Coasting (17 page)

All tide races are supposed to have an “inside passage”—a ribbon of water close inshore through which you can sneak past the race without getting caught in it. Such inside passages exist only in the right weather. Some are just diluted versions of the turmoil to seaward. Some are avenues of calm as wide as the Champs-Elysées; others are narrow alleys in which a boat is squeezed tight between the race and the rocks. They are all places where your heart quickens and you keep your fingers crossed as you go in.

The inside passage round Start Point
was
there that evening—a broad, sluggish channel, its seaward bank marked by a ragged line of scum. It led into what was left of the sunset; a few low cloud banks smeared with ocher and mauve. Everything was darkening fast: Start Bay was turning to a lake of ink, and lights were coming on in the straggle of villages along the shore. I steered for the fading obelisk on the hill over the entrance to the River Dart until I lost it in the dowdy sky. Then there was just a confusion of colored lights. Crab boats, returning to the river at different angles, showed as winking dots of red, white and green. The trouble was that the rest of the world was afloat too. Pubs, cars, lampposts and front rooms were bobbing about among the crabbers. Observing the international collision regulations, I gave way indiscriminately to nursing homes, Volvos, bungalows and guesthouses as they steamed past my bows, before I found the metrical flash of the Kingswear
light which guided me into the river between a pair of invisible castles.

By night, Dartmouth was a dazzling incandescent city. It blazed on the water, a mile-long pool of blinding reflections so hard and bright that you could nearly hear them clink. They shattered and regrouped in the crisscross wakes of fishing boats and ferries—a Manhattan of lights on the hop. I left
Gosfield Maid
chained to a buoy in midstream, rowed through the middle of the loud reflections, found a seafood restaurant on the waterfront and basked in my luck at happening on such unexpected splendor.

But day broke on Boots the Chemists’ and on Barclays Bank. It disclosed an English seaside town, bunched and squat, with too much pastel pebbledash and too much teashoppe half-timbering. The jam of traffic on the streets was as quiet as sludge, patiently shifting, a few feet at a time, through narrow conduits of low brick villas and tall advertisments for low-tar cigarettes. On a green hill of razored lawns to the north of the town, the Britannia Royal Naval College lorded it over Dartmouth. I studied it through binoculars. No one seemed to be at home, although some wheeled cannons were parked on the gravel near the front door. The College didn’t look a very friendly place. Its bland white facade and banks of bare uncurtained windows gave it the supercilious expression of an officer staring fixedly over the tops of the heads of the Other Ranks. Searching the grounds, I found a gardener marching a power mower uphill, another cannon, pointed strategically at Marks & Spencer’s in the town, a bed of obedient and well-drilled roses, a blue naval Land-Rover and a horse. Perhaps everyone had gone to the Falklands.

In the town, I tried ringing the College number and found that the cadets were away for their Easter holidays, but that the Captain was in residence and would be happy to see me. He would, he said, find a chap to show me round. Thinking of those lawns, the ruled parallel lines of green left by the mower, the nap of the turf trimmed to the quick, I decided that I’d better get a haircut first.

I had hoped to find the College barber and persuade him
to disguise me as an officer and gentleman, but I got Kath in a small and smelly Unisex Salon. She wore her name on a badge pinned between her breasts, which were unusually large and tended to get in the way of her craft.

“Here on business, are you?”

“Sort of. Not exactly.” I could hardly breathe for breast, as Kath soaped and kneaded my skull. Given our intimacy, I felt that this was a lame and dumb reply. Washed, cradled, patted, pummeled, I confided in Kath and tried to tell her what I was doing.

“Oh … 
travel.”

The air in the salon was hot and chemical. Wriggling free of the breast for a moment, I inhaled a sick-making lungful of acetone, peroxide and synthetic jasmine.

“I’d like to travel.”

To travel
. An intransitive verb. A state of being, not a journey to a destination.

“Where to?”

“What, dear?”

“Where would you like to travel
to?”

“Oh—you know. Abroad.” She was on to the scissors work now, snipping away behind my ears, her coral slacks a bright splash in the mirror. “You get fed up, don’t you, staying in one place all the time? Specially in Dartmouth. You should be here in the winter—it’s a real dump then.”

