The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Read online

  Finally there came the blessed scrunch of keel on fine shingle and the half-hearted tug of Jack’s nose up onto the little beach by a spreading oak, followed by the determination to just walk away, walk away and never, ever come back.

  It wasn’t over yet. While waltzing deliriously through the middle of a wide meadow, I felt a sharp jolt as though someone had flung a pebble and caught me on the funny-bone. I also seemed unable to move forward, try as I might.

  Ping! The jolt came again. An invisible bolt out of the darkness. And still I was rooted to the turf.

  Ping! A sling-shot to the nerves again. In English folklore there is a phenomenon called a ‘stray sod,’ a patch of grass enchanted by the faeries to bewitch and bewilder any mortal careless enough to stumble upon it. I had clearly found one, put there – possibly – by the same malicious wight who had designed the Morda Brook.

  Ping!

  It took me some twenty seconds and five more shocks to realise that I was standing up against an electric fence in the darkness. I am sure it was only the additional amps that gave me the energy to get to Keith’s at all.

  And so this long and weary chapter comes to a close. At half-past midnight, I clawed at the cottage window like some hideous swamp creature and startled Keith into a near heart attack. He opened the door to a gibbering, mud-oozing wreck, Jenny Greenteeth’s husband, my face peppered with nettle rash, my head garlanded with alder twigs, willow bark and leaf mould. Never so weary, never so in woe, bedabbled with the dew and torn with briers, I stood swaying in the doorway. One trouser leg flapped open to reveal a gashed and bloody calf and the hands held up in supplication were a mass of cuts and blisters beneath the grime. One eye was swollen and closed where a hail of Himalayan balsam seeds had scored a direct hit, and a puddle of silt, river water and fresh liquid cow dung was spreading at my feet. I was still twitching every four seconds as the last of the amps chased one another playfully through my nervous system.

  ‘Any chance of a gin?’ I chirruped, before pitching headlong into the hallway and onto the floral carpet.

  ‘Ice and lemon, please. I’ll have it here on the floor. Thanks.’

  Sails and Stained-Glass

  Never in his life had he seen a river before – this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver – glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble.

  —KENNETH GRAHAME, The Wind in the Willows

  Day Two.

  Day Two?!

  Day Two was not going to be remotely like Day One if I could help it – nor were Days Three, Four, Five and through to Eternity.

  Rules would have to be made, and as I awoke and went through the cheerful ritual of waking up properly, I listed them.

  Rule 1. Stop before nightfall. Never, ever sail after dark again.

  Rule 2. Stick only to waterways marked clearly as thick pale-blue lines on the map. Thin dark-blue lines are mere culverts, brooks and drainage ditches and not to be considered as even remotely navigable.

  Rule 3. Consult map carefully and often.

  Rule 4. Stay dry.

  I said my heartfelt thanks to Keith and apologised for the six inches of rich river silt in the bottom of his bath. Then I walked back across the meadows to see what could be done about Jack de Crow.

  As far as I knew, I was returning to a half-wrecked dinghy full of sodden luggage, with a large section of her gunwale missing, one rowlock irretrievably lost, my Leatherman multi-tool likewise full fathom five at the bottom of the Morda Brook, and therefore any chance of repairing the damage gone with it. But the day was warm, the fields were wide and peaceful, and I felt like Mole hurrying for the first time, the sunshine hot on his fur, across the Great Meadow for his life-changing appointment with the River.

  And besides, I had my four Rules, my four sensible, well-considered, easy-to-keep rules. Especially the last one. I liked that one. Stay dry.

  When I reached the Vyrnwy’s bank and the little shingle beach by the spreading oak tree where I’d pulled Jack up the night before, I decided suddenly on a Fifth Rule.

  Rule 5. Tie the dinghy up each night. Firmly.

  Jack had vanished.

  Same shingle beach. Same massy oak. Same broad bend. No Jack.

  Day Two was already beginning to look a lot like Day One.

  So tired and careless had I been last night that I had done barely more than hoist her bows onto the shingle. Now, on an extra six inches of floodwater, she was gone.

  I found her half-an-hour later a mile downstream, caught in a tangle of osiers and willow in midstream. Rule 4. flickered tauntingly through my mind for a few seconds and then I stripped off and plunged in.

