UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
The Riven Oak
By JOHN BRANFIELD (Queens' College, Cambridge) T T high tide the estuary forms a wide sickle of water, and around the edge, from the riverside to the Pool within the bar, lie the old abandoned hulks. There are ketches, and barges which were built at Bridgwater, and schooners, and the last Newfoundlander. Some still have wheel- houses and superstructure. Some are no more than hulls. Some are torn and charred, where the villagers have collected wood for burning. And some are just ribs, half shrouded by the sand. They lie like whales dying in their graveyards, and their only memorials are twisted metal and rusted anchors. The tide piles mud and stone against their sides, and tugs at their rudders, and for a short while gives them the appearance of life, until it ebbs, and leaves them in a wilderness of seaweed and rock. The only sound is the seeping of moisture, and the water dropping from the timbers into a pool with the noise of a clock counting away time until the next tide loosens another plank.
There is a path following the riverside, which was used by the shipwrights as they went to work in the yards along the river. It passes through woods and twists around bays, and in one place is high above the water on the edge of a cliff. At the foot of this cliff is a hulk whose name I do not know, for the stern has been ripped away, and even when it was complete I do not remember seeing a name on it. if it ever had one, it has been forgotten. From above it appears cigar-shaped. It rests on a drift of mud, slumping on its side; and some ropes hang about it. To get down you follow along the path for a short distance, winding down into a bay surrounded by trees and full of coarse grass. There are some stones which look as though they might be the remains of a small quay, and some rusty barbed wire, and two posts in the mud where the ' Darling' used to berth. You walk around the corner on the shore, over seaweed and the sharp edges of laminated rock, and you come to the hulk.
A year ago, at high tide, I watched a man row down the river to this point, take a bicycle from his boat, carefully place it high up on the rocks, and row away again. I never under- stood why. When I last went to see the wreck, it was an afternoon in hungry March. It was rather misty, and the sun was a ball of fluff in the sky. An east wind whipped across the estuary, cutting weals on the surface of the river. It made no impression on the hulk, although a rope swayed slightly. Most of its planks still remained, black with tar or charred in the ruin ofits sweeping stern. Its keel lay along the wet rocks. The niader was intact, and it made a step into the inside, where I had once found an artist's paint-box, with all the colours turned to a creamy fawn, except the green. Between its bulging sides there was nothing but mud and slime. The stanchions along• the side were twisted, and they looked like eyes on stalks, crossed and staring and crazy. There were curlews by the water's edge, and their cries were mocking. The hulk seemed a King Lear of boats. After its drunken career it had declined into a senile madness.
I climbed back to the path through the gorse-bushes and followed it through the wood, where the thick lichen on many trees gave them a Chinese look, and came to the bay where the shipbuilder had his workshop. It is a quiet place. ' Some people ask me if I don't get lonely down here on my own," he says, " but it suits me all right. I can get on with what Fm doing, and one or two people look in for a chat sometimes."
It is not surprising that they should be attracted by the work- shop, with its variety of tools and models and woods. There are curved pieces of oak where the grain follows the curve, and sails and oars and the name-board of the ' Silver King, and all the odds and ends which might come in useful one day; and in the centre of them all is the shell of a new boat. On this day he was working in the open, building a cabin on to the Crack-o'-Dawn,' and I went aboard, through the daffodils on the bank and across the ladder on to the deck. He wore a cap slightly pushed back above his pale blue --eyes, and we stood in the cockpit, leaning on the side and looking down- river to the estuary. He was working with mahogany which was slightly furry, and he talked of elm lasting below the water but rotting above, and wych-elm being good for boat-building, and the caramel and cream finish on laburnum.
He found a piece of Sitka pine from an island off Western Canada so that I could test its lightness and strength. He spoke of the seasoning of wood, a year for an inch, and how he was- taught to stand it in the rain to wash out the sap. He told how he steamed his boards in a large pipe with a fire underneath, an hour for an inch, and then riveted them to the frame whilst they were still so hot that they blistered the hands. He pointed out the Lapwing ' as being made . from some fine timber, and he told me of the teak and oak he had had from the breaking up of one of the old sailing men-of-war.
It was springlike the next morning, and buds were copper and black and pink. I walked to the other end of the estuary, where the breaking-up yard had been. It is a small sandy beach at the edge of the Pool, close to the village. There were three boats there. The oldest was the Olive Annie '—the names are slurred, together so that it sounds vaguely Italian— and she had changed greatly duritig the winter. She was now no more than a skeleton. Between the ribs were pools of water, and the framework made a cage against the sky. There were no boards left, and it was quite open. Beyond it you could see the mud and the- channel of the river at low tide and the low line of the dunes. The sand-barges were loading on a bank. They go out on each tide, and at night it must be one of the strangest jobs, sitting on a sandbank surrounded by water and darkness- in a tiny circle of light, which gleams perhaps on a jelly-fish or is caught by a star-fish, as you wait for the tide to take you off. One of the other hulks had lost its stern, and you could look through it as though it were a tunnel. The bare frames were stuck with rivets which pointed in all directions, like savage needle teeth. They added to the impression that the low cliffs enclosed the workshop of a modern sculptor in metal, who worked on an enormous scale. An anchor was embedded deep in the sand, the end of one of the arms just- showing. The stock had rusted to a walnut-colour, had worn thin in the middle, and was covered with knobs. The shore was very wet, and each step pressed the moisture out of a pad of sand, into which the water seeped back as soon as the pressure was lifted. The tide had scooped around conical shells, so that they capped small towers of sand and formed fniniature castles surrounded by moats. In its wetness the beach shone, and the wandering lines and thick bulks of the wrecks were black against it. These timbers, oak and teak and Oregon pine, were lifeless; they were bones in the desert. The Olivani ' dead.
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