“Where have you been so far?”

“Well …” Kath stood back from her handiwork, her big and rather piggy face heavy with thought. “I went to Sheffield in November. I got an uncle and auntie living there. In Sheffield.”

“Yes, I know Sheffield. That must have been a change from Devon. The North’s so different from the South, isn’t it? What did you make of it?”

She snipped and put on her thinking face again. “It were a lot cheaper than here,” she said.

Cuttings of gray hair were falling into the lap of the surplice which Kath had dressed me in. I thought:
surely that’s not mine?
It struck me that the curious style of babying which goes on in a Unisex Salon is exactly the same treatment
that gets meted out to the senile, and perhaps it was my elderliness which had entitled me to the insistent nuzzling of Kath’s breast against my ear.

“Well, meat—things like that—
they
was cheaper. But fruit—that was round about the same.”

Up on the barbered hill we sat out on the terrace of the Captain’s House, taking tea.

“There’s no romance in the sea,” the Captain was saying. “It’s interesting, of course. Fascinating, even. But it’s not a place for the Walter Mittys of this world.”

We’d been discussing the schoolboys who came to Dartmouth as officers-in-training, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that this talk of romance and Walter Mittyism might, just conceivably, be directed at me.

“Do you get a lot of prospective Walter Mittys, then?”

“Not a lot. Some. Either it gets knocked out of them in their first few weeks here or they don’t stay the course and go off and work in … advertising, or something.”

The Captain’s crisp, open-air, naval voice came straight out of British war movies of the 1950s starring John Gregson and Kenneth More. It suggested unflappable calm in times of peril and boundless common decency and common sense. You could hear it saying things like “Buck up, old girl—we’ll soon have Jerry licked” and “All right, Number One; I’ll take her over now.” Like the rest of the Captain, his voice was perfectly tailored to his job. Fiftyish, grizzling round the temples, tidy-featured, he was a national archetype; the sort of Englishman whom one could sell in Texas or Saudi Arabia as a masterpiece of authenticated provenance. There was just one detail which seemed to be at odds with the rest of him: against the background of his fine-check Viyella shirt, he was wearing a brilliant gold silk tie. Looking at that splendiferous tie, I wondered if perhaps there was a streak of Mittyism in the Captain’s wife.

Of course, the Captain said, the College had changed a great deal since his own days there. It was far more democratic.
One saw a lot of chaps nowadays from state-run schools.

“A lot? How many?”

“Oh, I haven’t got the figures offhand. But we get quite a few coming in now.”

Certainly the college was very democratic in its academic standards. A handful of O levels and one scraped pass at A were enough to qualify a boy as an officer-in training. (“We don’t call them ‘cadets’ nowadays.”)

“We’re not after intellectuals. We’re looking for leadership potential.”

Talking to the Captain, I felt that I was being interviewed for a place in the College and was being found wanting on every count. Words went flat in my mouth. I didn’t know how to crack the dry little jokes that would have made things easier between us. When I referred to the Falklands adventure as “a pretty Walter Mittyish sort of exercise,” trying to milk our one common allusion for as much as it was worth, the Captain stared at the sky with a smile of forced politeness.

Below us, the River Dart was landlocked by the hills. Boats which were too small and far away to see were decorating it with feathery wakes. I wished that I were afloat instead of stranded here out of my element, feeling cowed and clumsy in the Captain’s headmasterly presence.

The “chap” who had been detailed to show me around was a uniformed Lieutenant Commander who had, in the service phrase, “risen from the ranks,” as if the process were closely akin to miraculous ascension. “I’m Mike,” he said, and his voice had kept the local coloring of what I took to be Cheshire or the Pottery Towns. I liked his slight stoop, his meat-plate hands, the way his uniform hung on him like someone else’s cast-offs. He made being a naval officer look like a proper job and not something that just happened to you, like being a debutante or a manic depressive.

