The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Read online

  ‘In there, on the right. Kitchen. Cold roast beef. Bread. Help yourself. And bring another bottle of red out, would you?’

  A few minutes later, I was out again in the September sunshine, a roast beef and horseradish sandwich the size of a Bible in one hand and a goblet of superb red wine in the other. We chatted of this and that, Mr Gray snapping out shrewd questions about my plans hereon and expressing a gruff admiration for my courage.

  ‘Courage?’ I queried. ‘Why do you say that?’

  Suddenly I was worried.

  ‘Ever been to Ironbridge Gorge, hmm? And before that there’s Shrewsbury Weir, of course. Didn’t they tell you? Ah well, you’ll find out soon enough,’ he murmured. A silence, while I swirled the wine in the glass, watching the sun make a bright ruby in its dark heart. It was very peaceful …

  ‘Isn’t that gorgeous?’ I said. ‘That colour – it’s like a garnet, or the colour you get in old stained-glass.’

  ‘Funny you should say that. My wife’s not here at present. She’s putting a new window in Shrewsbury Abbey today. Won’t be back till late. More wine?’

  ‘Yes please.’ I held out my glass. ‘A window? In the Abbey?’

  ‘That’s right. Jane Gray by name. May’ve heard of her. Quite well known actually. Makes stained-glass.’

  Ah. I had a vision of Mrs Gray, a little faded perhaps, a Parish Worthy, busy over her retirement hobby with some Make-It-Yourself Craft Kit, piecing together garish glass kingfishers or improbably coloured autumnal sprays in circular frames for polite neighbours to hang in their front-parlour windows. At this very moment, I thought, the Rector of Shrewsbury Abbey was diplomatically accepting some well-meant offering in coloured perspex (‘I call it my Rainbow Prayer, vicar’) and wondering where he could best lose it in some dark side aisle or dusty apse.

  ‘Care to see her workshop?’

  ‘Lovely,’ I enthused, and considered launching into how, too, my mother kept herself busy making Victorian Christmas decorations, silk flowers and ceramic kittens for the parish jumble sale. The moment I saw the workshops, however, and a portfolio of Mrs Jane Gray’s work, I realised that she and my mother were in very different leagues. The glasswork was magnificent. Photographs and designs for vast windows all around the country spilled into my lap: castles, cathedrals, cenotaphs, museums, and such a blaze of saints and angels, swords, lilies, fountains and flames, glowing like jewels … and these were only the photographs. How they must look in real life, with God’s good sunlight transmuting into sapphire and garnet, honey-gold and cool amethyst, I could only imagine. I determined there and then to stop at Shrewsbury Abbey as I sailed past in the next day or two and see the new window in its place. But talking of Shrewsbury, if I wanted to make it there by nightfall I had best be off , so making my farewells to my grim, ironic host (‘Best of luck! Regards to the Weir.’) I hurried down to the dinghy, hoisted sail once more and rippled on my way.

  I was immensely grateful, not just for the slabs of roast beef, horseradish and wholewheat bread settling comfortably into my belly, nor for the ambrosial wine sloshing rosily into my bloodstream, but for the chance kindness of a stranger, the spontaneous call across the river at the sight of my red sail that was to set the pattern for the next three thousand miles.

  Mr Gray was the first to be warmed by the sight of Jack de Crow and to respond so encouragingly; the first of many to send a small part of himself winging down the river with me into the wide lands beyond. And if this sounds uncommonly like an epitaph, then I’m afraid to say that, in fact, it is. Mr Kiril Gray died three days later, but not before receiving a postcard from a pith-helmeted stranger downriver, assuring him of a successful outcome with Shrewsbury Weir and the Ironbridge Gorge, about which he had remained so disturbingly tight-lipped, with only his shrewd eyes gleaming with amusement.

  The river by this time had become a deep, beautiful dark green running between rich pastures and glossy rhododendron woods and every now and then overlooked by some gracious manor house across shaven lawns. Horses grazed in the meadows and white Charolais cattle browsed beneath spreading chestnut trees, knee deep in the late summer grass.

