The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Read online

  The incoming tide swept me up across mud-flats at a steady five knots, with barely an oar stroke needed. In the dazzle of the afternoon sun, the mud-flats were no longer drab grey but silver-blue as they reflected the wide sky, and they were teeming with bird life. White gulls stood above their own reflections; redshanks and curlews picked daintily over the slabby mud, and flights of duck whirred into the air as I passed. As the channel narrowed and tus-socky salt marsh closed in on either side, the odd gaunt heron could be seen poised frozen on the margins – and as the marsh gave way to flat grassy pasture, flocks of green lapwings shrilled and piped and flew with their big rounded wings flopping and rolling and pivoting in the air.

  The Ladder Runs Out …

  It was splendid. I was on a magic carpet, woven of soft greys and bright silvers, faded sea-greens and blues, a carpet that bore me silently along in the wide, empty afternoon sunshine, as much part of the landscape as the plovers and gulls that inhabited this bewitched no-man’s land.

  Soon the channel deepened and narrowed to a surprising degree. The teeming mud-flats gave way to mud-cliffs, and these in turn were replaced by black, kelp-covered cliffs of stone. Every now and then I would pass a white house perched on the cliff tops, all curved walls and tiny windows in the manner of a lighthouse. When the tide is fully in, they must squat right at the water’s edge, their clean white and blue paintwork reflected in the river, but now they clung high up on the rocks like teeth on unhealthy black gums, thirty feet above the river. At intervals mud-filled creeks would cut down through the rock banks littered with lopsided yachts lolling on the gleaming mud like abandoned toys. In three or four hours’ time they would all be dancing at their anchor chains once more, alive and awake.

  Later the gorge became steeper and higher still – huge cliffs of orange sandstone above the river; and then there was the historical Clifton Suspension Bridge a hundred feet above me, soaring between its square stone towers; and finally the huge gates of the lock that would take me up forty feet to the floating harbour of Bristol Docks. I had made it, completed the journey from Colemere Woods to Bristol and finished on a note of success and inner contentment – and there was absolutely no question of Jack and I parting company just yet.

  ‘How about London?’ said Jack de Crow.

  ‘London it is,’ said I.

  Wi’ a Hundred Locks an’ A’ an’ A’

  Vogue la galère.

  (Row on whatever happens)

  —RABELAIS, Gargantua

  Approaching by water, it is easy to believe that Bristol was once regarded as the most elegant city in England. The long harbour snakes for two miles between wharves busy with ships of every description, from tiny sailing dinghies to blunt-nosed tugs, from old schooners to HMS Great Britain, moored in splendid retirement. Everywhere you look, someone is doing something on, to or with a boat. Sails are being mended, awnings stitched, engines greased, ropes threaded, narrowboats restored, and a little black Puffing Billy steam engine runs up and down the quayside on narrow rails adding to the air of busy purpose.

  On the north side of the harbour rises a long steep ridge, and up this climb the Georgian houses of eighteenth-century Bristol – the fashionable city of Jane Austen’s novels – in every elegant shade: cream, rose, pastel golds. This too is the city of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great engineer of the nineteenth century who strode about the country with his cigar, knocking up railways and viaducts, tunnels and termini as breezily as a boy playing at sandcastles on the seashore. I was rather hoping his flamboyant shade still haunted the place and would lend me some inspiration; I had a few engineering projects in mind myself.

  If I were to continue to London (travelling overland via the Ken-net & Avon Canal to the Thames), I would need to conserve funds. This I planned to do by converting Jack de Crow into a yacht, so that I could sleep aboard each night.

  Well, no, not a yacht, but something more than an open dinghy. To this end I hauled her ashore near a friendly boatyard and over the next three days plunged once more into the baffling world of carpentry.

