April 2015 – Writer-insighter

Elmer’s Tune

Today is probably the 70th anniversary of something I didn’t do. Obviously, if you saw me, even on a bad day, like the day after I fell off the boat ladder in the yard and banged my ribs into the side of it as I fell. That felt like I was 70 and not in particularly good shape. The time I fell off the earth bank at the side of a sunken lane and landed on both knees, ten feet down on gravel was pretty instantly ageing too. But none of those things are to do with Elmer’s Tune. It was a song someone used to like, back then when this happened.

There are several things I haven’t written and mean to write. It isn’t that I don’t know the stories; they’re very simple and both of them true. The issue – apart from laziness and never knowing whether anyone would want to read them – is what to write, whether to write them as a book, as a stand-up spoken word performance, as a screenplay or what. The screenplay idea isn’t so far-fetched. This one would make a good radio piece though. Visually it would need lots of airplanes that went to a Swiss scrap-heap long ago, a full-size American airfield in Suffolk, a blacked-out town and lots of young women in 1940s clothes, or at least hair-styles, given that getting these women out of their clothes was the major reason this particular story happened.

A young man who happened to be an American fighter pilot went to a dance. Because he was excited, because he wanted to sleep with this English girl, because all kinds of things, he missed his lift back to his airfield. The dance was in Ipswich and the truck picked people up near the railway station, except by the time he got there the truck had long gone and he had to walk. He was due to fly in the morning, escorting bombers on one of the last raids of the war, the last time his squadron fought, flying out of Leiston airfield.

So he walked. Through the blacked-out town. Up the hill along the Woodbridge road, out past what was then Martlesham airfield, where Bader had flown, but silent at that time of night. Over what is now the A12 but then was just a minor road. Over the huge roundabout that wasn’t there, past the huge Suffolk police headquarters that hadn’t been built. Some police officers have sworn that they’ve seen people in there who aren’t really there now, people who used to be there, judging by their clothes. In the 1950s some people swore they’d heard airplanes on the base, ten years and more after they all went home.

Down the hill past the Black Tiles pub, down into Old Martlesham and the Red Lion, all shut and long empty then. Along the low road, past what wasn’t then an antique shop, under the railway bridge and as the road starts rising again, up to the roundabout where the Woodbridge bypass begins, the other side of the valley the old road slid down into, the valley the modern road drives straight across. You can see the old road here for the first time, going straight on where now the road sweeps round to the right.

He may have gone straight on along the bypass. It was built in the 1930s. It’s possible. Or right, through the little town. When he told me this story he couldn’t remember and it was dark anyway. He thought he might recognise the street, but in the dark these narrow thoroughfares look much the same. He would have walked through Wickham Market next, either way. Some of that looks very similar.

Before you get to Wickham there is an avenue of trees on another abandoned stretch of this road. In the 1970s the A12 was upgraded. Part of the old bypass was bypassed and a half-mile stretch of it shaded by big trees sits in a field. Those trees must be seventy feet high; they were just about ten years old when the pilot walked under them. If he didn’t walk through the town.

Out past Wickham the modern road plays tricks again. There are so many places he could have taken a wrong turning. There was no-one to ask, no passing traffic. Petrol was rationed and around here only people like doctors had cars anyway. Military vehicles didn’t pass often and this part of England, so close to the invasion coast was emptied of people five miles back from the shore. The Army confiscated huge parts of this place, all around Iken, Snape, Blaxhall and Tunstall, to practice for the invasion of Europe.

Unlike Imber village, the people were allowed back after the war. In Orford they found some changes to the Jolly Sailor pub. Hardening the building as a defensive strongpoint in 1940 the Army poured concrete on the upper floor. It’s still there, bowing the roof beams in the room below, pushing the walls outwards much heavier than the wood and plaster it sits on top of, but the Jolly Sailor is another story all its own.

