A Floating Home Part 13

Life moves slowly in Pin Mill. If going by steamer to Ipswich or Harwich one is expected to be seated in the ferry-boat, which goes out to meet the steamer, at least ten minutes before she starts. When we went to Ipswich one day the ferry-man, having stowed us and the other pa.s.sengers in the boat, left us and returned fifty yards up the hard to resume varnis.h.i.+ng a boat. When we did start it was certainly five minutes earlier than necessary, and we had not got more than half-way out when I saw a look of annoyance come into the ferry-man's face.

'There yaou are,' he said angrily, jerking his hand towards some figures on the sh.o.r.e; 'them people tould me they wanted to go to Ipswich, and they came daown half an hour agoo, and they 'adn't got nawthen to do, only wait, and they goo off for a walk or suthen!'

Another day the children's gramophone nearly caused a fire on board to be more serious than it need have been, for it prevented us from hearing the cries for help which Louisa uttered while she struggled with an outbreak in the forecastle. We had bought a new cooking-stove with a patent automatic oil feed. We ought to have understood when buying it that it would be unsuitable because it had to be kept upright. The first time it was used while we were under way was one day in Harwich Harbour. We had been running, and had just hauled our wind to stand up the Orwell. Luncheon was almost ready. The _Ark Royal_ was heeling a little to a fine topsail breeze, and was spanking along to a selection from the 'Mikado,' when suddenly I saw some smoke issuing from the forehatch. I sent one of the boys forward to see what was happening, and he bellowed back that the forecastle was on fire.

The Mate took the wheel, and I rushed forward in time to see Louisa, like a pantomime demon, pop up through the forehatch in a cloud of smoke. We attacked the fire from aft, and a few buckets of water and some damp sacking put it out.

In September we returned to Newcliff, went into our old berth in the creek, and once more spent Christmas on board.

Soon afterwards the Mate was taken mysteriously ill. The doctor asked for another opinion, and a specialist came from London. But for the fact of our isolation on board s.h.i.+p the diagnosis would instantly have been typhoid. But the next two days, we were told, would settle the question.

It was typhoid.

The s.h.i.+p now became a hospital, with a special bed sent down from London and two nurses. The saloon was emptied of everything save what the nurses wanted, and the long struggle began.

It was like all other serious illnesses in any other home--the children sent away, the pitiful lies that affection devises, the a.s.sumed bravery, the broken nights, the anxious talks with the nurses or doctor, and (the background of it all) the fever chart. I wonder whether any skipper of a s.h.i.+p ever watched his positions on a chart with such feelings as I had then.

The crisis came and pa.s.sed, but 'When will she be out of danger?' was asked secretly for many days before a confident answer came. How far these good nurses perjured themselves I do not know. Often they made me go to London, but the journey home was torture. Once, returning in the dark, I saw from the train that there was no light in the saloon.

The Mate, as it turned out, was only sleeping. But afterwards a light was always placed on deck to show me that all was well.

At last the children were allowed to come and look fearfully through the windows, and later to speak a few words through them. And then step by step the Mate grew stronger until at last she walked on deck, and we dressed the s.h.i.+p in her honour, and she went away on a long convalescence.

When she came back well and strong I had a surprise for her. She had always been rather afraid of the great fifty-foot sprit which used to sway in a heavy threatening way over our heads when the barge rolled in a cross sea. I had therefore sold the mainsail, sprit, topsail, and mizzen, bought a large yacht's mainsail second-hand, and had it made into a new mainsail and topsail. I had also bought an eight tonner's mainsail, which I rigged as a larger mizzen. The whole transaction from first to last cost about eight pounds.

What we really needed most was a motor-launch to give the barge steerage way in calms, to help her up creeks, or for going on sh.o.r.e.

With a slow large craft it generally happens that one has to anchor a long way off the landing-place, because the smaller craft are always near the hard; and in bad weather this means heavy work. We bought a book on internal combustion engines, but it did not prevent us from buying an engine that did not generally achieve internal combustion.

When the next August holidays came we were delayed in starting for our usual cruise because the motor-boat had not been delivered. We stood over her till she was ready, and then went for a trial trip, during which she emitted the most distressing noises we had ever heard.

