Alone on a Wide Wide Sea Read online

  I was like the cat that got the cream and fell on his feet all at once and the same time. And it got better too. Within a month or two I was married to Zita, and I was designing all the old man’s boats for him, and making models for the children too. We lived all together in the huge family home adjoining the boatyard, where everyone had their own chair on the verandah – even me, my wedding gift from Zita’s father.

  Then came the icing on the cake. I know you’re not supposed to mix metaphors, that cats that get the cream and icing on the cake hardly seem compatible. But to describe this supreme moment of my life, I need all the metaphors I can lay my hands on – there’s another one! Before I knew it, Zita and I had a little girl of our own, Allie – Alexis really, but I’ve never called her that. Everyone else does, but to me she was always Allie.

  “She’s got your nose,” Zita told me. Luckily for me that’s all she’s got of me. The rest is perfect. I have to say that because it’s Allie who’s writing my story down at this moment, typing this all out for me on her word processor. But it happens to be true. She types as fast as I can speak, which is amazing. But then she’s always been amazing to me, ever since she was born nearly eighteen years ago. It seems like yesterday.

  Down in the old man’s boatyard, I was adapting Mr Dodds’ designs for ocean-going yachts, for dinghies, for motor boats too. For the first time now I had the opportunity to imagine a boat, to dream it up first in my head like a story, then sketch it and design it and build it. But all the while I kept Mr Dodds’ principles in mind: that a boat should be built to dance with the sea, not just to go fast or look sleek. I had one or two arguments with my new father-in-law about this, but as soon as he found my designs were selling well, he was more than happy to let me do what I wanted.

  One boat I conceived, designed and built all with my own hands. I never let anyone else go near it or even see it till I’d finished it, and then the first person to see it was Allie. I called her Kitty. It came into my head – it just seemed a good idea at the time. And Allie liked saying it over and over. So the name stuck. Kitty was bright yellow, and built to sail the roughest waves in Allie’s bath, to survive close encounters with all her plastic ducks and loofahs. Based as usual on one of Mr Dodds’ designs, Kitty was sturdy and sound, the most bath-worthy boat ever built. Allie couldn’t turn that boat upside down even if she wanted to – and she tried often enough. Turn Kitty over and she’d just pop right back up again.

  When she grew bigger, I built her a bigger boat, Kitty Two, I called this one, to sail on the pond, yellow again and fully rigged. Mr Dodds’ designs, I discovered, worked every bit as well in the sea or the pond or the bath. And just as soon as she could walk, I made her first real sailing boat, a dinghy, Kitty Three. This one was big enough for the three of us to go sailing together in her. Once, on Christmas Day, Allie insisted on taking the tiller so I let her. As she took us out to sea that day, she began singing her favourite song London Bridge is Falling Down! Can’t think who taught her that!

  Allie was a natural sailor – it came I’m sure from starting so young. I hardly had to teach her at all. She took to it instinctively, and loved every minute of it. She won her first race when she was six. She just lived for her time on the water. Every day after school she’d be down at the boatyard, not only watching either, but building. For her, the boatyard was the next best thing to the sea, and she often had a canny way of making the one thing lead to another.

  She learned boats the proper way, Mr Dodds’ way, my way: from the keel up, from the inside out. And she learned the sea, because she was always out there. I’d go with her when I could of course, but if I couldn’t then she’d pester someone else in the yard. She wasn’t at all easy to say no to, not for me, not for anyone. Even the old man, her grandfather, who was no one’s soft touch, was putty in her hands. Zita used to say Allie had us all round her little finger, and that was just about right. But she was clever with it too. She knew she had to put in the hours down at the boatyard. Whatever needed doing she’d do it. She was the same kind of dogsbody Marty and I had once been in Mr Dodds’ yard. She was a hard worker, and the blokes saw that and liked it, which was why one way or another she’d usually manage to get one of them to take her out sailing.

  It was seeing her so at one with her boat, so happy, that inspired me to take it up seriously again myself. Watching the joy on her face, the sheer exhilaration, was infectious. I discovered I didn’t just enjoy sailing because she was with me, I began to love it again for itself, the way I had before. I was loving it because it made me feel alive again like nothing else. True, the sight of a passing fishing trawler, the unmistakeable lines of a warship on the horizon could still trouble me. But it was the heady, happy days with Marty I remembered most. And now I was out there again alone or with my own daughter. Zita came out with us only rarely on what she called picnic days, when the sea was listless, when there was so little wind the sails hung there limp above us. She liked it best like that, but Allie and I were bored out of our minds.

  It was on one of those picnic days that it happened – Allie would have been about ten by then I think. The three of us were lazing there in the sun after lunch. I had my eyes closed when I felt Allie fiddling with my lucky key. She loved doing that. “Tell me about the key again, Dad,” she said, “and your sister Kitty.” I’d told her the story hundreds of times before, trying to make it a little bit more interesting each time, as you do. This time when I’d finished, she took it off me and put it round her neck. “You know what we should do when I’m a bit older, Dad? We should sail to England and find her. Could we do that, Dad?”

