‘Are you a novelty act in your yellow wellies?‘ the woman asked me as I walked into the main dressing room, shared by other performers in the show.
‘Well, don’t tell anybody, I said in a whispering voice. I have a fetish for yellow wellies.’
‘How interesting. By the way, I’m Georgia, one of the acts on the bill.’
‘Monique. Nice meeting you’. We shook hands in a formal fashion, which truly contrasted with our theatre surroundings.
Georgia was tall, slender with a generous bosom. She wore a low cut royal blue sequence dress, which accentuated her beautiful curves. Her big glossy lips beamed like a beacon and her radiant smile brought the sun into the room.
‘Will you be yodelling in your wellies?’ Georgia asked with a grin. She saw me getting dressed in my colourful Swiss costume. As I powdered my face, and slipped into my red stilettos, I felt that I had regained my credibility as a performer, having shed away my nautical identity.
‘Ah, I won’t be yodelling in my wellies, I replied with a mischievous smile. I live on a boat and I am like a mermaid coming ashore to sing’
‘Ah very interesting, I would like to hear more about it but I am on in five minutes.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I am the magician’s assistant, who gets sawn in half.’
I only just managed to stop myself saying ‘break a leg’ as Georgia left to go on stage. Considering the nature of her performance, she may not have been too impressed.
My home, ‘Capricorn,’, a bright yellow boat, took centre-stage in the middle of the harbour, like a ballerina dressed in yellow in ‘Swan Lake.’ Anchored to the seabed with chain, the boat stood on retractable legs and when the harbour dried out, she looked like a stranded whale on two legs. Although, we were only a hundred yards away from the shore, the tide controlled our lives. Peter, my skipper, left for work at 7am every morning and when the tide was in, I rowed him to the quayside in my nightie and wellies, still half asleep. I would blow him a kiss as he stood ashore waving affectionately back at me. We looked like two lovers, anguished at the prospect of a long separation of only a few hours. In the evening, the roles reversed; Peter rowed me ashore when the tide had ebbed but when the harbour was dry, I walked across the mud and up a vertical ladder. I then had a short walk uphill to the theatre.
I had climbed Swiss mountains and glaciers in my teenage years but tidal waters were unknown waters to me. I found the tide a ruthless and unbending master. I would always hear it flowing in as the water lapped against our steel hull, which amplified the sound. Sometime I would wake up in the middle of the night, thinking water was flooding our boat. Many times, I went and checked the bilges for water and to my great relief only found dust in there.
Understanding flood and ebb prediction meant pure survival to me. I plotted my every move according to the tide-table; from the time, I stepped off the boat to how long I would be gone. I changed into my stilettos once I was ashore and carried my wellies in a backpack, everywhere I went in town during the daytime. People often teased me and I often wondered if they truly believed that I had a fetish for yellow wellies? I had to explain to them that I had no wish to walk across the mud or climb down slimy ladders in my stilettos.
Sailors would know too well that a miscalculation of the tide-table could find me stranded ashore on my boat with the incoming tide, and the dinghy tied up at the wrong end. Swimming across the harbour was never an option; North Sea waters are too cold. When I left the dinghy tied up against the harbour wall, I gave the line plenty of slack, so that it would not dangle from the rope-end with the receding tide. Alternatively, if I made the rope too tight at the bottom of the ladders, the dinghy could be pulled under water on a rising tide. There were times when the ebb played tricks on me and I ran out of sea, rowing half way across to the boat. I then had to splodge in the mud, dragging the dinghy back to the boat. I often carried my shopping or laundry up and down the thirty-foot vertical ladder clinging to the harbour wall. Perched on this ladder, holding my bags in one hand whilst gripping the rung with the other like a limpet to a rock, I would hang in mid-air for a split second as I lunged for the next rung. Missing it would have meant leaving a deep spread-eagled cartoon imprint of ‘Monique’ in the mud below. With Peter gone all day, I was the captain of the ship but a long way away from the theatre spotlights. These trials and tribulations would make a sailor out of me, so I believed.
My first experience sailing had been in my hometown on Lake Neuchâtel. The yacht had heeled over at such a dramatic angle that it gave me no inclination to take up sailing. Later, though I felt that the sea had chosen me when I was offered a job on a yacht. With two other crews, we sailed around the Canary Islands, on a ninety-foot schooner the ‘Spirit of Labrador.’ I learned nothing about sailing on this luxurious sailing yacht as I worked such long hours mostly down below deck, cooking and baking for our charter guests. I often had to hide away when I was seasick.
It had taken five years of our lives to build the ‘Capricorn’ in a field next to a dairy farm. I remembered the lorry driver, delivering the large steel plates. When he saw the rusty steel skeleton of our boat, he deliberately misquoted Nelson‘s‘Wooden Ships and Iron Men.’ He said instead, ‘My God, Wooden Men and Iron Ships.’