However, we could wait no longer, and took her in tow behind the _Ark Royal_.

The first night of the cruise we lay off Southend. The weather, which had been bad, became worse; the wind backed with vicious determination at low water; and by ten o'clock it was blowing a gale. Southend is an exposed anchorage, and we foresaw that we should have some anxious hours as the tide rose. We were close to the pier, where there were five other barges, whose anchors lay round about us sticking up out of the hard sand, and promising us destruction if we should sit on one of them.

We laid out another anchor, forcing it well into the sand, and by eleven o'clock the _Ark Royal_ was afloat. It was a wild night indeed; the barge wallowed, and the motor-boat jerked about on the rollers, s.n.a.t.c.hed and snubbed at her painter, while the spray was cut off from the tops of the waves as though by a knife and flung into her.

I was on deck all night. The gale was blowing its worst about two o'clock in the morning at high water. I could have sworn that the other barges had driven nearer to the _Ark Royal_, so close did their flickering lights seem to us, till I checked our position by the marks I had taken and by the anchor buoys of the barges, and made sure that none of us was dragging. On board each of the barges I could discern a dim watching figure. What an incredible waste of riven water as I looked over the plunging bows of the _Ark Royal_! The sea was like a snow-drift, and across this bleak waste the wind roared unresisted and tossed the spray even on to the deck of the _Ark Royal_. I was much occupied with the thought of a humiliating wreck on a lee sh.o.r.e, as I had little hope of being able to claw off the land if we did begin to drive. And yet I do not think there was a moment when I would have admitted that I had chosen a wrong way of living to be here with my family instead of in a house on the land. Every moment was enriched by an exhilaration that conquered other feelings, a kind of zest in defiance.

The wind is a grand enemy. He gives you his warnings fairly, and those who are not careless have generally time to cut and run if they are only coasting. In this storm, for instance, no one could have mistaken the signs. The gla.s.s had fallen rapidly, and a 'mizzle' of rain had been followed by a downpour; and all the time the wind had been flying round against the sun. The gla.s.s fell still more during the first four hours of the gale, then it suddenly leaped upwards, and the wind moderated or 'sobbed,' as the fishermen say, only to be followed by a harder blow than ever--a blow in which the squalls moved at over sixty miles an hour and followed one another in rapid succession, showing that the gale was still young.

There is nothing that relates the dweller at home so intimately to the business of the wider waters as to lie at the mouth of a great estuary. Here were steamers from the ends of the world slogging across the snowdrift, their masthead lights moving steadily like major planets across the sky. Some, perhaps, had pa.s.sed through the very region in which this storm had been born. No yachtsman who studies the weather can think of a gale as an accident of the British Isles; he sees in imagination a tiny cyclone created as a whirlwind somewhere, it may be, in six to eight degrees north lat.i.tude. In the desert of the Atlantic, in calm and heat, with the sun nearly overhead, a tiny column of air ascends and cooler air rushes in to replace it. The cyclone is born. Perhaps it is not a hundred yards across, but as it goes revolving on its journey of thousands of miles it draws in the air all round it as a s...o...b..ll gathers snow. Westward and north-westward it travels to the West Indies, turning on its axis against the hands of a watch, unlike the cyclone born south of the equator, which revolves the other way. The wind does not blow accurately around the centre, but curves inwards spirally, so that in the northern hemisphere, when you stand face to wind, the centre of the storm is always from eight to twelve points to the right.

When once you understand this rotatory and spiral movement of the wind you cannot listen to the roar of a gale without thinking of ocean-going sailing s.h.i.+ps fleeing from the deadly centre. You think of the cyclone touching the West Indies: one rim on the islands, the palm-trees staggering at the a.s.sault; the other rim on the open ocean, a s.h.i.+p laid over by the blast, the crew, clinging to the yards, fighting to get the maddened canvas under control before it is too late. The master of that s.h.i.+p had had the warning of the swell which is the gentle forerunner of the storm, but perhaps he carried on too long. Now, under heavily reefed canvas, or perhaps under bare poles, he races from the deadly centre of the storm.

