ignorant of our presence. She’d passed a half-mile to our south, heading towards Biscay.
The sight of the tanker had jarred me into a new alertness, but the wakefulness didn’t last. Despite the foul pain in my tooth, I dozed. I sat on the port side of the cockpit, one knee crooked over Sunflower’s tiller, and leaned my head against the guardrails. The banging of the sea against the hull was hypnotic. I’d sleep for a few minutes then start awake to stare in sudden, uncomprehending alarm at the compass. Once or twice I rubbed my eyes to help my vision, but mostly succeeded only in grinding dried, accreted and stinging salt into my eyeballs. The pain in my tooth was a throbbing agony, but even that was not sufficient to keep me awake. But I knew I had to stay awake. Sometimes I would stand to let the spray hit me, hoping that its forceful discomfort would keep me alert, but as soon as I sat again the sleep would insidiously steal over me. I was in a half-gale, in short steep seas, in a small boat pitching like a demented rocking-horse, sailing into the world’s most dangerous seaway, with an aching tooth and stinging eyes, and all I could do was sleep. And hallucinate.
I was used to the tired hallucinations of a night sail, yet familiarity did nothing to convince me of their falsehood. The hallucinations are half-dreams of an uncanny reality. That night I distinctly saw the loom of a lighthouse guiding me home and, later, a coastline. If the hallucinations had been of fantastic things, say of women or hot food, then my mind would have dismissed them as apparitions; yet that night’s visions were of the things I most wanted to see – signs of a safe landfall – and so I saw a gentle twilit coast backed with church towers, trees and cliffs, and the coast even had half-obscured leading lights showing the way home. One part of my brain knew that I was seeing an elaborate illusion, but still I would indulge it. It was only when something shattered Sunflower’s rhythm that the mind would sluggishly tear itself away from the comforting fantasy to accept that we were indeed slamming through a shortening sea in a half-gale with no leading lights to guide us home. Those were the moments of wakefulness.
Eventually I stopped fighting the sleep. Somehow my wet clothes so arranged themselves that I had the illusion of comfort, and to move was to bring cold wet cloth against a sore chafed skin. So I stayed still, I dreamed, and Sunflower flew up-channel to where the big ships thumped and the black rocks waited.
And still I did not know why I came home, or what waited for me in England.
I’d fled England four years before. I’d gone home because my brother had died and I had become the new head of the family. They looked to me to solve their problems, but instead I had bought Sunflower, victualled her, then run away to sea. I’d scraped round Ushant against this very same southwesterly wind and had felt an immense liberty unfold before my bows. I had gone, I was safe and I was free. The unwanted responsibilities and my family’s spitting accusations had dropped astern like sea-anchors cut adrift.
I’d never regretted that leaving. I’d stepped on far beaches, sailed into distant nights and made friends with people who knew nothing of my past. To them I was merely John Rossendale, master under God of the good ship Sunflower, and a welcome mechanic, carpenter, welder and rigger. I was anonymous. I was free.
And now I was coming home. Alone.
I hadn’t always sailed alone. When I’d first left England, seven years before, Charlie Barratt had sailed with me. We had three good years together, sailing the southern oceans; then, when my family demanded my return, Charlie had gone with me. We had been in Australia when the news of my brother’s death arrived and we had been forced to sell our boat to raise the money for the air fares. We promised ourselves we’d buy another yacht in England and go back to the Pacific, but Charlie had married instead and that put paid to his dreams of far blue seas. I had struggled with my brother’s legacy for as long as I could; then, in desperation, I bought Sunflower and went back to sea alone. I didn’t sail alone for long. A German girl came aboard at Belize and stayed as far as the Marquesas where she abandoned Sunflower to join a ramshackle commune that shared a vast catamaran skippered by a moody Pole. I’d heard that the catamaran had broken up off the Trobriands, drowning everyone aboard, but the sea lanes are full of such rumours, so perhaps the German girl was still alive. In the Solomons I’d met an Australian who sailed with me one whole year, but she discovered who I was and wanted to marry me and, when I adamantly refused, she jumped ship in California. There had been others. The oceans are littered with hitch-hikers, struggling from one coast to another, bartering rides on battered yachts, and all believing that their freedom from bureaucracy will last for ever. Some of the hitch-hikers drown, some get murdered, some disappear, a lot become whores, and a few, a very few, go home.
