T. S. Eliot:

But where is the penny world I bought
To eat with Pipit behind the screen?

Chapter 7 Learning the ropes

That year between the Easter and the start of the school summer holiday I sailed the boat as often as I could. I hadn’t sailed on the sea before and I was cautious, not wanting to put the boat or myself at risk. Linda and I intended to use Fram during the six week holiday, and I needed to get used to the boat, the sea and the tides, and the winds’ effects on them. Linda was pregnant for the first time, and we knew the baby was due in October. She found it difficult to get up and down the ladder to the boat on the Newhaven mooring and didn’t come sailing very often. But we planned some gentle summer cruising later.

The previous year when I was renovating Fram at Linda’s parents’ house in Haywards Heath I met a neighbour of theirs, a nice bloke called Peter Broome, then in his early thirties, who turned out to be a keen sailor. He was very helpful and encouraging; he told me about the cheap moorings at Newhaven where he kept his boat, a Sunstar 18. He very kindly offered to accompany me the first time I took Fram out to sea, an offer which I gratefully accepted. On that occasion we popped out of Newhaven on a gloriously sunny spring morning and sailed up and down the coast, trying the boat on the various points of sailing. Fram went well, and I learned a lot about trimming the sails when going through a choppy sea.

I’d been collecting equipment for the cruise all year, and by this time I had on board a couple of lifejackets (one of which was Linda’s), a Sestrel Junior handbearing and steering compass, an inshore distress flare pack, a Danforth pattern anchor, a fisherman anchor for everyday use, a two burner cooker, a chemical toilet and a pair of oars - I could just about row Fram if the outboard failed, though not in a chop or against a head wind. I never took a camera with me in these months - I wish I had - so my words will have to suffice here.

I didn’t sail far in those three months; going east from Newhaven I once went as far as Beachy Head - or at least to within a mile or so of the old lighthouse under the cliff. Linda's father, Les, came with me on that occasion. The first time I went west to Brighton and Shoreham I sailed in company with Peter Broome in his boat and a friend of his, whose name escapes me now, in his Alacrity 18ft; we passed the (then new) Brighton Marina, sail past the Piers and go as far as the entrance to Shoreham. I learned to sail Fram on my own, I sailed it in almost flat calm and in conditions where I needed to reef, but probably never more than the bottom end of force five. The scariest thing was getting in and out of Newhaven harbour, especially when one of the Car Ferries was using the entrance. I should explain that the entrance is about 400 metres long and 60-70 metres wide at its narrowest, and the Ferries seemed to take up about 90% of that width; in reality it wasn't quite that bad, but from literally sea level they looked huge. There was a system of lights to prevent small craft using the channel when a Ferry was moving and this allowed enough time for a fishing boat with a big diesel to get into or out of harbour without inconveniencing the ferry - but not enough time for a small sailing cruiser with a 4hp Seagull, especially against wind and current. A couple of times I was halfway in, struggling against the tide, when the Ferry appeared at the top of the harbour entrance. All I could do was to turn smartly round and run back out to sea hoping that the Ferry wouldn’t catch me up.

My favourite memory of this short period was one Saturday in the June of 1977. My parents had visited us and my Dad came out for the day. Fortunately I also had my friend Paul Davies with me. The wind was from the west, the sun was out, and the tide was ebbing down towards Brighton. We tacked down to the marina, the tide under our keel flattering Fram by increasing our speed over the ground. When we got to the Palace Pier (Brighton had two fully functioning piers in those days) we turned to head back to Newhaven, now with the wind behind us but the tide against us, still on the ebb. As we went the wind steadily increased from a Force 3 up to about the top of Force 4 - and I started to learn about the dangers of wind over tide. The waves were travelling in the same direction as we were, but the tide ebbing under them gave them a steep, occasionally breaking face. We would sail up the back of a wave and then, as we surfed off the top of it, we would drop two or three feet with a bang into the trough - and it was quite a bang. Now I had no experience of this, and I’d just rebuilt the boat and wasn’t wholly convinced that it wouldn’t split in two when we slammed down into the waves' troughs. Paul said I went ominously quiet; I got the impression he wasn’t feeling too happy, either. Meanwhile my Dad, bless him, was standing in the hatchway with his elbows bracing him on the cabin roof. Puffing his pipe, he was completely unconcerned. Later, when I told him how nervous I had been, he paid me one of the best compliments I’ve ever had. “I wasn’t worried, John. I had complete faith in you.” I really did feel about a foot taller after that.