Another seven miles from Wickham to Saxmundham and from there straight up the hill the way the leave truck went, the six wheeler everyone piled into when they weren’t flying to take them down to the railway station, London and the Picadilly Commandos, the working girls who knew that American officers, gentlemen even if only by virtues of their wings badge were paid five times the rate British soldiers were given. It would be light by four-thirty. It was today, 70 years on, the day I always think ‘shall I walk it today?’ But it’s a long way and it’s raining and much as I might want to for other reasons, there’s nobody to make me go to Germany today.

Past the Waitrose and the Tesco and the Costa, past the charity shop, the bookies and the factory discount store. One of the pilot’s friends cycled down this hill once. He gave a lift on his bike to a girl in the street and they cycled up the hill the other side of the rialway station to a little triangle of grass at a crossroads. They made love there, overlooked by houses not even fifty yards away that 1945 afternoon.

Past the church, another two miles up that long, long hill, out into open country then left on the corner and over the railway crossing, past the memorial to this squadron and its 82 dead pilots that wasn’t there and on to the changing rooms, kit up and walk to the flight line to report for duty. Last flight of the war. That war, anyway.

When I first came to live here I talked to an older woman who as a girl had played on Leiston airfield just after the war, with her friends. They were airplanes. Boys and girls alike became P51s, arms out for wings, mouths open for take-off, the imagined sound of engines coming from childrens’ throats as they ran across the empty runways, bound for Germany.

Under the empty blue sky of 1946 the phantom tyres stopped rumbling on the tarmac. The shadowy wing tipped a little one way and then the other and then steadied. A silent Merlin engine clawed its way into the forgiving sky as the wheels lifted, folded and locked back. All in a child’s mind on an abandoned airfield.

I met someone who grew up in a town flattened at the end of the war for no reason. It wasn’t a strategic town. It didn’t make anything much. It was just a beautiful place with medieval buildings until one day in March 1945 when half of it was demolished by the pilot’s friends, because it was there.

It made me feel differently to meet someone who described herself as ‘the third generation of the War.” But still at Christmas I come here to this memorial. I stand and read their names out loud so that someone remembers these boys who couldn’t go home.

Starting in neutral

I had two interviews today and got the one I wanted, by Skype, while I made muffins and soup. Verily a man for all seasons. The result is that next Tuesday will see a big change in my life, doing something I’ve thought about doing for two years, admired people who’ve done it for about ten times that and never heard a bad thing about doing it, apart from the wages and that seems to depend a lot on where you are and how you do it.

It’s an odd time of year. It looks sunny and warm but while it definitely is sunny most of the time and the smell of Spring is on the wind, it isn’t really warm out, or at least I’m not. It’s the time of year when everything seems to be starting but at the same time some things are coming to an end. I’ve been trying to write about the end of the war in a village in Germany in 1945 for two years now and this time of year always makes me think of how people still, with what we now know to be less than two weeks of this terrible war left, lots of people still had no idea when it would end, or if they would be around to see it. This time last year I walked through a little forest to Aldeburgh with a friend’s dogs for the first time ever. I’d never found the path before. I doubt I will walk that way again now. Things change.

Except on the water. I went down to the boatyard to think, to sit on my lovely wooden Folkboat. Time seems to stop there. It always has for me, as soon as I get on a boat. I don’t know why it is. It isn’t as if it’s even in the water yet because although it’s now ready to go back in the yard crane has started slipping so badly that nobody wants to use it and I don’t want two and a half tons of my hard work falling off a crane. Apart from destroying the boat it might well destroy me if it did. You wouldn’t be getting up in a hurry, certainly.

Apparently it's an anode. Probably. It does magic stuff. — Apparently it’s an anode. Probably. It does magic stuff.

I made do with putting the lovely chrome safety rails up, the ones that look great but actually pitched an inch below your kneecap are just high enough to turn a stumble into an Olympic-style double back-flip into the North Sea. But they do look good. Some people have said that counts for too much in my estimation.

I thought as I ate some bread and cheese cut with the same kind of knife sailors used on the Mary Rose, a simple, unserrated, wooden handled blade that just does pretty much everything onboard. Chiefly I thought I’d go for a walk and not paint the coachroof outside, because it looked as if it was going to rain. Naturally, it didn’t, but that can wait for another day.