  Swimming down to Jack was easy. Boarding her was accomplished by the epileptic seal method again. Rowing her back upstream against the considerable current with only one oar was a task that would have challenged Odysseus. My resemblance to that voyaging hero was emphasised by the fact that, just as he is depicted on all those Greek vases, I too was stark naked. It was indeed fortunate that this stretch of the Vyrnwy meanders through wide flat water-meadows empty of all but placidly grazing Friesians and the odd heron, none of whom took the slightest interest in the naked, pith-helmeted gentleman rowing in tight circles in a little yellow dinghy.

  It was sheer bad luck, however, that a small party of canoeists consisting of three young women should choose that morning to be out practising their craft on the river, on their way from the Llany-mynech Bridge to lunch downstream at the Tontine Inn at Melver-ley. It is a pleasant but dullish run, this stretch, and does not generally aff ord the canoeist much in the way of interest to look at. But I think there are three people now who may disagree with me on that score. All I will say is that despite my cheery wave and smile – and my attempts to use my pith helmet in the style of the classical fig-leaf – this small party did not seem inclined to stop and chew the fat or pass the time of day. I cannot think why.

  Once they had paddled on, I somehow managed to zigzag Jack ashore, climb back into my clothes and start setting things to rights. Strange though it sounds, I cannot think of a time when I have been more content, as slowly through the long noon tide, there on the warm grass under a wide sky, surrounded by miles of empty, lonely fields, Jack and I thoroughly sorted ourselves out.

  Firstly, I found to my relief that the splintered-off section of the gunwale holding the rowlock had fallen, not into the brook as I had thought, but into the dinghy. Secondly, likewise, my Leatherman was lying buried in the half-ton of debris in the bilges and had not fallen overboard last night. The Morda had only been teasing.

  I hauled Jack up and spent an hour shovelling out the twigs, the weeds, the leaves, the balsam seeds and alder cones, the clay and silt and shingle that had collected in her yesterday. Then, propping her on her beam ends with an oar, I sluiced her out from stem to stern with the bailer full of water. Finally, I wiped her down inside and out with a big sponge until she was gleaming clean again.

  Meanwhile, I had unpacked all my luggage – soon every grassy tussock and thistle clump was draped with underwear, shirts, socks and pyjamas drying in the hot sun, so that the meadow looked like Mrs Tiggywinkle’s washing day.

  I assessed the damage to the hull from yesterday’s overland expeditions and found, to my surprise, that apart from a good many scrapes and gouges in the canary-yellow paintwork, the hull remained watertight.

  The main damage was topside, especially that awful broken gunwale. This is a stout thickened length of wood running right around the rim of the boat, making a sort of solid lip to the hull. At the point where the rowlock sits on either side, it broadens out in a D-shaped curve to allow a hole to be drilled down through it. Into this hole drops the pin of the rowlock, enabling an oar to be manoeuvred. It was this section of the gunwale that had snapped away and now need
ed to be fixed before I could hope to proceed.

  I am no carpenter. When in woodwork lessons at school other boys were knocking up drop-leaf coffee tables and walnut roll-top bureaux to take home to their adoring parents, I was struggling to produce a breadboard. A breadboard, I should add, was only distinguishable from a slab of chipboard by its bevelled edges. I hadn’t even managed those. What I really needed was some proper wood glue. But unless I was to manufacture some by boiling up cow dung and willow sap, I would have to do without. Instead I looked closely for the first time at the extraneous fittings dotted about the decking of Jack de Crow. In its heady days of racing back before the war no doubt it had flaunted all manner of fancy rigging – staysails and spinnakers and what-not – and all these had demanded various eyelets, cleats and runners that were now obsolete, each one sporting a pair of perfectly serviceable screws.

  I spent the next couple of hours removing obsolete fittings and with my Leatherman screwing the smashed section of gunwale back into place as a temporary repair job. It would certainly do until I got to Shrewsbury where there was a chandlery and boat-repair workshop.

