The Tadorna Days – Part Nine

Tags

boats, Grove Ferry, Kent, Memoir, memories, sea stories, serial

Chapter 9 – A Trip to the Bay

In which Tadorna and Peggy go to sea…

Midsummer’s eve, that year, was dull and damp. We bustled about on the landing-stage with the gear, amid the deep earthy scents of the grasses and the damp wooden smell of wet decking. The air in the cockpit was clammy under the musty hood, though it would soon be cleared by Dad’s cigarette smoke, or the warm gassy air from the cooker when we boiled the kettle.

There was a blue haze on the trees across the river, with a grey backdrop, still as still could be. Dark alders and pale grey willows drooped over the green and silver surface, with nodding moorhens silent under the bank edges. All the colours were muted, even the bright fenders and ensigns. There were drips off the pulpit rails, and the swallows had all gone home.

We were loading up for a weekend on the river, intending to spend the night at Pluck’s Gutter, and then take the early tide down to the estuary. Our neighbouring boat club at Sandwich had arranged a picnic on the beach at Sandwich Bay, and the Grove club were invited to join in. Only Peggy and Tadorna were going down. It was quite possible to cruise the whole way to the Bay and back in a single day, given an early start and a favourable tide, but we found it less exhausting to take a flying start from Pluck’s Gutter.

Under the small sycamore, Frank and Rene were busy loading Peggy. Soon we pulled out of the moorings and cruised off downstream with the evening ebb, a flotilla of two, heading for Pluck’s Gutter.

The rain had stopped, and I sat on the cool bow on a plastic bag as we slipped out among the fields, past the curious little row of poplars below Grove, past the old boathouse, on and on, the river becoming imperceptibly wider, reach by reach.

Down among the green fields and the dark hawthorns we sailed until we came to the place known to us as Blood Point. It was a deep V-shaped bend in the river, with a high mounded bank on the promontory, a slightly enclosed and uncomfortable place. Rene always said it was the site of a battle with the Vikings, and the mound the burial place of the many bodies. But since the spot was in the middle of the old Wantsum Channel and was probably under the sea at the time, it seemed unlikely to be true.

On and on across the flat fields we went with the bleating sheep watching from the banks, standing and staring, until we passed the grey building of the pumping-station marking the joining place of the Wantsum, and came in sight of Pluck’s Gutter.

It was a miserable evening as we made fast the boats in our old place by the Dunlin. The hoods were closed up straight away against the damp, and we retired to the cabins for supper. Mournfully the kettle whistled on the gas, steaming up the windows and bringing little droplets of condensation onto the cabin ceiling. It was hot and humid inside as we ate. As darkness began to fall we emerged, red in the face and sticky, and shambled off to the Dog and Duck with Frank and Rene.

It had seemed a very romantic idea to sleep out on the boat on midsummer’s night. But the short night was lengthened by dreary clouds closing in early. When I awoke the next morning it was scarcely light. There was nothing left of the bright glow I remembered the last time we stayed at Pluck’s Gutter, in May. No hawthorn perfume. This time it was just meadowsweet and damp, damp, damp.

I lay and listened to the rain, soft and pleasant, pattering on the water, on the cabin roof, on the hood, each surface with its own tone. I could hear the flutter of birds’ wings in the reeds, and hollow plops in the water; and the sinister patter of rats’ feet, echoing on wood – on the Dunlin’s deck, perhaps, or even along our own gunwale, not inches from our heads. I was worried by the presence of rats; I saw them sometimes at Grove, scurrying furtively under the landing-stages, to the dark places. I lay awake a long time, listening, and then dozed off again. At half-past six Mum’s alarm went off.