From the West Indies the storm curves to the northward and north-eastward, still growing in size, till it may have a diameter of even a thousand miles. Along the Gulf Stream it comes, conveying within its frame that mysterious core which no one in a sailing s.h.i.+p ever wishes to see--a central patch, it is said, of unnatural calm surrounded by squalls from every point of the compa.s.s, a patch where the sea is piled up into a pyramid, untrue, treacherous, and overwhelming. The cyclone bursts later into that tract of dripping fog where the Gulf Stream meets her frigid sister from the north; and when it reaches us in England it is sometimes huge and harmless, but sometimes it has stored its strength and blares across a comparatively narrow belt with the power of a hurricane. And it comes in various guises, in pale bright skies, or wreathed in films of scud, or in rolling hard-edged clouds of inky darkness, or behind a tormented veil of rain.

About three o'clock in the morning I went below to drink some tea and to smoke. When I returned the motor-boat was gone. The frayed painter, hanging from the stern of the _Ark Royal_, told me what had happened.

Our brand-new uninsured motor-boat, which we never ought to have bought! I knew that if she had reached the stone-faced seawall or one of the breakwaters there was little hope for her.

As the tide fell I went off in the dinghy in search of her.

Fortunately, I found her in the hands of two men from the gasworks, who had seen her coming ash.o.r.e and had waded out to meet her. They had pushed her clear of a breakwater, and were standing in the rollers holding her head to sea at the foot of the sea-wall.

As the tide fell farther we walked her out gradually to the _Ark Royal_, and I settled the question of salvage by paying a couple of pounds. Even c.o.c.kney Smith could not have accused the gas-workers of a 'salvage job' in the circ.u.mstances, though no doubt he would have pointed out that they were gas-workers and not sailormen.

Our cruise of that summer was ordered by the necessity of sailing continually from one port where there was a motor engineer to another port where there was another engineer. The children used to take the metal seals off the petrol cans and hang them on the engine as medals, in numbers according to the merit of its performance. If the engine began to knock, for instance, a medal would be forfeited--to be restored if the knocking stopped. They enjoyed the vagaries of the engine; and loved it in secret even when it stopped work altogether and had lost all its decorations. They christened the motor-boat _Perhaps_.

CHAPTER XIX

'The stormy evening closes now in vain, Loud wails the wind and beats the driving rain, While here in sheltered house, With fire-y painted walls, I hear the wind abroad, I hear the calling squalls-- "Blow, blow!" I cry; "you burst your cheeks in vain!

Blow, blow!" I cry; "my love is home again!"'

After the Mate's illness an unreasoning dread of the place where she had lain ill conquered me, and I put away all idea of returning there for the winter. Fortunately, a move was easy enough. If we had been living in a house it would have been otherwise, but a 'house removal'

for us meant no more than weighing anchor and going to a new spot of our choice. Our choice was conditioned, first, by the necessity of my going to London daily; and, secondly, by the need of providing for our girl's education, who was now of school-going age.

One anchorage--now known to us as the Happy Haven--attracted us beyond all others. We had found it under stress of weather during one of our Ess.e.x cruises, and had ever since thought of it with affection for the quiet peace of the tidal creek between its gra.s.sy banks and for the welcome we had received from the family which lives at the head of that creek and presides over its amenities.

As the autumn deepened it became urgently necessary to decide upon our winter quarters, but the Mate had received no answer to a letter in which she had asked the Lady at the Happy Haven whether means of education for Margaret could be found thereabouts. One day, when we had almost despaired of an answer, I met the father of the family at the Happy Haven unexpectedly in London. His wife, he said, had been travelling; we must write again. And soon an answer came that solved our difficulties. There was no school to give such an education as we wanted, but Margaret could be taught with the family in the house at the head of the Happy Haven. Within a few days we sailed to the Happy Haven, and there we have since lived and hope long to live.

To reach our port there are but two ways, one by water and one by land. Are you coming by water? Then you must come in from the sea and take the young flood up the river past the low-lying islands; if the wind be foul you will have to wait for water according to your draught. With a fair wind come straight on past the village and the wood off which the smacks lie, and past the church tower to the south.

When abreast the creek leading to the red-tiled farmhouse on the starboard hand you will find the best water in the middle.

Keep close to the point on the north side, and from there steer straight for the three great poplars you will see ahead until you reach another church among the trees on the north side. Then keep the hut on the point just open of the old water-mill.