The other great thing about that day was seeing two dolphins swimming parallel to us about twenty yards away as we approached Newhaven. I even forgot about the waves for a moment. They glistened darkly in the late afternoon sun.

Back on the mooring I carefully examined the boat - floorboards up, stem to stern. There wasn’t a drop of water: Fram was tight as a drum.

Chapter 6 A Launch at Lunchtime

Over the winter of 1976/7 I finished off the inside of the boat and, a few days before Easter, put a good coat of International TBT Antifouling (tri-butyl tin - now banned) on the bottom ready for launching. I also bought a very secondhand outboard - a British Seagull 102 longshaft. This was already about thirty years old but it was the cheapest 5hp motor I could find - it cost me £40 from a small boat chandlers in Horley near Gatwick of all places.

We fixed the launch for the Easter break, and my parents came down for the occasion, our friend Jean Davies came to help (her husband Paul was working), and Linda’s parents joined us for the launch. Here we are getting the boat on its trailer out of our front garden - a pretty daunting task in itself. Reading from left to right we see Jean, my Dad, Gordon (an ex-pupil of mine and son of a neighbour) and me. In the second picture apart from the humans we see Jean’s VW Camper, our Renault 6, Fram and my Dad’s MG Magnette, aka an Austin Cambridge in drag.





This picture shows me loading the Seagull outboard into my Dad’s car boot and him with his pipe on the go.



I’d arranged a mooring in Newhaven - not at the Marina (expensive) but up the River Ouse a bit in the creek around Denton Island (an island smaller than our back garden, but lined with yacht moorings). We’d arranged to use the boatyard slip to launch, and we drove down there to arrive late in the morning on Easter Saturday. There was no-one at the boatyard except a bloke working in the big shed where they built the Vancouver 27 yacht. Our first discovery was that there was a dirty great motor catamaran parked on the slip, and the tide hadn’t yet come in. The second discovery was that there was no-one about to move the catamaran. It was an ocean survey vessel. In this picture you can see my Mum wondering how we were going to launch - our fallback position, we decided right away, was to leave Fram tied up on the slipway until the Tuesday when presumably there’d be someone about to move the cat.



So we manouevred the trailer on to the slipway and undid all the tie-downs and loose gear. In this shot, from right to left, there's my Dad, me bent over, Linda's father Les restraining the boat and Linda and my Mum looking on. Linda, incidentally, was two months pregnant at this time. More of this later.



Then we had the naming ceremony - my Mum and I christening the Fram with a can of lager. The tide had started to creep up the slip by then, so we waited until there was sufficient depth of water and then floated Fram off.



And this is as far as the two old blokes went into the water.



But I was waist deep by the time it was off the trailer and we had secured mooring lines. I didn't need to go that far in but I hadn't done this before and I was determined that no damage should befall my immaculately painted hull. It was friggin' freezing! Easter, remember, and a fairly early one at that. Needless to say the parents stood around laughing.



And there we were - all that remained that day was for me to change into dry clothes - for once I'd had the foresight to bring some - and to take the boat on its first voyage - motoring the 200 yards to the mooring.

26 Gettin' there (as they say in Norfik)

This is starting to look something like! One coat of International One Pot Polyurethane Norfolk Green over one of Berger's Lead Grey Undercoat over three of Blake's Waterprof Primer. Am I getting sick of painting this hull? Is the bear a Catholic? But it's worth it.

25 There’s the rub

Thought I was running out of corny titles did you?