I thought I’d have a look at the electrics and see if the engine would start. I connected up the battery I’d charged up two weeks ago with no great hopes. There was a red switch in the engine compartment and a green lever on a pipe at the bottom of the engine. There was oil in the sump when I pulled the dipstick to check, so I turned the key. Two quick turns of the engine and it started, quiet and without missing a beat. The bilge pump kicked in and water started pumping out of the boat, just the way it should. The only slight snag was that the engine was going to blow up within the foreseeable future for two reasons I knew and could see immediately. Engines on boats are cooled by water. Boats float in water, so they pump that up and circulate it round and the heat is exchanged into the water and the water is pumped out and everything is lovely. If the boat is in the water. But all I’d wanted to do was see if it started and while I didn’t really think it would it had, beautifully.

It wasn’t the onlhy snag though. The other snag was that I couldn’t turn it off. I turned the key but that didn’t do anything. I turned the red key but it came off, as it was supposed to do and it had the same effect as removing the leads from the battery which I did next, namely nothing at all because it was a diesel and you only need the battery to start it anyway. And apart from that, I didn’t know how to switch off the engine. I turned the lever on the line that I presumed was a fuel line, but there seemed to be loads left in the injectors and north of the fuel valve, if that’s what it was.

I went down the ladder without falling off it this week after nearly busting some ribs the last time I came to the boat and found a friend who luckily knew that there was a little lever to pull. It probably vents the cylinder is my guess, so there’s no compression. Whether or not, the engine stopped at once, before it overheated and siezed.

So I have an almost fully-painted boat with an engine that sounds 100% and starts. All the electrics worked onboard too, with all three cabin lights coming on including the awful ugly flourescent that is coming out when I get around to it. The thing that doesn’t work is the depth guage, which is important here where you can run into 10cm of water a mile out to sea which will do you no good at all.

It isn't warm yet. It's just beautiful instead. — It isn’t warm yet. It’s just beautiful instead.

I removed the corroded thing that had three wires running into the top and a black wire running into the bottom of it and showed it to a man at the engineering shop on the quay on my way back to the car. After the young Irish guy with a van who had sold him a set of knives (“best knoives in tha world sor,’ he said, ‘Swedish steel. But they’re made in China..”) then tried to sell me a generator I don’t have any use for whatsoever, he told me it was an anode. It’s supposed to dissolve. And there are no electronics in it. It does something to the electric field that might corrode and dissolve the copper nails in the boat maybe possibly, so screw it back on and connect all four wires back onto it. Then the depth guage readout might work.

And it might not, but it’s worth a try. And a better day than yesterday.

A Question of Balance

I wasn’t allowed emotions when I was a child. It wasn’t the done thing. Some children at school were sad, but we, or certainly my sisters and I, were told there was something wrong with them. One boy cried a lot, even thought he was one of the bigger, older boys. In fact there were two boys like that. One smelled and to this day I don’t know why or how that happens. I can hear an adult in my head saying that soap has always been cheap, but now I’m old enough to be an adult it seems to me that having soap isn’t enough, you have to know what to do with it and when, and why it’s a good thing to do.

One of my more abiding memories is almost constantly being told to smile. The reason why a small child has to be told to smile is obvious; because they aren’t smiling. Instead of addressing the problem, which is nothing to do with whether your mouth goes up at the corners as mine was advised to do almost daily, my family simply steamrollered on, as ever. Sad was bad. Or at least showing that you were sad was. And anger was reserved for grown-ups, but in fact it was only realy reserved for the two people who were older in the house I lived in.