It is quite easy. But long before you come to the Happy Haven our mahogany-faced old pilot, with a walk like a penguin, a parson's hat tied under his chin with a piece of tarred string, a red jumper, and yellow fearnought trousers, will 'board you,' if you want him, and berth you. Two s.h.i.+llings is his charge.

But suppose you come by land. For two s.h.i.+llings you can be driven from the railway station out through the old market town until you come to an avenue of trees and a rookery. There you must turn off the public road into a private road, and drive under the great trees which meet above, and down a lane of thorns until, suddenly turning a corner, you will drive alongside the river to the gra.s.sy quay where the _Ark Royal_ is lying.

You can go no farther, for the road ends there.

After all, you may say, there is not much to see. Only an old water-mill and three barges alongside it; the mill-house, and above it the mill-head spreading wide; our friend's house among the poplars; on the opposite sh.o.r.e a farmhouse where a barge is loading hay; under the sea-walls on both sides fields dotted with cattle and white gulls; an unbroken vault of sky; and the s.h.i.+ning creek stretching away into the ultimate green of flat pasture lands. Perhaps a red-sailed barge is coming up the river; the 'tuke,' or redshanks, are giving warning of her approach; and a thousand dunlin keep settling on the brown mud, rising to show off all together in a flash that they are snow white underneath.

A cable's length from the _Ark Royal_ is a small head of water held up by a sea-wall and a sluice-gate, and from it, meandering down past the s.h.i.+p into the gut, is a narrow course worn by the water. If you happen to come at the right moment, two families of children in bathing costumes--ours and the children from the house among the poplars--will be taking turns at packing themselves into a large bath. Someone lifts the gate, and the bath in a torrent of foamy water 'chutes' down the channel into the gut or is capsized on the way.

Such is a brief description of how to arrive at the Happy Haven, and what there is to see there. But wild tugs with steel hawsers will not drag the name from me. Those who want to live in floating homes will search far to find a better berth.

We have only one very near neighbour, an ex-barge skipper. Like the bargee of whom Stevenson wrote, there seems to be no reason why he should not live for ever. He has seen the best part of eighty years, and is still hearty and quite as active as he need be. He has achieved an appearance barely suitable to old age, and has stopped there. He spends many hours each day in thought. Like us, he pays no rent, rates, or taxes, for he lives in a small and old yacht. And though his means of living are a mystery he lives well.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BATHING IN THE SLUICE AT THE _ARK ROYAL'S_ HEADQUARTERS]

Twice to our knowledge he has taken a party for a short cruise in the yacht, but beyond this we have never known him earn a penny. And yet if a new mast be wanted, or new iron work, or paint, or varnish, or a rope for fitting out, or a new sail, he buys it. Rumour says he has been a notable smuggler, and there are some that say he has friends who are still free traders. Others believe that he has a share in a barge. But no one knows.

Always healthy, he observes none of the laws of health. It is true he sleeps nine hours every night, but that is in a cabin without ventilation. On a fine summer's morning most people, when they get up, begin to do something, even though it be unimportant. Not so our friend. He starts the day--breaking, as usual, some rule of health--by lighting his pipe. Then, seating himself comfortably in the open, he airs himself for a long time. While the airing is going on he surveys the sky many times, rotating slowly till he has examined all points of the compa.s.s. If anyone be present, he will give his considered verdict on the prospects of the weather for the day.

When that problem has been solved he will chop a few sticks and remark that he must 'see about his kittle.' Soon afterwards smoke will issue from the chimney of his boat, and for the next hour he will not be visible. After that some cleaning operations--not personal--will go on in the c.o.c.kpit for possibly another hour. Then he may sc.r.a.pe a spar or varnish one, or do a bit of painting. If it be hot he will probably rig an awning, and sit beneath it st.i.tching at an old sail; if it be cold he will rig up a windscreen, and sit behind that.

A couple of hours before high water the pilot, also an ex-barge skipper, arrives to see what barges are coming up, and then he and our friend will be seen side by side discussing things connected with the sea. The approaching barges have to be watched until recognized, and again watched until they are safely berthed. From this important but unpaid labour they know no remission during the proper hours.