The past three days have all been spent on the keel band and bilge runners. They're of English red oak and although not very thick they're almost tough enough. The most difficult bit was around the centre plate opening. I originally intended to make the whole keel band in one piece, but it was just too complex because of the original shape of the hull (it went up and down in the middle like nobody's business). So there are separate pieces each side and fore and aft of the opening. It's all held together with SP Systems best Epoxy Resin so it ain't gonna fall apart. The photos show it and the bilge runners finished and coated with epoxy. The next job (which may get done before the end of the day if the showers stop) is to undercoat the outside of the hull. Not long until we turn it back over for the finishing touches.

Chapter 5 Our own boat

We decided it would be good to have our own boat - oh, all right, I decided, Linda acquiesced - and I started to look around. Everything seemed to be too expensive. Of course, I didn't have any idea where to look; there were no "Buy a Boat for less than £2,000" magazines then. But one Saturday morning in early summer, I saw a small ad in the Crawley and Horley Advertiser or some such title (yes, we were living in Crawley by then - well, someone has to). It said "17ft Sailing Cruiser for sale with road trailer; needs some attention. £500 ono". I rang, arranged to see it, thought it was basically OK, offered £400 and settled on £425. I put a towing hitch (cost £12) on to our Renault 6 (850cc, 42bhp, what a charger!) and dragged it back to Crawley where Linda took these photos.





In the photos you can see the Renault 6, our house at the time (the one nearest to the camera in the first photo) and my Morris Minor Traveller behind the boat (the Renault was Linda's car).

Then it was off to Haywards Heath where L's parents had kindly agreed to let me keep it in their garage while I renovated it. Looking at these pictures now I wonder if I paid too much for it - you could probably pick up a plywood boat in similar condition now for about the same money, 29 years on. But then there just wasn't the choice; the bottom line in the mid-'70s was about £1,000 for a small sailing cruiser in good condition, ready to sail - and that figure hasn't really changed much in the intervening years.

The boat was called “Rambler”. It was a Lysander class 17ft marine ply two berth sailing cruiser with bilge keels. Designed by one Percy Blandford in the early sixties (he also designed many other small boats and wrote books about boat building and maintenance, as well as others about traditional handicrafts). The deck and cabin sides had been painted white, the hull and coachroof had been blue, but as you can see from the photos, most of the paint had peeled off. It was all basically sound apart from a patch of rot in the top starboard corner of the transom. That summer I worked hard, removing and renovating all the fittings, stripping the whole hull back to bare wood, and repairing the rotten bit of transom - I had to replace the corner of the deck, corner of the transom and the corner of the starboard topside as well as part of the framing beneath.

“That summer” was the famous heat-wave summer of 1976. Linda’s parents lived in a bungalow in a dead end unmade road in a steep little valley in Haywards Heath. It was very, very hot. What little wind there was never seemed to get as far as the bungalow. On the plus side paint took about 20 minutes to be touch dry and glues and resins went off in record time. I developed a Heineken addiction. We had the usual six week teacher holidays (the only thing that kept - keeps - many people in teaching) and I spent five of them working on the boat - seven days most weeks, driving the 15 miles to H. Heath in the early-ish morning and back again in time for dinner in the evening. Linda came with me sometimes, but she ended up talking to her mother all day long so soon gave that up. I don’t think it rained once. I was very brown, but much of the time I didn’t look it because I was covered with dust from sanding and sawing.

In the middle of the holiday we decided to go to Scotland with our tent and dog for a break. The boat was getting on quite well and we hadn’t been that far north before. A friend had recommended Applecross about three quarters of the way up the west coast, so we headed for there in our trusty Renault 6. On the way up we went through a sort of weather portal about thirty miles north of Glasgow. The temperature dropped considerably, the sunshine turned into rain and mist, and we donned sweaters and anoraks. We lasted five days before we came home. On one occasion we sat in the tent at lunchtime, listening to the rain, the dog wrapped in Linda’s sleeping bag because she was shivering, and heard on the radio that old people were dropping dead on the streets of London from heatstroke. So when people talk about the wonderful heatwave summer of 1976 remember that it wasn’t that hot everywhere. We drove south and, as we passed Glasgow the sun came out and we took off our sweaters again; it was like driving through a door into summer.