  The idea was very simple, and lifted straight from Coot Club, one of the Swallows and Amazon books. In it, Tom Dudgeon equips his little dinghy Titmouse for sleeping aboard by making an awning that drapes over the boom at night and laces down either side like a tent. This I would do, but whereas Tom slept curled up in the bilges, I planned to make a sort of removable decking, allowing me to lie on a flat platform level with the thwarts. I hit on the idea of constructing some planks that by day would sit lengthways in the bilges under the thwart and replace my old bottom-boards, but by night would fit snugly across the dinghy side by side and create a temporary deck to lie on.

  The carpentry involved was basic, but it still took me three days to complete – three days under the open sky and a mercifully warm sun. I was lucky to have the aid of Dave, the taciturn young man who owned the boatyard and kindly lent me the tools and advice I needed, advice such as ‘No, that’s a screw you’re holding. It needs to be inserted with a screwdriver, not a hammer,’ or ‘Please never use my best chisel as a screwdriver again or I’ll drown you.’

  In the next-door workshop was a blacksmith, and he made me a crutch, a thin pole of iron with a horseshoe-shaped piece of steel on the top. This slotted neatly into the pintel holes where the rudder fit-ted and would support the end of the boom; the boom then could act like a tent’s ridgepole for the awning. The awning itself was a large blue tarpaulin that I took along to a sailmaker’s loft overlooking the little Puffing Billy railway and the harbour wharf. Here a girl sewed a strip of Velcro along the front edge and five eyeholes down each side. Through each of these protruded an elastic strap with a hook on the end. When the awning was draped over the boom, the front of the tent was velcroed shut around the mast and the five hooks clipped onto the gunwale, leaving a skirt of tarpaulin dangling outside the dinghy. The back end remained a clear triangle open to the air.

  During my three days in Bristol I stayed with an ex-student called Alex. He had only just left school and was in his first week of university, an exciting time of new freedoms and throwing off the shackles of home and school – just when you want a former teacher turning up to stay on your sofa and tell embarrassing school tales to your new flatmates. Alex bore it with his usual exquisite manners and good grace. He is a tall, dreamy, flop-haired lad with all the aggression of a Buddhist gazelle. Oddly enough, every character he had played in school drama productions over the last five years had demanded a cold and violent nature. A superb actor; nevertheless I had sometimes had a job to stir him to the necessary heights of bitter rage demanded by each part – threatening to pin his beloved goldfish to the drama noticeboard just before opening night usually did the trick.

  Jack de Crow by Day and Night

  When it came time to leave, Alex came down to the dockside, admired my handiwork and presented me with a special bottle of something called Hobgoblin Ale. Then I hoisted sail once more, and Jack and I tacked our way up the long harbour, heading inland once more.

  My love aff air with Bristol faded as quickly as the afternoon wind died. Rowing out of the city was a grim business. On and on I rowed as darkness fell, but still I found myself behind Tesco supermarkets or derelict goods stations where wafts of sewage and pungent chemical odours rankled on the damp evening air and drove me on, looking for a mooring place where I would not be asphyxiated as I slept. I was also spurred onwards in my dreary rowing by a gang of youths who jeered from a concrete stairwell. My temptation to stop and give them a short Baden-Powellesque lecture was stifled when they stopped flinging comments and started flinging half-bricks.

  By the time I had left the suburbs behind and trees had crowded in on either side, it was pitch dark and I was cursing myself for breaking one of my Rules – the one about never, ever continuing after dark.

  Suddenly around a bend ahead there came the blare and tinkle of jazz trombones playing ‘New York, New York’ at full volume and something resembling t
he Louisiana Belle came steaming down the river, decked out with fairy lights in orange, gold and red. I plunged out of the way to one dark bank and immediately tangled the mast and stays in an overhanging tree while the party boat swept by. Fifty merry, sozzled passengers raised their glasses to the little yellow dinghy crashing up and down in the wake, pinned to the bank by a spotlight beam that blinded the pith-helmeted figure within.

  ‘’Allo, Doctor Livingstone,’ they happily cried. ‘Have a drink! Are you alright there? Gawd, it’s Michael Palin. Cheers! Bye,’ and those vagabond shoes strayed off down the dark river and left me and Jack de Crow filling up with willow twigs and sploshes of water in the choppy wake.

