Chapter 3 To Infinity And Beyond - well, Potter Heigham anyway

Later that same year - Whitsun half term of our Lower 6th, I believe, when we should probably have been revising for exams - we (Ian, Charlie and myself) set off for Martham, on the Norfolk Broads, to pick up the sailing cruiser we had hired for a week. Here’s a photo of us just before we left Stevenage outside Ian's family home; reading from left to right there’s Ian, Ian’s Mum Dallas (actually Mildred but she changed it), Charlie, and myself with fag on the go. (I smoked Players Number Six, Ian smoked Rothman's, Charlie was slightly asthmatic and choked quietly.) The Standard 8 has been polished to within an inch of its life and is loaded with (mostly unsuitable) clothes, bedding and food. And cider, which was the officially sanctioned alcoholic drink for the trip. Dallas is holding Ming the Siamese.



The photo was taken by Ian’s father George who worked for ICL in Stevenage and was well off but who strangely refused to stand guarantor for the hire of the boat. We though this was mean, but fortunately my Dad (who probably earned half of what George pulled in) signed on the dotted line and we were off.

Ian drove most of the way at 50mph, which wasn’t far short of flat-out. It took about four hours to get there, an average speed of about 23mph. He was very careful.

The boat we hired was called the Vagabond, and was the oldest hire yacht on the Broads. Also the only one without an inboard motor (apart from the Hunter fleet at Ludham who probably wouldn’t have rented to us three). It was a terrifying 32 feet long including the bowsprit, and had three berths, one of which was very adjacent to the leaky and smelly marine toilet.

On the first afternoon, as I remember, we loaded up our stuff, Ian paid the extra money to have his car garaged for the week at the boatyard (Charlie and I thought this was very funny), we told them we could sail competently, and clamped the one-and-a-half horse power British Seagull outboard to the transom bracket. We had bottled out and rented the outboard for an extra fifteen shillings a week (75 pence - ah, dear dead days!). We motored to Hickling Broad and tied up for the night at (I presume, though I can’t remember) The Ferryboat Inn. All the evenings descend into an alcoholic blur from this point on. I couldn’t remember them at the time and I certainly can’t now.

The next morning we were brave and got the sails up for the first time on Hickling. It was immediately apparent that this was no amateur's boat. By the standard of most Broads hire yachts she was vastly overcanvassed (I believe there was even a topsail hidden away in a locker somewhere) and we scared ourselves pretty thoroughly. We decided to motor down to Potter Heigham and lower the mast to go under the bridge and reach the rest of the Broads system. Our immediate target was Barton Broad where both Charlie and I had attended our School Sailing Camp and learned to sail. At least, I had learned how to coax a British Seagull into life there. This is us at Potter before we dropped the mast for the first time, Charlie on the left, me on the right.



Our aim was to tie up at a pub every night, but we soon found that it was cheaper to buy booze from shops and souse quietly in the cabin at night. We saw no girls all week; the boat was fizzing with hormones. I seem to recall a copy of a dubious magazine called Fiesta (which was usually soggy with bilge water) was all the reading matter, except for a copy of Jean Genet’s “Our Lady of the Flowers” which I took, and Charlie’s guitar tutor book; he could strum a tune, but his sense of rhythm was awful. We didn’t encourage him to play. I think Ian may have had a copy of Autocar.



We topped up on food and alcohol whenever we could - at Potter, at Ludham Bridge where the above photo was taken, at the Hole In The Wall at Barton Turf (the back door of a grocery shop where we could buy cigarettes and alcohol - a place we learned about at the age of 12 when it had supplied all the illicit booze to the School Sailing Camp), and at every stop thereafter.

Actually the photo above is almost a historic document now. The far river bank, at the extreme left of the shot where the white hulled motor cruiser is moored, is now lined with mature trees which make sailing up to the bridge more difficult than it was in 1966.

We made it up to Barton Broad and had a good couple of days there; we went down as far as Acle Bridge and up as far as Ranworth; then we turned round and started back. The weather was a bit miserable - only a couple of sunny days - but I can't remember much more about our week, mainly due to a combination of alcohol in unaccustomed amounts, lack of sleep, and because I was going down with Glandular Fever at the time - I was in bed and delirious a couple of days after we got back to Stevenage. But I do remember putting that fearsome bowsprit through the side of a plywood hire dayboat - Ian was on the helm and we'd been trying to tack past St Benet's Abbey while this bloody dayboat had impeded us all the way along that straight bit of river. Ian had a stubborn streak; he shouted at the day boat for about the 5th time that it was his right of way and that he was going to carry on with his tack. They presumably didn't believe us and also carried on in our way. To our horror Ian was as good as his word and rammed the dayboat halfway down its length with the steel-tipped bowsprit. The bowsprit went into the plywood hull with a crunching sound and as it went deeper in - we had quite a lot of momentum behind us with full sail up and weighing about three tons - there was a sort of zizzz noise as the bobstay - a steel rope connecting the end of the bowsprit to the Vagabond's waterline, sliced a neat groove down from the point of inmpact. When we finally managed to kick ourselves clear from the dayboat it had quite a neat keyhole-shaped aperture in its side, about a foot deep with a four inch circle punched out at the top.

A great deal of shouting went on and Ian, incandescent with rage although we could no longer be said to be the injured party, was still making rude gestures at them as we cleared St Benet's Reach. They were tieing up at the Abbey, presumably to inspect the damage. (We didn't report the incident to the boatyard, we heard no more about it and, thank heavens, my Father didn't lose the deposit on the holiday.)

That was the high point really; I've never been a sailing vandal since. The rest of the week it rained, we got wet, Charlie moaned about us smoking in the cabin, we ran out of money, we took turns to cook awful meals (by the end of the week we were down to bread and jam and cheese), Charlie worried about his guitar getting damp, and I started to feel really quite peculiar as the Glandular Fever took hold. It was character-forming. I've been morose ever since.