"WE'VE BEEN TOGETHER NOW FOR ........"

by Tony Tomkins

 

Tony Tomkins, sadly, died in 1999. He made a great contribution to the Club, introducing large numbers of boys from Newcastle and Croydon, many of whom are still active members almost forty years later. He was much-loved by them and others who enjoyed his company and benefited from his encouragement and friendship.

Ancient as I must seem to younger Green Wyverns, I am not in fact a foundation member of the Club. I was in my second year at Cambridge before I set foot on a yacht - "Pirate", skipper Dave Kirby, Norwich Yacht Station, Easter 1951.

Norwich is a splendid place from which to start a lifetime's cruising. For one thing, it makes you wait for it... there is a long period of mounting excitement as you go through various extraordinary manoeuvres before actually pulling up a sail. For another, although those manoeuvres, such as scrambling along the factories, are low in the expectations of a newcomer to sailing, he soon learns that they are nevertheless essential elements of Broadsmanship. Heaven knows how many hours . .days. weeks since then I have spent pushing and pulling yachts up and down those rivers !

 It was Dave's first time as a skipper, and I cannot think that having me aboard did anything to alleviate his nervousness. However, after a rather firm first mooring at Brundall, he did very well. I remember doing some cooking, but little else. If I tried to tack, the results have long been expunged from a mercifully selective memory.

 In those days, the yachts were hired by the fortnight from Banham's of Horning, so the cruises wee regularly Horning to Norwich first week and back to Horning the second. The route was Brundall (Yare Hotel), Cantley (Red House), Reedham (The Ship), St. Olaves (The Queen's Head and The Bridge), Oulton (The Lady of the Lake), Beccles (The Ship), The Waveney Arms, Yarmouth (The 'Mucky Duck' and The Crystal), the Thurne Lion and Horning (The New Inn and The Swan). This was, and always has been, the classic Green Wyvern cruise ... that magnificent arc from Beccles to Horning, bisected by the Yare radius from Norwich. Like listening to classical symphonies ... the pattern always the same, infinite variety within the pattern.

So, on my first cruise, I learned to love the Great Green Wyvern Highway. My fascination for the by-ways ("ditch-crawling" as dismissed by Cecil) awoke in my second year of sailing, when we blazed the trail to Rockland. This is what happened.

The aim of the venture was not to get to the pub at Rockland St. Mary ... sorry, I will rephrase that: it was not exclusively to get to the pub, but to sail across Rockland. So the fleet sailed up the Short Dyke and assembled at the eastern end of the Broad. Then Cecil and I set out across it in a dinghy, Cecil rowing, I taking soundings with a boat-hook. We returned to the apprehensive fleet, to which Cecil, with vast sweeps of the arms worthy of Captain Nolan's instructions to Lord Cardigan before the Charge of the Light Brigade, explained the safest course. Who should go first? Whether out of deference to age or as a result of fraternal pressure, Bert was sent off in "Shamrock". In a light breeze, he ambled across to mounting applause, which abruptly ceased when, having cleared the Broad, instead of turning left towards the mooring, he unaccountably went straight on and hit a tree, the remains of which are still to be seen. So Cecil and I had to row across the Broad again to disentangle him. Thereafter, no more problems; all went according to plan, culminating in the famous EDP photograph.

I have said that the memory is selective, and, in truth, I have forgotten all unmitigated disasters. I can remember only those with triumphant conclusions. Like one of the two occasions on which I nearly sank "Stella". Tacking through Reedham Ferry, I caught her a glancing blow on a protruding bolt, and when, as we passed the sugar factory, a floor-board floated out into the well, it became evident even to me that all was not well. But what was this to a man of my resource? Just before we went down I sailed her full tilt into that dyke between the Red House quay and the factory, squelching into the grateful mud. An hour later, the hull was repaired classically with an oiled tea-towel held in place with a hammered out baked-beans tin (Heinz), and the tide had risen sufficiently to be able to back out onto the quay.

On another occasion, I rescued a damsel in distress. I was moored to the catwalk at Reedham Ferry when, in the middle of the night, the cabin-boy woke me and said, "Listen". I listened and heard feeble cries for help from across the river. We both rose, borrowed a dinghy from the next yacht and rowed off into the night in the direction of the cries. Near the remains of the "Cockatrice" we found another dinghy containing a distraught young lady, floating up helplessly. We tied her painter to our dinghy and rowed back, with difficulty against the flood-tide. The girl told us she had had a row with her boy-friend and cast herself adrift. It was not clear how this was supposed to help. We located her cruiser and helped her back on, at which point the door burst open and a man, presumably her father, emerged, carrying a glass. "Where you bloody been, then?" he demanded, and swiped her across the face with his free hand. Then they disappeared inside and we went back to our yacht. Neither that night, nor the next morning, did anyone from the cruiser say anything to us. At intervals, during our alfresco breakfast, various occupants passed by with what seemed to be suspicious sidelong glances, but not a word was said. The Lord only knows what tale she had told them (I'm sticking to mine). I have often thought that the whole eerie episode had some bearing on the parable of the Good Samaritan, but I am not certain what.