Just after seven, as we left the moorings, a creamy glow showed through the clouds. The rain was over and the damp stillness descended again, warmly. Peggy and Tadorna sailed off, out across the marshes, the river’s course running like a gutter down the middle of the old Wantsum Channel, all that remained of that broad seaway. It was still tidal though, and the drop from high to low water increased downstream, as did the proportion of salt water, and the character of the river changed slowly to match. Below Pluck’s Gutter, the riverside lands became clearly a drained coastal marsh. The river ran fairly straight, banked on both sides by great mud walls. In the distance the stark outline of the Ebbsfleet power station crept ever closer.

We made good time, and soon arrived at Minster Fields, a favourite picnic and rally site of the two boat clubs. The place was marked by a great line of pylons, taking the river in their stride; almost the only landmark in these empty reaches.

The Ebbsfleet power station was very near now. It was an amazing sight from the river. The concrete cooling towers rose up, steaming, hissing and pouring warm water back into the river, with the sinister hum of generators in the background. It was a weird place and none of us cared for it very much at close quarters. The towers were visible for miles around in this flat landscape. We were within earshot of the sea by now, a soft echo, though it could not be seen, and the salt tang on the air was clear and sharp above the strange steamy smells of the power station.

Although the sea was so close, there was still a long way to go to reach it. The Stour made a deep meandering loop down to Sandwich and back up to Ebbsfleet. The cause of this detour was a long shingle bank that settled across the old river mouth long ago, leaving only a narrow gap at Sandwich. The two ends of the loop came very close at Ebbsfleet, and there was once an attempt to make a cut through the bank to join them, but this was now closed off, and we had to follow the rambling river all the way down to Sandwich and back up through the salt marshes to arrive at the same point.

So we trudged on downriver. In front of us a square hill reared up out of the marshes; Richborough Castle, a Roman fortress and once an island in the Wantsum. It was another strange place with an eerie feel as Peggy and Tadorna cruised together along the short reach in its bulky shadow. It was full of the past, like so many places on the river, abandoned by the sea, left high and dry.

We all gave a cheer when the strange bridge at Sandwich came into sight – part medieval packhorse bridge, part modern. Going down to Sandwich always depended heavily on the state of the tides; at Grove, although the river was distinctly tidal, the drop to low water was only a couple of feet at most. The further you went upriver, the weaker the influence of the tides, until at Fordwich there was scarcely any upward flow at all. But downstream from Grove the river took on an ever more seaside and salty character until at Sandwich the difference between high and low tide was startling. At high tide a full river, grey-brown with silt, filled the banks to the brim, deep enough for a big yacht or even a small ship. And the boats moored at Sandwich were big – sea boats with a cluster of masts.

Beyond Sandwich we went soaring out into the salt flats, the sound and smell of the sea becoming stronger by the moment. As we passed the Sandwich boat club moorings, a little downriver from the town quay, some of their boats had already left for the bay, while others were preparing or just leaving. Tadorna and Peggy fell in among them, and we all went down in a convoy, laughing and waving.

We were regular visitors to the Sandwich club. It was always pleasant to wander down through their sprawling boatyard full of salt-encrusted new arrivals shored up on solid wooden props, of boats in all stages of refitting, and of weatherbeaten oldtimers, their hulls peeling and splitting, that would never be seaworthy again. It was a wide open poppy and mustard-blowing place, sandy and shingly, noticeably of the sea, not of the river, which was like a tidal creek at this level.

At low tide, the whole aspect of these salty downriver places was changed. The bridge at Sandwich, so lately up to its armpits in water, would be suddenly left with only its feet in the river, which shrank, in some places, to a narrow stream flowing unevenly through a gutter at the base of the mudbanks revealed by the water’s retreat. This was still wide enough for the likes of Tadorna to navigate. The boats at the quay would lie beached, settling unhappily at awkward angles on the pale mud, coated in a singular green slime of uncertain origin and heady smell.

When we arrived at last at Stonor Cut, where the river began to widen right out for the estuary, we were only yards from the point at the other end of the loop which we had passed earlier. From here downwards the river opened into a broad stretch of water, quite impressive at high tide, and, of course, a pathetic stream amid interminable mudbanks at low tide. The level could change quite quickly, and it was an intimidating place for a small boat. But at last the coastal marshes gave way to sand dunes, and, finally, to the sea.

