The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Page 6

  But I found I had relaxed too soon. The boat stopped with a jolt. After a second or two of violent heeling, there came an almighty crack from somewhere under the keel, and Jack drifted on once more.

  The centreboard. I had left the damned centreboard down again, and now it sounded as though it might be damaged on yet another underwater obstacle.

  I tried pulling it up, but it was stuck fast. There was nothing for it. Just as I drifted clear of the lower end of the island, a sloping shelf of mud and shingle appeared on the left bank. Moreover, the lights of a cottage shone out in the dusk a mere fifty yards up the hill. I turned towards the beach, rowed as far in as I could before I felt the centreboard grating on the river bed, and, resigning myself to the fourth wetting in four days, hopped overboard into waist-deep water. Tilting the whole boat over to see her keel, I could see the problem. The centreboard had been smacked hard side-on and had split right across at the point where it protruded from the keel. Rather than breaking away completely, it still hung on by half its splintered thickness, but these splinters were preventing it being drawn up.

  A major amputation was called for. A few hefty heaves snapped the damaged centreboard completely in two, allowed me to beach the boat properly and collapse sobbing onto the grassy bank in muddy despair. This boating adventure wasn’t turning out quite as I had envisaged. I couldn’t recall Jerome K. Jerome leaving a trail of vital components in splintery heaps all the way down the Thames. Ratty had not spent his summer days eschewing the delights of picnickery for yet another visit to Harry the Stoat’s lumber yard. And in all the fairy tales I knew, chirpy little kingfishers did not lead innocent travellers into death traps and then vanish sniggering.

  After lying on the grass for ten minutes feeling thoroughly sorry for myself, I trudged up to the cottage I had spotted earlier, trying out different opening lines in my head.

  Excuse me, do you have an open fire and require fuel? I have just delivered a whole stack of firewood to the bottom of your garden in the form of a small, useless dinghy. It will need chopping up, of course. Savagely.

  Or …

  Hello, you don’t know me, I am a complete stranger and very possibly a raving lunatic. May I take my trousers off in your front room and drink your whisky?

  I knocked on the door and was greeted by a pleasant-looking man with greying hair.

  ‘Er …’ I began.

  ‘Good Lord, it’s Mackinnon, isn’t it? Sandy Mackinnon?’

  ‘Er …?’ I continued. I’d never seen this man in my life.

  ‘Yes, from Ellesmere College. Well, well. You don’t know me, but I used to have sons there, and I’ve been back quite a bit and seen you around. Come in!’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘So what can I do for you? Lord, you’re soaking, come in and take your trousers off. Whisky?’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘Excuse the mess, won’t you. I’ve just been knocking together a few odds and ends in my workshop. Carpentry, you know. Bit of a hobby.’

  ‘Er … funny you should mention that …’

  Those of you who are sickened by this unfailing tendency to thrive on the kindness of strangers will be mollified to hear that I did not in fact batten hungrily onto this particular one’s kindness. Before I could work out the order in which I would take advantage of his various offers of help, I found out where I was – Wroxeter. Beneath this tiny hamlet lie buried the remains of the largest Roman city yet discovered in Britain. Recent archaeological finds even hint that this may well have been the stronghold of the fifth-century dux bellorum, the best contender so far for an historical Arthur, which makes Wroxeter nothing less than Camelot. It seemed that my Fisher King had led me true after all. Under normal circumstances, this fact alone would have accounted for the joy that now flooded over me, but on this night I had another reason for euphoria. Less than a mile from Wroxeter was the house of a family I knew well and it was to them that I could cheerfully turn my leech-like feelers for help and hospitality.

  A quick phone call, and I was soon ensconced on my friend Jenny’s sofa just up the road, sinking in a sea of her home-made silk cushions embroidered with pomegranates, tropical flowers and coral fish. Once my sorry tale was told, Jenny’s husband Henry was dispatched to the work shed and emerged some time later with a brand-new centreboard, which was then varnished and left to dry overnight.

