my goats on that theer stretch o’ the canal. Still you’m knows best, Oi’m sure. Marnin’!’

  And off he stomped.

  A second, closer scrutiny of the OS map among the teacups did reveal that yes, beyond Maesbury Marsh the solid pale-blue line indicating the canal did seem to thin out a little … in fact, became distinctly dotted … and I might have to revise my route.

  Damn.

  Some of my audience were losing faith in my abilities as an explorer and beginning to drift away, so I had to make up my mind quickly. Ah yes, here. This thin blue thread on the map. The very thing. Perfect.

  ‘I will, gentlemen,’ I rapped out, snapping all attention back to me, ‘be taking the ship down …’

  Yes? Yes?

  (A nifty flourish of a handy teaspoon.)

  ‘… the Morda Brook.’

  Gasp!

  That’ll show ’em, I thought. The Morda Brook. So that was the plan. A breezy sail down the canal to Maesbury Marsh, where surely some ox-eyed yokel would be standing by to await orders; a quick lift and heave of the featherweight skiff into the limpid waters of the Morda Brook; and an easy ride on the current down to the Vyrnwy River and the cottage of a friend and colleague, Keith, who would expect me for a gin and tonic and early supper that evening.

  A plan beautiful for its spontaneity, simplicity and utterly deluded optimism.

  After two hours of rowing in good spirits between banks heavy with ripe blackberries, I came to Frankton Locks, a series of three locks stepping down a long decline of about six hundred yards. I was mildly apprehensive about how Jack and I would be greeted here. I had no idea whether small unpowered vessels were allowed through them. There was also an uneasy thought in my mind concerning licences. Did I need one? Surely not for such a harmless little tub.

  So it was with a few well-rehearsed winning smiles and persuasive banter that I approached the first of the three locks.

  ‘Ah,’ said I to the red-haired lock-keeper who appeared. He had watery blue eyes and a complexion the colour of brick-dust. ‘There’s no problem, I assume, in taking this little fellow down the locks, is there?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Ah. Meaning “Yep, I can”?’

  ‘No. Meaning “Yep, there’s a problem.” No unpowered boats in the locks, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

  ‘I’ve got oars,’ I said brightly, waggling them at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and turned on his heel.

  I had a brief but miserable vision of rowing back to the College, poking my head round the Common Room door and saying, ‘Hi! Remember me! The Traveller returns. Brilliant trip. I’ll tell you all about it one day. Meanwhile, anyone got an Inter-City timetable I could borrow?’

  This I quickly dispelled and hurried after the lock-keeper.

  ‘Um, hello, sorry. Me again.’

  A blank look.

  ‘Chap with the dinghy, yes? Look, there’s a barge coming along now. What if I get towed through? Is that okay?’

  Red looked me up and down, looked at Jack de Crow wallowing hopefully beside me, and made up his mind.

  ‘Nope. Sorry. No towing.’

  Right, right. Right.

  I took a de
ep breath, and hurried after him once more.

  ‘Okay. Here’s what I’ll have to do. I’ll empty her of all her luggage, remove the bundled rigging and somehow lift her out of the canal. Then I will drag her bodily down the towpath to beyond the lowest lock. I assume there’s no serious objection to that?’

  There followed a few seconds of teeth-sucking cogitation and, finally, grudging agreement.

  ‘But if you start cutting up the towpath,’ he added, ‘I’ll have to ask you to stop. We can’t have British Waterways property damaged, you know.’

  By now I was beginning to suspect that Mr Ginger-mop was not fully behind my project. The suspicion was confirmed when, after I had removed the luggage, the rigging, the oars and all extraneous weight, it came time to lift bodily the entire dinghy up the sheer three feet of concrete canal bank onto the towpath; a two-man-and-a-small-crane job if ever there was one.

  ‘Right,’ I called to Mr Stickler-for-the-Rules, who’d been sitting on a nearby bollard lighting up a pipe. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Ready? For what?’

  ‘I wonder if you could possibly help me to lift … it’s a bit tricky for one person, you see, and …’

  ‘Oh no. Can’t do that, I’m afraid. Not my job, see. Can’t get involved.’

  And he took another contented puff on his pipe.

  Flinging sotto voce a few happy statistics about tongue cancer and pipe smokers over my shoulder, I set to hauling the boat out of the water. The method I adopted was to haul up Jack’s bows as far as I could until the dinghy’s keel was resting on the concrete lip of the canal, her rear two-thirds sloping sharply down into the water. Then, putting all my weight on the front third and ignoring the ominous cracking sounds of grinding timber from her keel, I levered the stern up level until the boat was horizontally hanging out seven feet over the water. Finally, I pivoted the whole boat around parallel to the canal and safely onto the towpath.