We sailed down through the estuary and out at last into the water of Pegwell Bay, where we puttered around foolishly in the unaccustomed expanse, before running the boats ashore on Shellness.

It was odd to see Tadorna pulled up on the sand with waves running in behind her, among the other boats all stretched out like kites on the ends of their anchor ropes, all this with the background of the wide empty bay and the sea beyond. We all picnicked among the sand dunes and talked boats with the Sandwich contingent. Rene, as usual, managed to inspect every boat on the beach, and came back with a detailed report of other people’s good ideas.

At last the tide began to flow in once more and we were forced to begin the long journey back upriver to Grove Ferry. We pushed Tadorna back off the sands, and she bounced afloat again as we stowed the anchor. Janet and I paddled round with her and jumped aboard, dripping on the warm deck; then waving to our friends on the beach, we turned out into the bay again, looking for the river channel.

Peggy led the way looking superb – an elegant white boat surrounded by acres of gleaming water. The river-mouth was quite hard to identify from the seaward side and we followed the line of marker buoys carefully. As we ploughed along we suddenly heard the unmistakable slithering crunch of a boat running aground. It was a horrid sound. Frank and Rene were waving arms and boathooks indiscriminately, but to no avail. Peggy had run onto a sandbank. We slowed, turned and gingerly circled her. Whatever had brought Peggy to a halt didn’t stop Tadorna, her flat hull spattering and bumping on the wavelets. In the end we pulled poor Peggy off backwards; undignified but successful, and made our way cautiously back into the rivermouth.

So off we went on the rising tide, back between the great shelves of shining mud which smelt of salt and seaweed and sludge – quite different to the green river-scent at Grove Ferry – and headed for Sandwich. The river always seemed too big for us here. It was heavy and dangerous – scarcely the same river we pottered about on so carelessly upstream. It was good to be going back. Dad opened up the throttle and sent us roaring past the black hulk of a wreck beached on the mud, handsome even in its decay. Wrecks were not a happy sight, and we gladly left it in our wake.

 

Back at Grove Ferry, hours later, we swabbed and swept the sand and seaweed off the boat, souvenirs of a day at the seaside, and were grateful again for the meadowsweet and the moorhens, the quiet shade of the alders, and our safe, sheltered moorings.

 

Look out for the next chapter of The Tadorna Days in which we meet the sweeps and millers…

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The Tadorna Days – Part 8

Tags

boats, Grove Ferry, Happiness, Kent, Memoir, memories

Chapter 8 – All the Way to Fordwich

In which we explore the river upstream to its navigable limit…

It takes only a cool wind to empty the moorings in early summer, and sure enough there was no-one about as we left the landing-stage. Slowly along the moorings we went, Tadorna trembling with vibrations from the engine. Dad throttled back as we cleared the concrete arches of the white bridge with a foot to spare, and we sailed out into the empty marshes once again. To an observer on the bank I could imagine how it looked – the fresh blue and white boat, butting through the ripples, nippy wind tugging at pennant and ensign; us, already pink-faced, carried with her, and a narrow white wake in tow beside the blue dinghy, with its nose up, following behind. But there was no-one to see us, and we chugged off all the long rambling way upriver.

It was the sort of day when the sunshine comes and goes with the clouds, shadows lost and found, colours bright and dull by turns. The wind had come in from the sea, salt tang intact, but mixing with the river-scents of broken grass stems, late hawthorn and half-dried mud, and, for us, warm varnish and fuel oil.

A mile or so upstream we passed Stodmarsh, now a national nature reserve. It was invisible from the river, but from up on the bank you could see right across the reed-beds, acres and acres of them stretching away. Little streams ran through and there were dark, dense thickets and big shallow lakes – the banks crowded with waterplants – flooded hollows, scrubby hawthorns, and reeds, reeds, reeds. The whole place teemed with wildlife.