  That was exactly what Marty had said I should do all those years ago as we were sailing past Dunedin off New Zealand.

  “Could we, Dad?” Allie asked again.

  “It’s a long old way to England,” I told her. “Half way round the world. And what if we can’t find Kitty when we get there? I’ve no idea at all where she’d be.”

  “We could find her,” Allie said. “Course we can, and we’ll find out what the key’s for. I think it’s a box. Got to be, hasn’t it? S’only a little key. And we’ll open it up. What’s inside, d’you think?”

  And then I said it. I said it quite deliberately. I’d thought about it, and I meant it. “I don’t know what’s inside,” I replied. “But we’re going to find out, Allie. I’ll have to build a bigger boat of course, but I can and I will. We’ll sail to England and we’ll find Kitty. If she’s there we’ll find her. It’s something I should’ve done a long time ago.”

  “Do you promise me, Dad?” she said, looking up at me wide-eyed with excitement.

  “I promise you, Allie,” I replied. And it was a promise I was determined to keep.

  I looked across at Zita then, and she knew I meant it too.

  I could see she was suddenly fearful. But I couldn’t backtrack now. I’d promised. Everything had been decided in those few moments. When Allie was older, we’d do it. We’d sail to England together and find my sister, Kitty, and discover what my lucky key was really for. On the way back home that evening, I was already designing the boat in my head – Kitty Four, she’d be called.

  Kitty Four

  It could have been just a pipedream. It would have been if Allie hadn’t kept me up to the mark. She didn’t pester me – not exactly. But she did prod me, and every prod was a reminder, and all the reminders served to crank me up, to get me going, make me feel guilty if ever I was thinking of back-sliding – she knew me too well, she still does. She knew the dream of the boat, the dream of her great ocean adventure, would never come to anything unless she made it happen, unless she made me do it. I had my own reasons for delaying the commitment, and they weren’t just backslides. I had good sound reasons too.

  Both she and I needed far more experience of ocean sailing before we could embark on such a voyage – Zita was adamant about that. There was no way she’d let us go, she said, unless she was quite sure we were both ready for it. The old man
said the same.

  “Yous not going till I say yous ready,” he said. And he always meant what he said.

  Zita also made it absolutely clear that Allie couldn’t go until she was eighteen – and that was years ahead. But years have an uncanny knack of passing. The boat I was building in my head was a thirty-three footer – the ideal size for ocean sailing, Mr Dodds used to say, because it’s compact. “Size,” he once told me, “is not all it’s cracked up to be. Look at what happened to the Titanic.” And while I was busy dreaming up my compact thirty-three footer, I was out there practising hard – encouraged by Allie, who was herself entering and winning every race she could.

  I knew what she was about. With every new silver cup on the mantelpiece she was proving to us all just how good a sailor she was. Zita was proud of her and her grandfather was too, too proud I sometimes felt, but then grandfathers are entitled. But neither was happy about the prospect of the two of us going off around the world. They made that very clear. And already Allie was talking of not just going to England and stopping off there to find Kitty, but of doing the whole thing, the entire circumnavigation.

  As for me, I won no silverware, but I was in training. Four times I went crewing on the Sydney-Hobart race, and of course, everyone at home was there to see me off, follow my progress on the television, and was there to welcome me when I came home. I had some hairy moments – the Sydney-Hobart race specialises in providing those. No boat I sailed in ever won. But for me that wasn’t the point. I was learning again everything I’d learned with Mr Dodds and Marty, and more besides. I could feel my confidence and strength growing with every race. Best of all though, and thanks to Allie’s persistence and dogged determination, the old man himself was coming round. He was still cautious, but he was beginning to encourage us now in our great endeavour. Allie had it in her blood, he said. Cretans were the greatest and bravest sailors in the world.

  When I told him I needed some time off work to do some longer sails on my own he arranged, just as Mr Dodds had done before, for me to deliver Stavros boats far and wide. I sailed again to New Zealand, solo this time. I took a boat to Bali once, with Allie, and another to Hong Kong, solo again this time. On each trip I was testing my endurance, learning how to deal with minor and major catastrophes alike, and all the time I was learning the sea again, learning the winds and the tides. I was ready. I was as ready as I was ever going to be.

  By now Allie was sixteen. The two of us had done lots of sailing together, ocean-going, long trips. I knew how good a sailor she was – far better than me already, that’s for sure. She only had to feel the wind and to look at the waves to understand what dance they wanted to do, what sails were right; she had already mastered all the new gizmos of modern sailing. That side of it seemed to come as naturally to her as the sailing itself. When she was on board I spent most of my time cooking or watching albatross or dolphins, or stargazing. I just wasn’t needed. But she was still only sixteen. Still Zita wasn’t at all happy about it. And still we didn’t have a boat.

  We had a design though by now, and just as importantly, we had the means to build it. The old man had done a deal with me. He’d sponsor the whole thing, he said, pay for everything down to the last can of baked beans. But he wanted the Stavros Boats’ name and the logo up there on the sails, and along the sides. And he insisted we had to get as much publicity as possible.

  “We can sell many many boats on the backs of this,” he said.

