A Floating Home Part 10

When a beam was wanted for a house, or a roof for a church, chestnut was the wood, no doubt because of the belief that no insect takes kindly to it. The great building age of what is now rural Ess.e.x must have come immediately after the suppression of the monasteries, and you can hardly go into an Ess.e.x village without finding a Tudor house.

If it be a manor-house, it may have a moat or a monkish fishpond; and perhaps the pigeon tower, which dates from the times when the lord of the manor had his rights of pigeonry, is still standing. The old inns have a s.p.a.ciousness which informs you of the well-being of agricultural Ess.e.x when they were built. Where the land is good there the inns are good also; where the land is poor the inns are built on n.i.g.g.ard lines. You can come across Ess.e.x villages--such as the Rodings, the Lavers, and the Easters--which for remoteness of air and unsophistication could not be matched except in counties so distant from London as Cornwall and c.u.mberland.

Certainly Ess.e.x has no great hills, even as it has no great buildings.

But the value of hills is relative. From many places in Ess.e.x only about sixty feet above the sea there are wide views, and you may gaze upon the Kentish coast thirty miles away on the other side of the Thames. The secret of the Ess.e.x coast is the illusion of immensity.

The dome of sky is scarcely interrupted by the small frettings of land and wood along the edges. In this vast atmospheric theatre a change of weather may be seen at almost any point of the compa.s.s planning its tactics on a clear hard line of horizon, and thence swinging up the sky, showing the soft white flags of peace or the threatening front of a battle formation. One even has an important sense of the monstrous nearness of natural forces when the 'inverted bowl' is filled with a dark low-flying scud that seems to be crushing down on you in a kind of personal a.s.sault.

Men who have become captivated by the marshes have been able to measure the gradual and unconscious change in their feelings about hills and flat lands by a visit to some such spot as the Italian Lakes. The beauty of the lakes has always to be admitted--the purity of the water, the affluence of the colour, the abrupt fall of the hills to the water, the sweetness of the glinting villages perched high up as though resting in a long and difficult climb to the sky.

But at the end of a week the visitor may have found himself insisting on these beauties; he has felt that the sense of them is slipping away. He who needs to argue with himself is losing ground. He becomes unreasonably conscious that the water is imprisoned, and does not lead to the sea round the distant headland; that the sky is filched away; and that the winds are false, being misdirected by the hills and simply blowing up or down a long corridor, so that Nature is frustrated in these coddled and enchanted haunts.

In shallow estuaries like those of Ess.e.x the tides have necessarily to be studied more carefully than in deep waters. The ebb tide runs faster than the flood; for the ebb is hurried seawards, pressed on its flanks as it goes, by the weight of water that pours off the flats from either side of the channel. The flood comes in from the sea like a cautious explorer. It is as though it could afford to be slow because it has the authority of the sea behind it. Moreover, it has nothing to do with the joy and madness of escape from confinement, but daily performs a sober function of renewal. It is a deliberate, sightless creature, pushing before it sinuous fingers with which it gropes its way through the crushed jungles of matted weed.

For the gulls, the redshanks, the stint, the herons, and the curlew, the important moments of the day are when the water first leaves the banks and a refreshed feeding-ground is once more laid bare. But to the yachtsman the vital time is when the sea advances, bringing its salt breath among the drowsier inland scents, raising the weed from the dead, and changing into sensitive buoyant things the smacks and yachts which have been stranded on their sides, heavy and immobile for hours.

There are two yachtsmen at least who are almost ashamed to confess how childish in its reality is their pleasure in watching the return of the tide over the flats or up some shallow creek. They have not counted the number of times they have leaned over the side of a yacht, knowing she could not float for an hour or more, watching the tiny crabs scuttle into fresh territories as the oily flood bearing yellow flecks of tide-foam brims silently over one level on to the next; watching each weed being lifted and supported by the water until its whole length waves and bends in the tide like a poplar in a breeze; watching the angle at which the yacht has been lying correct itself until she sits upright in the mud; watching, perhaps, in the proper season, the swish and flutter of the water, and the little puffs of disturbed mud drifting away like smoke, as mullet thresh their way through the entrancing green submarine avenues. And then there is always the thrill of the moment when the rising water touches with life the dead hull of a yacht, and turns her into a creature of sensitiveness and grace swaying to the run of the tide. One moment she is as a rock against which you might push unavailingly with all your might; the next she has sidled off the ground, and will sheer this way and that in response to a finger laid upon the tiller.

