Sea Lord

  On a chart Salcombe seems like one of the most sheltered havens of England’s south coast, and so it is if you’re safe inside its steep-sided web of flooded river valleys. Many a yacht has waited out Channel storms in Salcombe, and the very harrowing of hell would find it hard to disturb the innermost lakes, but in an onshore wind against a falling tide the entrance to Salcombe is a death-trap. Salcombe means safety, but reaching that safety in a southern gale is suicidal folly. A bar lies athwart the harbour entrance like a hidden barricade. The wind-driven waves are toppled by the sudden ridge on the sea bottom to make a churning turmoil of breaking seas that crash white and are made even steeper and more dangerous when an ebbing tide tries to challenge them. Only a fool chooses Salcombe in a southern gale. Dartmouth, which can be entered in any weather, is just a short distance to the east, and Plymouth, even safer than Dartmouth, is not so far to the west. Torbay, the classic shelter in a southern or westerly gale, is an easy sail up-channel, but I chose Salcombe.

  Perhaps, I thought, if I was not meant to be coming home, then the bar at the estuary’s mouth would tell me. I would tempt the devil and, if I lost, Sunflower and I would die on the bar, rolled and swamped and broken up within the very smell of home. That reasoning was the stupid bravado of tiredness, made worse by a lethal mix of self-pity and arrogance. The self-pity came from my reluctance to see my family again, the arrogance from a determination to show off my seamanship as I came home.

  Sunflower’s boom was hard out on the port side as we ran towards Bolt Head. We were crossing the seas now, sliding diagonally over their eastwards flow. One moment we would be on the crest of a wave, triumphant and flying, then we would plunge deeper and deeper into the watery darkness and I would see the next wave threatening astern, its top sleeked and whipping with the wind’s force. The glassy dark heart of death would rear up Sunflower’s port quarter and, just as I thought she would never rise again, so we would be heaved up to the next crest from where I would stare ahead for a sight of land. The tiredness was gone, I did not even care that I was cold and wet. Now I was elated by the thrill of daring a sea to do its worst.

  Yet the gale-driven sea was not our enemy. Our enemy was the steep rise of the bar, silent and hidden, beneath Salcombe’s entrance. Charlie and I had once watched a yacht crash down into a wave trough on Salcombe’s bar. The boat had come up again, but in the trough her keel had struck bottom and the compression of the blow had smashed every bulkhead inside her hull and fractured the skull of a man sitting at her chart table. Even a lifeboat had been lost on Salcombe’s bar, and lifeboats make Sunflower look fragile. Scores of widows cursed Salcombe’s bar, and now we were racing towards it, driven by a southern gale and madness.

  There was a moment, early in the afternoon, when I knew I could turn east and still make Prawle Point to reach Dartmouth in safety. For a second I hesitated, tempted by sanity, then the greater temptation of tweaking the devil’s tail took over. I was a Rossendale, the last of the line, and I would come home with all the savage flair of that unpleasant family’s blood.

  Bolt Head came up like a grey threat on the port bow. The land was blurred and soaking, the wind had a noise like an eldritch death shriek, and the sea was harrying me on to the lee shore. The waves were huge, steep and made tumultuous by the land’s proximity. At the top of each breaking crest I stared forward and I knew what I would see and, when I saw it, the fear came. I saw whiteness. It’s one thing to imagine a danger, but quite another to see its true malevolence, and to realise that the imagination does not have sufficient horror to match reality. The bar was frantic with shattering seas. I had a glimpse of breaking wavetops, spuming a mist of white, and beneath that mist the weight of water would be a churning maelstrom. Men ashore would have seen my sails by now. They would be knowledgeable men, and they would damn me for a fool and pray that my boat lived despite my foolishness. Doubtless the inshore lifeboat would already have been called, but only to pluck my corpse from the incoming waves.