  As there was still a fair following breeze, I had the sail out full and was beginning to relax into the way of things. I found it was possible to sit down low in the stern, my back propped for comfort against my folded life jacket (such a useful thing; I had been right to bring one) and steering the tiller with an idle elbow. The nice thing about running downwind as opposed to tacking into it is how calm and gentle and sunny things appear. With both the current and the breeze going my way on this sunny afternoon, there is no alarming gurgle of water racing under the keel, no pushy wind tugging fitfully at the sails, nothing in fact to indicate that I am moving at all, except for the smooth retreating glide of the distant banks.

  Until I stop dead, that is.

  I had closed my eyes for a moment, my face upturned to the warming sun, identifying the sweet trill of what I thought was possibly a skylark somewhere above me in the pure serene, when BANG! something clutched at the centreboard, held it fast. The placid green waters of the Severn, seemingly so dreamy a second before, became an inexorable muscle of torrent sluicing past the bows as Jack turned side-on to the current. The breeze that had lulled me along now ripped off its benign mask and revealed itself as a bullying braggart, pushing, pushing, pushing the sail over until the dinghy was heeling at forty-five degrees and water was pouring over the submerged gunwale.

  Whatever had snagged the centreboard beneath the boat was still holding it fast, and any minute now the wind and current would capsize me completely. The orderly sheets and lines had been transformed into a snarled tangle of sodden ropes in the bottom of the boat. The jammed mainsheet was holding the sail hauled in, rather than safely spilling the wind. The life jacket was half overboard, clearly making a bid for shore and leaving me to sink or swim.

  I tried pulling up the centreboard, but it was firmly stuck. With an almighty heave and a horrid gouging sound, up it came like a cork from a bottle. I reeled backwards, sprawling into the flooded bottom of the dinghy, while the flying centreboard did a graceful somersault into the air before landing with a crack across my ribs.

  I lay for a few seconds, wild-eyed and breathing hard. Floating ropes and a foot of river water sloshed gently about my buttocks as I glared up at the sky and listened to the river rippling on the hull. But all was calm again, instantly, miraculously, the moment Jack was freed from the grip of that underwater claw. Now that we were once again going with the elements, the Severn was murmuring its silken whispers under the keel, and the faintest of breezes was saying with some surprise:

  ‘Us? Violent? The dear old river and I? No, you must have been dreaming, old son. We’re your friends.’

  Jack may have been fooled by these blandishments but not I. As the river and dinghy waltzed arm in arm down the long curling ribbon of water, I sat ramrod-straight, darting suspicious glances from sail to bank, from bank to prow and back to sail, muttering edgily to the odd wayside moorhen, ‘Ha! Just try it and see, buster,’ as the golden afternoon slipped away and the spires of Shrewsbury town came in sight.

  Rapids and Repairs

  But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

  Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

  A savage place; as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing …

  —COLERIDGE, Kubla Khan

  I still had five miles to go to Shrewsbury when the breeze died to nothing and I took to the oars once more. But with every stroke the section of gunwale I had screwed into place the day before was slowly working loose. Already the screws were at the cardigan-snagging stage that is a trademark of Mackinnon carpentry.

  ‘Good Lord, is that a Mirror?’ a silvery-haired gentleman on the bank called out as I struggled by.

  ‘Yes,’ I called back. ‘A Mirror. Want to buy one?’

  He watche
d me benignly for half a minute, then spoke again.

  ‘Probably a silly question, old son, but why are you rowing round and round in small circles?’

  I explained.

  ‘Ah, now what you need is some wood glue, old boy. And a little expert advice. Pull in here. I may be able to help you.’

  And that is how I met Alan Snell, who just happened to have a waterside boat shed at his back, and who just happened to be building a wooden sailing-dinghy in his spare time, and so happened to have wood glue, screws, planes, files, chisels and bags of expertise. He also had rather a nice bottle or two of chardonnay – it seemed that fine wine was becoming a regular feature of these unscheduled riverside stops.

  For two hours Alan helped me mend the damaged gunwale and kept refilling my glass, and by the time we had finished the gunwale was as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, which is more than could be said for the pair of us. As well as gluing, he had taken a strip of steel, drilled screw holes through it, curved it to the shape of the gunwale’s swell and bolted the whole thing on with a reinforcing strip. It is a matter of record that for the rest of the long, long voyage, that gunwale and rowlock never gave the slightest trouble again. It was with blurry words of gratitude that I set off again with both oars pulling strongly once more. The fact that I was still going in circles was, I suspect, entirely due to the third glass of chardonnay.

