This is a bit left field. It has nothing to do with Swallow Boats (oops, sorry, - Yachts), and everything to do with why we go sailing. Quite by chance, a previously unknown bit of my heritage has come my way, and I would like to share it with you if I may.
Below is a poem written by my father while my parents were abroad in 1937, a year before I was born (now there’s a give-away), reminiscing about sailing on the Deben in Suffolk, two years previously. The boat in question was built somewhere on the Deben in 1935, was given to my grandfather as a retirement gift, and was kept on a mooring at Ramsholt. She was a capacious, clinker-built half-decked 15 ft dinghy, with a short bowsprit, gunter rig, a galvanised iron centreboard, and several cwt of pig-iron under the floorboards as internal ballast. (Laid up through the war, she went to Brightlingsea thereafter, where my three siblings and I, still quite small children, learned to sail in her - a privilege in those days because small boats were quite scarce.)
My Dad was multi-talented: he was very musical, a gifted artist, and a born leader and manager. However, it is not until now, 25 years after his death, that I have discovered that he could also write not-half-bad poetry. What a man! I hope you find it as evocative as I do.
RAMSHOLT by Geoffrey Rogers
Rushes of breeze in the bracken
Sing away through the pines,
To the slap of the halyard of one of the boats on the river
With the wind in her lines.
Waves coming shorewards, like children
Running, laughing and free;
A shining blue sky with white clouds sailing up from the east, and
Oh! the tang of the sea!
Short turf to the sand and the sea-wrack;
An old overturned boat;
Grey mud; and the Hard running down to the wash of the tide
Where the sea-weed’s afloat.
Little boats ride to their moorings
With their bows to the breeze,
Where they dance to the smack of the waves and they call to us, “Sailors,
Come down to the seas!
“To the song of the wind in the rigging,
To the sting of the spray,
To the whip of the foresail, the throb of the tiller, the boat’s wake
Slipping swiftly away.
“Down the wide waters of Deben
To the wider blue sea;
Or above, where the trees grow close down to the water, come quickly,
Come sailing with me!”
A couple of trips in the dinghy,
And a quick bailing out;
Sail’s up, and the mooring’s adrift, draw the foresheet and sail her!
Helm down and about!
With the song of the wind in her rigging,
And the spray in our face,
We’re away to the windward, heeled over and scudding along
At a glorious pace,
Past the flats where the snipe run together,
Or the lone heron stands,
To where in the harbour the seagulls dip screaming above
The uncovering sands.
Drifting lazily back in the evening
With the sail falling wide,
And only a ripple to tell we are moving at all
On the incoming tide.
Back to moorings, sail furled, and all ship-shape,
Then shorewards for tea:
What sailor but knows that there’s much of the Call of the Land
In the Call of the Sea!
