On the island

I was born and brought up in Essex, which always gives people the wrong idea. My Essex is coastal, a mixture of marshland and arable on the gentlest of river valleys. The river itself is wide, muddy and powerfully tidal. On its far side, in the deep channel, timber ships come and go just as they did when I was a child. Over the rest of its breadth, up to seven rows of yachts are moored downriver for as far as the eye can see, swinging round with each change in the tide.

Childhood walks would invariably end up along the sea wall, with fields on one side and on the other the river. If the tide was low, great cracked slabs of seaweed-covered mud flat would be exposed. If the tide was up, the limpid water would wash up against the sea defences, and the smaller sailing boats that infest the river would tack right up to the sea wall.

The curses of a helmsmen berating the crew would sometimes erupt just below you as you walked the sea wall path, the boat having arrived through the slow swell almost without a whisper. Then the whipsnap and crash of the boat going about, the straining and singing of the ropes as the wind filled the sail again, and sometimes, with the wind up, the low hum of a fast dinghy just beginning to plane on a good reach.

There aren’t many loud sounds on the river. There is the occasional klaxon wail creeping up and down the river valley. It sounds like an air-raid siren but in fact it calls the timbermen back off shore leave. The only other noises are the explosions that periodically boom across the water.

On summer weekends or Wednesday nights it’s almost certainly the cannons that are used by the yacht clubs to mark the start and finish of races. When out on the water, race starts largely consist of timing the cannon perfectly. The helm waits for the five minute gun with forefinger over stopwatch, but it’s the crew’s job to keep an eye on the top of the clubhouse for the tell-tale puff of smoke. It’s more accurate to call the gun from the smoke than wait for the sound to roll across the water to the far bank.

But there are still other occasions when larger, deeper booms echo across from the other side of the river. That, as all locals know, is where the Ministry of Defence still test explosives on one of the isolated river islands. I’ve never been on this island, but, as my Dad reminisced over a beer at the weekend, he has.

In the mid-sixties, he was racing Dragons; long, elegant wooden yachts with just a hint of the Viking about them. They managed to run this beautiful creature aground trying, as river racers always do, to steal extra yards in the slack water near the bank. Someone must have consulted the tide tables, because they quickly calculated that it would be eleven at night before the tide to rise enough to float them off the mud. There was nothing for it but to wait. They were, they realised, on the island owned and maintained by the MoD.

The group of them went ashore and, surprised not to be challenged, they made their way inland to the single, small village. There, on the green outside the solitary pub, the village was playing cricket. They filed past, meriting hardly a sidelong glance from the fielders. Inside the pub, fortified with the necessary pint, they enquired after food to keep them going through the evening.

The pub didn’t serve food, but the old boy nursing his half in the corner did, nipping home and returning with a loaf turned into corned beef sandwiches for them. I didn't need to confirm that he was paid in beer not cash.

I think the cricket match must have ended, because the next detail is that someone turned up in the pub with an accordian and started playing. The way my Dad described it, it must have been some kind of reel. The old boy got up and started dancing. He was, my Dad noted, wearing clogs.

Later, they got some of his story. He was eighty years old, give or take, and had lived on the island for the last sixty-six of those. At age fourteen, he and his brother had been orphaned, and he had been sent here to be looked after. His brother had been sent to a different family on the mainland.

What had happened to the brother? Oh, the old boy was told he lived there -- indicating, back across the water, my home town. Going by name and age, my Dad realised the brother was the retired head of one of the town boatyards, one of the town names. The two brothers hadn’t met since being orphaned, sixty-six years ago.

Sixty-six years and the width of the river.

My Dad glossed over the details of the night sail back with the words ‘pretty exciting’. Racing yachts are not made to be sailed at night, but the journey was short, not much more than a couple of miles. The water always seems flatter, faster, more malicious at night. But they were all good sailors, and none got hurt.

The town lights would have looked sensational, a shimmering mirage, when approached in dark silence. At night, down on the water, they seem just beyond grasp, unreachably distant, like the past itself.

I don’t usually think of my home town in this way, because, usually, this isn’t how it feels to me. I can recognise it here, but it feels alien, somewhere I know implicitly, but have never visited.