  I kept to the western side of the entrance. The water’s deeper there, though the Bass Rock is waiting just in case the bar fails to kill. I saw an explosion of white spew up as a wave broke into fragments on the Little Mew Stone, then Sunflower dipped her bows as a wave lifted her stern, but this time, instead of riding up over the wave’s crest, the great steel hull began to plane on the tons of rolling water. Now we were no different to the surfers of the Pacific. We were no longer a boat, but a scrap of material being carried aloft on a wave’s violence to where the bar made a white turmoil of the sea. We were also just where I wanted to be: hard under the western cliffs. I was braced in the cockpit with the tiller between my thighs and with both hands on the mainsheet for I knew what was about to happen.

  Sunflower’s hard-reefed mainsail was still out to port. At any second the wind would bounce and curl off the cliffs and she would gybe. I should have furled the main and let the small jib and the big sea take us in, but to furl the main would have been to show cowardice. Let the bar do its worst. I’d chosen to play the sea’s game, and I wouldn’t give in.

  The leech of the mainsail shivered. It wasn’t much, just a tiny flicker of the heavy grey material, but it was the sign I had been waiting for and, before the cliff-turned wind could dismast me, I hauled the sheet in with both hands. I braced the tiller hard, knowing how Sunflower would be knocked to port when the gybe came.

  It came.

  Unless you’re pointing dead into the wind and happy to go nowhere, the sails of a boat are always stretched either to port or starboard. There are two ways to bring them across from one side to the other. One, to tack, is to turn the boat into the wind, so that the wind slides decorously across the bows and the sails, like flags streaming from flagpoles, obediently change their direction. The other way, to gybe, is to turn the boat in front of the wind. Then it’s as if the wind has sneaked fast round the flagpole and the flag is crushed up against the pole before it smacks out in its new flight. Gybing is dangerous and violent. Instead of a flag I was letting a gale rip round behind a heavy sail that was lashed to a skull-crushing wooden boom. The weight of all that gear hammering across the wind’s eye could easily tear my shrouds free of their chain-plates and pluck the mast clean out at its root. Except that I had just enough of the mainsheet gathered in to act as a spring and, as the great sail and boom slammed across, I used the sheet to soak its force and tame its threat. I skinned my right palm bloody doing it, but it was a proper job. That’s what Charlie would have called it. ‘A proper job’ was Charlie’s biggest approbation. He offered it rarely, and only to practical achievements like a well-scarfed piece of wood or a neatly welded seam, or for a maniacal gybe off the bar at Salcombe.

  Not that I had time to admire my own manoeuvre. We had survived the gybe, but as soon as the sail settled I felt Sunflower’s bows drop and I knew the bar was straight beneath the boat’s stem. I whooped a crazy challenge. I was staring down into the trough where mud and sand discoloured the water. Scummy strings of foam whipped across that dull patch. I was running into the killing trough and, for a few seconds, the howl of the wind was muted by the towering wave behind me. I could only hear the seething of the water. This sea had perhaps a hundred yards left in which to kill me, no more, but they were the worst hundred yards. If I broached now then nothing would save me because Sunflower would be turned over, her mast would snap, and the sea would pounce on us to tear man and hull into dented steel and bloody scraps. I was holding the tiller with both hands, muscles rigid, as the crest behind shattered to cascade like spilt ice down the wave’s dark face. Christ, I thought, but why had I done this?

  The jib was flogging, shielded by the main. We were veering to port, I dragged her back. The wave that was carrying us collapsed, its underpinning sheared off by the rising bar, and Sunflower was suddenly nothing but a scrap of steel in the heart of a broken tidal wave. Water bounced halfway up her mast. A new wave reared behind and Sunflower’s keel began to drop, crashing down through an incoherent s
ea towards the hidden land that could fracture her steel hull as though it was an egg. Down we went, and still down, and behind me the new wave curled at its top and I saw the glassy black beneath the fractured white, and still we dropped and I saw that I would be crushed between the bar and the following wave, but then Sunflower, good Sunflower, began to rise. She fought her death inch by damned inch. The peak of the reefed sail was drawing, forcing her on. She had way on her still and she was cutting her steel through the water. She would not give up, but still that toppling wave threatened to poop us and I knew it could kill with a blow as easily as it could drown us.