  Ten minutes later, eight of which had been spent carefully extricating myself from the twiggy clutches of my captor willow, back she came jazzing away like a full chorus of Seraphim and Cherubim but twice as glittery, and sent me ploughing into another willow to the brassy strains of ‘When I’m Sixty Four.’

  In the end, however, she turned out to be my saviour. Half-an-hour later in a dark and bosky bend upstream, I found her moored against a section of river bank backed with steep woods, and her whole cargo of happy inebriates piling out into the little waterside garden of a warmly lit house. In the light from the party boat’s searchlight I could make out a sturdy pontoon with proper mooring rings and I decided that here was my best chance of a safe place to spend the night. As it turned out, this was the only place I could have moored that night in safety. I did not realise until the following morning that this stretch of the river was tidal. Had I tied up to the bank anywhere else, I would have found myself high and dry by midnight, and as likely as not sitting on submerged rocks that would surely hole the dinghy. Mooring to the floating pontoon ensured that I stayed afloat whatever the tide level.

  That night was the first spent sleeping aboard. After a meal and a beer or two in the little pub, I crept outside, past a little tinkling fountain and a spotlit statue of Venus knee deep in ferns, and down to the dinghy. Here I set up the awning, put my decking planks in place and unrolled a thin foam mattress. Ten minutes later, to the gentle rocking of the stream and the small rippling night sound of the river, I was fast asleep in my new home.

  The Avon River winds its way up to Bath to join the Kennet & Avon Canal that would take me over to the Thames. The river widened into a long sunny stretch where a fleet of sailing dinghies were holding a regatta, zigzagging about between reedy banks and wide pastures. There seemed to be two races going on, one among seven or so slim white Lasers, and the other, to my delight, among a fleet of Mirror dinghies, Jack’s red-sailed, snub-nosed sisters. I could see the puzzled faces of the other boatmen, frowning as they tried to place me as I sailed up the reach alongside the other racing Mirrors.

  As we reached the buoy that marked the limit of the racing course, one by one my fellow Mirrors neatly rounded it to beat back up to the finish line. I kept sailing, of course, rippling on towards a wooded bend upstream. Faint cries of alarm came from concerned skippers behind me, petulant cries about rounding the buoy and following the correct course … and something about a bridge. But what cared I for rules and races, buoys and bridges? Let others compete for their tin trophies; I was on my way to the wide world beyond, leaving these tame sailors to shake their heads over the clubhouse coleslaw and ask in wonder, ‘Who WAS that pith-helmeted stranger?’

  I should have listened about the bridge, though. Unlike all the bridges encountered on the Severn, this one was a foot too low to allow my mast through, and I spent an awkward ten minutes in a welter of collapsed sail and tangled stays in an attempt to lower the mast and scrape my way upstream beneath the bridge’s blackened arch.

  Before ever I left Ellesmere, I had rigged up an innovative contraption to allow for this contingency. On a normal Mirror, the three wire stays holding up the mast are bolted firmly to the gunwale by shackles, useful screw devices for such semi-permanent fix-tures. However, I had rigged up the forestay to a running pulley system so that by simply releasing a rope I could loosen it off and let it run free, thus allowing the whole mast to lean backwards and, if needs be, lower completely to the deck. I could even haul the mast upright again using only one hand. I was really very proud of my Auto-Pulley-o-matic Ezy-hoist, and I found that the next ninety miles were to justify its presence to the very hilt – they are pretty niggardly in the south-west when it comes to bridge headroom.

  Rowing upstream, slight though the current was, was proving to be tedious; I had not realised how much I had been taking for granted the gentle onward flow of the Severn. I found myself singing almost continually to keep up a steady rhythm – old folk-songs, hymns, numbers from musicals – anything to drive me onwards through the water. But always there was something to catch my eye, something to cause me to rest on my oars for a few seconds and make the toil worthwhile: a pair of jays, blue-winged, flying out of an oak copse maybe; the discovery of some skullcap with its indigo flowers hidden beneath a grassy bank; or on one occasion a grass snake gliding across the stream just in front of the bows, so near that I could have leant out and scooped it into the dinghy.