Now I was going home, and I didn’t want to. I hallucinated, I slept, and I dreamed of far southern seas.
I was woken sharply in the dawn. It was not the feral grey light that woke me, nor my toothache, but rather because the wind had shifted abruptly to the south and Sunflower went over. It could only have taken a few seconds, a blink of a dream, no more, but the tiller slipped under my knee’s grip, and she broached. For a moment she was speeding along the hissing crest of a wave, then the sea smacked her over, the wavetop broke, and she was falling, tipping, slamming down on to her starboard side. Water poured like Niagara over the port gunwale. For two seconds I was standing in sudden amazement on the far thwart, then I was pitched forward into the maelstrom of white water. Just before my head went under I saw the mast-tip drop into the water, then I was thrashing in sudden panic until the safety line jerked me hard and fast. The wave was still seething round me and breaking high over Sunflower’s hull that was lying flat on the sea. I despaired for a moment, until the inexorable laws of physics began their work and the deep heavy keel began to drag Sunflower upright. No law of physics would save me. I would have to drag my waterlogged weight to the high gunwale and somehow climb back aboard, but then a merciful and freakish backwash of water flung me against a starboard guardrail stanchion. I felt a sharp blow against my ribs, but all I could think of was to cling like grim death to the guardrail as the boat righted. She came up sluggishly at first, then tore herself free of the sea’s grip, and I rolled up with her to haul myself unceremoniously over the rails into the swamped cockpit.
That was the sea’s alarm call. Good morning and welcome to the Channel. I crouched in the swirling cockpit and gasped for breath. The pain in my ribs stabbed at me, but there was no time to worry if anything was broken. The jib was flogging and another steep sea was charging at our beam. I rammed the tiller hard to port and dragged the jib sheet in to catch the wind. Sunflower sluggishly turned her quarter to the waves. Water was still streaming off the foredeck and coachroof, cascading green and grey into the white-flecked, heaving sea.
The drains were emptying the cockpit. I doubted any water had got into the boat. Sunflower’s washboards are of one inch teak and, like the companionway hatch, I keep them bolted shut in dirty weather. I had been lucky. The knockdown had been my own fault, but, thanks to the safety line, I was alive. I gingerly felt my ribs and, though the pain was sharp, nothing seemed to be broken.
I was soaked through after my ducking, but Sunflower was moving again in the broken seas. I lashed the tiller, then stripped myself stark shivering naked. It was springtime, but the Channel air still had a cutting edge and the sea was as cold as an opened grave. I unlocked the companionway, waited until Sunflower had been overtaken by a hissing sea, then clambered over the washboards to drop into the cabin.
I had very few dry clothes left, but I found two pairs of jeans, one pair of socks, and three sweaters. I pulled them all on. They felt warm, but I knew they were full of dry salt crystals which, exposed to even the smallest dampness, would attract the moisture and swell to make me chill and damp again. I scrubbed my hair half dry with a mildewed towel, then wedged myself into the galley and slid the Thermos out of its padded clips. I poured a big mug of tea and, though Sunflower was pitching and corkscrewing, I didn’t spill a drop of the precious hot liquid. Practice in such small things makes for perfection. A tanker could have turned me into scrap steel in the time it took to drink the tea, but I needed something warm inside and I was craving for a pipeful of dry tobacco.
Those creature comforts gained, I went back to the cockpit and disentangled my oilskins from the wet mess on the bottom grating. I grimaced, knowing that the water inside the oilies would soak my new dry clothes, but there was no choice. I kitted up, pulled on drenched boots, then hauled up the mainsail that had three reefs already tied to the boom. Sunflower liked the extra canvas and became steadier. We were on a beam reach, and my boat was sailing the gale’s wrath like a dream. I was wide awake now, my hallucinations had