  I made a thorough check of all the rigging. Mast, gaff, boom, sails, halyards, sheets and stays, all needed untangling and unfurling and shaking out of the remarkable amount of river vegetation that had found its way even into the centre of the tightly rolled sails. Once I had finished, I felt that I now knew every inch of the little ship. The whole exercise had forced Jack and myself into a more intimate acquaintance, and when I relaunched her, I felt she had become in some sense truly mine. We had survived our first major ordeal together, and though both battle-scarred, we were now ready to set our faces downstream with hopes high and heads unbowed, to take whatever adventure might befall as we journeyed into the wide blue southern yonder.

  I aimed that afternoon to reach the tiny magpie-and-thatch church of Melverley, set amid its smoky yews. The afternoon continued fine and the steep-sided Breidden Hills, rearing vertically from the plain in three lofty peaks, swung to all points of the horizon as the Vyrnwy meandered in broad loops between buttercup meadows. These three hills seen from afar resembled an illustration on the dust jacket of an old book of fairy tales: The King of the Golden Mountain or The Enchanted Giant. In fact, there was something giant-like about the way the blue, sun-crowned mass seemed to tiptoe silently about the landscape, now straight ahead, now peering over my shoulder, now retreating coyly behind a nearby copse of oaks.

  That night at Melverley I dined in the Tontine Inn. I sat down, placed my beloved pith helmet on the table beside me and started to order the grilled chicken and a green salad. The waitress-barmaid, somewhat to my surprise, on seeing the pith helmet broke off in mid-order, clapped a hand to her mouth and ran off into the kitchens. She soon emerged behind the bar dragging the chef with her, and with much muffled giggling and whispering pointed me out in the corner, only to collapse into giggles again. The chef gave me a long amused stare, shook his head and vanished kitchenwards. After a minute or so, back came the waitress clearly attempting to control her mirth, and I’d got as far as telling her that I preferred my salad without dressing when she shrieked, ‘No dressing!’ and collapsed again with a barely stifled snort of laughter that threatened to choke her as she ran for the door.

  A pith helmet is, I admit, an eccentric piece of headgear to wear about the highways and byways of Britain, but that is partly its purpose. There is nothing wrong with a little harmless idiocy to put people off their guard before they find themselves talked into lifting a dinghy over twenty metres of towpath or doling out a free meal to a stranger. But I had not yet encountered a reaction quite so extreme as this at the sight of my headgear. At last an older woman appeared. She was clearly the landlady, presumably taking over from the mirth-struck waitress who, one could only pray, was suffering a choking fit somewhere far from medical aid. She approached the table, glanced at the hat, smirked, but completed taking the order.

  ‘… and afterwards, the Black Forest Gateau, thank you.’

  ‘Certainly sir. Um …?’ She paused.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir, but do you by chance have a rowing dinghy?’

  ‘Well, yes, I do actually. But how did you – ’

  ‘A yellow rowing dinghy, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes, yellow,’ I replied, wondering where this was leading.

  ‘Ah,’ said she. ‘Good.’ She nodded. Then she leaned over and whispered reassuringly in my ear. ‘They’re a bit old-fashioned hereabouts, see, pet. Me, I’m broad-minded as they come, but all the same, I think you was right to put on a suit of clothes before you came in here tonight. Anything to drink then?’

  It was clear that my three lady canoeists had made it to the Tontine for lunch. And equally clear what the main topic of conversation had been over the sherry trifle. But, with luck, a good current and a following wind I could be over the border and into Worcestershire before the news hit the Shropshire Star the next day. An early night that night, and an early start on the morrow, and they’d never catch me.

  Day Three. (You see, we are getting on quicker now.)

  Less than a mile from the Tontine Inn, the River Vyrnwy flows into the River Severn, the longest river in Britain and my highway from here to the sea some two hundred miles away. Once onto this relatively broad thoroughfare, it would be time to start doing things in earnest. I would hoist the sail.

  I rowed in to a little beach of shingle and spent half-an-hour unwrapping the mast and rigging from its neatly furled bundle, stepping the mast and attaching the long wire stays to their three respective fittings – port beam, starboard beam and prow. Once these were adjusted and tautened, the mast stood proudly erect and Jack already looked more like a sailing ship than a common rowboat.