I had often watched Peter, in awe, his face covered inside a protective mask, dressed in a blacksmith leather apron, holding a welding torch. How he managed to weld this giant steel jigsaw puzzle together from a skeleton to an ocean going yacht? Throughout the building of ‘Capricorn,’ Peter had held the vision of water lapping against her hull. He never stopped believing that he would sail his own creation across the Atlantic.
Stripping down an old marine diesel engine for me proved quite a revelation from my love of plugging strings on my guitar. I was becoming more pliable and practical but life was hard and tempers stormy at times and so was the weather, especially during the winter months.
One day after a night frost, Peter slipped on the icy decks of ‘Capricorn’ and fell twelve foot down. During his fall, for a split second, his mind reverted to when he was sixteen, learning Judo. For a month, he kept practising how to fall. Before he hit the ground, he remembered all that he had learned, twenty-two years ago. His forearms hit the ground first and in doing so broke his fall. Without this mighty intervention, he would have plummeted to the frozen ground and may not have survived the fall. He immediately got up, cursed his stupidity and decided that very day, to weld temporary railings around the deck. He never told me about the incident until much later.
Then the grand day came when ‘Capricorn’ made her four-mile journey to the sea. It was a strange looking convoy, which set off for Scarborough Harbour, on a cloudy and cold June morning. Heading the convey was a Morris 1000 pick-up with an orange flashing light on its cab-roof, followed by ‘Capricorn’ transported on a world war II bomb carrier and towed by a large four-wheel forestry tractor. Friends with a taste for unusual classic cars completed the convoy with their Citroen 2CV, Austin Princess and an old Ford Cortina.
I still wanted the theatre and safely of terra firma but kept reminding myself that living on the water required a fluid approach. It was such a leap into the deep end to set off on our boat with no returned date in mind. I kept using the lyrics of one of my own songs as a mantra. ‘Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare but if you‘re looking for safety, it is on the shore, sailing is a love affair.’ I felt more like the reluctant sailor but Peter’s love pulled me as the moon pulls on the tide. I knew that nobody could steer him away from sailing ‘Capricorn’ across the Atlantic in his own creation and I had no desire to do so. I did want the adventure too.
‘How romantic to sail away with the man you love, who loves you’, Georgia had said to me once. ‘I am getting tired of always feeling ‘half a person’. Can I come with you?’
‘You might be seasick or bored travelling at such slow speed, getting cold and wet, even frightened.
‘I’m used to fear. Do you think it’s fun stuck inside a box, waiting to be cut in half. How long will you be gone?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘I’m so envious. I think you are really brave.’
‘I’m just mad about the sailor.’
‘I hope you are doing the right thing and won’t regret it?’
I shrugged my shoulders for I had no answer to that. Only time would tell. Whilst I understood the attachment of a sailor with his boat and the sea, I had mine with the stage. I consoled myself in the thought that I would find venues to sing and perform and that our voyage would inspire me to compose more songs. I knew how challenging the sea could be. How a ‘kitchen’ called galley in nautical terms, could turn into a crime food scene. When the olive oil drowned the galley floor on the ‘Spirit of Labradour’, the captain had shouted angrily.
‘You can’t expect anything to stay put on a flat surface on a boat.’ I did not tell him that I only managed in time to stop a bag of flour from carpeting the floor as well. This could have made the biggest pizza base ever seen.
My skipper and I staggered back to our boat after my last performance of the season at the theatre. We were two drunken sailors, unable to remember whether we had rowed back to the boat or walked across the mud. In the morning, I saw footprints all over our deck and my wellies caked in sludge. This gave me the clue. The tide must have been out when we returned from the theatre. We had walked across the mud to the boat that night. Had the tide been in, we could have fallen in the freezing water after so much celebration. We might have drowned.
The harbour would soon loose the sailor and his muse as ‘Capricorn’ was now ship-shape and ready to sail. We had lowered her waterline by a few inches with our bicycles, guitars, speakers and all our possessions. Peter had to repaint a new waterline in between tides.
Being a chocolate-addict and not so keen to share it like a dog with his bone, Peter looked for a locker to hide his precious cargo. In one of the lockers, he found my full collection of stilettos, and another locker a year supply of toilet rolls.
‘Do you intend to use them as a paper trail so that we will know our way back?’ He asked smiling. In the galley, I left no food or bottles lying about. Mopping cooking oil from the floor had left a lasting impression on me. All that we were waiting for now, was a favourable wind and a following tide, to set us off on our epic journey, in sunshine so we hoped.
© Monique Newby 2009. All rights reserved.