Coasting (14 page)

“Nine fifty, ten, ten fifty—”

Two merchants were bidding against each other. Both had pipes—one a meerschaum, the other a briar. To bid, each man wagged his pipe a fraction of an inch with his teeth. Meerschaum, briar, meerschaum, briar. Neither was alight. The bowls tittupped along in an easy fox-trot rhythm until the briar went doggo at sixteen pounds.

“Sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen—
Wemmidge.”

The men trooped on, hunch-shouldered, to perform the last rites over a bucket of yawning ling.

Soon after daybreak I found an open corner shop with the morning’s papers stacked in bundles on the floor. The huge headlines looked like schoolboy whoops and yells. There was no fun, apparently, quite like the fun of going to war, and the
Daily Express
, the
Daily Mail
and the
Sun
had announced the Falklands expedition as if a national holiday, with fireworks and free beer, had been declared. There were pictures of the Argentine dictator smiling broadly and making a thumbs-up sign; the message of the headline writers was that nothing would give the British more satisfaction than to wipe that smile off Galtieri’s face and crack the joints of both those thumbs. I bought a
Guardian
, which was striking a discordant note of sanity in the middle of all the heady bombast. Its editorial listed the bungled efforts at diplomacy and the bungled collection of intelligence that had led to the crisis. It went on to observe flatly that:

This remark—a plain-enough fact, even if insufficiently varnished with the right amount of topical valor—was to be denounced later that day in Parliament by the Liberal Member for Inverness as an outrage that fell only a foot or two short of downright high treason.

Wanting to clear my head at sea for a while, I untied the boat from the quay at nine o’clock and gentled it out through the pack of trawlers. Three small boys were fishing for crabs at the dock-end with lumps of raw meat knotted to pieces of string. One fair-haired child, his face as void of malice as a carton of yogurt, was holding a large live crab in one hand and pulling its legs off, one by one, with the other.

“She loves me—” He pulled a leg out of its socket. “Loves me not. Loves me—”

When he’d run out of legs, he sent the carcass of the crab spinning far out over the water. It was the graceful flick of a Frisbee expert. The crab hit the surface, bounced, bounced again, and sank, leaving a faint dribble of guts to mark where it went down.

The boy saw me watching him. He nodded pleasantly at the splash. “Bloody fiddly.”

“What did you say?”

“He were only a bloody fiddly,” he said, and went on with his fishing.

Ahead, the world was monochrome, like a smudged charcoal drawing—gray sky, gray sea, gray ships, gray breakwaters, gray cliffs, gray everything. A swell from the far south, relic of someone else’s gale, made the oily-smooth water bulge steeply, although there was no wind at all. It heaved and sucked around the long breakwater in the middle of the entrance to the Sound; it broke in an ash-blond fringe around the Mewstone. It was nice to ride this swell out slowly, under engine: its soothing rockabye motion came as a blessed relief after the violent corkscrew rolling of the land.

The evening before, with the retired commanders, I hadn’t cared to let on that I didn’t actually know where exactly the Falklands were. Later, I’d looked them up in the inky-fingered school atlas in my floating library. They showed as a rash of heat spots off the coast of Argentina, picked out in British imperial pink. By a funny twist of chance, they occupied precisely the same latitude in their hemisphere as the British Isles did in theirs: at 51°46’ S, Port Stanley was the Hemel Hempstead of the southern world.

More than that, the Falklands stood anchored off the coast of South America very much as Britain stood anchored off the coast of Europe. You had only to look at the atlas to see that the identity of the Falklanders, like that of the British, was bound up in endless aggressive assertions of their differences from the continental giant across the water.