  Soon the rudder was in place, the sheets were clear and I was ready to hoist the scarlet mainsail. Even many months later, when I was hauling up the sail for the thousandth time, I could not help thrilling to the sudden bellying out of the red canvas, the sail’s peak soaring into place against a bright sky in three swift, easy glides, the clunk of the main pulley lifting free of the gunwales and the smooth run of the mainsheet as the boom swings fully out. There is always the faint, stirring lilt of the Onedin Line music as the sail goes up, the ghostly drift of sea spray on the high bows, and it always took me a second or two to realise that I was not in fact a Bristol clipper heading out into the Atlantic in the last century, but a small dinghy on inland waters about to ram a coot’s nest again.

  Once a boat is sailing she is alive, and every time those halyards hoist the peak to the heavens with a gentle breeze following, there is a resurrection of sorts. I once saw a sick and dying horse lying in a stable-yard, an ungainly, sweat-darkened tangle of inert legs and neck and hooves on the dusty cobbles. Then the vet stepped back having administered an injection. In ten seconds, with barely a twitch between near-death and full consciousness, the horse rolled, unfolded its legs and shook itself upright in one swift movement and was off, skimming across the field in a gliding canter. The sudden sail-shaking resurrection of Jack de Crow that morning on the upper Severn was as heart-thumpingly beautiful as that.

  The weary creak-thud of the oars was now replaced by that loveliest of all sounds, the light rippling music of water on the wooden drum of the hull. I could sit in the dinghy facing the way I was travelling rather than in the neck-craning posture of the oarsman who must travel through life backwards. The sheets were easing and flexing as the light breeze nudged the mainsail out; the tiller thrummed beneath my fingers, gently tugging to one side as it should but kept in check by my steering hand.

  Wonderful it was, but the hazards remained. Though I had been sailing on and off since I was five, I had still to learn the importance of not letting go of the tiller. In a dinghy, if you remove your hand from the tiller for so much as half a second, the rudder swings out of control, the boom takes a murderous lurch at you and you find yourself ramming your vessel in
to a willow tree. The willow tree on this first of many such occasions, a mile or so above Shrawardine, was a particularly clingy specimen and managed to get its green-grey twiggy fingers thoroughly enmeshed in the stays and halyards before I knew where I was.

  After several minutes of carefully trying to wiggle the boat free, snapping off a twig here, bending back a bough there, I gradually became aware of a presence six feet above me on the bank.

  A bull.

  It stamped. It snorted. It pawed the ground, sending great sods of turf and soil down the steep bank and into the dinghy. It had a shiny, spittle-covered brass nose ring. It had two mad, little piggy eyes that turned to two spinning red spiral discs as its temper grew. It tossed its massive head and stubby horns in frustrated rage at being unable to find a way down the bank to gore me to death. For a minute I wondered why my presence seemed to enrage it so. Then I realised that with every attempt to shake the red sail free, despite making ineffective bull-soothing noises, I was flapping a bright red piece of cloth in its face. I may as well have had a thousand cheering Spaniards in the background, worn a frilly shirt and been shouting Olé.

  Eventually the last willow twig snapped away. Wiping sweat and bull-spittle from my ashen face, I pushed away from the bank and out into the current once more. The westerly breeze blowing down from the Welsh hills behind me filled the sail, Jack gave a shake and a ruffle as if to say ‘Concentrate, Sandy! Concentrate,’ and we were on our way once more. Two miles later the bull’s bellowing had faded over the fields and I had stopped shaking enough to think about lunch.

  The God of Spontaneous Lunch Offers was not slow in manifesting his bounty. Since escaping the bull I had bowled merrily along and was approaching Shrawardine and its overgrown castle mound clothed in fading dog’s mercury when a voice hailed me from the bank.

  ‘Twenty years I’ve been on this river,’ it barked, ‘and I’ve never seen a sail. Come and have lunch!’ Well, my friends say I’m slow at many things, but when it comes to free lunch invitations my reactions are those of an electrocuted stoat. I put the tiller over, gybed neatly and came to a graceful halt on a grassy bank below a wall bright with purple aubretia and snow-in-summer. At the top of this wall on a sunny terrace sat my host, an iron-browed gentleman with a gammy leg, reclining in a garden chair. He introduced himself as Kiril Gray and waved me towards the French windows behind him.