boats nearly always do. Robin Knox-Johnston, rounding Cape Horn, found himself engaged in a long conversation with his father-in-law, who was up in the crosstrees; Joshua Slocum had a ghostly pilot aboard; Naomi James came across an old friend who had stowed away in the chain locker. I was saddled with Commander King, the man who had taught me to handle the boat in Fowey. He kept on slamming the wheelhouse door behind me, and standing at my back. Every so often he coughed—a constrained, gentlemanly, naval cough that meant I was doing badly. Once, he pushed past me and went below.
“Just checking the bilges,” he said. “Something you should have been doing at least every hour in a sea like this. Never mind.”
I apologized out loud and kept on steering, leaving the bilges to the care of the Commander. Trying to rid myselfof the hallucination, I set to wondering if I felt seasick. I had never yet been seasick, because of some defect of sensitivity in my inner ear, but always half-expected to be. I ticked off my symptoms: fright, shiveriness, dry mouth, lack of sleep, an anxiety that seemed rooted in the bowels, but hardly amounted to a real case of seasickness. This playing at doctors-and-nurses seemed to work. I was no longer being harassed by the spick-and-span Commander King.
At seven o’clock I managed to coax the boat round the south side of Bardsey Island into Cardigan Bay. Shielded from the wind, the water here was like a ruffled lake in a civic park. I was able to set the autopilot, put on the kettle for morning coffee, smoke a pipe and sit at the chart table in fair comfort, reading the instructions for getting into the harbor at Pwllheli, while the radio over my head repeated the words
South Stack, South Stack
. It was clear that everyone thought the men on board must have been drowned long ago.
I’d sailed two thousand miles to reach the Isle of Man. Fowey was still four hundred miles off, down the Irish Sea and round Land’s End. Yet I felt that I’d arrived at the place where the voyage really began—this insular, enclosed world with its 1950s cars and 1930s trains, where you could still spend half-crowns and seven-and-sixpences, where the long days dragged, where butterflies flopped about the country lanes in droves, where the men went about in their old trousers, where strangers were watched from behind curtains, and the eggs were fresh and the boredom stifling. I was indignant when I was mistaken for a comeover, because this, surely, was exactly where I’d spent my childhood: the Island was Home with a capital
H
—the home I’d always been running away from.
The parsonage was our island. The house was surrounded by a high wild hedge of privet, nettle, holly and blackthorn. No one ever thought of trying to tutor it with shears, and the hedge grew as tall as the trees; every year it encroachedfarther into the garden, swallowing old herbaceous borders as it came. On windy days, the tumultuous hedge rolled and broke like the sea.
The invisible world beyond this hedge kept on changing: one year, there was a pallid brick council estate on the fringe of a city out there; the next, a Hampshire village with rustic thatch, an Oldest Inhabitant, and a Common of gorse and primroses, where you could find adders sinisterly coiled in the grass. But the hedge was the same hedge. It changed only with the weather. Sometimes there were whitecaps of honeysuckle on it; sometimes combers of bare twigs crackled in it like winter surf.
Although the architecture of the house had a protean habit of sprouting an extra bedroom or two, then suddenly contracting again, the house itself remained as fundamentally unvarying as the hedge. It had been furnished not by my parents but by some dreadful personages whom we called The Ancestors. The Ancestors were our board of guardians. They provided the books on our shelves—Baker’s
Sport in Bengal
, the
Royal Kalendar
for 1832,
Sermons
by The Revd. W. Dunsleigh, the 1908
“Just checking the bilges,” he said. “Something you should have been doing at least every hour in a sea like this. Never mind.”
I apologized out loud and kept on steering, leaving the bilges to the care of the Commander. Trying to rid myselfof the hallucination, I set to wondering if I felt seasick. I had never yet been seasick, because of some defect of sensitivity in my inner ear, but always half-expected to be. I ticked off my symptoms: fright, shiveriness, dry mouth, lack of sleep, an anxiety that seemed rooted in the bowels, but hardly amounted to a real case of seasickness. This playing at doctors-and-nurses seemed to work. I was no longer being harassed by the spick-and-span Commander King.
At seven o’clock I managed to coax the boat round the south side of Bardsey Island into Cardigan Bay. Shielded from the wind, the water here was like a ruffled lake in a civic park. I was able to set the autopilot, put on the kettle for morning coffee, smoke a pipe and sit at the chart table in fair comfort, reading the instructions for getting into the harbor at Pwllheli, while the radio over my head repeated the words
South Stack, South Stack
. It was clear that everyone thought the men on board must have been drowned long ago.
I’d sailed two thousand miles to reach the Isle of Man. Fowey was still four hundred miles off, down the Irish Sea and round Land’s End. Yet I felt that I’d arrived at the place where the voyage really began—this insular, enclosed world with its 1950s cars and 1930s trains, where you could still spend half-crowns and seven-and-sixpences, where the long days dragged, where butterflies flopped about the country lanes in droves, where the men went about in their old trousers, where strangers were watched from behind curtains, and the eggs were fresh and the boredom stifling. I was indignant when I was mistaken for a comeover, because this, surely, was exactly where I’d spent my childhood: the Island was Home with a capital
H
—the home I’d always been running away from.
The parsonage was our island. The house was surrounded by a high wild hedge of privet, nettle, holly and blackthorn. No one ever thought of trying to tutor it with shears, and the hedge grew as tall as the trees; every year it encroachedfarther into the garden, swallowing old herbaceous borders as it came. On windy days, the tumultuous hedge rolled and broke like the sea.
The invisible world beyond this hedge kept on changing: one year, there was a pallid brick council estate on the fringe of a city out there; the next, a Hampshire village with rustic thatch, an Oldest Inhabitant, and a Common of gorse and primroses, where you could find adders sinisterly coiled in the grass. But the hedge was the same hedge. It changed only with the weather. Sometimes there were whitecaps of honeysuckle on it; sometimes combers of bare twigs crackled in it like winter surf.
Although the architecture of the house had a protean habit of sprouting an extra bedroom or two, then suddenly contracting again, the house itself remained as fundamentally unvarying as the hedge. It had been furnished not by my parents but by some dreadful personages whom we called The Ancestors. The Ancestors were our board of guardians. They provided the books on our shelves—Baker’s
Sport in Bengal
, the
Royal Kalendar
for 1832,
Sermons
by The Revd. W. Dunsleigh, the 1908
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