The thickets beyond Stodmarsh were tossing in the breeze. This was one of the few places on the river where trees overhung enough to make shade, and it had a private character all its own. Beyond the thicket reach the river made a deep V skirting a wet meadow where the cattle fed, sometimes sunk up to their knees among the tussocks.

On the other bank the spoilheaps of Chislet Colliery, part of the old Kent coalfield, were piled high, the oldest ones grown over with little birches. The old tip by the mine was white with oxeye daisies. The mine buildings themselves were graceless, all hard squareness, industrial grey, with steel cables and corrugated iron. And yet they scarcely made a dent in the beauty of the river – given half a chance the creeping grasses would take it all back, cover it in, rusty cables, rattling coal trucks, spoilheaps and all. The spoil was carried from the mine to the tip across the river by a tall chute with a chuntering conveyor belt. As we sailed under the chute the dull underground rumble of machinery was just detectable. Otherwise there was no sign of life.

The mine was a landmark to us, and, despite its lack of beauty, it had changed the face of the valley in a most remarkable way: the underground workings had caused the land to subside in places, and the result was a set of lakes. The Stodmarsh lagoons were part of these.

After the chute, the river curved round by a stream outlet, and settled into a long, straight reach, with the tips towering on one side, the other bank low, willow-clad, the margin of a wet field where wading-birds piped enticingly, and Tadorna’s namesakes, the shelducks, popped their heads up over the rush tussocks to keep an eye on the boat. The marshy field became wetter and wetter until it gave way to open water, scarcely visible from the boat, and wildly vegetated, until suddenly the bank fell away, and there was the lake. Broad and shallow it stretched away, with islands of reeds. Sometimes in summer it was full of swans, the feathers from their preenings spread all over the surface.

It was unusual among the lakes and gravel pits of the Stour valley in that it was tidal – there was no division between it and the river for a short way, and it filled and drained with each tide. At low tide, or times of drought, mud banks appeared and blocked off the lake entrances, showing how shallow it was; at high tide a boat could float quite happily over – we took Tadorna out on this lake once. The lake-bed was all soft silt, a couple of feet below the surface, and, venturing out in a dinghy, it was quite possible to lose your bearings among the reed islands. In the middle of the lake was a group of dead trees, drowned after the subsidence, and often occupied by a company of cormorants settled on the branches with wings outspread. Year by year the white skeletons of the trees became less and less, a bough or two going every winter.

The bank opposite the lake entrance consisted of dirty shale from the colliery. On the far side was yet another lake, even larger and more remote. It was a great flat expanse, a deep-water digging where the wind blew heavy waves slapping against the stony shores. The grebes and ducks liked this one – it had an air of the utmost desertion, spread all the way from the river to the valley edge.

Just beyond the lake entrances was the weed boom. Every year about this time it was set up across the river, a plank raft with long upright poles reaching down into the water. It was intended to catch the cut weed and other debris that floated down, and a rare old collection of clutter it caught, too. Old oil drums, plastic bottles, dead branches, broken planks and the inevitable weed, all hooked behind the raft.

Since it was only cleared when the boom was taken out in the autumn, the accumulated rubbish soon became dense and smelly, so that the wagtails trotted on its surface for the insects it attracted. Some of our friends at the boat club regarded the weed-boom as the upper limit for boating, as the amount of debris floating down to it constituted a hazard. It never stopped us, and we continued to edge through the gap left beside the boom for craft to pass.

We were happy that others hesitated to go beyond the boom. It meant that Peggy and Tadorna had the upper part of the river pretty much to themselves in high summer. Perhaps we even sometimes exaggerated the size of the floating weed-masses so that the nervous would not follow. We certainly didn’t encourage them to try. So each summer we nosed our way through with Tadorna as we did with Miranda in her day, coming to grief rarely and riding on to the choice spots beyond – Puxton Corner and telegraph pole reach.

