Atlantic Britain Read online

  ATLANTIC

  BRITAIN

  Adam Nicolson

  HARPER PERENNIAL

  for Sarah

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  1 The Auk

  2 The Passage

  3 The Islands

  4 The Man

  5 The Beach

  6 The Edge

  7 The Crew

  8 The Arrival

  9 Seamanship

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The Auk

  I was having an affair with the Atlantic. Alone with my books in my room, I had been thinking of little else for weeks. I was longing for the sea. I wanted to get out, away from my desk, into the air, somewhere on the big Atlantic shore of the British Isles, that incomparable, islanded world which has more miles of coastline than the whole eastern seaboard of the United States. Not just to see it, but to sail it, to immerse myself in that ocean side of the country, its long, beautiful wildness, from headland to headland, the place where high winds met hard rock. I wanted days and nights of it. If I thought of openness, or even freedom, it was the Atlantic that filled my mind. I didn’t mention it to Sarah. I knew these were, in their heart, treacherous thoughts.

  I went down, one Sunday, to the beach on the Sussex coast. Milky rollers poured on to the shingle. The cafe windows stared at them as though the sea weren’t there. People sat in their cars looking at the waves. From time to time they used their wipers to clear their windscreens of the spray. I drank it in and felt stranded on the shore. To be out there! What would I give for that?

  Until the eighteenth century, Europeans thought the sea in general and beaches in particular smelled disgusting. The air on a beach was not full of life-restoring, energising ozone, but stiff with rot. The beach was where the natural order collapsed and the sea beyond it was pure anarchy. It carried no marks of history or civilisation and was filled with nauseating monsters whose flesh turned putrid if ever cast ashore. When, in the first chapter of Genesis, the Spirit of God was said to move ‘upon the face of the waters’, those waters were clearly what God was not. The sea was the absence of all meaning, not its source.

  But I wasn’t living in 1680, I was heir to another tradition. Looking out from the beach suggested to me, as it had to others for two or three hundred years, something larger than the ordinariness of life on land. The Romantic instinct equates roughness with reality. It thinks of the sheer discomfort and violence of the sea as the guarantee of authenticity, the lack of safety a measure, strangely, of truth.

  It is a curious fact that you can know why you are acting as you are; be fully aware of the influences which have you in their grasp; understand the damage which those actions might cause; and still be unable to do anything about it. So I talked to Sarah one evening. ‘The sea?’ she said, a sudden focus in her eyes. Yes, yes, I explained, the sea, the western shore, that wild place, away from here, encountering the world as it was, a boat, perhaps from March to October.

  She looked away and said, ‘If that is what you need to do, that is what you need to do. But you have got to make sure we are all right here before you go.’ She took the idea for what it was, a kind of leaving, a desire to live before you die. ‘I don’t want you to go,’ she said, ‘but I can’t stop you.’

  Alone with an atlas and a cup of coffee, I picked a course, wandering through that ocean-enriched and ocean-threatened world. Not knowing what I wanted or needed, I looked at yachts in magazines. Nor, to be honest, did I know how to sail. I knew the rudiments but little else and had little seacraft, the half-instinctive knowledge of what to do when things go wrong. Blindly, I found a man in the phone book who said he was an expert and drove down to Brighton to see him. It was the first lesson in seamanship. Everything I had been dreaming of, the whole inflated souffle, collapsed on sight. His yacht, something called a Bavaria 46, tied up in the marina, was a big fat white empty plastic thing, a bulbous caravan with too many cabins and no soul. My heart sank. And sank further as the man told me how he’d been in the RAF, how this was a cushy number for him, as if the sea was part of the saloon bar, its surface coated in swirly floral carpet, the red cherries on sticks. ‘It’s no more difficult to learn than golf,’ he said, ‘easier in many respects.’ He had never been to the west coast of Ireland.