  As I continued to tell of the discomforts and trials of the voyage, Jenny would get up, bang about in various cupboards outside and then return to hear the next part of the story. When I had finished, she presented me with an array of goods for the morrow: gardening gloves for the prevention of blisters; plastic map case to prevent my already dilapidated map from crumbling further; large packed lunch of sausage sandwiches, cheese, home-grown apples and chocolate bars; a bottle of white wine in case I got tired of rowing in a straight line; a corkscrew; and, best of all, a big, soft cushion appliquéd with gaudy parakeets to sit on in comfort.

  The next morning I learnt that there was to be an additional item. Kate, Jenny’s ten-year-old daughter, would accompany me for the next ten miles and be picked up at Buildwas Abbey downstream. A further surprise was in store when we all tripped down to where I’d left Jack de Crow, my new centreboard under one arm and the sack full of goodies under the other. There was another centreboard, newly made, leaning against the dinghy. A short note from the friendly cottager of the night before wished me well, was sorry to have missed me that morning, and hoped that his mocked-up centreboard might be of some use. From some nearby willow came the thin tinkling sound of a kingfisher laughing.

  Hastily, before anyone else popped out of the woods or hurried across the fields with newly made booms, gaff s, oars, rudders or the like, or just blank cheques and suggestions that I should upgrade to a yacht, Kate and I clambered aboard and Jack de Crow set off once more.

  As the river approaches Buildwas Abbey above Ironbridge Gorge it runs in broad sweeps between flat green fields which lap against the Wrekin, a steep conical hill dominating the whole plain from Staffordshire to the Welsh border like a brooding giant. At one point on this stretch we sailed around a bend and straight into a flock of Canada geese, who launched themselves into the air in a hurricane of wings. What a flurry and fury all about us, a whirring, wonderful snowstorm of beaks and breasts and wide, wide pinions. It was a phalanx of archangels ascending to the Throne. The gibble- gabble from a hundred outstretched necks, the creak and whoosh of two hundred wings, the spatter of water all around and our scarlet sail breezing along in the middle of it all; this is what I had dreamt of when I first thought of sailing the Severn. Ah! and the breezy air full of drifting grey goose-down afterwards.

  After a little while the breeze died, but that didn’t matter because I now had a galley slave. Kate, wearing my red and white handkerchief pirate-style on her dark head, manned the oars while I lay back dreaming in the noonday sun, dreaming of this and that, of giants and T.H. White’s geese and golden days ahead, and wondering if I could perhaps purchase Kate for a fair price for the remainder of the journey. My idle happiness was tinged only by a minor irritation that for a ten-year-old beginner at rowing she was doing considerably better than I had done.

  Alas, at Buildwas Abbey my brief idyll came to a halt as Jenny appeared on the bridge, waving a huge Union Jack pillowcase flag and hooting like a schoolgirl. Once Kate was safely ashore, I turned my nose downstream once more and prepared to face the Ironbridge Gorge.

  Ironbridge, tucked away in its steep valley off the main roads, is not very big and I doubt if many people outside the Midlands are more than vaguely aware of its existence. Yet it holds the distinction of being the very birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. An engraving of the Gorge done in the late 1700s looks like the work of a more than usually deranged Hieronymus Bosch: the river banks crumble beneath the weight of factories, shanty-town houses, belching chimneys and sooty wharves. The river itself is clogged with ships and barges, cranes, derricks, steamers and wherrie
s, and on every side are piles of filth: slag heaps, overflowing middens, effluent pipes and broken piles of rubble swarmed over by emaciated people, skeletal and hollow-eyed.