As the tide rises towards its height you may see smacks--oyster dredgers, trawlers, shrimpers, and eel boats--filling the shining mouth of the estuary. The lighting of this part of the coast is like nothing else in England. A pearly radiance seems to strike upwards from the sea on to the underpart of the clouds, which borrows an abnormal glow. In these waters, when the sea is not grey it is generally shallow green, and sometimes, when there are thunder-clouds with sunshine, it becomes an astonishing jade. At sunset the vapours over the marshes burn like a furnace, and the c.u.mulus clouds sometimes glow underneath with the dusky fire of a Red Underwing moth. When the water has left the flats the lighting does not change appreciably, because the gleaming mud, glossy and shining like the skin of the porpoises which sport along the channels, has the quality of water.

The most characteristic effect is the mirage, which swallows up the meeting-point of sea and sky in a liquid glare, exalts the humblest smack with the freeboard and towering rigging of a barque, and separates the tops of trees from visible connection with the land, so that they appear to be growing out of air and water. Often one might fancy that the trees of the Blackwater and the Crouch, thus seen in the distance, were the palm-trees of some Polynesian island.

On the marshes, or reclaimed lands, which are inside the sea-walls, and are intersected by tidal d.y.k.es called fleets, sea-fowl and woodland birds mingle: curlew with wood pigeons, plover with starlings, rooks and gulls, feeding harmoniously. Here and there the mast and brailed-up sail of a barge sticking out of grazing-land tell of a creek winding in from some hidden entrance, and remind you that in Ess.e.x agriculture and seamanship are on more intimate terms than are perhaps thought proper elsewhere.

Outside the sea-walls are salt marshes ('salts' or 'saltings') which are covered only by the higher tides. In the early summer the thrift colours them with pink and white, and later a purple carpet is spread by the sea lavender. The juicy gla.s.swort (called 'samphire,' though it is not the samphire of Dover Cliff in 'Lear') changes from a brilliant green to scarlet. Herons wade in the rivulets; the whistle of the redshanks, the mournful cry of the curlew, and the scream of the gulls which fringe the edge of the water like the white crest of a breaking wave, sound from end to end of these marshes. In the winter you may hear the honking of Brent geese. But by far the most beautiful sight is hundreds of thousands of stint or dunlins on the wing together.

These birds are also called ox-birds, and the fishermen call them simply 'little birds.' When they wheel, as at the word of command, the variations in their appearance are almost beyond belief; now they are wreathed smoke floating across the sky, and scarcely distinguishable from the long smudge that pours from the funnel of a steamer on the horizon; now the sun catches their white underparts, and they are a storm of driven snowflakes; now they present the razor edge of the wing, and then disappear in the glare as by magic; again they turn the broadest extent of their wings, and a solid and heavy ma.s.s blackens the sky.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEAUMONT QUAY]

In May, when the sea-birds are hatching their young, the spring-tides are slack and do not cover the saltings. In a pretty figure of speech the fishermen call these tides the Bird Tides.

The lives of the fishermen are ruled by the tides. For them the working hours of the clock have no significance. On the first of the ebb, be it night or day, their work begins, and it is on the flood that they return to their homes. They have no leisure or liking for the time-devouring practice of sailing over a foul tide. The tide in the affairs of these men is absolute.

And although they do not confess in any recognizable phrase of lyrical sensation that the sea has cast a spell upon them, it is obvious that that is what has happened. On Sundays, when they are free from their labour, they will a.s.semble on the hard--a firm strip of shingle laid upon the mud--and, with hands in pockets, gaze, through most of the hours of daylight, upon the sweeping tide and the minor movements of small boats and yachts with an air at once negligent and profound. The mightiness of the sea, like the mightiness of the mountain, draws mankind. Men have learned the secrets of these things in a way, and have turned them to their profit or amus.e.m.e.nt; but the mastery is superficial, and it is man who in these great presences is unconsciously and spiritually enslaved.

CHAPTER XIV

'He was the mildest-mannered man That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.'

A great merit of a barge as a house is that when she is 'light,' or almost 'light,' as the _Ark Royal_ is, she can be sailed out of rough water on to a sand and left there, provided care be taken that she does not sit on her anchor. By the time there is only three feet of water the waves are very small, and thus, however strong the wind may be and however hard the sand, a barge will take the ground so gently that one can scarcely say when she touches. The explanation is simple enough, for, besides being flat-bottomed, a barge, owing to her length, strides many small waves at once.