They were visibly, audibly, our kith and kin. A family of
Falklanders, holidaying in Britain, had been exhibited on television. Even by wintry English standards, they were white. It was the way they spoke, though, that made them so evidently worth fighting for. Their voices had a tinny quality, as if they were being played through a gramophone needle with dust on it, but their accent was loudly Home Counties. They all talked in the voice which, heard across the distance of a
souk
, or a patch of jungle, in some remote quarter of the world, puts you instantly and depressingly in mind of gin-and-tonic, cavalry twill, the next monthly mortgage payment, brussels sprouts, tea cozies,
Journey’s End
at the amateur dramatic society, the Magimix in the kitchen and the Queen’s head on the stamp.

The Falklanders
were
us, but they were us in looking-glass reverse. Our spring was their autumn. Their Atlantic depressions came to them from the east, spinning round clockwise; ours came at us from the west, spinning counterclockwise. On the same principle, their bathwater ran out of the plughole in the opposite direction from ours; and if we stood upright on the earth, the Falklanders must have been standing upside down and clinging by their boot soles through the power of suction.

In this miniature inverted cluster, the British had hit by accident on a perfect symbol of themselves. The Falklands held a mirror up to our own islands, and it reflected, in brilliantly sharp focus, all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood. As for the Argentinians, they were the last word in Comeovers from Across. They’d got monstrously above themselves, and, as Comeovers deserve, they were going to be given their Come Uppance.

I had on board a copy of E. Keble Chatterton’s
The Yachtsman’s Pilot
of 1933, whch had belonged to my sailing grandfather. It described the approach to the river Yealm, nine sea miles east of Plymouth: a fussy business which involved lining up a succession of marks to make a dog’s-leg course avoiding the rocks to starboard and the shoaling sands to
port.
Not to be attempted in strong onshore winds … care must be exercised
 … Chatterton’s last line on the place, though, was irresistible: “You are now in one of the most secluded and lovely spots to be found in Southern England.” In search of loveliness and seclusion, I motored east through the gray swell and found Chatterton’s first set of marks—a church spire followed by a pair of white-painted wooden triangles on posts, one on the shore inside the estuary mouth, the other high up on a hill behind. So far, so good.

I waited while the triangle on the shore moved slowly rightward to join the triangle on the hill, then swung the boat round and squeezed it by within feet of Yealm Head, where the sea slopped and piled on the rocks, blackening the lichens and leaving the exposed granite looking like wet moleskin. The course zigzagged through high bluffs of trees and bracken, going east, then northeast, then southeast, then northeast again, then finally northwest into a deep wooded cleft containing a mile-long pool of dark water like a secret lake. A Victorian hotel stood on a sandy point, half hidden in pines. A dozen early season yachts swung on their moorings. The noise of my engine, echoing in the hollow, disturbed a wading heron, which flapped off up into the woods on boxy wings.

After several minutes of panicky mismanagement, I got the upper hand of
Gosfield Maid
, which had seemed to grow to the size of a cargo ship the moment that she entered the river, and I tethered the boat between two buoys in midstream. In drizzly soft focus, the Yealm was exquisite, just as the late Mr. Chatterton had promised, with its thick country silence, its steep terraces of dripping evergreens and its glassy water, scrolled by the tide and current with loops and whorls of teasingly near-legible sham Arabic.

Below, the saloon was snug and full of comfortable noises: barbecue charcoal wheezed and crackled in the stove, the river muttered companionably in the bilges. Even in this flattest of calm waters, the room felt afloat: the floor shimmied slightly underfoot, the ceiling, walls and furniture had a palpable absence of specific gravity. It was like living inside a soap bubble, suspended, sustained, by a contradictory
harmony of tensions. It brought the weightlessness and detachment that are usually confined only to sweet dreams.

Floating, I switched on the wireless in time to catch the beginning of the great Westminster debate. For the first time since the Suez crisis of 1956, the House of Commons was sitting on a Saturday, and the chamber was honoring the occasion with an ominous, unnatural hush. There were none of the usual feeding-trough noises of Parliament in session; just the hiss and rustle of order papers, like static.

The Prime Minister said: “The House meets this Saturday to respond to a situation of great gravity. We are here because, for the first time in many years, British sovereign territory has been invaded by a foreign power.” But her cross, nanny’s voice made it sound as if there had been ructions in the nursery and the children were going to be sent to bed without any tea.