  Today, mercifully, it has largely reverted to a steep secluded gorge, though rather too dank and sinister in the dark depths of its waters for my liking. Up the banks swarmed trees clad in thick creeper, a tangle of black bryony and bitter ivy. Autumn seemed more advanced here, the leaves already rotting to dampness on the trees and clogging the stilly waters. Grim verses chased through my mind – The shadows where the Mewlips dwell are dark and wet as ink – and I found that I was singing to myself the Twenty-third Psalm. Under the semicircular arch of Telford’s Iron Bridge (incidentally, the first to be constructed thus) I drifted ghost-like before the faintest of breezes, but was cheered to see a madcap figure standing high above me on the parapet waving that outsized Union Jack again – Jenny, who had raced down in her car for a last sweeping wave. On an impulse I dug into my rucksack for my tin-whistle, and as the great curving tracery drifted astern I played a rousing chorus of Rule Britannia. Thinly over the water came Jenny’s lusty vocal accompaniment while Kate – no doubt – shrunk back in horrid embarrassment.

  Final Farewell

  But Rule Britannia gave way to the melancholy Tom Bowling and just before the bridge dwindled to a distant dot, I got in a couple of bars of Auld Lang Syne, modulated to a minor key by the mournful echoes and the air of departure. For this was the start of another stage of the adventure. Once the waving figure of Jenny on the bridge had vanished astern, I would know that I really had said goodbye to my old life at Ellesmere. Up until this point I had been charting familiar territory, seeing old haunts and relying on friends, never more than a phone call and a ten-minute drive away. But from here, from now, beyond the Gorge, all was new.

  I am not yet beyond the Gorge, however. At the bottom of it lie the Jackfield Rapids, a welter of white water some two hundred yards long, thrashing over and between black boulders and jagged rocks. Every weekend the place is gay with kayaks and canoes and their various lycra-clad, fluorescent-helmeted owners, who spend happy afternoons doing impossible things in craft as slim and unstable as a French runner bean. These boats are tough; the odd knock on a boulder at twenty knots is a mere scuff to the tough fibreglass, and as for flipping over – well, that’s half the fun.

  I, on the other hand, want merely to get beyond the rapids upright, dry and unscathed, and am none too confident about any of these three. ‘Fortune Favours the Brave’ runs the Mackinnon motto – though I’ve always found that, be that as it may, she also favours the prudent, the discreet and the well heeled. I decide to opt for prudence. The plan is to adopt roughly the same method as for the Shrewsbury Weir, though with protective gloves this time. The problem, however, is that here there is no clear towpath for me to amble along, and there are large rocks midstream against which Jack might be crushed like an eggshell. Nevertheless, I try.

  I slip and stumble among the slimy black boulders on the bank and attempt to control Jack’s progress on a short lead, but the current keeps jamming her between rocks or spinning her into side eddies and I have to stumble back upstream a few yards to pull her free. Wiry brambles and the low sweep of ash branches jut out over the banks, hampering my slow toing and froing. This footling progress is not to last. Jack, an altogether more impulsive soul than I, finally grows impatient with my caution and takes off with a swoop down a small cascade. Taking me off guard, the rope tether pulls me from a wobbly boulder, and I dive head-first into the river on the end of the line, towed along like an unsuccessful water-skier who refuses to let go. Here we go again. A rush and roar of foam about my ears, a lungful of Severn water and a cracking blow on the ribs from a submerged boulder; none of these things can divert me from the sudden illuminating thought that if one is planning to take a boat down England’s fiercest rapids, it makes more sense to be actually in the boat at the time.

  Twenty yards downstream I surface spluttering in a side pool where Jack has fetched up on a black rock and is kindly waiting for me. When I have finished spluttering, I sigh. Day Five, fifth wetting. As for my ribs, they are aching abominably. There are more than two-thirds of the rapids below us still to negotiate. At that point, I lose my patience with this whole prudence lark and decide to take Jack’s lead. With a silent prayer I hop in, push off and ride the remaining two hundred yards of the rapids as though Jack were a Colorado inflatable raft. I believe I close my eyes.