  “Just so long as we can call the boat Kitty Four” I told him.

  “You calls it what you like,” he said. “Just make it the safest boat you ever built in your life. And you brings my little Allie back to me safe and sound, you hear me?”

  By now of course everyone down at the boatyard was part of the great project. We all built the keel together. Everyone rallied around and helped, all of us fired by Allie’s energy and enthusiasm. They all knew her well – after all she’d been hanging around the boatyard ever since she was knee-high. They’d watched her grow up and now they wanted to be part of her dream, wanted to help make it come true. They all knew the story about the key I wore around my neck, and about my sister, Kitty. Everyone in the boatyard felt they were part of the same story. Better than that, they were making it happen. Never was a boat built with so much care and affection as Kitty Four. We all wanted to build the safest boat that ever sailed the ocean. Knock her down and she’d come back up. Turn her over and she’d right herself again. She had to be unsinkable; we’d make her unsinkable.

  Allie worked alongside the rest of us in the shed, late into the night for months on end. Zita allowed her do it only if she kept up with her school work. She was very strict about it. So Allie did both. Keeping Zita on side was the most difficult part of the whole thing. As the skeleton of the keel began to look like the beginnings of a real boat, as Allie’s eighteenth birthday came ever closer, as plans for the trip began to crystallise, she worried more and more. Both Allie and I did all we could to allay her fears, to convince her that we’d be fine. But night after night, she’d lie awake beside me. I tried to reassure her about how safe the boat would be, how we’d make sure everything was just as it should be, about how good at sea Allie and I were together. We’d been in big seas, we’d managed, we’d coped, we’d be fine. Telling her though wasn’t enough.

  It was Allie who came up with the idea that at last enabled Zita to feel a little happier about it. She gave her a part in it all, a vital part. She told her we were going to need someone to run the whole communications side for us back home, all the emails, Satphone, the website. Allie said she would teach her everything she needed to know. That seemed to make all the difference. As we finished the keel down in the boatyard, Allie and her mother worked together at home. They converted the box-room to a communications room, fitted it all out, bought all the computers and gizmos they needed.

  We were all there together to see Kitty Four go into the water for the first time. Zita launched it for us. “I name this boat Kitty Four. May she take you both to England. May you find Kitty, Arthur, and all you’re looking for. And most of all, may she bring you back home safely.” I saw a lot of grown men cry that morning, and I was one of them. So was the old man. Allie held my hand tight as we watched.

  “Thank you, Dad,” she whispered. “She’s going to be the best boat, the best boat in the world. I know she is.”

  That evening as we celebrated I knew something wasn’t quite right. I felt dizzy first, then there was a pain in my head that wouldn’t go away. I’d always felt fit as a fiddle before, so when I fainted the next morning, Zita called the doctor. So the saga began – the tests, the waiting, more tests, more waiting, then the results, the verdict. The doctor gave it to me straight, because I asked him to. I had a brain tumour – malignant, advanced, aggressive. There was nothing they could do. Surgery wouldn’t help.

  Radiotherapy wouldn’t help. Chemotherapy wouldn’t help. Nothing would help. When I asked how long I’d got, he said, “Months.”

  “How many?”

  “Five or six, difficult to be precise about it. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  Since that day I’ve had so much to think about, so much to get sorted. I told Zita that I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want anyone to know outside the family, that I just wanted everything to go on as normal as possible, for as long as possible. Without Zita, without Allie, and without Kitty Four I would have fallen apart. I know that.

  We finished her together, fitted her out just as Allie wanted her. I wanted to see her in all her yellow glory – yellow she had to be, Allie said, because all the other Kittys had been yellow, and they’d been yellow because all the foods she most loved as a little girl were yellow – custard and butter and bananas. I was there on the quayside to see Allie take her out for the first time, saw her dancing through the waves, and I knew I’d never built a finer boat.

  There was something else I had to do as well before I went. I had to talk it
all out, write it all down, everything I could remember right up until now. To start with I could manage to write well enough on my own, but as things got worse, as my sight gave up on me, I’ve had to dictate it. I prefer it that way anyway. Telling a story is so much easier for me than writing it. Some of it I’ve dictated to Zita, but sometimes I can tell she finds it hard to endure. That’s why Allie and I are finishing it together.

  So in the end we didn’t sail around the world together, but we have sailed around my life together. Allie told me yesterday that she’s talked it over with her mother and the old man and they’ve given their permission. She says she’s going to sail to England on Kitty Four on her own now, that when she gets there she’s going to do all she can to find my sister Kitty and tell her all about me and find out about my key, Kitty’s key. And then she’s going to sail back all the way home again. Zita and her grandfather are still a bit sticky about it, she says, but they’ll come round. They will too. She’s quite a girl, my Allie, quite a girl.

  There’s times I think she only told me that to make me happy. But when Allie says something she always means it – she’s very like her mother that way, very like the old man. So I think maybe she really will do it. The thought that Kitty and Allie might one day meet up makes me very happy – my real world meeting my dream world. It’s just a pity I won’t be there to see it, that’s all. Or maybe I will be. Who knows.