We put the plan into operation on our way to Newcliff. We were running up Swin, and with the dark the breeze piped up; so instead of sailing all night or anchoring in the Swin, where there would have been a disagreeable sea on the flood-tide, we put the _Ark Royal_ on the sand between the Maplin Lighthouse and the Ridge Buoy, and there she sat as steady as a town hall.

This is, of course, an easy way of going to the seaside, so to speak.

You simply sail on to a nice clean sand and stay there till the wind moderates. Whenever the tide ebbs away, you can descend on to the sands by a ladder over the side, and pursue the usual seaside occupations of building docks and ca.n.a.ls and forts and catching crabs.

It was a memorable experience, this pa.s.sage up the Thames estuary, house and furniture and family all moving together without any of the bother of packing up and catching trains, and counting heads and luggage at junctions. The children enjoyed every moment of it--the following sea and the dinghy plunging in our wake, the steamers bound out and in, the smacks lying to their nets with the gulls wheeling round them waiting for their food, the tugs towing sailing ships, the topsail schooners, the buoys, the lightships.

When we arrived at Newcliff we anch.o.r.ed off the town, intending to look for a good winter berth later in the year. After the quiet of Fleetwick, Newcliff struck us at once as over-full of noise and people. At all events, we had the satisfaction of knowing that we were not going to live on sh.o.r.e. The spot where we lay would have been well enough for the summer, though with a fresh breeze on sh.o.r.e it was impossible to take a boat safely alongside the stone wall. The boat, however, could be rowed up a creek half a mile away. Unfortunately, this meant the chance of being drenched with spray, and it was also a too uncertain way of catching trains and trams. Nine times out of ten we could row to the stone wall, and when the tide ebbed away and the _Ark Royal_ lay high and dry (which, roughly, was for six out of every twelve hours) we could always walk ash.o.r.e. The sand was hard under about an inch of fine silt. Here and there it was intersected by shallow gullies, but short sea-boots served our purpose of getting on sh.o.r.e dry.

Of course, we always had to think ahead, for if one went ash.o.r.e in the boat and took no sea-boots, it might be necessary on returning to walk to the _Ark Royal_; and if no one were on deck one might shout for sea-boots for a long time from the land before being heard. The most awkward time was when the flats were just covered with water, for then there was too much water round the _Ark Royal_ for sea-boots and not enough to float a boat to the sh.o.r.e. Then one simply had to wait until it was possible to walk or row. Once we were caught in this way at one o'clock in the morning after going to a theatre in London. We waited a short time for the ebb, but were too sleepy to wait quite long enough.

We put on our sea-boots; and then, slinging my evening shoes and the Mate's round my neck, and cramming my opera-hat well on to my head, I gave the Mate my arm. The water itself was not too deep, but in the dark it was difficult to avoid the gullies, and the Mate nearly spoiled her new frock and my evening clothes by stumbling into a hole and clutching at me. This was the only occasion on which I should have been distressed if those who had disputed the advantages of living in a barge could have seen us. In anything like a gale of wind there was a nasty, short, confused, broken sea, and then one had either to row up to the creek and be drenched or wait till the tide had ebbed. It was evident that lying off the town for the winter was out of the question.

Soon we found a berth up the creek where yachts are laid up, and agreed to pay a pound for the use of it for a year. It was well sheltered, but as only a big tide would give us water into it we had to wait some days after we had found it.

Meanwhile Sam Prawle, who had remained with us all this time, had to return home. The children had rallied him a good deal on his yarn about 'Ould Gladstone' and on the ethics of salvage generally. Salvage was Sam Prawle's favourite subject; and we could never make up our minds whether he was more given to boasting of what he had done or to regretting what he had not done. The evening before he went away he was evidently concerned lest he should leave us with an impression that salvage operations were not invariably honourable if not heroic affairs. He therefore related to us the following episode, and the reader must judge how far it helps Sam Prawle's case:

'In them days, afore it was so easy to git leave to launch the lifeboats as that is now, we allus used to keep a lugger for same as salvage work. The last wessel as ever I went off to on a salvage job my share come to thirteen pound and a bit extra for bein' skipper, and if there hadn't bin a North Sea pilot aboard that ship us chaps 'ud have had double. But then agin, if us hadn't bin quick a makin' our bargain us shouldn't have had nawthen.

