Читать книгу A Floating Home - J. B. Atkins - Страница 5

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‘I will go back to the great sweet mother,

Mother and lover of men, the sea.’

One winter I made up my mind that it was necessary to live in some sort of vessel afloat instead of in a house on the land. This decision was the result, at last pressed on me by circumstances, of vague dreams which had held my imagination for many years.

These dreams were not, I believe, peculiar to myself. The child, young or old, whose fancy is captive to water, builds for castles in Spain houseboats wherein he may spend his life floating in his element. His fancy at some time or other has played with the thought of possessing almost every type of craft for his home—a three-decker with a glorious gallery, a Thames houseboat all ready to step into, a disused schooner, a bluff-bowed old brig. He will moor her in some delectable water, and when his restlessness falls upon him he will have her removed to another place. Civilization shall never rule him. As though to prove it he will live free of rates, and weigh his anchor and move on if the matter should ever happen to come under dispute. Nor will he pay rent resentfully to a grasping landlord. For a mere song he will pick up the old vessel that shall contain his happiness. Her walls will be stout enough to shelter him for a lifetime, though Lloyd’s agent may have condemned her, according to the exacting tests that take count of sailors’ lives, as unfit to sail the deep seas.

Certainly those who have the water-sense, yet are required by circumstances to earn their living as landsmen, have all dreamed these dreams. In many people the sight of water responds to some fundamental need of the mind. To the vision of these disciples of Thales everything that is agreeable somehow proceeds from water, and into water everything may somehow be resolved. When they are away from water they are vaguely uncomfortable, perhaps feeling that the road of freedom and escape is cut off. Inland they will walk, like Shelley, across a field to look at trickling water in a ditch, or will search out a dirty canal in the middle of an industrial town. The sea, which to some eyes seems to lead nowhere, seems to them to lead everywhere. Iceland and the Azores open their ports equally to the owner of any kind of vessel, and the wind is ready to blow him there, house and all. The water-sense is the contradiction in many people of the hill-sense. They of the water-sense cannot tolerate that too large a slice of the sky, in which they love to read the weather-signs, should be eclipsed; the wonderful lighting of the mountains is less significant to them than the marshalling of vapours and tell-tale clouds upon their spacious horizon.

But this water-sense which lays a spell on you often exacts severe tolls of labour. The yachtsman who employs no paid hands, for instance, must sweat for his enjoyment; the simple acts of keeping a yacht in sea-going order, of getting the anchor and making sail, and of stowing sail and tidying up the ship when he has returned to moorings, mean exacting and continuous work. If he goes for a short sail the labour might reasonably be said to be disproportionate to the pleasure; and if he goes for a long sail the pleasure itself may easily turn into labour before the end. These disadvantages and uncertainties the yachtsman knows, and yet they are for him no deterrent. He may spend a miserable night giddily tossed about in an open and unsafe anchorage, and call himself a fool for being there; but the next week he will expose himself to the same discomfort. Why? Because it is in his blood; because he has this water-sense which compels him, bullies him, and enthrals him.

The houseboats of the Thames are famous centres of a dallying summer existence in which life tunes itself to the pace of the drifting punts and skiffs, and seems to be expressed by the metallic melody of a gramophone or the tinkling of a mandolin. At night there is enough shelter for paper lanterns to burn steadily; and as the wind is tempered, so is everything else. All is arranged to add the practical touch of ease and comfort to the ideal of living roughly and simply, and the result is a mixture of paradox and paradise. One wonders what proportion of the population of the houseboats, if any, lives in the houseboats in the winter. The boats always seem to be empty then, and of course they were not designed for regular habitation. A wall or roof which, like

‘The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made,’

is not a meet covering for the winter. Nor would even a thoroughly weather-proof boat be so if it have no fireplace. But thought runs on from the spectacle of the mere Thames houseboat to the further possibilities of this mode of life. Why keep to the tame scenes of the upper Thames? Why not live on the Broads, under that clean vault of sky, scoured by the winds, among the wilder sights and sounds of nature? Thought runs on again. Why on the Broads, after all? They are a long way from London, and it may happen that one has to be often in London. And in the summer you might imagine that the upper Thames had been transported to Norfolk, so full are the Broads and rivers of picnicking parties. Why, then, not live in a houseboat on sea water? Sea water is a great purifier. No fear that it will become stagnant or rank. Its transmuting process turns everything to purity. Take an odd proof. Even rubbish or paper in sea water is not an offence as it is in fresh water. Hurried along on the tide, it bears a relation to the great business of ships; but in fresh water it reminds one of disagreeable people, careless of all the amenities.

The houseboat, then, must be a ship lying with her sisters of the sea in a harbour. Attracted by the Government advertisements that appear from time to time in shipping newspapers, one thinks, perhaps, or buying an old man-of-war. But old men-of-war, though very roomy, are more expensive than you might suppose. Besides, in the conditions of sale there may be a stipulation that the buyer must break up the ship. A barque, such as is often bought by a Norwegian trader in timber, and spends her remaining days being pumped out by a windmill on deck, might serve for a houseboat. So would a steam yacht when the engines had been taken out. But then the draught of either is not light, and the occupier of a houseboat might want to lie far up a snug creek, and there even the highest spring tide would not give him the necessary depth. A sea houseboat might be built specially, but that is not the way of wisdom; the cost would be very great. The houseboat must be a vessel of very easy draught, and also one that can be bought cheap and be easily adapted for the purpose.