The empty College smelled of polish and carbolic soap, with a faint residual trace of changing-room; of wet towels, jockstraps and dubbin. Its floors were called “decks,” and its architect had fancifully framed and paneled it like a ship in
varnished oak. We marched, out of step, down a corridor tiled in institutional sea-green and inspected the Seamanship and Navigation rooms. I looked, with as much interest as I could muster, at knotted ropes in glass cases, at colored wall charts. I read:

But it was the smells, which no carbolic could mask, that kept me silent and preoccupied. There was the broken soil and bruised grass of the rugger pitch. Blanco, chalk dust, gun oil, licorice, stale flannel, passed gas. The badgery musk of adolescent boys herded into classes, teams, sections was ingrained in the woodwork of the place.

“I’d expected a sort of nautical university,” I said; “but it feels just like a school.”

“They used to come here at thirteen, of course. Now they come in at eighteen or nineteen, and I don’t know … I sometimes think the College hasn’t quite adapted to that—they still tend to get treated as if they were thirteen.”

The walls of the Quarter Deck were hung with royal portraits which had the impressive awfulness of painted effigies of saints in a Maltese Easter procession. We were followed across the parquet floor by the waxwork eyes of Prince Edward, Prince Charles, Princess Anne and Lord Mountbatten. The bold crudity of the paintings was in sharp and significant contrast to the fussy perfectionism of the ship models. They sailed under glass, every hatch coaming and coil of rope fastidiously to scale. Some were tended by manikins two-thirds of an inch high, who were working their anchor winches, scaling their ratlines and furling sails on their yards. Tiny officers on 1:100 bridges squeaked tiny orders to their tiny men. This modeling of life in miniature seemed to me to be of a piece with Dartmouth at large; the College felt as if it had been designed specifically to stop young men from growing up.

“Would you have been happy to come here when you were eighteen?”

“Me?” Mike stood hunched, hands-in-pockets, intransigently life-sized. “I expect I’d have thought it was murder. But they’re used to it. They’ve nearly all been to boarding school. It’s the ones who haven’t been who find it a bit tough.”

“I went to boarding school, and I’d have hated it—it would have been everything I wanted to run away from.”

We went upstairs to the Poop Deck, where the dormitories were. The officers-in-training slept twenty to a room in tiers of bunks, their Navy-issue blankets nipped round the mattress ends in regulation “hospital tucks.” No space for private thoughts and feelings here: the bare quarters looked like a place of punishment.

“My worst memory,” I said.

“Oh—it teaches them to live together. Doesn’t do them any harm.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”

I stood leaning on a cold radiator under a high window, looking out. The river below was muddled with another river, a hundred miles or so away from here; the Severn, like simmering caramel, spilling over its banks into the water meadows and playing fields on the far side. It yanked up winter trees by their roots, swallowed unwary cats, carried away people’s garden sheds. Frogmen were forever searching it for bodies near the town bridge, a favored suicide resort. From the barred dormitory window, the river looked so wild and free that it was easy to see what made the jumpers do it.

“They share cabins after the first year.”

There was a small locker by each bunk. I opened the door to one of them. A
Playboy
centerfold was thumbtacked to the inside along with a Polaroid snapshot of a woman of about my own age holding a panting golden Labrador on a chain. Nothing had changed, except that the pin-up had grown a lot skinnier since my day and Mother’s picture was in color. The one missing item was a graph-paper chart on which you could cross out the remaining weeks, days, hours
and minutes to go before the end of term. I shut the locker, feeling breathless and tight about the chest.

“It’s a pity that the lads are all away,” Mike said.

No, it wasn’t. The lads were crowding far too thickly round for comfort as it was.

“I’m so sorry—” I made a pantomime of looking at my watch. “I’d completely lost track of the time.”

“The Captain said to show you the beagles and the Royal garden—”

“Tell him I loved them,” I said. “They were wonderful—”

“You’re sure?”

“Certain, thank you. I just have to go—”

On the way downstairs—we must have been on the Orlop Deck—I heard a light, cruel tenor voice baying “Fa—a—ag!,” the scramble of feet on a flight of stone steps, and a feeble asthmatic wheeze in my own lungs. By the time we reached the graveled drive with its memorial cannonry, I wasn’t so much leaving the Britannia Royal Naval College as running away from it in a fit of blind funk.