Monique Newby
Singer-Songwriter-Author
Excerpt from: Slow Boat to Nashville
Two hours passed, and I was still awake. By now, the pitching had become a roll. It wasn’t the romantic workout between the sheets one might have imagined. For a start, Peter was fast asleep on the inside of our double berth. And if either of us accidentally fell out of the conjugal bunk, I would be the one to hit the cabin sole first. By now, our boat was like a rodeo horse, fiercely bucking without a lull in between. Even our spring mattress couldn’t absorb the shock. So I held on tight to my duvet with knees and fists clenched, alarmed at the prospect of a night of this. I started counting sheep, which didn’t work. I tried white horses, but I frightened myself thinking of rough seas. In vain, I prayed for slumberland in a bed that didn’t move. It was no use waking the skipper up and crying, ‘I want to go home.’ Our boat was our home. If I sent a ‘May Day’ to Dover Coastguard: Wife in distress on a boat at anchor urgently needs a hotel room, would they respond to a matrimonial tiff? Finally, Peter woke up. By then, my nerves were like a mooring line, too tight for a falling tide.
‘I knew this was a bad decision,’ he said in a guilty voice. ‘We should have paid and gone to a marina.’
Port Side Buddleia
John looked tired and drawn. His large, nicotine hands were covered with red marks and gashes. I thought he must have been too busy keeping his head above water to appreciate the warning of vegetation growing out of the hull of his boat. Was the ‘Didier Patrice’ doomed as a floral Titanic?
I dismissed this dreaded thought for one of optimism. I hoped one day I would read a newspaper headline such as ‘Skipper, wife and dog have reached the Caribbean on their boat, the Didier Patrice.’
But my heart sank when I picked up the local paper weeks later, which ran a different story with the headline ‘Boat Drama in Marina.’
What happened to the Didier Patrice? After an unexpected power cut, the bilge pump, which had been running permanently to keep her afloat, stopped working while the owners were at work, and water filled the bilges.
I never made the connection until that night at a pub quiz when I answered Edward J. Smith as the Captain’s name on the Titanic. Jackie and John’s surname was also Smith. I thought their dog was named Edward.
Poor Jack Russell was left alone to guard the boat behind locked doors that day, and when the level reached the gaping seam by the buddleia, the Didier Patrice began her rapid dive into the deep. Captain Edward and Edward, the Jack Russell, would have shared the same fate and gone down with their ship had it not been for the owners leaving an open pothole where Edward jumped off to escape a watery grave.
“There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away....”
Emily Dickinson