Leontyne (3 page)

First thing in the morning we set off, towing the barge to the Medway: we had decided to tow rather than push where there was the chance of getting any sizable waves. As it happened it was a glorious, though misty, morning with a promise of sun later. The air echoed with the mournful calling of the foghorns and we were very excited by the strange beauty of the shipping in the slight morning mist, and of the
chimneys burning off the waste petroleum gases at Shellhaven.

The first landmark to appear on the horizon was the wreck of the
Montgomery
– an American ammunition ship that went aground in the war and sank. It would be too dangerous to blow it up because apparently, even now, the explosion would shatter all the windows in Southend – some fifteen miles away. It made a melancholy sight with just the masts sticking out of the water and the moan of the marker buoy whistling as it bobbed about in the swell.

After a couple of hours, and almost out of sight of land, we came upon a fishing boat trawling for Dover sole. We stopped and for ten pounds we bought three splendid fish. It was hard to tell what they weighed because they stubbornly refused to lie still in the scales. Later, I fried them so hard that I set off the smoke alarm, but they were quite delicious.

That night we moored at Thunderbolt Pier, Chatham, quite a privilege for a ramshackle craft like ours. A few years earlier, whilst the Navy was there, only the most gleaming burnished pinnacles would have been allowed to touch the hallowed jetty. Now the Chatham Dockyards, where the
Fighting Temeraire
and the
Victory
had been built, had become a ‘living museum'. At least the great buildings have been preserved but my feeling is that the once proud place is sinking inexorably into the land of the wicker basket.

I wandered round the ropery, through the yarn-combing and twisting areas, and then down to the main room where the rope is made. This is 220 metres long – 120 fathoms – long enough to make a coil of rope for the Royal Navy, which they have been doing since the end of the eighteenth century. I chatted to the men on the trolley that rolls up and down this long room, twisting the yarn into rope. They talked of better days, of ghosts, and the fact that most of the rope they were making went to Dartmoor prison for the inmates to make doormats with.

The best hemp comes from Riga in Russia and I decided to buy a length. I thought that Ray would be delighted, but when I presented it he turned up his nose and said hemp was dreadful stuff when it got wet. Perhaps that is what the rest of the boating fraternity say, which would explain why this place is a living museum: everyone now uses ropes made from man-made fibres. Even so, all through the centuries, through hot wars and cold wars, hemp has been finding its way from Riga to Chatham. I am always fascinated by the way that traders manage to rise above politics and continue to trade, in spite of the most enormous national upheavals. Pongees, of Clerkenwell Road in London, continued to get their silks from China right through the Cultural Revolution, and the Long March meant nothing to the tea markets.

I went to the Flag Loft, a pleasant place boasting lots of faded colour pictures of the Queen with her crown on, and resounding to the modern equivalent of
Workers Playtime
– the
Jimmy Young Show
, I suppose. They don't make White Ensigns any more, just house flags for office buildings. I wanted to buy a Rumanian courtesy flag, not that it would get me very far in that benighted country. A charming young girl said she would make the flags we needed within the hour but that she couldn't manage Rumania because it had a complicated crest in the middle, and no one went there anyway.

We left in the early afternoon and made our way to Queensborough at the mouth of the Swale, a river which runs from the Medway to Whitstable and is a sheltered passage for craft like ours. We had been having quite serious vibrations in the area of our propeller and wanted to have a look at the bottom of the
Leo
before we reached France. There would be no tide in the canals and that meant we would have to get the
Leo
lifted out by crane, whereas in Queens-borough the tide would do it for us for nothing.

We found a pontoon, moored up the barge, ran the
Leo
ashore, dropped two anchors, and waited for the tide to go out. When it did, it revealed that one of the two fins that I had welded on to the rudder some time back, in order to improve the steerage, had come off completely and the other had vibrated so much that it was hanging on by a whisker. The vibration was caused by a slightly loose rudder post and the huge turbulence of the water. With difficulty, we managed to get the portable generator to work and I ground the metal at the joint of the remaining fin until, after a little effort, it came away. Satisfied that we had done what we could we returned to the barge to have some supper, and wait for the tide to come in again. I decided that I should go and collect the
Leo
when the tide was right, at about 2.00 a.m., by which time she would be afloat.

