Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson Page B

vocabulary, its nostrums and obscurities from which the vulgar are excluded, it is also a source of potency and seduction.
    George had known glamorous yacht skippers in the Caribbean. As he saw, there was always something hollow about their potency because everyone at sea, in one way or another, had run away to sea. The cool of a cool yacht skipper belonged more to the yacht than the skipper. Divorced from his craft, in all its senses, the sailor becomes a diminished man, his prop not there for his elbow to lean on.
    George knew all these things but was at times subject to them too. There can be few people in the world as capable as him: a natural athlete, a charming and funny man, an incomparable mimic, a gifted musician, a man who sticks to tasks and knows how to dig deep, who will go ten miles before you have asked him to go one. But alongside all that, his need to exert control over the boat and its inhabitants, particularly when tired, could be powerful. He would ask me, say, to lash a dinghy to the deck, come back when I had done it and kick it to show I had done it wrongly or badly. He would ask me to attach a line to a mooring buoy or a quayside without showing me how, and allow me to struggle before showing me the right way. Rarely would he accept that anything I had done was done right. Some of my children had left their beach bucketsand spades on the boat: they became somehow symbolic of my messiness and unsuitability to boat life, or my ‘guilt’, as he said one day, about leaving the children behind. In part, I felt, what mattered to him most was the boat, as a destination in itself, when what mattered to me was what the boat might do and where it might go. An air of frustration hung about him.
    I don’t wonder, because what I had asked him to do for me was not easy. It is a version of the old predicament for a boat owner and the skipper he employs. The boat owner knows what he wants to do and the skipper knows how to do it. Even if that relationship has a dose of resentment and difficulty built into it, it is straightforward enough compared with our situation. With George, not only was I his employer, but also his crew. I would tell him what I -and, even more, the director of the TV programme -would like to do and he would then tell me to do it. The poor man had to look both ways, listening to and instructing the same person. No wonder he felt taut.
    This difficulty was made worse by my own lackadaisical, freedom-searching, and non-mechanical frame of mind. The qualities I love in my son Ben - akind of disengaged ease about things - George found wildly frustrating in me. He dreamed, he often told me, of the two of us becoming such a good crew together that there would be no need to talk. The boat would simply happen. It would go on its way as sleekly and neatly as an Atlantic panther.
    In his eyes anyway, that never occurred. Although he did once say that maybe it was because he was refusing to let me grow out from under his shadow, George never felt that I could skipper the boat myself. I did! I learned, well enough, how to read the weather, how to set the sails, how to navigate, how to anchor and weigh anchor, how to make our way along a difficult shore, how to stick with it, how to take the
Auk
out into a wind-strewn sea, how to bring her home, how to choose shelter for her. I could look up and read from the rigging what every stay and halyard was doing. But George never thought I could! What a sadness that is: the dream we both had at the beginning of the year, of a deepening friendship, of a trunk full of intimacies, of us becoming bound together, that never really developed.
    Of course, he was right. If a halyard block broke in a storm, or the bilge pump blew; if the fuel supplyto the engine became clogged, or if we were being blown, with no power, on to a lee shore, embayed and unable to escape, with a frightened crew around me, then I would have been at a loss. I simply did not have the hours, the days