W ith my wife’s consent, I have just become the lover
of a handsome 57year-old lady. She has a fine round bottom and a comfortable beam. I sought expert advice before embarking on the affair. Ian Burgoyne, marine surveyor, tapped her all over with a little hammer and probed her most intimate parts with a spike. He pronounced her in good condition for her age. Her knees were sound and her hog was free of wet rot, which was evidently a good thing. Mr Burgoyne’s only concern was five slightly cracked frames on the port side. Not knowing exactly what these were, I studied his recommended treatment: ‘The plank sea could be fitted with a seam batten and the frames doubled using oak timbers that are secured to the original frames as well as the hull timbers.’ Ah. If only the human frame could be so readily rejuvenated. I wrote the cheque.
Deglet Nour was built in 1948 by Geo. Wilson & Sons of Sunbury-onThames. She is a 30ft three-berth cruiser. The only bit of her that is not oak, iroko, mahogany or brass is a vile plastic commode called a Porta Potti, concealed in the heads. We try not to use it. The three-cylinder diesel engine is called Perkins, but why the boat itself is named Deglet Nour is a bit of a mystery. A clue is to be found on the label of a box of Eat Me dates: ‘The favourite delicious Deglet Nour dates,’ it says. Perhaps the first owner was an importer of dried fruits, like Mr Eugenides in The Waste Land, the Smyrna merchant ‘with a pocket full of currants c.i.f. London’. (The letters, as I remember from my brief spell as a merchant banker, stand for cost, insurance and freight.) Mr Eugenides or a later owner neglected the vessel shamefully. She was a hulk when she was found on the Thames by an ex-naval engineer who lovingly restored her. He plainly couldn’t abandon his old sea-going ways: the oil lamps are set on gimbals, there are fiddles around the edge of the saloon table so plates won’t fly off in Biscay storms, and there is even a binnacle, though a compass is of no more use on a winding river than a sextant on a submerged submarine.
Will I be up to keeping her shipshape? Vintage boats need as much care and attention as ageing Hollywood actresses. I shall have to spend winter days sanding, painting, varnishing and slapping bitumen on madam’s derrière. I quail at the thought. On the other hand, there is a pretty persuasive logic to the venture. The boat is moored at Wargrave, just upriver from Henley. My expat family, pampas-bound in Argentina, always loved this lush stretch of the river as being quintessentially English. My brothers and I rowed here. My widowed mother lived in Henley for a decade, starring in am-dram productions at the enchanting Kenton Theatre, which is about to celebrate its bicentenary. The local MP is a very decent chap. What is more, three months ago Father Ernesto, the town’s amiable Peruvian curate, helped us bury my parents’ ashes at Remenham, a mile downstream. It was on that brilliantly sunny June morning, with the grand-daughters’ graveside harmonies still ringing in our ears and the river as crowded as a Canaletto with crews practising for the regatta, that inspiration struck. We certainly couldn’t afford to buy a weekend cottage in Boris’s idyllic constituency, but why not a boat?
Ihave been trying to perfect my lock technique. Where coastal navigators must cope with tides and currents, Thames boaters face the hazard of inching their way into these narrow, slimy gulches and slinging their lines over bollards without damaging either their own craft or others, until the water has reached the required level. There are 44 locks between Teddington in London and Lechlade in the Cotswolds, the first having been constructed almost 400 years ago. At weekends one can queue for half an hour or more to gain entrance, and then find one’s boat hemmed in by all manner of craft, from a New Orleans paddle steamer with a jazz band on board to a punt crewed by Pimm’s-drinkers in boaters and bikinis. The scope for river-rage is measureless, yet so far I have had only one encounter. It was with a towering plastic motor yacht, equipped with side-thrusters and radar, better suited to the Riviera than the river. The odious Mr Toad at the wheel said my small flagstaff in the bows was interfering with his stern davits, a pointless bit of equipment since no dinghy hung from them. In fact his davits knocked my flagstaff into the bottom of the lock. When we came back through three hours later, the lockkeeper had kindly fished the metal pole from the depths and handed it to me with a matey grin. These keepers are traditionally ex-naval petty officers in crisp white shirts and beards, proud of their lavender-lined lockside gardens. But increasingly the sluice-gates are being handled, expertly, by young women in Environment Agency Tshirts. One handed me a leaflet explaining why lock use is currently being rationed. It was the driest winter and spring since 1975–76. And every time a lock empties it sends tens of thousands of gallons of water downriver to the sea, never to be retrieved. This makes hosepipe bans and Porta Pottis look like very small potatoes.
Despite the low river level, we swam twice in the Thames the other week. The water was as cool and sweet as recently reported by the editor of The Spectator in these pages. Better than that, we shared our swims with a great crested grebe and more than a dozen swans, while overhead soared a pair of red kites, two of the hundreds of these marvellous birds that have dramatised the skies over the Chilterns since their re-introduction from Spain in the 1990s.
Besides providing a platform for birdwatching, Deglet Nour will also serve as a pied-ii-eau for my wife, who is writing the authorised life of John Mortimer. Sir John, who lives nearby, was in an agitated state the other week because of Graham Lord’s newly published, unauthorised and somewhat spiteful biography. A few days later, however, Rumpole’s creator was on good form speaking at an Oldie lunch at the Phyllis Court Club in Henley. He recounted scabrous legal anecdotes from his wheelchair with panache. On the last such occasion, after his fathering of a son with Wendy Craig had been revealed, he jovially announced, ‘Anyone who wants a lovechild, see me afterwards.’ Aname like Deglet Nour is a come-on to anagrammists. Annoyingly, there are now numerous websites that do the job for you even without Richard Stilgoe’s help. Gender lout. Nude leg rot. Given the folly of falling in love at my age, I rather like this one: old gene rut.
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