Fog on the Solent (Norfolk House 5)

The Solent may have been the busiest sea-lane in the world and the most varied in its traffic. There were ferries between the mainland and our Island; the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth; the transatlantic liner port at Southampton; the Sawley Oil Refinery where tankers plied from the Gulf; and innumerable sailing craft. The Royal Yacht Squadron was just yards from Norfolk House. This was the spot where crowned heads of Europe, incumbent or in exile, would gather in the first week of August, and from their castle on the seafront, built by King Henry VIII, gaze disdainfully at ordinary mortals like me. Our own Queen seldom went but Prince Philip always did, and his bar-room yarns were repeated around the town, if you could believe the gossip. The Squadron had the largest yachts, with extensive crews to match; but Cowes was a centre for all kinds of yachting. My school was keen on sailing because it looked good in the Prospectus, and the geography master, Lt. Col. Ilton (ex Indian Army) ran the Sailing Club. Unfortunately it wasn’t free; so though I lived in Cowes I never got close to the humblest dinghy.

I can’t remember a Cowes Week. The locals would steer clear unless their business depended on it, for all the prices would go up and you could hardly walk down the winding High Street for the jam of tourists. But we never stopped talking of Cowes Week that year: it was make-or-break for us. Blackett was paying nearly twice his salary in rent for Norfolk House, but it reached the stage where we only had rent from Mrs Dominie and the “man in the scullery”. I never saw him enter or leave the building, or found out where his other rooms were: perhaps a secret annex, like Anne Frank’s.
We did a deal with the Gloster, the best hotel in Cowes. They’d pay us for every room we had vacant in Cowes Week. They’d provide the linen, the chambermaid, the guests. We’d get twice the weekly house-rent – each night! Naturally, I thought it would be fun, and dreamed up ways I could earn tips from the rich guests: carrying their bags, running errands, fetching their cigarettes from the tobacconist.

It never happened, I’m not sure why. Perhaps the bank called in a loan; more likely the figures still didn’t add up, for Cowes Week has only seven days and the house rent had to be paid all year round.

It was an adventure while it lasted, not least because we were so near the seashore. It was such a busy sea-lane that in a fog the Solent was a cacophony of foghorns, bells, whistles, klaxons and hooters. I’d lie in my dark bedroom, counting them, noting their rhythms and frequencies. Buoys would clang mournfully: the great liners would sound long bass notes in shameless flatulence. It was like a great exciting conversation coming through the window, and if I were embroidering this tale I’d speak of creeping out in pyjamas and dressing-gown to the rusty veranda for a ringside seat at the theatre of deafening fog. (When my younger son was four, I pointed out the window and said, “See? That’s fog.” “Where?” he replied. “I can’t see it. I can’t see anything.”)

There’s more I could tell about Norfolk House, but not now. Time’s arrow goes one way only, but memory’s meandering path can loop back and criss-cross the timelines like a plough behind a tractor, till all is brought to the surface. I’ve had the idea to rewrite my memoirs anew each year, for the same time-period. Why not? Artists do self-portraits again and again, for the sake of something to paint.

But there’s one scene I’d like to depict, a wayfaring ecstasy of the kind I cultivate consciously today. It was an early morning fog, you could see just a yard ahead. The Solent’s orchestra was in full-throated fervour, a maritime dawn-chorus. I went on the beach where the tide had washed up a line of flotsam and jetsam. The Solent has double the normal number of tides, and the distance between high and low water isn’t much, except at the mudflats where you can never reach deep enough to swim. I don’t remember swimming near the house: it’s said to be treacherous. But the line of dried weed and flotsam was treasure: the smell, the colours, the sculpted pieces of wood, all washed and sanded and bleached, drifted perhaps thousands of miles to arrive here, or jettisoned from cargoes loaded anywhere in the world. It was at that high-water mark, crunching the shingle, making the flies and sandhoppers jump as I passed, inhaling the seaweed, seeing the rusty cans and floats and ropes, that I as a wayfaring mudlark first embraced the whole world, which had laid its treasures at my feet. And if I stooped to take up a handful, each grain of sand was a jewel, coloured and faceted. Each flea-like creature had its life-cycle, sex-life, hunger, preferences, survival instinct.

I couldn’t have expressed it then, fifty years ago. I wouldn’t have shared my ecstasy, but hid it. Such was my secret shame, not to be a “people-person”, but a lonely wayfarer, even then. Now I understand that I can’t be what I’m not. Deficits shouldn’t define us: they free up space for strengths.