  The wave broke. The dark black glossy heart of the wave was blown apart as if by dynamite. It turned white as it tumbled and as it broke into a million fragments. It fell, and it would have killed me, except that it fell a foot behind Sunflower’s transom and the force of the sea’s fall was bounced up from the bar to lift and drive her on. On across the bar’s broken water, on past the Wolf Rock and the Bass Rock, and then, just short of the Poundstone, I gybed her again, and I knew I was showing off to the people who were standing ashore to watch my death. I was proving that I had mastered one thing and, in demonstration of that mastery, I had come home in style. So I gybed Sunflower again, turned her, and suddenly we were sailing into calmer waters as Limebury Point stole the wind’s brute force. I looked back. The bar was a mass of churning white, as bad as I’d ever seen it, but Sunflower had come through.

  And I, in a proper job, had come home.

  Charlie wasn’t at home. His wife, who had grudgingly taken my reverse-charge call, said he was in Hertfordshire on business. I could tell she was not pleased that I had returned. She believed I was a rakehell who might yet take her husband back to the sea. “When will he be back, Yvonne?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was guarded. Somewhere in the background a child whined.

  “Tell him I called, and tell him I’m moored in Salcombe.” Yvonne promised she would pass on the news, though I doubted if she would be in any hurry. I wondered why it was that Charlie, my best, closest, and oldest friend, should marry someone who so disliked me.

  I said goodbye; then, ignoring the impatient people who waited to use the public phone, I tried to reverse the charges to my mother’s house. There was no answer, so I had the operator call my twin sister in Gloucestershire. Elizabeth was not at home either, but her husband grudgingly agreed to accept the charges. He had once been a friend of mine, but he had chosen his wife’s side in our family battle. “Do you think we’re made of money?” was his greeting.

  I didn’t bother to explain that I’d only just landed in England and had no small change other than American, Antiguan and Portuguese coins. “Is Elizabeth there?” I asked instead.

  “No she’s not.” He sounded drunk.

  “I tried to reach Mother.”

  “She’s in hospital.”

  I waited to see if he’d offer more information. He didn’t. “Which hospital?” I asked.

  “South Devon General. They took her in last week. She’s in a private ward, which we’re paying for.”

  The inference was that I should help with the cost, but I ignored the hint. “What’s the ward called?” I asked instead.

  “The Edith Cavell Ward. It’s on the third floor.”

  “Do you know what the visiting hours are?”

  “I am not an information service for the National Health Service,” he said irritably; then, relenting, “you can go any time. They don’t seem to mind. Bloody silly, I call it. If I was running a hospital I wouldn’t want visitors traipsing about at all hours of the day or night, but I suppose they know their own business.”

  “Perhaps I’ll see Elizabeth there?”

  “I don’t know where she is.” There was a long pause as though he was about to add some comment, but then, without another word, he put down the receiver.

  There was no one else to telephone. I knew I couldn’t reach my younger sister, who was the only person beside Charlie who might be glad to hear I had come home, so instead I rowed myself back to Sunflower and dug out a tin of baked beans which I mashed with a can of stew and heated over the galley stove. The pain in my tooth had miraculously subsided, which was a blessing as I’d run out of both aspirins and Irish whiskey.

  It had begun to rain hard. The water drummed on Sunflower’s coachroof and gurgled down her scuppers. The wind howled above the moorings to slap halliards against noisy masts. I spooned down my meal and thought how I might even now be six seas away and running free.

  But had come home instead.

  The toothache had entirely disappeared by morning. For the first time in weeks I woke up without pain, except for the bruise on my ribs where I’d been thrown against the stanchion, but that kind of pain was an occupational hazard, and therefore to be ignored. Yet the tooth, astonishingly, felt fine. I bit down hard on it and did not even feel a twinge. The spontaneous cure and a good night’s sleep combined to fill me with optimism.

  The bus journey soon dissipated that happy mood.

  It wasn’t the Devon countryside which, though damp, looked soft and welcoming. Rather it was my fellow passengers. The bus was filled with young mothers and their squalling children. The sound of screaming babies is blessedly absent at sea and, suddenly exposed to it, I felt as if I was listening to nails scratching on slate. I stared through a misted window at the cars slopping through puddles and wondered how Charlie endured being a father.