To say that they were grown-ups implies that they were fit to have children. Neither of them were. For my father, when he could be bothered to be there, when he wasn’t playing Daddy in his other house, with his other wife and other family, the one we found out about when my mother tried to divorce him, anger was a thing he was good at, unlike, for example, being a decent human being. He had an explosive temper. For a variety of reasons, many of which I now think were to do with the way that children in abusive families are set against each other, I never got on with my sister, then or now. It seemed to me that she was encouraged to be aggressive and her school seemed to encourage stupidity, or at least the way she presented the things that happened there appeared borderline cretinous. The day she came home from school saying that they had had ‘some sort of test’ was the day she failed the 11 Plus. Whether or not the exam was a good thing or not isn’t even
vaguely the issue. Despite seeming to want to appear to be stupid, despite being deliberately provoking she didn’t deserve to be attacked by my father when he pulled the car into a layby in Burrington Combe specifically to get out, open the door and beat her up while my mother sat in the front seat. There was no help in that family. There was no trust. How could there be?

I was bullied at school. I allowed myself to be bullied. By the time I was nineteen I could run faster than our Irish terrier, as he found out several times when he escaped as a puppy. But at school I couldn’t run and I wasn’t allowed to fight. I didn’t want to fight, particularly, but my mother insisted that I mustn’t hit people. Now I think that was to stop her being hit by me, so that she had exclusive rights to violence after my father had gone off with a hairdresser to live in Andover in a gold-painted Mark II Jaguar with a back seat full of carpet of unknown provenance. And yes, that really was my last memory of my father before I learned that he had had a heart attack and died, still causing trouble after he was dead when the car he was driving, a company Audi, ploughed into three other cars. Perhaps because sometimes and unpredictably I can’t hear people properly, perhaps because I retreated into myself and didn’t like football or cricket much, to the extent that I simply refused to play either at school and sat with the boy with asthma and the boy who seemed to be modelling himself on Oscar Wilde, long before any of the pupils at my country church school had any idea who he’d been or what Sir Arthur Saville’s crime had beeen. I did have a fight. Throughout it I knew I was not allowed to hit the other boy. I allowed myself to nearly break his arm and to ram his head into and through a wooden gate, into a brick wall, but I wasn’t allowed to hit him. Obviously this was a one-sided rule. I hated being a child and I hated being in my family.

As I got older I began to allow myself the luxury of anger. Like many luxuries, too much of it isn’t very good for you. I solved the family thing when I was thirty by simply stopping talking to them. There might have been a better way of dealing with them but nobody was going to talk about what it was, so I gave up on it. With other people, especially with women, I put up with a lot then exploded. Drinking did not help. Somehow, especially as I got older, I had girlfriends who left ‘pretty’ for other girls, moving straight into OMG-Stunning category. And like me, being too much of something to be ordinary, they had their own issues with that too. Some of the simply most attractive women I have ever met have had something ripped out of them, usually their confidence. Usually by their parents. It made them needy, but seemingly not of me. It made me angry and I didn’t know how to deal with anger.

All I knew was I was back in the monkey cage with sticks being stuck through the bars. I am trying to learn that everyone gets angry, but they deal with it in different ways. That the best way to deal with it is to wait, to acknowledge it, but not to let it drive you and deal with it when you aren’t angry. Otherwise you end up like the man in Roger McGough poem, probably himself. He wrote that in the middle of an argument some woman had said to him something that was wrong. That shouting didn’t become him. I knew exactly how he felt when I read that, that she was wrong, he begged to differ; shouting did become him. And he became shouting. That’s what it feels like when you give in to it. Shouting and anger does become you. And they are all you become.

I’ve learned to stop the shouting part. I need to stop being driven by the anger until I can see a way of dealing with the thing that caused it. The immediate thing, naturally. I think it’s a bit late to deal with my father without an ouija board. Anger has not helped me. Several times anger has become me. Several times in my life I have become anger. I have not gained from it.

One day in the future

One day in the future I will remember the evening
Walking the river path when I could smell the winter ending
Me and your dogs; we could hear the birds
Starting to sing their evening songs again
The way they do when Spring first comes.
We saw the lights in the houses go on
From where we were, quiet on the edge of the wood,
Me and your dogs. We were late.
We’d found a secret river meadow so remote
That no footprints marked the mud smoothed by the floods
Then you texted: How long will you be?
Ten minutes. Five if we hurry. Is everything ok?
Everything was fine, you messaged me.
And all of us knew it was then, me and your dogs.
How long will we be now? A lifetime or so.
Then I can remember you again,
One day in the future.