I stood leaning against the galley bulkhead and looking out through the porthole. The heron had come back again. It was standing not more than twenty feet away, stock-still, head crooked, watching for the underwater flash of a turning fish. The ebb tide, picking up speed now, was leaving two fine plaits of disturbed water behind its legs. Did herons always fish upstream, like dry-fly purists?

“The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their own allegiance.”

“Hear, hear!”

A brick of charcoal hiccuped in the stove. The Prime Minister, reading her ghost-written words, kept on putting emphases in the wrong places. The moment one stopped concentrating on what she was saying it seemed as if she were drifting out of English and into Danish.

The heron’s neck uncoiled like a cracked whip, and there was a sudden wriggle of silver in its beak. This brilliant trick eclipsed the Falklands Crisis in a wink.

When next I listened, the radio had drifted off-station
and had to be retuned. A claret-and-Havana Tory voice out of the previous century was saying, “… this jumped-up junta of barbarous men …” and his words were met by a long indigestion of approval through the benches.

“Our duty now,” said the member for Taunton, “is to repossess our possessions and to rescue our own people. Our right to the Falkland Islands is undoubted. Our sovereignty is unimpeachable.”

“Hear, hear!”

“We have one duty only, which we owe to ourselves—the duty to rescue our people and to uphold our rights. Let us hear no more about logistics—how difficult it is to travel long distances. I do not remember the Duke of Wellington whining about Torres Vedras.”

“Hear, hear!”

“Hear, hear!”

“We have nothing to lose now except our honor.”

He was carrying the House with him. After this, any words of caution were bound to fall flat by contrast with these lofty generalities about honor, sovereignty and the Duke of Wellington. There were very few Members now who dared to prick the growing rhetorical balloon.

But the member for Surbiton wasn’t happy. He thought that an invasion of the islands at this stage could only lead to innocent people being caught in the crossfire. He had some ideas of his own about how Galtieri could best be dealt with.

“I understand,” he said, “that the people of the Argentine are great football enthusiasts—”

The House came back with a low growl of warning.

“The very least we should do,” the member for Surbiton said, against the gathering rumpus, “is to ensure the exclusion of the Argentine from the World Cup—”

He was roared and jeered down. The House was marching with drums and trumpets. It trampled on the member for Surbiton and left him far behind.

Beyond the porthole there was a small red cliff of sandstone. Its lips and ledges were bright with freshly opened primroses. The branches of the trees overhanging the water
were loaded with budding catkins and the green beginnings of new leaves. Farther up the hill, the gorse thickets were coming into flower. I wondered whether the Falklands autumn, now under way, was, as it were, the autumn that we’d had six months ago or the autumn of months ahead, when these leaves would go tinder-crisp and die. I reckoned that anything to do with the Falklands more probably belonged to Britain’s past than to its future, so the naval fleet would be sailing backward, into last year’s autumn, or maybe some other autumn belonging to the Duke of Wellington and another monarch.

I listened to the member for Brighton Pavilion saying, “We are determined to make the Argentinian dictator disgorge what he has taken—by diplomacy if possible, by force if necessary. Nothing else will restore the credibility of the government or wipe the stain from Britain’s honor.”

The outgoing tide made the land at the edge of the water seem to grow. Boulders white with barnacles were surfacing one by one, and fretted banks of mud were rising slowly proud of the river. The heron had gone, but a pair of oystercatchers were strolling fastidiously through the shallows, lifting their legs as if it pained them to get their feet wet.

The member for Wycombe was getting off to a bad start. “I should like to offer a few words which I know will not be popular with the House—”

The House gruffed its assent to this and prepared to give the member for Wycombe a hard time.

“—but they are based on three years’ work in Argentina, trying to avoid the eventuality that now confronts us.”

“For the Foreign Office!”

“You were working for the Foreign Office!”