When my alarm went off, I went up on deck and turned on the searchlight, swinging it this way and that, but to my consternation the
Leo
had completely disappeared. Really alarmed by now, I called Ray and we jumped into the dinghy. The outboard wouldn't start, which is the way with all outboards. As I struggled with the motor, I thought what a terrible mess it would be if I had really lost the
Leo
. At last the motor fired. I stood in the bows of the dinghy anxiously sweeping the horizon with a flashlight for a sign of our stubby little mast amongst the swaying masts and halyards of the yachts. Suddenly, at the very end of a row of boats, I saw the
Leo
. As the water had risen, she must have dragged her anchor and floated on the tide with her anchors trailing below her. When she reached the trots, the submerged chains to which the boats were moored, the anchors must have caught, and as long as the tide continued to flood, she would have been held in this position. As we came alongside and started to free the anchors, I looked over my shoulder and saw to my horror that we had drifted into the middle of the very narrow channel and that a huge sandboat was rushing up towards us. I leapt into the cabin, switching on all the navigation lights and the engine at the same moment. We've had
it, I thought, unless we get out of the way very sharply indeed: there was no possibility that the approaching monster, towering sixty feet above us, ablaze with lights and weighing at least ten thousand tons, would ever have been able to stop. Mercifully the engine fired and we shot out of the way, our anchors dragging on the bottom. With the sandboat past, we crept thankfully back to the barge and to bed.

We set out for Oare Creek, at the other end of the Swale River from where we were lying. I wanted to call there to see what the creeks round the Thames Estuary must have been like in the old days, when there were smugglers and excise men abroad. A special kind of Thames boot was invented by the smugglers, with a kind of snow-shoe or tennis-racquet shape strapped to its sole, so that the wearer didn't sink into the mud. Smuggling brandy for the parson and baccy for the clerk somehow seemed a good deal more romantic and socially acceptable than lugging a cardboard suitcase with a false bottom full of drugs through one of our lovelier airports.

We slipped down the Swale, which flows through lovely unspoiled marshes, until we passed a small blue launch which was just packing up its gear after taking some samples of water for pollution checks. As we passed they set off, and as soon as their backs were turned the waste pipe of an enormous factory started vomiting out a dark purplish liquid.

Oare Creek is a small tributary of Faversham Creek and at its junction, next to the Shipwright's Arms, the only other building for miles around, Laurie Tester and Don Grover have a wonderful, ramshackle boatyard. Laurie was brought up in the family that owned the Greenhithe Lighterage Company. It went out of business when the docks on the Thames closed, but Laurie, who had already purchased the land at Oare Creek, bought a tug from the liquidator and went into business with Don Grover. Laurie is very particular
about describing the place as a boatyard rather than as a marina. Marinas, he said, were full of men in white overalls, and the expense of these gentlemen would have put Tom, Dick and Harry off from bringing their boats to him at Oare Creek.

Laurie and Don have a passion for racing Thames sailing barges round the Thames Estuary in the summer months. They skipper one each, and theirs is a deadly rivalry which in the past has caused broken bowsprits, so close do they steer to each other when rounding a buoy. I spent many hours chatting to them. As they told of storms and close shaves, with the precision of men who have really been there, they were both privately occupied in planning how they could best each other in the summer races round the estuary – a contest where only experience counts.

Laurie and Don promised to escort us on the tide to Whitstable the next day. I was getting very fearful about towing the barge in any kind of sea. The barge itself was fine, but the tug,
Leo
, was low in the water. She was very buoyant, and on her own could manage seas up to force five without much difficulty, but when she was towing the barge, she laboured a good deal in the slightest swell. I thought that with the expertise of Ray, who was, God bless him, game for anything, and with these two old salts in another tug, I should be able to get a pretty objective view of our chances of making the crossing to Calais.