Sometimes it hurts

I cycled to Beccles to get some Tonkinoise, a special varnish I like to use on exposed wood on boats because of what it doesn’t do. Chiefly, it doesn’t bubble up if water gets under it and the UV rays from the sun don’t flake it off. Why everyone doesn’t use it I don’t know, but they don’t and I do. I cycled because I needed the exercise, but as often happens around here, the roads don’t go quite where you think they might. The main road does, but I want to cycle on the A12 the way I want to be fourteen again; I don’t.

Without going into too much detail it was without doubt the most rubbish Saturday night I’ve had in at least a year, which was fitting as it was the anniversary of something that doesn’t matter. Still upset on Sunday I messaged a friend who’d just posted the most smokingly sultry picture I have ever seen of her on Facebook. I thought she showed great restraint when she simply typed that her husband could see her screen. Fittingly, after what seemed like weeks of sun, Sunday was a cold, cheerless day.

But the sun was back this morning, along with some surprise visitors and after they’d gone I and I’d done some stuff to try to earn a living I went to almost finish off the boat and put the varnish on. I’d bought a litre, no more, not least as that was over £40 on its own. It was just about enough to do everything I wanted to do and a bit spare. The rails, the toe-rail, the cockpit, the seats, the deck even is now drying out. The deck drank the Tonkinoise up as if it hadn’t been oiled since the boat was built in 1992; I think it probably hadn’t. I had to thin the liquid out with white spirit to get it to flow before the deck timbers just drank it up in one go. And then I fell off the ladder.

If I'd been using this ladder it wouldn't have happened. — If I’d been using this ladder it wouldn’t have happened.

Predictably, I was at deck level, so it was about eight feet to the ground. One unexpected benefit of these past five or so weeks of stretching and climbing and reaching is that I’m much stronger than I was before, so when I grabbed for the rail I’d just painted my arms held and I didn’t fall far. I slammed into the side of the boat instead, as well as the wooden ladder. I scraped a lot of skin off my right ribs and my left arm but I didn’t end-up on paralysed at the bottom of a ladder between two boats in an empty yard. Didn’t even swear. There isn’t really much point.

To cap the day off I’ve just walked into a cold shower thinking it was going to be hot and as I live on my own there isn’t anyone to make me a cup of tea and tell me it’ll be alright. Actually, that’s not true. As a Facebook message said, my friends love me, despite the fact that I ache everywhere above the waist from the fall. But sometimes, when you put some effort into something, it looks good in the end.

Once it's all dry it's going to look great. — Once it’s all dry it’s going to look great.

On the slips

After another six hours, there’s another coat of white above the waterline. Of all of it, painting the stern and rudder was the hardest part, not because it was particularly big but because the ground slopes away under the boat there on its trailer and there is what I think is called a negative sheer. At least, the line of the stern is at a fairly steep angle up and out from the waterline, giving less hull in the water and more overhang above it. In theory you get less drag and more boat. In practice it’s a pain to paint it left handed hanging on a rope with one foot in a tree and the other on the boat trailer.

But it’s done and I have to say it looks good. It really does. I gave up on the Mickey Mouse hanging off a rope nonsense and went and got my proper folding ladder, hooked that over the rudder and tied it off so it definitely wasn’t going anywhere. That worked brilliantly. This is what I like best about boats, I think, aside from the now suddenly stunning beauty of this one that’s even getting compliments from the guy who runs the yard.

“Beautiful. Black and white. That’s what I would have done.”

Keep it simple. It doesn’t need flash. It does need a cooker though. That and getting it in the water is the next project.

Back onboard

Well, not quite, but the end of the initial ‘getting the boat ready’ thing is definitely in sight.

I haven’t been able to do anything to the boat for about ten days but today was sunny and windy and ideal for drying paint. I was waiting for a phone call about a job so I thought instead of sitting indoors I’d go and do something useful instead. So I did.

All of the old red topsides are now buried underneath a coat of white paint. It needs another coat, but that’s why I bought the second can and it took one can plus five brush-loads to do both sides, so I’ve got enough paint. Which is good.

