The Sea Is In My Blood, But...

by Maggie Cobbett

The sea is in my blood. Well, it must be. Let’s examine the evidence. I’m British, after all, and we’re an island race with a proud maritime tradition. I love to look out over the water and have spent hours sitting near Flamborough Head watching the waves break against the shoreline.

Turner’s seascapes are amongst my favourite paintings. One of the happiest days of my life was spent in North Africa, overlooking the Pillars of Hercules and the line indicating where the grey waters of the Atlantic meet the blue of the Mediterranean. If that were not enough evidence, my paternal grandfather was a Master Mariner, and I was brought up on second hand tales of his exploits. Second hand, that is, because he died of drink more than three decades before I was born.

He was at sea when life under sail was still very tough, and I suppose he needed his grog. The trouble was that he needed it even more when back on shore and working for the Customs and Excise. He left behind a studio portrait of a handsome man with magnificent whiskers, an impoverished widow, and a large family of hungry children, one for each of his annual leaves. Still, I wish I’d known him. His blood-curdling yarns of savage floggings with a cat-o-nine tails, hand to hand fighting with cutlasses, shipmates sewn into their own hammocks and consigned to Davy Jones’s locker must have been passed down to him by old sailors he met as a boy. He came into the world half a century too late to have served un- der Nelson but just in time to meet men who had. Oddly enough, he said little about the latter years of his career and the comforts of his rank.

His stories were of working aloft when not much more than a child, huge billowing sails in towering seas with a pitching wooden deck hardly visible below, and the dark and cramped conditions in which he had to sleep. He never tired of reminding my father and his brothers how fortunate they were to have comfortable beds to themselves, not shared with rats and other vermin. At mealtimes, he reminisced cheerfully about breaking his teeth on hard weevil infested biscuits and dry salt meat and having only putrid water full of maggots to drink when the grog ran out.

The story which really put them off their food was the one about having his seasickness cured by being forced to drink a pint of salty water from one of the Mate’s long rubber sea boots. His only daughter adored him and I suspect that these tales were told with a twinkle in his eye, but he was a stern father to the boys and they believed every word. Not one of them ran away to sea as he’d done and, when war broke out, they all joined the Army.

Apart from brief periods on troop ships, my uncles on that side of the family all managed to keep their feet on dry land. Dad, though, was one of the many soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force rescued at Dunkirk. Amused to find a photograph of the evacuation beaches in my school history book, he told me once that the seasickness he faced on the long journey back to ‘Blighty’ in a little fishing boat was far worse than anything the Germans could have done to him. During the whole of that crossing he’d prayed for someone to shoot him and put him out of his misery.

The only beach Dad ever visited with me was in Bridlington, where we spent our family holidays when I was a child. Money was very tight and the mother of one of our neighbours back home in Leeds put us up every summer in her house in St Mary’s Walk near the Priory. The journey on the train with the wheels click-clacking, We’re going to Brid. We’re going to Brid, was always the start of a week of bliss for me. to Brid. We’ve been to Brid, which always meant the end of our week away and no chance of seeing the sea again for another twelve months. Leeds is about as far away from it as you can get in England and even the carrier bags full of mint rock and plastic treasures won in Brown’s Amusement Arcade on rainy days were of little consolation.

Whatever the weather, we were down on the shoreline every day, building sandcastles, digging moats and paddling. Dad’s only concession to being on holiday was to take off his jacket, socks and shoes and roll up his trouser legs. Occasionally he’d remove his trilby hat, but he always kept his tie on.

Despite all my pleading, he could never be persuaded to take me on a pleasure boat trip out to sea, although he did once hire a rowing boat for us. We became ignominiously stuck in the harbour at low tide and had to be towed off to the cheers of the onlookers on the surrounding wall. I loved every moment of it but cannot say the same for my parents and I expect my grandfather was turning in his grave.