Eventually the boat was finished enough to be moved back to our house in Crawley (the rationale for keeping it at H.Heath was that it could sit in the garage when it rained and overnight - hardly necessary, as it happened). The exterior was done and looking good and I could finish the inside over the autumn and winter. I had to take out our gateposts and a couple of privet bushes to get the boat into our garden, but there it sat for the next six months, slowly being finished to be ready for the next Spring. The School workshops came in handy for all sorts of jobs that winter, from stripping the mast and spars to making a new carved name board for the transom. I decided to rename the boat “Fram”, partly after Fritjof Nansen’s Arctic exploration vessel (“fram” means onward or forward in Norwegian) and partly after Uncle Jim’s houseboat in “Swallows and Amazons”. My Lysander probably still holds the record for the smallest boat ever to be called “Fram”.

Greater Spotted Woodpecker

The best photo I've yet managed of one of our woodpeckers on the peanut feeder:

Chapter 4 Beyond Potter Heigham again

There’s a sailing hiatus now, from 1966 to 1974, so skip the next couple of paras if it’s only boats you’re interested in. In those years I took my A-levels, with ignominious results, and spent most of the spring and summer of 1967 in St Ives, living in a pillbox on the cliffs near Lelant. After which I went to College, Linda and I met, married and made a home (all in Brighton) as the '60s turned into the '70s, and I spent a year as the full-time president of our Student Union. Linda got a job immediately after graduating, but I pretended I didn’t need either a job or a degree, and set up a small publishing company with three friends (only one of whom had any money to invest) to produce a free fortnightly listings magazine in Brighton – a sort of local version of Time Out. I edited it, wrote most of it, and did all the illustrations and layout. It lasted three issues before the bloke with the money withdrew what was left of it from the Bank. In the meantime I did supply teaching to supplement Linda’s salary, but it became obvious that I wasn’t being fair to her, and that dreams of a local publishing empire were simply dreams. At about the same time in Brighton the vile Hoogstraten was turning his dreams into reality around the corner from us by burning out inconvenient tenants from old properties he had bought. I'm glad we didn't meet.

So I got work as a teacher of Technical Drawing and Printing (honestly) in a school which was scheduled to close within three years (Queen’s Park Secondary, Brighton), from where, in 1974, I moved on to what had been the largest Comprehensive School in the UK, Thomas Bennett in Crawley, to teach Graphics, Art, and Motor Mechanics (again, honestly) but not simultaneously.

By 1976 I was starting to think about boats again. I wanted to take Linda sailing and I also wanted her to experience the Broads. Her parents fancied a Broads holiday too, so the idea was that they would hire a two-berth motorboat and we would hire a two berth sailing boat; they, with their far better cooking and washing facilities, would act as the mother-ship, going ahead each day to secure a decent mooring for that night while we swanned gracefully around enjoying the scenery and the sailing. We went to Martham again to hire, but this time to the Martham Boat Building and Development Company, a grandiose name for what was a pretty shoe-string outfit; but they were cheap.

We hired the Jenny, (and here we are sailing it on Whiteslea near Hickling) a two-berth gaff-rigged river cruiser with the usual leaky, smelly loo, but this time a 1.5 horsepower Stuart Turner petrol inboard, advertised as “easy hand start”.

Ha! We also took our large dog, a cross Great Dane/Alsatian called Killer (the name was funny when she was a little cuddly puppy). She had never been on a boat before.

Linda’s parents hired the Jayne, a two berth motor cruiser with a proper(ish) loo and what sounded like the engine from an old London Bus.