  I was flummoxed. At home that evening, Sarah -and this was a measure of her strength of mind - said, ‘Why not ring George Fairhurst?’ I hadn’t spoken to him in years, scarcely since we had been sailing together off the coast of the Algarve. But of course he was the man: still in his early forties but a skipper of immense, ocean-going experience, with half a million sea miles under his belt, who had skippered square-sail ships and taken sail-training vessels across the Atlantic, to the Caribbean and back, up the coast of America; an Ocean Yachtmaster, a qualified Yachtmaster Instructor. But more than that, he was quite clearly a man who understood that the sea and sailing were more than just another version of golf, not just another play zone, but a way of being alive. I remembered something he had said to me one night when we were halfway to Ireland with the stars above us, some words from a film, the visions from a sea journey that would be ‘lost in time, like tears in rain …’

  Years ago, he had taught me, more or less, how to sail a yacht and now, perhaps, on this six-month journey from the spring to the autumn equinox, he might teach me again, in a bigger boat in bigger seas, how to be there, how to sail, how to cope.

  I rang him on his mobile. He was in the pub in Falmouth. He had just been sailing all day, a big roaring trip up the Channel with some friends. The noise of the pub behind him. I could see his listening face. Did he know of anyone who might come with me on this trip up the Atlantic shore? Who might teach me to sail an ocean-going boat over the course of the year? Who could help me find a boat? Who would be a sympathetic companion with reserves of sea-understanding on which we could draw when things turned for the worst?

  He did. No hesitation. He would come. It would be a thing to have done on which the rest of his life could feed. ‘When do we begin?’

  ‘Well, we need a boat, George.’

  ‘I’ll start looking tomorrow.’

  The right kind of boat needed to be quite big, forty to forty-two foot, to deal with the Atlantic, particularly as the swells came unbroken on to the west coast of Ireland. No bigger because that would become difficult with just the two of us. It needed a meaty engine as well as good new sails to get out of problems. It shouldn’t be one of those elegant New England yachts with long counter sterns and overhanging bows -sleek, leggy supermodels - because they were not made for the big seas that would be our world. She would have to be strong, beamy, and secure. She might not be the fastest, but we could live with that.

  We looked for weeks. We toured the harbours and boatyards of England. We scoured the magazines and had sessions on the Internet. There were phone conversations with boat owners in California and Maine. Something for a while looked right in Bergen. But everything had its flaws. Perhaps I didn’t entirely know what I wanted in the way of a boat. George walked me round marinas. Did I like the look of that kind of thing? Or that? Was that too flash? Or that too slick? Too big? Too small? Too fat? Too thin? Too little headroom below? Too ugly? Too pretentious? Too sharky? Too cute?

  We had by now reached the middle of November. Time was running on and the boat, the right boat, still wasn’t showing up. Then, late one evening, George rang me from his mobile. ‘I’m on her,’ he said.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘I’ve crept aboard. I’ve found the hatch open. There’s no one here and I’
m sitting below and this is the boat. I think this is the one.’

  I was down there the next morning at dawn, to a marina at Lymington on the Solent. Plastic decks, hi-tech rigs, and long sleek windows like the lenses of wrap-around shades spread around me in aprons of money. But over on a far pontoon, sticking up amid the aluminium, I saw a pair of wooden masts. George was poking around at the base of one of them. There she was. She lay in her skimpy little pontoon berth like a duchess in a supermarket, scarcely deigning to consider the indignity of her surroundings. Immensely wooden, larch planks on oak frames, superbly fat around the middle, with volumes of room below, enough berths to sleep eight, the perfect candidate, a substance in her big rounded stem and stern. She was descended, via a good few cream cakes, from the sailing lifeboats of nineteenth-century Norway, designed by the great naval architect Colin Archer - his parents were Scottish - to be safe in a storm. Her forebears had been built to wait offshore in the North Sea and, as bad weather struck, to take fishing boats in tow and claw off a lee shore, holding them like a gaggle of ducklings behind them. She was the kind of boat Erskine Childers used to run guns to the IRA in the Irish Civil War - her innards stripped out below and filled with a glittering pool of rifles. She was as strong as you like and only fourteen years old, built as an apprentice piece in a yard at Heiligenhafen on the Baltic. Here was the boat for the ocean margin. She exuded certainty. She would look after us. She was the one. She was one of us.

