Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Stretched barefoot on the starboard hand settee, George dozed and read and dozed again. Briquettes of charcoal whispered in the brassbound stove on the bulkhead; the fenders belched and sighed as the gale shunted the boats around against the quay. Away from the ancestors, away from the bureau drawers full of his father’s papers and from the faint, mothball smell of his mother’s widowed life, George was happily far out at sea. Captains kept him company: he dipped into Captain Slocum, he followed Captain Cook into the Pacific, he listened to the wind in his own rigging as Captain McWhirr drove stolidly for the eye of the typhoon. He re-read The Riddle of the Sands for the first time since he was thirteen. Galebound himself, all George required of a book was that it had the sea in it, and he read these voyages as impatiently as if they were thrillers. They piled up in the saloon, their pages splayed on the teak floor. When George slept in the boat he was a crucial eighteen inches — a whole world — away from Cornwall; when he dreamed, as he did almost continuously, the horizon was always empty and enormous.

It wasn’t the first time that he’d run away to sea. George was an old hand at this game. In May of ’43, when he’d been sitting his exams for School Cert, he had prayed for the war to go on long enough for him to get into the Navy. He grew more anxious at each new advance of the Allies. There was another, undeclared war on then, between Mr Churchill and G. P. N. Grey’s first gold stripe. It was a close-run thing between George and Admiral Doenitz as to who was keenest to keep the U-Boat fleet on station in the Atlantic. All George wanted was the view from the bridge of some dumpy little corvette on convoy duty, with the sea high and the sound of the engines broken by the monotonous pinging of the Asdic. He didn’t want to kill anyone — he hated the messing about with—303 rifles and Bren guns that went on every Saturday morning in the school O.T.C.. He just ached to take ship.

His father, of course, wanted George to go into the Army. Denys Ferguson Grey had spent the Great War as a chaplain in Poperinghe, and he still enjoyed being called “Padre” by his more military parishioners. He had never learned to swim; though rather a fat man, he had the kind of weighty bulk that looked as if it was designed to sink. You only had to see him in a bathing suit to imagine him going straight down in a stream of bubbles. Whenever George thought of the sea, it seemed to him a kindly place mainly because he imagined himself floating away on it leaving his unbuoyant father stranded on the beach.

On summer holidays, first in Dawlish, then in Ilfracombe, Mr Grey led his family to this dangerous element like Moses going at the head of the Israelites on their passage through the wilderness. In his old school boater and black and burgundy striped swimming costume, he made strangers look up from their deck chairs and snigger. He always carried an upended prawn net like an episcopal staff. George’s mother walked six paces behind him with the picnic hamper (an aeon later, in Aden, George realized that his mother was a model Arab wife); George himself skulked twenty, thirty, forty yards behind, and did his best to announce to the world that he was in no way related to the odd couple ahead. Hands deep in the pockets of his long short trousers, he put on his Edward G. Robinson scowl, kicked moodily at the sand and kept his eyes on the horizon, where colliers and cruise liners left their smoky prints upon the sky.

“Oh, do buck up, old boy, for heaven’s sake! Stop loitering!” his father shouted, and George, aged eleven, would slowly turn his head and peer behind him, searching the beach for the truant child of the fat man in the straw hat.

Mr Grey had no more liking for the sea than he had for charabancs, garlic or flappers. He found it disorderly and vulgar. But year after year he visited it — in much the same spirit as he visited the sick; a regrettable duty whose chief merit was that it chastened the soul. When he retired to the seaside, and not just to the seaside but to a house called Thalassa no less, he must, George thought, have been carrying his holiday principle to its logical, dutiful conclusion.

Now he remembered his father bending shortsightedly over a rockpool. Mr Grey was parting the oarweed with the cane of the prawn net. “Blenny,” he said. Then, “Starfish”. Then, “Anemone”. It was as if by naming each sea animal he could rob it of further interest. When the oarweed closed back on the pool, it was like the curtain coming down at the end of a play; the story was over, it was time to go home.

On the cliff path back to the hotel, his father took the same melancholy pleasure in pointing out the fossils embedded in the soft grey limestone. Every few yards he would tap the rock with the prawn net and say “Hmm? Hmm? What do you make of that?”

“Ammonite,” George said, and the tribe of three was allowed to move on a little further up the cliff. The handle of the net rattled on the rock again. “Trilobites,” George said; but his father had found the flaky remains of yet another prehistoric something.

“Old bullets,” George said and giggled, hoping to make his mother giggle too. “Oliver Cromwell’s toenails.”

“Lipsticks!” his mother said, and laughed at herself for daring to say such a thing.

“Belemnite guards, old boy, belemnite guards.” His father gave a weary sniff. There was so much silliness around in the world today; was there, the sniff asked, any need to add to it?

Seven years later, George got away to sea. At least, he had got as far as the requisitioned Butlin’s holiday camp at Pwllheli, where he apprenticed himself to Commander Prynne and had already got drunk, twice. He was both on the run from his father and trying to beat his father at his father’s own game. All through his childhood he’d been licked hollow by his father — at fossils, at names of the English Kings and Queens, at Greek mythology and the county cricket scores. (Denys Grey was solid for Worcestershire, so George, who hated cricket, was credited with a passionate loyalty to the fortunes of Surrey, the one county for which his father expressed complete contempt and which he always referred to as “Surburbery”.) After each tea-table defeat, his father would put on his most polite and inquiring voice to ask: “I do sometimes wonder, old boy, if they teach you anything at all, nowadays, at public school?”

Well, George was learning a thing or two at Pwllheli. His father could bloody well keep Harold Larwood and the belemnite guards; for George now had cocked hats, starsights, distances-off, bowlines and tidal streams. On his first weekend leave he came back to the Rectory with his new sextant, Tyrrell’s Principles of Marine Navigation and Volume 3 of the Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables .

On Saturday morning George set out his books conspicuously on the dining table. His father watched him from over the top of The Times . “Swotting?” He let out a little whistle of disdain. If you had to swot on a Saturday, you must be a pretty dim bunny, by his father’s lights.

“We’ve got a Nav. test next week.”

“I suppose it’s all done by numbers nowadays, is it? Maths was never my strong point.” His father went back to his paper.

“You have to get into the top five to make the Nav. Officers’ course. Otherwise it’ll just be Deck for me.”

“The Whitaker boy … what’sisname?”

“Nick?”

“Yes. He’s doing awfully well. In North Africa, now. With Monty. His father says he’s up for his third pip.”

At Matins on Sunday, George’s father preached on a text from Ephesians. “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.” George sat with his mother in the seventh pew from the front.