  Shrewsbury lies in a great loop of the Severn and is almost an island. The Romans came and placed a castle at the narrow neck of the isthmus and threw up walls with the river serving as a natural moat. In later centuries the Normans added to the defences, built an abbey, improved the castle, and the town thrived behind its impregnable bastions, keeping the enemy hordes at bay for almost a thousand years before a major breach in security let in the Town Planners, who wrecked the place.

  Still, from the river it remains an attractive town, a mixture of Tudor and Georgian architecture and wide riverside parks. On I rowed, past the Shrewsbury School boathouses in mock Tudor, beneath the gilded blue of the iron tollbridge, and so on to the huge red-stone abbey and my promised stop to see the newly installed Jane Gray window. This depicts St Benedict in lovely neo-mediaeval lines and deep, rich stains, every bit as glorious as I had hoped. For Jack and me, there was the sinuous river loop that encircles Shrewsbury, a map in Delft blue glass winding across the bottom of the frame, showing the onward way. An even lovelier window, also by Jane Gray, stood opposite, showing St Winifred crowned with stars and her holy fountain springing in silver-blue arcs at her feet.

  By the time I left the abbey, the warm glow of the wine had faded from my veins. This allowed me to row in a relatively straight line but was otherwise a pity, because approaching Shrewsbury Weir I felt in particular need of courage. This is the most fearsome obstacle to navigation in the entire length of the Severn, chiefly because it is not meant to be navigated at all. There is no boat pass, no side channel, no lock – nay, not so much as a fish ladder. It is simply an eight-foot concrete wall built across the river from bank to bank over which the pent-up waters pour in one unbroken, white, roaring fall. At the foot of this thunderous cascade is a great trough of seething foam where the waters roll endlessly back on themselves. This is known to kayakists as a ‘stopper,’ for the very good reason that it stops things – kayaks, canoes, canoeists and so on, holding them there in an eternal tumble of crushing waters until other things stop as well: breathing, pulse and neural activity, for example. Nothing that goes into this trough ever comes out again. For all anyone knows, there are the whitened bones of Norman soldiers, Tudor suicides and pre-Roman coracle fishermen revolving in an endless whirl at the foot of the weir, held there spinning in a restless watery grave, and soon possibly to be joined by a late twentieth-century dinghy sailor.

  To this day, I do not know the proper technique for getting a small dinghy down an eight-foot weir – there must be one, surely – but here is the method I invented. I do not recommend it.

  1. Moor up well above the weir.

  2. Walk along and look at the layout.

  3. Blanch slightly.

  4. Decide that if and when the boat goes over, one will be somewhere safely on the bank at the time.

  5. Rally five or six old-age pensioners who are dozing on park benches nearby.

  6. Organise said pensioners into a chain gang to shift entire contents of boat by land to some point below weir.

  7. Tie painter, halyard and mainsheet together to make one long, long towrope and attach one end to dinghy.

  8. Pause to chivvy back into line one or two pensioners attempting to sneak back to their benches for afternoon doze before job fully done.

  9. Hold other end of towrope tightly.

  10. Smile bravely.

  11. Push dinghy out into midstream with one foot.

  12. Walk alongside drifting dinghy on bank clutching rope.

  13. Walk more briskly.

  14. Trot …

  15. Break into panicky gallop …

  16. Scream as rope races out through hands, removing most of skin in process.

  17. Watch with utter astonishment as dinghy plunges over the fall, breasts the maelstrom unharmed and bobs like a cork over the rolling bones beneath her, laughing all the way.

  18. Make short but heart-warming speech of thanks to pensioners, spectators, dogs, ducks, etc. before rowing away downstream using undamaged tips of fingers to hold oars.

  Many months after this escapade I read Sam Llewellyn’s superbly witty account of a very similar exploit, The Worst Journey in the Midlands. His book describes a disastrous attempt to row an ancient dinghy in 1982 from Welshpool to London via the Severn and various Midland canals, and it came as no surprise to discover that we had many experiences in common. The boat-handling pensioners at Shrewsbury Weir were one of them. Do they go there for the weekly exercise, I wonder, or had they just crept cautiously back after a fifteen-year absence reckoning it was now perhaps safe to return to some peaceful riverside dozing?

