The Journeying Moon
Ernle Bradford had been an art student before he went to war but he’d ended as the first lieutenant of a destroyer; office life just wasn’t going to work for him.
Shortly after the war I married and tried to settle down to a life in London. Like most of my generation, though, I was infected by restlessness. Early in our lives we had been given a taste for the world of action, and too much adrenaline had gone through our systems to adjust easily to the routine of ‘nine to six’.
Our palates had been spoiled for the softer nuances of contentment. The after-lunch doze with the Sunday paper, the clatter of the lawnmower, and the distant scrape and fiddle of BBC tea-time music seemed insipid after fevered nights in leave-time ports.
Of those who failed to adjust, some emigrated, some took to drink, and some climbed mountains. Others – and I was among them – attempted the return to post-war living, found it unsatisfying, and then cut out new paths for ourselves. The welfare state was designed for the generation that followed us. London was strange and uneasy in those immediate post-war years. It had something of the same smell about it that conquered Naples had at the time when Naples was the leave centre for our Anzio troops: a little dust; much decay; and the smell of corruption.
I remember the nightclubs thick with black marketeers; the well-fleshed smiler who knew where you could get whisky, and whose new Bentley echoed nightly with the giggles of loose-legged girls. People never fight for the world they get. They fight for the world they remember. Perhaps that is why so many returned soldiers make poor citizens.
I had an acquaintance, a Labour MP in the post-war government. He had never dined nor dressed so well in all his life before.
‘If you don’t like it,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you get out of it? It’s a big world, my boy.’
You’re right, I thought, I will. Just give me time, just let me save a little money.
[...] Four months later, we left England for France. We had been waiting for two days inside the bar at Chichester Harbour while a spring gale blew itself out down the Channel. The wind was dying now and the barometer was rising. Janet took the tiller while I heaved in the anchor. The voyage had begun.
Our boat Mother Goose was a 10-ton cutter. A Dutch boeier, with a draught of only 2ft, she was 40 years old, clinkerbuilt of galvanized iron on iron frames. She was as tubby, as solid and as dependable as a Dutchman’s ideal hausfrau. Her decks were teak, her curved aerofoil leeboards – which threw great fan-like shadows on the deck – were oak, and her saloon and interior were panelled in polished mahogany. With her dark blue hull, her red sails, her curved gaff, and elaborately carved tiller – which ended in a goose’s head – she was a romantic boat. Some had their doubts about her. ‘I wouldn’t mind her on the Broads,’ said an ocean-racing friend. ‘But I wouldn’t like to be out in her in any real weather.’
‘You’ll never be taking that, midear, any far way from land,’ remarked old Jack, who was coxwain of the Fowey lifeboat. ‘Why, look at them there leeboards! No, midear, you want a good keel under you when you get out to sea. Them there boats is all very well for the Dutch.’
I heard many such arguments. When questioned closely as to where I intended to take her, I hedged or remarked casually, ‘Well we might pick a quiet day and run over to France.’ I never disclosed my real intentions. Certainly, even I never realised that within the 30ft length of Mother Goose we should make our home for two-and-a-half years.
The first time that you make a departure for a foreign coastline in your own boat is as unforgettable as first love. There is a tension and suppressed excitement about your actions. even routine details like taking a pair of crossed bearings to fix your point of departure assume a strange and satisfying importance.
Outside the bar we found that the wind had died but the sea was still running lumpily up the Channel. The grey sky was touched with faint light along the edges of the clouds. I sighted along the hand-bearing compass and called out the bearings to Janet who had the chart splayed out on the saloon table.
Within the 30ft length of Mother Goose we would make our home
‘090º – the Nab Tower.’ She repeated it back.
‘230º – Culver Head. 1º easterly deviation on the compass.’ Fixed.
The simple ‘mystery’ of the navigator’s art now held our small, swaying world of food and books and iron and wood and us, located in one pinpoint on the Channel chart. The intersected lines that marked the boat’s position marked the start of our new life. In the act of taking two bearings, we had crossed our Rubicon and established for all our lives the point of no return.
The kettle feathered a wisp of steam through the open hatch, and soon we were clasping mugs of hot coffee as we sat in the cockpit and listened to the suck and swallow of the sea against the ship’s side. The wind died away, and the sails hung empty as a sailor’s pockets. I started our small twin-cylinder diesel engine, waited an anxious moment until its first asthmatic cough had settled down to a steady snore, and then lashed the tiller while we lowered the sails.
Even under power Mother Goose left a clean, sweet wake. Her rounded stern settled down or rose to the sea like a bird’s blunt tail. She lifted easily over the swell, and ran down its sides with a smooth, unhurried movement.
We were 24 hours out from Chichester Bar when we sighted Le Havre lightvessel blinking and groaning in a cold white mist. As the lights of Le Havre faded against the dawn and went out, we altered course for the nearest whistle buoy, whose sigh blended with the melancholy morning. The broken buildings and the stark lines of the reconstructed city came up past the headland. Shipping thronged the fairway, and a Chinese cook carrying a vast teapot along the decks of a merchantman, gave us ‘Good day’ with a flash of teeth.
Janet and I looked at each other and smiled. The damp night air had crinkled our hands, and it sparkled in our hair. ‘Made it!’
The first leg of the voyage was over. Now we could confess to each other what we had never confessed to inquisitive longshoremen or even to friends: that this was not just a casual trip to France ‘only if the weather’s fine’. This was the end of one life and the beginning of another.
We were bound up the Seine for Paris and beyond – through the canal for Lyons, then down the Rhône to Marseilles. Our course lay eastward to the dolphinhaunted waters; to the islands of thyme and silver rock, and the high noon that leaves no shadows.