'One night, after a dirty thick day blaowin' the best part of a gale o' wind sou-westerly, the wind flew out nor-west, as that often do, and that come clear and hard, so as when that come dawn you could see for miles. Well, away to the south'ard, about six mile, we seed a wessel on the Sizewell Bank; she was a layin' with her head best in towards the land. There was a big sea runnin', but there warn't much trouble in launching the lugger with the wind that way, though we shipped a tidy sea afore we cast off the haulin'-aout warp.

'We'd close-reefed the two lugs afore we launched the bo't, and it warn't long afore the fifteen of us what owned the lugger was a racin'

off as hard as we dare. You see, we den't want no one to git in ahead of we. Us dursn't put her head straight for the ship, for the sea was all acrost with the shift o' wind, and us had to keep bearin' away and luffin' up. You see, them seas was all untrue; they was heapin' up, and breakin' first one side, then t'other, same as in the race raound Orfordness.

'As we drawed near the wessel, that fared to we as haow she were to th' south'ard of the high part of the sand, and that warn't long afore we knaowed it, cos we got our landmarks what we fish by, for we most knaows that sand, same as you do the back o' your hand, as the sayin'

is. We laowered our sails and unshipped the masts and raounded to under the wessel's quarter--a barquentine, she were, of about nine hundred ton--and they thraowed us a line. All her sails was stowed 'cept the fore laower torpsail, which were blown to rags, and the sea was breakin' over her port side pretty heavy. There warn't no spars carried away, and there den't fare to be no other damage, and if she was faithfully built she den't ought to have come to a great deal o'

hurt so fur.

'Then they thraowed us another line for me to come aboard by, and we hauled our ould bo't up as close as we durst for the backwash. I jumped as she rose to a sea, but missed the mizzen riggin' and fell agin the wessel's side; them chaps hung on all right, and the next sea washed me on top o' the rail afore they could haul in the slack. That fair knocked the wind aout o' me, and I reckon I was lucky I den't break nawthen. I scrambled up, and found the cap'n houldin' on to the rail to steady himself agin the b.u.mping o' the wessel.

'Well, she was paoundin' fairly heavy, but not so bad as other wessels I've bin aboard. Still, that's enough to scare the life aout of anyone what ain't never bin ash.o.r.e on a sandbank in a blaow, and most owners don't give a cap'n a chance to do ut twice--nor pilots neither. I could see the cap'n fared wonnerful fidgety, for the wessel had been ash.o.r.e for seven hours and more, so I starts to make a bargain with him for four hundred pound to get his ship off, when up comes a North Sea pilot what was aboard. I was most took aback to see him there.

'"What's all this?" he says.

'"Four hundred pound to get she off," I says.

'"Four hundred devils," he says.

'"No cure, no pay," I says.

'"No pay, you longsh.o.r.e shark!" he says.

'Of course, he was a tryin' to make out there warn't no danger to the wessel and nawthen to make a fuss about. You see, he was afeared there might be questions asked about it, and he might get into trouble.

Anyway, it don't do a pilot no good to get a wessel ash.o.r.e, even if that ain't his fault which it warn't this time, for the wessel was took aback by the shift o' wind and got agraound afore they could do anything with her.

'One thing I knaowed as soon as my foot touched them decks, and that was that she warn't going to be long afore she come off. Sizewell Bank's like many another raound here; that's as hard as a road on the ebb and all alive on the flood, and them as knaows, same as we, can tell from the way a wessel b.u.mps what she's up to. I could feel she warn't workin' in the sand no more, but was beginning to fleet, and 'ud soon be paoundin' heavier than ever, but 'ud be on the move each time a sea lifted she. Howsomdever, I kep' my eyes on the cap'n, and I could see he was skeered about his wessel, and 'ud be suthen pleased to have she in deep water agin.

'"Cap'n," I says, "three hundred and fifty pounds. No cure, no pay."

"Too much," says the cap'n, but I see he'd like to pay it.

'"Too much?" says the pilot. "I should think it is! The tide's a flowin', and she'll come off herself soon; besides, if she don't we'll have a dozen tugs and steamers by in two or three hours, and any of 'em glad to earn a fifty-pun' note for a pluck off."

'"That'll be high water in two and a half hours, and you'll be here another ebb if you ain't careful," I says to the cap'n, "and this sand's as hard as a rock on the ebb. The pilot'll tell you that if you don't knaow that already for yourself."

'"There ain't no call to pay all that money," says the pilot. "She'll come off right enough."

'"Well," I says to the cap'n, "if I go off this ship I ain't a comin'

aboard agin 'cept for much bigger money, and when she's started her garboards and 's making water you'll be sorry you refused a fair offer!"