  Staring down at her I couldn’t quite believe such a thing might ever be mine. Such a ship! It was as if I had given birth to a cow. I negotiated a mortgage with Barclays Marine Finance, offered two-thirds of the asking price, subject to sea trial and survey, and it was accepted.

  Early in December, I drove down in the dawn to a freezing Lymington. The wind was gusting up to thirty knots, a Force 7. With the ship broker, all courtesy, all smoothing of every path, and an employee of the owner who had been out on the boat before, we edged into the winter sea. We soon had all four sails up - a genoa, a staysail, the mainsail, and the mizzen - and she went, steadily, rather like a drawing room afloat, no huge speed, but so homely, with such a big calm motion, sailing at six or seven knots or so in the Solent, kettle on the gimballed cooker, that there were smiles all round.

  The boat needed setting up properly. The shrouds, the big stays for the mast, were not in the right place and as a result the mainmast leaned forward slightly. The sheetleads and blocks were all wrong. The main-sheet arrangement was a chaos. The sails were both too small and too loose, and she was underpowered.

  For all that, there was something there, the sense of what might be. The yacht that windy morning felt like a capsule of possibilities. A boat is not a destination, nor a conclusion, as a house or a piece of land might be, but a means to reach conclusions and destinations that otherwise you could only dream of. Everything that hangs in the air above a boat is open-ended. She knows no horizons. For her, anyway, every prospect is an invitation and every casting-off an absorption in where she might go. A boat is all beginnings, and something about that boat that morning felt as if she wanted to go, to head out there and get out there, to sail out into the sea for which she had been made.

  There was a moment when George and I both lay down on our backs on the foredeck, looking up at the mast and headsails while the big girl rumbled along beneath us in the wind. That was also a beginning, as if we were astronauts lined up on the pad.

  Later, in the pub at Lymington, George allowed himself to talk about what we might do, where we might go, what the year might mean. A mission, he called it, and was clearly touched by it, by the things we would see, the whales surfacing at night, the phosphorescence running off the bow, the early mornings, the harbours after storms.

  All that open-endedness requires the very opposite from the boat itself. The boat needed to be closed. The Atlantic shore is the realm of possibilities, but if this boat was to thrive there she needed to sharpen up. George had already shown a photograph of her in her current state to a boatbuilder in Cornwall - her short masts, leaning forward, her baggy, tiny sails, her unachieved condition. ‘Oh, look at her,’ the Cornish-man had said, ‘broken wings.’ If she was to be released into her Atlantic life, she had to be redeemed and to do that we would have to take her down-Channel to the Cornish yard. And, despite the superstitions, give her a new name. She was called Irene May when I bought her, after the mother of the previous owner, but that couldn’t stay. George’s own mother, Bar, understanding these things, and seeing a picture of her, thought she might be renamed the Auk, because her big round body and her slightly stumpy wings reminded her of the way the auks - the razorbills and guillemots and puffins - all exist so bravely and buoyantly in their gale-swept oceanic world. The auk is the bird of the ocean and it was as the Auk that we finally took her to sea.

  Negotiations over the price and conditions of the sale had run on - there had been problems with the masts - and it was early February by the time she was released to go. A hundred and fifty miles of the winter sea, a huge lump of sea life taken in at a gulp. George had driven up from Cornwall to Lymington and spent the night on her. I drove down in another dawn. Anxious excitement, a boat we didn’t know, big south-south-westerlies coming across the Channel. A long hike in February, hard on the wind, with certainly no other yacht at sea, one of us as green as they come, the other at least a little rusty. Getting things ready in the early dark, eggs and bacon down below, saying we would just go out into the Solent to start with, just to test the gear, to see how the newly fixed rigging would perform, not entirely certain that the engine was in the greatest of shapes. But knowing, somehow, that there was a big draw out there - that invitation westwards, down the Channel.