  Finally I came to the City of Bath. I rowed on all in a dream into its gracious Georgian heart and came to the graceful curving horseshoe of the weir below the Pulteney Bridge. Here three cascading steps prevent craft from proceeding further on the Avon River and I must have made an intriguing sight for day-trippers on the bridge, gazing down to watch the oarsmen in the dinghy hanging on his oars and scanning the silver crescents of water ahead for a way forward. Baffled, I paddled around the wide green foaming pool like a confused toy duck until some kindly stranger on the bank pointed back downstream and mouthed the word ‘Lock!’ above the sweet roar of tumbling waters. Back I rowed a half-mile and there discovered my onward route. Here is the western end of the Kennet &Avon Canal, which rises sharply through six locks to continue its journey across the Wiltshire Downs and so to the east-flowing Thames a hundred miles away.

  Bath is as beautiful as the postcards show it, a gem of Georgian elegance in honey-coloured stone. Avenues and arcades spread their amply respectable elbows as luxuriously as after-dinner smokers in a Hogarth painting. Graceful curved facades bask in the sun, tall windows conceal elegant drawing rooms behind rich brocade drapes, and in the spacious squares about the abbey buskers not playing Byrd, Purcell or Elgar are taken quietly away and shot.

  The abbey itself is famous for the vast windows of clear glass on every side – its epithet is the Lantern of the West. It is a light, airy building with none of the sombre heaviness of Gloucester and Tewkesbury. I visited also, of course, the famous Roman Baths … fascinating – or rather, that is what one is supposed to say. But Bath will remain in my mind not as the most important Roman site in Britain, nor the cultural and spiritual centre of the south-west, but as a place where I moored next to a bright garden where a pomegranate tree clambered up a sunny wall, its round fruit as glossy and magical-looking as in an eastern folk tale. It needed a hoopoe or a pair of turtle doves in its William Morris branches of course, but was otherwise perfect. Bath will also be forever the place where I nearly died, dashed to death in the deepest lock in Britain.

  Serious Inland Waterway enthusiasts will have been somewhat hurt and puzzled that I have not given some ink and space so far to the joys and terrors of locks. The fact is that even though I had been through twelve or so locks since halfway down the Severn, it was not until the start of the Kennet & Avon Canal that their presence began to loom large in my life: larger and more frequently than I would wish on my bitterest enemy.

  Canals are artificial rivers but without the flow. Their sheer banks make them a death trap for any badgers or hedgehogs careless enough to topple into them, but otherwise they are charming and picturesque additions to the English countryside. They wind their way along the contours of the land – occasionally ducking through tunnels – on a flat placid level for miles on end; such flat sections of canals are called pounds. Inevitably, howev
er, they must make their way uphill somehow, and it is locks that allow this. A skipper of a boat approaching a lock from downstream finds himself facing a massive pair of black wooden gates, usually decked with hart-stongue, moss and maidenhair ferns sprouting prettily from the woodwork. Once these are opened, the boat glides forward into a narrow compound of concrete walls that rise up to twenty feet above him on either side. The gates behind him are shut fast, some sluices ahead of him (called paddles) are winched open, and water pours into the lock from above, raising the boat higher and higher until he finds himself on the new upper level of the countryside with the next pound stretching away before him. There he discovers that there is a further pair of gates ahead. Once these upper gates are opened, the boat can glide out and continue on its way.

  Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

  ‘But who is doing all this paddle-opening and gate-shutting?’ you may ask. ‘If the skipper is steering in and out of the lock, who is it operating the lock itself?’

  The usual answer is the skipper’s crew, but in cases such as my own, going through a lock consists of the following steps.

  1. Moor up and climb ashore 100 yards below lock.

  2. Step around nicotine-stained old tramp staggering about on towpath.