The real upper limit for boating was Fordwich, an ancient town, once the port for Canterbury. Beyond its old bridge, the river split and formed two mill-ponds. These absorbed the tidal upsurge which was slight in any case this far upstream, and neatly closed off the river to craft. The spire of Fordwich church, towering above the trees was our upstream landmark, and it crept steadily closer.

Before we got to Fordwich there was the Bailey bridge to negotiate. The little railway that carried gravel from the pits to the plant crossed here, with steam engines chuntering up and down. It was another good landmark, despite being so low built, and was used by anglers as a handy crossing-place. We used to fish by it long before we had a boat.

As its familiar span of planks and green girders came into view, we slowed. It was always a chancy matter to take a boat under this little bridge. It was such a tight squeeze, usually, that it was impossible to tell if we’d make it without trying. On one memorable occasion poor Miranda had become firmly wedged halfway through, and we had great difficulty freeing her. Tadorna, with her curved cabin roof, was taller, and needed even more careful handling. But this time there were inches to spare and we sailed on up the shallow reach to Fordwich, and tied up outside the Fordwich Arms.

The upstream view from here was charming. The old town hall on the water’s edge led the eye along a mossy wall to the hump-backed bridge, half-covered by a willow leaning right out in front of it. The town hall, a tiny ancient building – a relic of Fordwich’s former glory – was tucked away where the road ended, right by the water. It was probably handy for the wharves, when they existed, but now the road just stopped at the water’s edge, with nothing but a chain slung on a row of low posts to prevent you driving straight into the river.

Across the river was a gaggle of scruffy boats – Fordwich had just a few moorings. There was actually a boat club, newly begun. A couple of half-dead boats were beached on the grass, a slipway having been improvised out of the lowest stretch of bank, which was torn and guttered with their passage.

Our stern rope was tied to a flight of steps, wooden and rickety, leading down to the water. We used to hire dinghies here in our fishing days. And, later, we moored Miranda here, though the steps wobbled and bent suspiciously in the middle when we trod on them. By now they were too precarious to walk on at all, and we jumped off straight onto the paved bank.

When we came back downstream in the late afternoon, it turned quite cold, and we huddled in the cabin while Dad steered us home. Halfway back, who should we find but Frank and Rene. They had started out too late to follow us to Fordwich, and waited for us near the lakes. We circled while they cast off, and Peggy and Tadorna ran back to Grove together, companionably, as so often before.

 

Look out for the next chapter of The Tadorna Days, in which Tadorna and Peggy go to sea…

The Tadorna Days, part seven

Tags

boats, Grove Ferry, Happiness, Kent, Memoir, serial

Chapter 7 – A Night on the River

In which we go on a downstream expedition…

In the second week of May we decided to take Peggy and Tadorna downstream and spend the night on the boats. Our port of call was to be Pluck’s Gutter, one of the few places where the River Stour is bridged, and a couple of miles down from Grove Ferry.

Early on the Saturday evening we were packed and ready. The engine started at the first attempt, and with the bow-line loosed, the current turned Tadorna’s head out into the river. When the stream had pulled her nearly all the way round, we pushed off from the stern, and the engine went into gear with a thud. Past the dormant Blue Dolphin we went, and off down the moorings, with Peggy following close behind, and out into the open fields. Janet and I sat side by side on the cabin roof with an ear each pressed against our transistor radio – we were accustomed to share everything – and sang along all the way downstream.

The character of the river downstream always seemed quite different from the same river above the bridge, not two hundred yards away. The long ridge, of which Grove Ferry Hill and the high north bank were part, ended just here; the higher ground and the marshes met. In ancient times the Stour was a great river, flowing out into a broad sea-passage, named the Wantsum, which separated the Isle of Thanet from the Kentish mainland. Grove Ferry, at that time, stood at the tip of the estuary where the river met the sea. This, of course, was long before the ferry was thought of – there must have been a muddy beach or a saltmarsh where the moorings stand now.