  There is a rush and a roar, one or two sweeping ups and downs, several slow waltzing spins and somehow, miraculously, I am through. The rush mutes to a chatter, the chatter to a gentle chuckle, the chuckle to a murmur, and then dreaming silence steals in once more. I am through. The rapids are behind me and I have survived the greatest hurdle of the journey to the sea.

  Steam Trains and Smooth Sailing

  I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

  Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.

  —JOHN MASEFIELD, Sea-Fever

  I awoke the next day with a light heart. Bridgnorth, approached by river in the slow gold of the evening before, had taken my breath away, even more than the adrenalin rush of the Jackfield Rapids. The town sits on its high red bluff of rock above the deep winding river, topped by the red sandstone tower of St Leonard’s and the more elegant green-domed cupola of St Mary’s Church. The previous evening I had walked up the steep winding Cartway that zigzagged up between black and white timber cottages and four-square Georgian houses, each with lead-paned windows lamplit from within, looking indescribably homely in the blue dusk. It may have been the arrival by boat rather than car, but I felt I had come to some foreign port, some island kingdom in a fairytale, five days voyaging across chartless seas rather than the charmless forty-minute drive down the A5 motorway. I almost expected the good folk of Bridgnorth to speak in an unknown tongue and use florins or gilders for currency. This elbow-spreading of time and distance was to remain with me throughout the entire voyage, an enchanted gift from Jack de Crow to me as we travelled together through these new-made kingdoms.

  My heart was light for a more practical reason, too. Most of the disasters that can befall a small dinghy had queued up to occur in the first five days, and Jack and I had dealt with them one and all. Having got them out of the way, we proceeded on our journey with a degree of stately calm, with time to enjoy the pleasures of river voyaging.

  And pleasures there were aplenty. The day that I sailed away from Bridgnorth I remember as one of ruffled blue water, long straight stretches of river and high white clouds racing across a bright sky on a stiff northerly breeze. Jack took me in an almost unbroken run of twenty-six miles, the red sail out full, the water creaming under my bow and the glorious chuckling, rushing music of sailing dinghies everywhere. Reach after reach I sailed, through deep valleys of beech forest, between cliffs of red sandstone, past dreaming meadows where cows grazed peacefully, and all the while deeply, gloriously happy.

  At one point an old black steam train burst from an oak wood beside the river in a chuffing cloud of white smoke. A glance at my map showed that this was the Severn Valley railway that takes trippers between Bridgnorth and Bewdley. For the next mile or so we raced together, train and I, down that long sunny stretch of water, red sails against white steam, while all the passengers leant from the carriage windows and waved and cheered. Then with a long drawn-out hoot from the driver, the train drew ahead and vanished around a curve and I was left blinking and wondering if I had dropped straight into an E. Nesbit story.

  At another point that day, I encountered another rapid – one I had not been warned about. The valley here had deepened to such an extent that the wind had died to nothing, baffled by the curves of the gorge and the thick beech forest on either side, so I was rowing along but with the sail still set, idly flapping about my head, ready to catch the next breeze. As I rounded a bend and heard the telltale chatter of water over shallow stones I
stiffened in alarm … but no. My experience in the Jackfield Rapids had taught me the wisdom of relying on the family motto; it was better to throw caution to the winds and run straight down the middle. Besides, from the sound of them this section of rapids was a mere trickle compared to the Niagaras I had faced already.

  There was one problem, though. Ahead was a gaggle of kayaks, ten or so, occupied by small children and an instructor: clearly a school party of beginners learning that there was nothing to be afraid of on the river, that one was always in control, that even in a rapid such as this one need never capsize.

  Fortunately they were strung out only halfway across the river, leaving a good twenty-yard gap for me to shoot through so long as I rowed hard across to the other bank starting now. A heave at the oars, a slip of the hand, and my left oar somehow flew out of its rowlock and splashed overboard into the river. By the time I’d recovered an upright position it was twelve feet away and I was drifting broadside on, out of control, towards the happy novices in their frail craft.

  The Race