  The bus dropped me a mile from the hospital. I could have waited for another bus which would have taken me up the hill, but the thought of more screaming infants persuaded me to walk. I was wearing my heavy oilskin jacket, so only my jeans got soaked with rain. The oily was smeared with grease and dirt, but it was the only coat or jacket I possessed so it had to serve as formal wear. I climbed through the pelting rain and cut across the hospital’s waterlogged lawns. The big entrance hall was loud with more squalling children. I ignored the lifts, climbed three flights of stairs, and wondered just why I had sailed for six weeks across three and a half thousand nautical miles.

  I had been half expecting and half dreading that my sister Elizabeth would be visiting the hospital. She was not. Except for the patients, the Edith Cavell ward was empty. On the wall opposite the ward’s two beds a silent television was showing a frenetic children’s cartoon. An elderly woman lay in the nearest bed with a pair of earphones over her grey hair. She eyed my sodden jeans and sneakers with distaste, and her face betrayed relief that I had not come to visit her. “She’s asleep,” she said reprovingly, at the same time jerking her head towards the second bed which was still surrounded by drawn curtains.

  I crossed the rubber-tiled floor and gently pulled back the pale curtains.

  My mother was sleeping.

  At first I did not recognise her. In the last four years her gold hair had turned a dirty grey. Even in sleep she looked exhausted. She lay, wan and emaciated, with her grey hair straggling untidily from her pale forehead. She had always been a woman of great pride, foully excessive pride, but now she was reduced to this drawn creature. Her great beauty was gone, vanished like a dream. Her breath rasped in her throat. Every heave of her lungs was an effort. Once she had worn a king’s ransom of diamonds, but now she struggled for life. She was only fifty-nine, but looked at least a decade older.

  “She had a bad night,” the grey-haired woman volunteered.

  I said nothing.

  The woman took off her earphones. “She won’t have the oxygen tent, you see. Stupid, I call it. I’ve told her, I have. I told her she should listen to the doctors, but she won’t take a blind bit of notice. She says she’s got to smoke. Smoke! That’s what’s killing her, but she won’t listen. She says she can’t smoke if she’s in an oxygen tent. Stupid, I call it.”

  I dropped the curtain behind me which had the happy effect of shutting the woman up. The sound of my mother’s breathing was horrid.

  A cylinder of oxygen stood by her bed. A pac
ket of cigarettes and her gold lighter lay close to an oxygen mask. I picked up the mask and heard the hiss of escaping gas. I turned off the tap, then lay the mask back on the thin blanket. I had moved very gently, but something must have disturbed my mother for her eyes opened and she stared up at me. At first there was no recognition in her face – the sun had bleached my pale hair almost white and turned my face the colour of old varnish – but then, with a palpable start, realisation came to her eyes. I was her living son, and I had come home.

  “Hello, Mother,” I said.

  She said nothing. Instead she groped for her cigarettes, but, before she could find them, a dreadful cough convulsed her body. It was a foul, grating and harsh cough, as rough as broken glass being crushed by stone. It came from deep in her chest and it would not stop. I turned on the oxygen and put the mask over her face. Somehow she fought the cough to draw a desperate breath and, as if she was fearful that I would take the mask away, she clamped her right hand over mine. Her crooked thin fingers were like claws. It was the first time she had touched me in fourteen years. I had been twenty that last time, and she had briefly embraced me beside the grave into which my father was being lowered. Since then we had never touched, not till now as she fought for life. She put her hand on mine and gripped so tight that it felt like a scaly bird’s claw clinging to refuge. Her eyes were closed again. Her palm was warm on the back of my hand, her fingers were contracting, and her nails were digging into my skin.

  Then, very slowly, her breathing became easier. I could feel the relief course through her body as her grip relaxed. She had left two flecks of blood where her nails had driven into my fingers. She opened her eyes and stared at me, then, almost irritably, she twitched her hand as if to say that I should take the mask away.