In the Fifties, we encountered an organisation which provided sailing holidays for preparatory school boys, run on religious lines by the Rev. Mr Sneed. We met him once and he suggested that we should have joint sing-songs. "Certainly," said Bert. "Our boys could sing alternate verses." As we walked away, Len murmured, "Didn't you mean alternative verses Bert?"

In my time, I have done various Green Wyvern things ... crewing, mating, skippering, commodoring, a stint as secretary, organising parties, helping with races ... but what I have taken most pride in has been the opportunity to introduce "new blood", particularly, with the wonderful help of John Elders and Mike Lee, from Newcastle and Croydon. Would there still be a Club without my many friends from those places? More than that: I like to think that my introduction of boys from Newcastle in 1956 was the first major breach in the Leicester-bound membership ... as momentous an event, in its way, as the recent admission of girls.

After so many experiences and activities over so many years, how do I now feel about sailing, about the Broads and about the Green Wyvern? More or less the same as I did to start with, or, at any rate, as I did when I first became reasonably competent with a yacht. I must have spent close on two years of my life afloat and it would be absurd to pretend that it has all been bliss, but, somehow, as the Bloody Boring Bard puts it, "the labour we delight in physics pain". I still glory in a spanking tack up from Reedham, followed by a leeward landing sweet on Cantley bend. As I approach Reedham Swing Bridge, or Yarmouth, from either direction, I still experience what dear Peter used to call "angst". When sailing the upper reaches of the rivers, I still wonder whether I shall get there by candle-light.. as Nev has observed, whatever the charts say, it is twenty miles from the Waveney Arms to Beccles, from Bramerton to Norwich Yacht Station and from Thurne Mouth to Horning. Always the same, and yet, as I have said (why else keep coming?) always new. Plus c'est la meme chose, plus ca, change.

All the same, there have been some changes I regret. I make no secret of my opinion that the widespread proliferation of motors has robbed the Club not only of incentives to patience and ingenuity but also of comic possibilities. As when a new member, towing up the Ant and arriving at a dyke a bit too wide to leap, carefully took off his shoes and socks, stepped in... and disappeared. Telling that one, Bert used to become brick-red and incoherent with mirth.

And we never sing any more. Why not? It is true that some of the old songs (such as "silvest") have become politically incorrect, but there must be more to it than that. Perhaps we have become too self-conscious. Or perhaps (even worse) we have become too serious. Perhaps we feel that singing wastes valuable time that might better be spent setting the world right through profound discussion. Either way, it is not an improvement, in my view, that the pubs no longer re-echo to the embarrassment of song. The therapy of sailing lies in its being a totally absorbing activity which, at the back of our minds, we know to be as totally unimportant. Singing shares that quality.

Further to song, in the Fifties Bert used to like to compose verses to the tune of "Oh, You'll never get to Heaven", such as
 

Oh, you'll never get to Heaven
With Skipper Gord 
'Cause Skipper Gord 
Swore at the Lord


and I do not think I can end this farrago of carping and self-aggrandisement without some reference to our Commodore. Gordon has served society well ... domestically, as a teacher and headmaster, as a politician, as a raconteur, as a writer and poet and as one who has added a new dimension to the art of song. As Rear-Commodore, Vice-Commodore and Commodore he has repaid the Club with loyalty, with panache and with love. But on quality he lacks. He is not a quiet man. His progress through life has been punctuated with peals of thunder. Even when circumstances have imposed vocal silence upon him, he has found ways of making his presence audible. As when we were playing bridge on "Hope" and Gordon, pipe clenched between his teeth, went into the fore-cabin to make tea. There was an orange flash and a dull crump! and Gordon re-entered the saloon backwards and landed on the table. Someone had left the calor on. Gordon was not badly damaged, but the game was completely ruined ... dummy had just been laid down and some of it finished up in the bilge.

But, toffee-nosed bastard that I am, who am I to object to a bit of noise? If we have to live in this extraordinary world, we might as well be noticeable. And, Gordon, praise be, always manages to be that.

A youthful Gordon.