Downstream of Grove, we were sailing out into the old Wantsum Channel, long since silted up to become a low marshland. The River Wantsum itself, not much more than a ditch now, met the Stour about half-a-mile above Pluck’s Gutter. It stretched the imagination to think that the sea tides once flowed here, and that Roman ships on their way to Canterbury sailed past Grove. It must have been a very exposed place.

Pluck’s Gutter itself, despite the odd name, consisted of not much more than the pub, the Dog and Duck, a favourite visiting place for us before our boating days. It was apparently named after one Gunther Pluck, a Danish land drainage engineer, whose ‘gutter’ or drainage channel, ended near the bridge. The Pluck’s Gutter bridge was an ugly concoction of steel tubes, quite unlike the graceful bridge at Grove, and soared high above the river. The nearest village is called Stourmouth, which it once really was, standing on the outlet of the Little Stour into the old Wantsum. Pluck’s Gutter must have stood on the very tip of the estuary of the two Stours, a beach again, like Grove Ferry. It is still the place where the two rivers meet, though the Little Stour is not much more than a stream now.

We gave a little cheer as the tall Pluck’s Gutter bridge swung into sight round the bend, and watched it look larger and larger until at last Peggy and Tadorna passed beneath it and tied up beside the Dunlin, an old and battered sailing boat, and long-time resident at the Gutter, well known for her soft, rotten planking.

Frank and Rene came up onto the bridge with us to admire the view. Downstream, there was the flat expanse of Minster Marshes, with the river vanishing among them on its way to the sea; below us were Tadorna and Peggy, looking very small beside the heavy Dunlin. Upstream was the pretty confluence where the Little Stour flows into the main river. The stream was dredged out just deep enough for boats to be moored a short way along its course – a picturesque moorings with its colourful clutter of boats and landing-stages. Beyond Pluck’s Gutter, our river was as lonely as it could be, with scarcely a trackway coming down to it through the criss-cross of drainage dykes. Looking out across these flats we could see clear across the old Wantsum Channel to Thanet.

There was a long companionable time while the sun sank. In the west, the red sun came down into the marshes, and the river turned pink and blue with steely shadows. Through these wondrous colours the moorhens bobbed, each leaving a golden sparkling wake behind it. Overhead the swifts screamed and screamed, soaring in the dark blue. When the bats came out we retired to the Dog and Duck for the evening.

When we came out of the pub, there was the intense, warm, celery-like smell of cow parsley all around. It was very dark. We scrambled down the path to the boats, torches shining. Already Tadorna had a heavy coat of dew, and smelt of damp wood instead of warm varnish. Moths flashed in and out of the torchbeams while we slithered down the bank. The trees were dead still in an overhead canopy, the river still, too, with gleams of water between the boats in the torchlight. We slipped under the flap into the cockpit, clumsy in the dark. It was cold; the water vapours seemed to penetrate the very woodwork. The floor was icy under our feet as we prepared for bed, and the feeling of clamminess never quite wore off. Still, we had slept aboard before, Mum and Dad taking the cabin, Janet and I bunking down on the cockpit floor. It was surprisingly comfortable, and we always slept well. The lamps went out, and we all settled down. Peggy’s light went off, too, and it fell very quiet.

I was awoken very early by – what? The birds? The thrush and the whitethroat, the screaming swifts, the sedge warbler chattering in the reeds, and very far off, a cuckoo. The light? Great floods of yellow light were pouring through the polythene flap, unchecked. The movement? Tadorna was almost still, but perceptibly afloat. No, it was none of these. It was the scent. Sweet, insistent, almondy – every hawthorn along the river was giving of its dewy best. I could see them in my mind’s eye as I lay comfortably on my back, the sun already warming the bulkhead beside me. Every branch would be covered with creamy flowers, all giving out that cloying fragrance, now thinned down by the river-scent of fresh leaf, mud and green water. I got up, stepped over Janet and rolled up the hood flap. The keen air came in; down the river the bright greens softened in a pale haze; the water was still, brilliant with diffused light, the surface alive with small insects, their wings glittering. I shivered and let down the flap.