For obvious reasons (the trauma of holidaying with one’s in-laws - and here they are) I can’t remember too much



about the week, except that it was pretty cold, it rained a bit and blew half a gale – one of those “Roger’s blasts” you get on the Broads, probably about force six in the gusts - the day we were on Hickling Broad with full sail up. I decided to reef. To do this on a Broads yacht of that vintage you have to come head to wind, lower the gaff a bit using both peak and throat halyards, leave it all flogging while you tie in the reef, then hoist again. Well, it works when there’s not much wind. In the minor hurricane we had the boom danced about all over the place, the gaff refused to come down at all, let alone far enough to reef, and the mud weight (all that these boats have for an anchor – a 26lb lump of iron) dragged. We ended up in very shallow water, drifting closer and closer to the reed beds on the lee shore; I hadn’t started the engine. I was on the foredeck swinging on the luff of the mainsail to try to get it down, yelling at Linda to hold the boom still. The boom was lifting her off her feet and threatening to drop her over the side. She was not impressed with my captaincy. I finally managed to get the main right down, then the jib, ran back to the cockpit and started (not easily) the easy start engine, raced back up to the foredeck to pull up the mudweight (covering myself and everything else with mud), and finally managed to get the boat back into the dredged channel. Linda spent some time telling me never to speak to her like that again – and I never have.

One other highlight of the week stands out in my memory: we were tacking up the Thurne really efficiently, using the whole width of the river, bank to bank, making good speed, when Killer the dog decided she’d had enough. As I executed one particularly fine turn, inches off someone’s garden quay-heading, the dog stepped off the boat and stood on their manicured lawn, watching us as we sailed away on the opposite tack. We did a very quick 360 and grabbed her as we went past again, alternately cussing her and laughing.

By the end of the week we were handling the boat pretty confidentally, we'd agreed that hoisting the mainsail was my job, we'd learned not to worry about the three or four inches of bilgewater slopping about under the cabin sole at the end of a day's sail, and we'd even managed to sleep for almost the whole night on the ancient interior-sprung bunk mattresses which smelt of mould. And we'd almost mastered the easy-hand-start engine. Here we are moored up in Neatishead Cut one afternoon towards the end of the week.





But if this holiday didn’t convince Linda that sailing was the thing for her, it decided me that I needed a boat.

24 We have the technology . . .

There are now three coats of primer on the exterior, with rubbing down between, principally to get rid of the mini-dings that are all over the hull and which didn't show up until I painted it and then looked along the lines of the planks with the light in the right direction; so some I spotted in the morning and some in the afternoon - and each time I cursed! In each case it was a necessary to scrape off the paint in the area of the little ding, scratch up the surface of the gelcoat to ensure adhesion, level with polyester filler, sand it smooth, and repaint. So that's done now, t'ankeegod (cf Gerald Durrell), and it's taken three bloomin' days (cf Raymond Briggs).

The next job is the keel rubbing band. I started by epoxy-ing a thin (6mm) strip of red oak to the keel. I wasn't sure how to make the wood conform to the curve of the keel while it was glueing, but after much thought I arrived at this very high-tech solution. If you want to restore a dinghy like mine I can provide the major parts of this laminating kit very reasonably - say £10 per brick or slab?





Tomorrow I hope to be glueing a thicker (8mm) strip of oak to this initial strip given the time and decent weather. But it's a Bank Holiday on Monday, so I'd best get as much done before the rain as possible.

Oak before Ash

We're in for a splash. This is a shot of the trees by our pond in the middle of May 2005. The oak is far in advance of the ash this year. Other notable dates: swifts arrive and start to nest in our roof on the 15th May (usually 10th or 11th) and first cuckoo heard today, May 25th. Very late; we're normally a long way behind other parts of the country with these birds, but this year was exceptionally late, probably due to the cold northerly winds we had in the first half of the month. We're coming to the conclusion that we have a fairly cold microclimate here in Themelthorpe - everything seems to be later even than Reepham or Salle.

The photo also shows Linda weeding, by the way. A fine division of labour - she weeds, I take the photos!