  I was fingers and thumbs. I scarcely knew a knot that was any good. I hadn’t yet grasped that running a boat involved sweat and physical engagement. It doesn’t happen while sipping a glass of white wine. We reattached the big genoa in the morning to the forestay while the wind flogged and snatched at it. I made a mess of it three times before George stepped in. We fuelled up. The man operating the pump said, ‘So you’re the fellow who bought dear old Irene May She’s built like a horse, isn’t she?’

  Was that good? Was a horse what you wanted? I’d no idea.

  We left eventually in the early afternoon. The marvellous abandonment of leaving. The wind still coming in sharply up the Channel as we headed out under the motor. Sick with apprehension and strangeness. The tide just short of the Needles was kicking up into little pinnacles. I would have been swamped or capsized in any dinghy, but the Auk slapped through it all, the sunshine off the milky water, the headlands stepping away to the southwest. We hauled up the mainsail and set the genoa in what had by then turned into big heaving seas, the bow plunging in as the Auk took each new one. George went below, leaving me at the wheel. Two things happened at once: the full whack of a bigger-than-average wave came all the way back to the cockpit, a freezing, drenching, dense, heavy shower that left me with a face aching like a mouth that has had too much ice cream; and I threw up over the lee side-deck.

  It was like a sneeze - a clean, straight, if enormous, expulsion; everything from breakfast onwards, leaving me surprised to have been that sick that quickly. George came up from below with a cup of tea. I drank that and sicked it up. Then a couple of chocolate biscuits that went the same yo-yo route. I saw a look of resigned horror on George’s face. At that time of year, the night lasts about fourteen hours, from five in the afternoon to about seven in the morning. He had an invalid along with him. How was he going to manage it?

  The rest of the voyage remains what can only be called impressionistic. Sick every now and then, cheerful enough to start with but gradually shrinking into a little ball of cold and paralysis. George saying, ‘You have got to keep moving.’ Me, ignorant of everything around me - boat, sea, systems, methods, means of keeping well - shrivelling with what felt like straightforward shutdown but was perhaps fear. ‘Why don’t we just go into Weymout
h?’ I said to George, longing for some relief. ‘Better to go on,’ he said. ‘We’ll have eighty miles under our belt tomorrow.’ Shrunken child of a passenger, I said yes, was sick, crept down to my sleeping bag in the saloon, sick on the way down, sick as I took off my oilies, sick getting into the sleeping bag, sick every now and then into a bucket George had put beside me. It was 5.15 in the afternoon and it felt like midnight.

  From time to time in the night George came down, a huge figure in his wet oilies, reeking of a hellish world outside, to check our course on the instruments below. It was now blowing a full gale, Force 8, and the sea was against us. All I could hear was the grinding and banging of the rig and the heavy bass thumping as the bows fell into each new sea. At one of his visitations I was being sick. ‘Everything all right?’ he said.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  At about one o’clock in the morning, I woke again and felt too ashamed of what was happening, pulled on my clothes and waterproofs, gloves and hat, and went on deck. It was bitterly, bitingly, grippingly cold and the bow was throwing one freezing shower of spray after another the full length of the boat. The deck gleamed green and red with the nav lights. I managed to persuade George that I was feeling all right and he went below for a sleep after more than eight hours at the wheel, half of it in a blizzard in which the rain was ice.

  The privacy of the winter sea closes in at night. Far to the south I could see the big pale looms of the lights in the Channel Islands lifting up above the horizon like wraiths. The cold of the night prickled on the skin. England - the yellow lights of its coast roads necklaced in the dark to the north - was a foreign country. Here just the grinding and the thumping of the boat as she pulled her way westwards into the night. Seas came at you blind. There was no reading them. All I could do was drive on into them and take the thump, the shudder, and the cascade as we hit each wall. Fishing boats, lights swinging wildly, crossed our bows and occasionally a tall merchant ship, lit like a Christmas hotel, steamed past at three or four times our speed in the dark.