Back in my sleeping-bag, I watched the play of reflected lights on the inside of the hood, vaulted on its supports. This was the most delightful time of day to be on board. So peaceful; and while it was quiet I imagined that this was what Tadorna was like when we were not with her. I had long wanted to know the atmosphere she had when she was alone. This was as close as I would ever come to finding out.

 

On the way back to Grove, we pulled in at the pumping-station that marked the joining of the Stour and the Wantsum. Janet and I took it into our heads to haul the dinghy over the bank and go for a ride on the once-great waterway. The Wantsum was narrow, dredged-out and full of water crowfoot. We saw it as an adventure, and flopped the dinghy into the pool behind the pumping-station, started the little outboard, and set off into the unknown. About a quarter of a mile on, the crowfoot stems and a plastic bag wrapped themselves round the propeller and we spluttered to a halt. Our little half-horsepower engine refused to restart, and we had to row back, which was difficult since the oars were wider than the waterway.

I think we may well have been the only people from Grove ever to sail on the great Wantsum Channel.

 

Look out for the next chapter of The Tadorna Days, in which we explore the river upstream to its navigable limit…

The Tadorna Days – Part six

Tags

boats, Grove Ferry, Kent, Memoir, serial

Chapter 6 – Good Friday

In which we intrepidly begin the season…

I sat in the cockpit thoughtfully watching the view downstream while the boat was made ready. Our moorings neighbour, Blue Dolphin, was tied up close behind us, deserted; and, beyond, lay the last boat on this side of the river, the Kathie, a large clinker-built boat, kept neat but rarely used. The moorings were closed off behind her by a hedge with a rickety boundary fence, reinforced by Len with interwoven thorny branches to make it impenetrable. Ours was one of the best and safest moorings at Grove, with Len’s caravan just the other side of the garden wall.

Across the river the boats were equally deserted, all the way down to the last one, Whitewings. She looked as though she belonged on the Thames, or at least somewhere more refined than our rough and ready river, and never seemed to move from her mooring under the large hawthorn.

It was Good Friday, the first day of the new season, and we were going to be the first on the river again. It was warm, clear and bright, but with a cold strong seawind blowing in from the north-east; a typical spring day on the Kent marshes.

 

Already Janet and I had performed the first of our summer season rituals, launching the blue dinghy from the slip and rowing up the moorings with the picnic bag. It was a bit of a squeeze to get both of us and the bag into the dinghy, and even more difficult to row it. But we were old hands at this, and bumped and splashed our way down the quiet moorings to tie up at Tadorna’s stern cleat. Dad was fixing on the fuel line, and behaved with considerable tolerance when we rocked the boat and bumped his elbow as we climbed aboard.

When everything was ready we paused a moment in silence, admiring our handiwork with the refit, and our new red ensign flapping, glaring red, in the breeze. On the bank the fresh cow parsley leaves were springing up, their pale green reflections bouncing in the gap of dark green water between the bank and Tadorna’s bow, where Janet and I took up our usual places with ropes and boathooks while Dad started the engine. At each try the boat shuddered and started forward, then fell back in silence. As we fidgeted on the hatch, the engine started and drowned out everything with an open-throttled roar. The lines were unhooked, and I pushed out with the boathook.

Tadorna slid smoothly out into the river, round the next-door boat with a gently bump, and off upstream as we clumped into gear. Frank and Rene, who were still fitting out, waved to us from their landing-stage as we passed. I could just hear the little trickling rush of water past the bow – we were moving too slowly to make any real wash.

All along the moorings there were loops of bristly rope, plump fenders, and shining cobwebs hanging off the boats’ white sides, reflected beneath.