We left soon after noon, down Faversham Creek into the Swale. It was the best kind of spring day, with beautiful clear air and a smart little breeze. Ray and I were so busy watching the towrope that we ran aground on a spit of sand when we got into the Swale. It wasn't a serious blunder and we were able to stumble off it in a few minutes, but we both felt very embarrassed under the unflappable gaze of Laurie and Don, who had correctly assessed us as amiable but inexperienced in the estuary. In an hour we arrived at Whitstable Harbour, which has a tricky entrance. With the wind blowing against
the tide, we were quite seriously tossed about and were very glad when we got into the harbour, which isn't normally available to anything but small coasters, sandboats and fishing boats.

My plan was that we should spend a day or two here, make our final preparations for the Channel crossing, and wait for the weather: if it turned on us, we could always slip into Ramsgate and wait for a better day – or so I thought. On our first day in harbour the sea was, as the French so neatly put it, ‘mer belle'. There was not a ripple in sight, and I decided that we should leave on the tide at 4.30 a.m. the next morning. My decision was also prompted by the knowledge that the sandboat whose berth we were occupying was due back on the morning tide.

We had a rendezvous with Laurie and Don in their tug, the
Evelyn Sperring
, at a buoy about three miles out in the estuary, from where they planned to escort us to Ramsgate. If the weather was good, I secretly hoped that we could make the crossing in our little boat in one hop. In the darkness, Ray and I prepared the tow and cheerfully set out, passing the incoming sandboat in the harbour entrance whose crew shouted down that the sea was as smooth as glass, just as the weathermen had predicted.

We had taken the precaution of buying some drainstoppers from the local civil engineering contractor, which we had placed in the portholes to prevent the wash from large ships from shattering the glass in the ports: a wise precaution as it turned out, for we were no more than twenty minutes out when a squall blew up and all the bonhomie of our departure evaporated as seas broke over the stern and soaked us to the skin. Head up into the wind, our problem now was how to turn back. Ray decided that the best thing to do was to lengthen the tow and come round while the rope was slack. With the water breaking over the stern of the
Leo
in great black lumps and pouring down into the cabin through the open door, this manoeuvre turned out to be a good deal more
hazardous than I could possibly have imagined. As Ray clung on to the wheel and ducked under the flailing towrope, I struggled to shut the cabin door. Many gallons of sea water had rushed into the cabin and, as always in these conditions, the very things that one feels must be secure had come crashing down and were now swilling about in the bilges.

We were really tossed about in the entrance to the harbour and even inside, where it became marginally calmer, the swell continued to knock us against the piles at the outer end, where we were obliged to moor. It was hard to believe that we had left on a perfectly calm morning barely an hour before, and that now there was a good gale blowing.

Laurie and Don joined us within the hour for breakfast, and as they munched they predicted that a blow like this could last as long as five days. They also recommended that we get the help of a serious tug to tow us across the Channel, as a repetition of what had happened that morning would be the end for us. Don, whose face is so weatherbeaten that he is supposed to be able to turn into the north wind and so disturb it by his looks that it turns round and blows in the opposite direction, sat sucking on his delicate pipe and grunting advice about the North Foreland and the tide that races there. They set off into the teeth of the storm to go back to their boatyard in Oare Creek and I watched them go with a great deal of admiration, as their rusty old tug leapt about like a sailing dinghy in the waves, which by now were breaking over the harbour wall and spraying our decks with a mixture of sand, gravel and salt.

Ray and I decided that it would be foolhardy to try to cross the world's busiest shipping lane on our own: the realities of what might happen had been brought home to us that morning, and so I called Ray's old employer, Alan Jubb, to see if he would bring his tug the
Sir Aubrey
down to Whitstable and take us across to Calais. As luck would have it he
was towing a small oil platform down to the Medway when I reached him on his mobile telephone. He agreed to come the next day.