  One of the pensioners there told me, as he limped by clutching my sleeping bag, that he too had set off down the Severn in just such a boat many long years ago. ‘Really?’ I enquired eagerly. (Perhaps I wasn’t so foolhardy after all.) ‘Where did you get to? What happened?’

  ‘I got as far as Stourport and was hit by a tanker,’ he replied, shaking his head sadly. ‘Sank, of course.’ He sighed. ‘The leg’s never been the same since …’

  Right.

  Below Shrewsbury the river runs swiftly and strongly again in several more loops, and by mid-afternoon a good breeze had sprung up that stiffened to a fair wind over the next few hours, a wind that whipped steely ripples from the river’s surface and sent silver-white squalls among the osier leaves.

  I will not dwell on the horrible half-hour I spent jammed firmly in yet another riverside willow’s branches while the greeny current attempted to suck the keel out from under me. I will pass lightly over the horrid scraping bump as I grounded on the shingle bank below old Atcham Bridge. This is, apparently, where all the drowned bodies end up – those released by the weir, that is. Legend tells of a mermaid that dwells in the deep pools by Atcham, and the story is perpetuated by the fine inn of that name that stands by the double bridge there. More modern tales tell of a giant eel that also lives in the umbrous shadows of the arches. Year by year it grows in stature, feeding on corpses and cockle-boats, defying all attempts to capture it. In the minds of local anglers it has now assumed the proportions of Jormungander the World Serpent. It would not surprise me to learn that the two tales, of mermaid and monster eel, are of equal antiquity – and veracity.

  I skimmed on downriver and, just as dusk was falling, saw that the stream divided into two on either side of a thickly wooded island. Which way to go? Where was the main channel? Wind and current were bearing me swiftly on and I had no way of telling the safer route. Just then a flash of blue skimmed out low across the water and zipped down the left-hand channel. A kingfisher! An omen! I have alwa
ys loved these jewel-like birds – who does not? – not only for their sapphire and flame-orange plumage, but for all the myths and magic that fly with them. First to fly from the Ark, legend has it, the kingfisher flew up and drenched its then drab feathers in the dazzling hues of the first rainbow. Such a symbol of summer days and cloudless skies, old bestiaries claim that it lays its eggs on the silken surface of the sea when it is glassy calm. Such days of tranquillity are known therefore as ‘Halcyon days’ after the king-fisher’s Greek name. I have always made a connection, too, between this secretive bird and the equally elusive Fisher King, mysterious keeper of the Grail in his hidden River Kingdom. Thus it was that with the whirring spark of turquoise leading me down the eastern channel, I silently thanked the gods and steered after my bright guide into the dark tunnel of trees.

  Whenever a river is interrupted or split by any obstacle, the current either side intensifies to become a mill race, and this was the case now. It was almost pitch black under the crowding trees, and the channel narrowed to a dark, wrangling torrent that swept over submerged logs and around out-thrust tree-roots. Down came the sail in a flurry. I managed to bundle it safely away out of reach of the ripping branches overhead, and turned quickly to my oars. My raw, rope-burnt hands flinched on the timber of the oar handles, but I was in control again. Then, to my horror, I saw what lay ahead. At the further end of the tunnel of trees, a huge fallen pine tree lay clear across the channel from island to bank, seemingly damming the entire stream. Even from here I could see the long, wicked spikes of pale snapped-off branches, a deadly cheval de frise ready to impale me if I were swept down onto them. Aghast, I spun the boat to face back upstream and started to row … oh so slowly … back up the wrangling channel. At first I thought I was making headway, but soon I realised that it was no good. The current was so strong that even straining at the oars with cracking muscles I was still being swept down like a leaf on the flood. Only at the very last minute I saw that the left-hand end of the felled trunk was submerged – there the waters sluiced through in a gleaming black-glass muscle of water. I changed tactics and paddled furiously to the left bank to squeeze through the gap, and with only inches to spare brushed by those deadly spikes that jutted out from the main trunk in every direction. With a dark hollow gurgle Jack was through.