Often had my thoughts carried me to this point by some such stages as have been described. But the floating home had remained a phantom because my desire for the sea was partly satisfied by the possession of a small yacht, the Playmate, of which I was the Skipper and my wife was the Mate, and in which we had spent all our holidays. Our home was a country cottage, which I had bought at Fleetwick, not far from a tidal river that strikes far into the heart of Essex. But at length circumstances, as I have said, caused the dream to become for me a very practical matter.

It happened in this way. The shadow of the change from governess to school had fallen on our two boys. We regretted it the more because there was no school within reach of home, and they were, in our opinion, too young to go to a boarding school. And so there seemed nothing to be done but to sell or let our cottage—if we could—where we had lived for nine years, and move to some place where there was a good school for the boys. Whatever place we chose had to be on or near salt water, for neither my wife nor I could seriously think of life without water and boats.

We found a satisfactory school near a tidal river in Suffolk, but we could not find a house—at least, not one we both liked and could afford. One day, having returned dejectedly from a search as futile as usual, we were discussing the situation, which indeed looked hopeless, for our means were obviously unequal to what we wanted to do, when the idea of a floating home suddenly repossessed me with a fresh significance.

‘Let’s buy an old vessel,’ I said, ‘and fit her up as our house. We have often talked of doing it some day. That may have been a joke, perhaps. But why not do it seriously—now?’

The Mate evaded the startling proposal for the moment.

‘I wish the children wouldn’t grow up,’ she commented sadly.

‘If we don’t have the vessel,’ I persisted, ‘we shall fall between two stools, because with all the expenses—school, rent, and so on, which we’ve never had before—we shall have to give up the Playmate.’

‘That would be worse than anything.’

The mere idea of giving up our boat was more than we could contemplate—our boat in which we two had cruised alone together, summer and winter, on the East Coast, and from whose masthead more than once we had proudly flown the Red Ensign on our return from a cruise ‘foreign.’

‘I would rather live in a workman’s cottage and keep the boat, than live in a better house and have no boat,’ said the Mate emphatically.

‘Well, we’ve got to leave here, and it’s something to have found a decent school. I suppose, if we take a house really big enough to hold us, it will cost us forty pounds to move into it.’

‘Much more than that if you count all the new carpets, curtains, and dozens of other things we shall want.’

I thought an occasion for reiteration had arrived.

‘Just think. If we had a ship, we should do away with the expense of moving for one thing, the rent for another, and the rates and taxes for another. We may be absolutely sure our expenses will increase, and our income almost certainly won’t.’

The Mate was silent, so I continued: ‘Suppose we are reduced to doing our washing at home. Washing hung up to dry in the garden of a villa is one thing, but slung between the masts of a ship it is another. Not many people can scrub their own doorsteps without feeling embarrassed, but one can wash down one’s own decks proudly in front of the Squadron Castle.’

‘There is something in that.’ She was gazing out over the marshes, where the gulls and plover were circling. She sighed, and I knew she was thinking of the ‘move.’

I sat beside her and looked out of the window too, and the familiar sight of a barge’s topsail moving above the sea-wall caught my eye. ‘That’s what we should be doing,’ I said, pointing to the barge—‘sailing along with our children and our household goods on board instead of waiting for pan-technicons to arrive with our furniture, and spending days in misery and discomfort moving it into a house we don’t like, and then paying a large rent every year for the privilege of staying in it. If we had a barge we could anchor clear of the town, and when the holidays came we could up anchor and clear off to a place more after our own hearts. Of course a barge is the very thing—the most easily handled ship for her size in the world. I see the way out quite clearly now.’

A Barge at Sunset in the Lower Thames

‘Yes, that sounds very jolly, but there would be a lot of drawbacks too.’ The Mate began to retreat towards the drawing-room.

‘Oh, but you haven’t heard half the advantages yet,’ I called after her.

The Mate wanted time. So did I. I lit a cigarette and thought for a few minutes over our position; and the more I thought the more sure I became that a barge would solve the problem for us. And when I joined her I felt that I had a pretty strong case.

‘Now listen to me,’ I said. ‘Not only should we save a great deal over the move, and over the rates and taxes, and have no landlord to interfere with us, but we should actually be freer than we are here. We should be sure of our sailing, which is one great advantage; and later, when the boys go to their public school, we can move wherever we like and not be tied to a house for seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years. A move without a move—think of that. I am sure salt-water baths will be good for the children, and hot salt-water baths will be excellent for rheumatism—or anything of that sort. The barge will be warmer in the winter than a house, and cooler in the summer. She will be cheaper to keep up. You will save in servants and also in coals. You know you hate tramps, and hawkers, and barrel-organs. Well, you will be free from all these things. Of course, we don’t have earthquakes in England, but if we did have one we shouldn’t feel it. If we had a flood, it wouldn’t hurt us. You remember we paid about four pounds to have our burst water-pipes mended last winter, but we shouldn’t have that sort of thing in a barge. We shouldn’t be swindled over a gas-meter, and servants wouldn’t leave because of the stairs. It will be a delightful place for the children to bring their friends to, and no one will know whether we’re eccentric millionaires or paupers only just to windward of the workhouse. We’ll have the saloon panelled in oak, and white enamel under the decks, and our books and blue china all round. We’ll. …’

I had just begun to warm to my work when an expression on the Mate’s face showed me that I had said enough and said it reasonably well. I had made an impression on her adventurous heart.