The greatest gift?
What is the greatest gift a father can give to his son? Courage? Intellect? Honesty? In my case it was the art of sailing, which arguably combines all three of those ancient virtues. A century has now passed since my father, Richard Stephens Durham’s birth. On his death-bed the man who taught me to hand, reef and steer struggled against the cancer that was killing him, to feebly draw the lines of his first day-boat, Sprite. She was an 18ft, hard-chined, three-quarter decked, gunter-rigged, short-bowsprited centre-boarder that went like the wind which propelled her. She was an American Utility One Design, built by an ancient longshoreman, Les Warland, in an old steel lighter in a forgotten corner of Thames-side saltings.
As he lay there helpless, unable to form a sentence and never to leave his bed, alive, again, that sketch of Sprite was the only way of communicating with his son.
This year I have been thinking about this gift of sailing and wondered how it came to my father. On the face of it his own father, Richard Stephens Durham the 1st, being a sea captain, should have been his teacher. RSD I was the son of a Chelmsford tailor, but foreswore the fitting room for the foc’sle head of a three-masted barque, Pass of Killiecrankie, as a 16-year-old apprentice, sailing the wrong way around Cape Horn to load bird lime in Chile for Europe. He eventually worked his way up to Master Mariner in the Port Line bringing freights of frozen lamb from New Zealand home to London’s Royal Docks, now the site of Excel.
Before grandpa retired he was decorated with a DSO for rescuing the crew from a torpedoed ship off Malta in the Great War and an OBE for continuing to help feed Britain for the duration of the Second World War.
Clearly grandpa was a hard act to follow. He was, physically, only a short man, but, in terms of character, he threw a long shadow. But it was a shadow mostly absent from my father’s youth. My mother told me how grandpa would be away at sea for six weeks or more at a time, and how when he was due home everyone dreaded the ship-shape discipline which would then be instituted in their daily routine. He certainly had no time to teach his son to sail.
Now, having outlived my father’s span by three years, I am re-reading a book he gave me. In fact the only book he gave me. It’s The Wandering Years, by Weston Martyr written as an old man looking back on his life as a guide to young men looking forward to theirs. It begins like this:
‘Men should tell what they know. If my father had told me, at fifteen, a little of what he knew at fifty-five, he would have saved me a world of trouble and grief. He died aged 92, and he took all he knew with him.’
Weston Martyr’s father was a Master Mariner, and had learned to sail in square-riggers, just like my grandfather.
‘He was a stranger to me. In the early days I saw him only for a day or two at long intervals, when he came home between voyages,’ wrote Martyr.
Reading that book today I realise my father identified with Weston Martyr. Like Martyr, he was the son of an accomplished seaman who had departed this earth without imparting his knowledge and wisdom.
As a young father, having read Martyr’s book, he made sure of one thing: that for all my youthful idiocies, my dismal school reports, my motor-cycle endorsements, I could sail. The day I took command, with my father this time watching from the sea wall, I will never forget. My plywood sailing dinghy scooted halfway out across the estuary. Would I be able to turn her round and bring her back? I put the helm down and when she came about and headed back to shore, I felt like a kestrel leaving a gauntlet.
Thanks, Pa.
The art of sailing: the greatest gift a father can give to his son?