There was room to spare under the bridge and we soon cleared the moorings and sailed off along the first reach. Dad opened the throttle and Tadorna threw her nose up and sat back in the water. This was what we had waited for all winter. The lapwings were crying and looping the loop over the marshy fields to the south, while down below the riverbank was covered in yellow flowers, coltsfoot and celandine pushing up out of the cold soil. All it had taken was a little sunshine.

On the north bank, too, the warm weather had set the willows flowering; the trees stood with their feet in the water, leaning out over the river. Behind them the north bank rose up, still bare, untouched by the spring, though there were points of green in the undershrubs. High up on the ridge a song thrush was singing, invisible and far-off among the trees.

We went gliding in among all this on the still water. I felt a gentle bump and change of balance as Mum went in to make coffee. As we turned into the s-bend at the end of the reach, the wind came stinging our faces; we had left the shelter of the north bank and faced out into the marshes. The water splashed at Tadorna’s sides in chill ripples; she steered well in a wind, despite her flat bottom. I sat on the bow with Janet, and we talked and laughed and sang as we rode on along the empty reaches and round the slow curves until we came to Westbere.

Westbere village itself was scarcely visible from the river, being half-a-mile or so away across the marshes; the end of the track that led to it was marked by a distinctive bunch of willows – the Westbere Trees, we called them.

The many water-filled gravel pits in this part of the valley were collectively known as the Westbere Lakes, and we moored near the first of them. The lake, too, was invisible from the river, hidden by a willow thicket which could be depended upon to provide shelter from a spring north-easterly, and we tied Tadorna under a budding willow. This was the telegraph pole reach again, the scene of our disagreement with the weed-raft two summers earlier. In fact it was the same tree.

Dad drove the mooring stakes into the ground with a mallet, the sounds reverberating up and down the reach, so you couldn’t say where they came from, if you couldn’t see the mallet.

Janet and I jumped off the boat and wandered into the mass of flowering willows. Only the topmost branches of the thicket reacted to the wind, so it was nearly still at ground level. We scuffed our feet through the leaf litter, listening to the creak of branches and the cries of small birds. Beyond the thicket was the lake, once a gravel-digging, but now well grown over and stocked with fish. The lake lay placid, reflecting the skies, the dark willow trunks and the yellow pollen. In the distance the reed-beds were cream-coloured, with small dark trees on their margins. The waterside plants had green spikes showing above the tangle of fallen stems. I sat with Janet on a collapsed trunk by a fishing swim and watched the water. Above us the sprouting branches leaned down to the lake, and the sun spangled in between them. Out on the water the coots were scuttering and calling loudly. Their metallic calls echoed like the mallet-blows, bouncing off the brimming lake.

Later we settled in the cockpit for the afternoon, with Tadorna’s nose prudently facing into the wind, and basked in the sunshine, the new red duster flapping lazily as the breeze came and went. It seemed a long, long time since that freezing day of the launch. In fact it had been only twelve days.

Dad and I squashed ourselves, one each end, into the blue dinghy and rowed off with the camera to take some fitting-out portraits. Tadorna positively glowed in the fresh light, and began to look quite unreal, like those sea-going yachts tied up in the artificial pool at the boat show.

Late in the afternoon the wind freshened, and we made our way back, anoraks zipped up to the chin, to Grove Ferry for tea. Frank and Rene came on board to give us the latest gossip. As they talked, and the tea brewed, and the water slopped hollowly on the boat’s side and trickled underneath, and the wind caught her and bumped her into her landing-stage with a regular thud, I looked out through the cabin window. Across the river the hawthorn hedge marking the field boundary stretched away, and it was green at last. And under the first hawthorn Whitewings still sat, bleak and deserted, as she would be all summer. Then the kettle boiled again, the windows steamed up, and there was nothing more to be seen.

 

Look out for chapter seven of The Tadorna Days, in which we go on a downstream expedition…