The other highlight of that particular holiday was when the donkey carrying me sedately across the sand decided to head into the sea with its owner and my father in hot pursuit. That day, Dad ran into the waves up to his knees, the furthest he ever ventured after Dunkirk. Not expecting to leave dry land, he hadn’t rolled up the legs of his new flannel trousers and the salt water took out all the colour. On the way home that year, his laments over the ruined flannels were even louder than the train wheels with their doleful We’ve been

My parents never went abroad for holidays, so when I first boarded a cross Channel ferry, I was eighteen and with a group of friends. For reasons of economy we’d chosen to set off from Tilbury Docks, which meant a long time on board, and we were all quite nervous, but only I was sick in the terminal before the boat even arrived. That set the pattern for my future dealings with the sea. Every crossing was an ordeal, even when the water was utterly tranquil and everyone else was heading for the bar or the cafeteria. Even years later, when accompanying school parties abroad, I had to tell my pupils to leave me in peace as I lay flat on my back with a coat over my face or dashed backwards and forwards looking for somewhere to be violently ill in private. This usually meant commandeering one of the cubicles in the Ladies and trying to ignore the angry banging on the door. Hanging over the rail on deck was an alternative I only tried once. There was a stiff breeze which... Well, perhaps that’s better left to the imagination.

Everyone told me that the root of my problem was psychological. It had to be, because I wasn’t generally queasy in cars, coaches, or aeroplanes and even Blackpool’s Big Dipper held no terrors. I just convinced myself before I set foot on board ship that I should be sick and therefore I was. This was finally brought home to me when I met a very attractive young American on the train from Paris to Calais one summer. By the time we reached the coast he’d asked me to go out with him during his stay in England and he went on to make such a good impression that we were on the train to London before I realised that I’d finally crossed the Channel without a qualm. Unfortunately, the next time I went to France there was no such pleasant encounter on the way and I was back to square one.

I’ve been ill on the North Sea, the Tyrrhenian Sea between Italy and Sardinia, the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean but never more wretched than on an ill-fated sailing trip around far too many of the Scottish islands. An enthusiastic boyfriend – not the American from the train – persuaded me that we should join a group of his friends for a week. His ambition was for us to sail around the world eventually in our own catamaran and he thought it would be a good opportunity for me to pick up a few nautical skills. All my instincts cried out against it, but I was keen on him at the time and feebly agreed. It might not be too bad, I told myself. Maybe even quite romantic. Starlit nights, the waves gently tapping against the sides... Mmm.

So it was that I found myself one cold wet morning standing by the quayside in Gairloch. A group of hearty bearded types and a girl of the jolly hockey sticks variety, all clad in yellow oilskins, bore down on us and we were soon underway in two small yachts. My stomach started to heave before I made it down into the cabin and that was the beginning of a week of abject misery. No one else was sick, they all expected me to do my share of cooking food I’d no hope of keeping down and my boyfriend turned into

Captain Bligh. The only respite I had was during the one afternoon when we were becalmed for several hours and he took me ashore in the dinghy, cursing our bad luck. Romance? Forget it! There were times during that week when I think he’d have liked to throw me overboard and times when I wished he would.

We made it back to Gairloch eventually and Captain Bligh and I parted company. I really couldn’t blame him. How could he head out into the Atlantic with a first mate who couldn’t even keep down dry bread between Skye and Harris?

Since those days, I’ve managed to avoid close contact with the ocean waves by flying above or driving beneath them. If I were in charge of choosing candidates for sainthood, aeronautical engineers and the men who built the Channel Tunnel would be at the very top of my list.

Yes, the sea is in my blood but, as long as it goes on demanding the contents of my stomach, I shall be content to view it from a safe distance.

A Yorkshire girl through and through, Maggie Cobbett lives on the edge of the Dales. With five books to her credit, she also writes short stories, features and even the occasional poem. Her many travels, as well as careers in modern language teaching and television background work, have furnished an inexhaustible supply of inspiration. http://maggiecobbett.co.uk/

Pirates

by Lis McDermott

One-eyed Jane, Black-heart Josh, and Captain Billy, Imaginations at boiling point, fully engaged in their pretend world; giggling, happy, rascal pirates watch the land flow past them, as they flee with chests of gold, diamonds and pieces of eight.

Their little boat joyously skims across the lake, It sails, canvas billowing as the wind blows the craft over the lightly moving, rippling wake.

Shouts of “aye-aye, cap’ain” and “guns at the ready”, echo across the blue expanse, into the treelined hills.

One-eyed Jane sits at the stern, with her toy telescope, Captain Billy is at the helm, Black-heart Josh searches their realm.

‘Land ho!’ shouts One-eyed Jane with glee, As their pirate hide-out appears; where they live like kings.

Full of their adventures, excitedly, the children, run home for tea.

After a long career in music within education, and as an OFSTED inspector, Lis began to focus on her other passions, photography, and writing. Working as professional headshot photographer and writing coach. She has since published numerous books on photography, poetry, short stories, and romantic suspense.