Even better is how it looks now. With a simple, austere black and white finish, the way I think boats ought to be, especially wooden boats, especially wooden boats with beautiful lines, especially wooden boats with beautiful lines and a Scandinavian lineage, I like to keep it simple and pure. And it looks great. So great that people are stopping in the yard and asking about it. One today estimated it cost me twice what I paid. I nearly asked him to make an offer, but I want to sail this firstIn fact,

I want to keep it. It feels like my boat. It was nice to get back to it again. I spent about five hours there today, too long, so that by the end, clearing up, I was grunting when I moved from using muscles I never normally use. I do my 10,000 steps a day thing, but it’s not the same at all. That’s the thing with wooden boats. You have to put the hours in, but the difference is unbelievable. Actually it’s not. The even better thing is being able to say “See that? I did that. Me.”

So I’ll be there tomorrow to finish the paint by putting another coat of white on and using up the last pint of anti-foul. It’s going to be a good summer. Good things are happening. And not just on the boat.

Cheat’s Bacon

I was told this recipe recently. Apparently (the word you use when you don’t want to keep saying ‘I was told’) it can be smoked or not smoked, as you wish, but you get sort-of bacon and you know what’s in it. Belly pork used to be really cheap. I think it depends if a TV show has used it recently.

So, bish, bash, bosh, me old china muckers, gertcha, or something.

Cheat’s Bacon

1kg pork belly

1kg salt

200g brown sugar

A plastic bucket

Take half the salt and put it in the bottom of the bucket. Rub the sugar into the pork. Put the pork on the salt. Pour the rest of the salt over the pork. Leave it for 24 hours. Then take it out, wash it in water and it is ready for use.

You can smoke it or slice it up and use it as bacon exactly as it is. Apparently.

Going to Russia

I’ve just spent four hours or so putting black anti-foul on the Folkboat Fern. I haven’t had time to do anything to her for six days and I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about it.

I ached so much last week from sanding that I really couldn’t do much more. I got all of it done apart from some bits I missed on the rails and the stern itself, because I didn’t bring my big ladder and I can’t reach where I need the sander from the ground. I started this the stupid way, the old way, with a heat gun and a scraper and it was hard, hard work. The power sander made things a lot easier, not to mention quicker.

Black - the proper colour for below the waterline. — Black – the proper colour for below the waterline.

Do you imagine it was easy?

It’s beginning to look like a manageable project, if the rain that’s started doesn’t wash all the anti-foul off again. But it might not be raining where the boat is, nine miles away from here. And it was drying quickly in the wind there anyway. It’s not raining much.

I bought enough sanding pads. I have the white yacht paint and probably enough for inside as well. I bought the brushes and the white spirit and the Tonkinoise and if somebody somehow ran out of time and couldn’t quite do what she’d said she was going to do and pick it up from the chandlery then it’s the last thing that needs to go on anyway, and she made it up to me somehow. But it’s still been quite hard work.

I had a friend whose family got hugely rich from wool. After they pretty much controlled the entire British woolen industry, sharing it and Halifax as a sort of feudal fiefdom with another family, my friend’s ancestor went to Russia to get cheaper wool. This was one of the reasons you don’t see a lot of sheep’s cheese in England. With no need for the large flocks they sent them to slaughter. Actions have consequences. Not being convinced he couldn’t get wool still cheaper elsewhere the wool baron, or at least High Sheriff as he’d become went on to Australia, where he was sure wool was even more of a bargain.

He got fabulously even richer. I remember my friend’s indignation when I complained about something being hard work.

“Do you imagine it was easy going to Russia? Well? Do you?”

The boat isn’t that hard work. It doesn’t get me seven hundred million pounds if and when I sell it either, unlike some concerns, but that isn’t really the point of this boat. I’ll sell it if someone gives me a good price for it but it feels like the kind of boat I could keep for the rest of my life, or until I can’t sail it, which given the state of my pension might as well be pretty much the same time.

Time seems to stop when I’m with this boat it. It’s not much like going to Russia, really.