The Cassandra Syndrome by Colin Brookfield, Colin Brookfield (an ebook reader .txt) 📕

Finally, my foot touched the gunnels of a little boat and with my friend following, we were soon sitting in, what turned out to be a small, leaky old tub with no oars. We also had six inches or so of water in the bottom soaking our feet and, an old tin can that needed no explanation.

We cast off with great care, not to lose our hold on the quayside timbers, gradually pulling ourselves towards a derelict motor torpedo boat that we had previously noticed. It had a dinghy upon its deck and some oars that it was about to lose.

A short time later, complete with oars that were a bit too long, I directed our little boat towards the Tilbury lights and pulled on the oars. Meanwhile, my friend baled furiously to keep the water at bay and raise us a little higher out of the oily black waters.

The target we had set for ourselves was a very large ship, anchored about a quarter of a mile offshore and half a mile downstream. My strategy was to row in a straight line towards Tilbury whilst the flow of the river would be pulling us seawards. By this method, we should eventually arrive at the rear of the ship. It had not crossed my mind that the tide could easily have been going the other way, which, with the benefit of hindsight, might have proved a great deal safer.

The over-long oars made progress much more difficult than it should have been, so it seemed an eternity before I could finally swing the boat seawards and in line with our distant target.

Since starting out, barely a word had passed between us, because our lives depended on total commitment to our equally important jobs.

All we had to do then was leave the penultimate stage of our plan to the river current. Our ship was now easy to see; it was lit up like a Christmas tree but this could disappear within a few seconds in the event of an air-raid warning, as would the distant shore lights from either side of us. Without those lights, the surrounding blackness would soon deny us all reference to ship and shore.

With the current doing most of the work, we had time to reflect on the frightening possibilities of our position but, it soon became much more serious. The fast approaching ship had begun growing at ‘mind boggling’ speed. To counter this, I quickly swung the dinghy 180 degrees until it was pointing upstream and then rowed for all I was worth against what had now become, an ebb tide. The procedure did little to slow our speed as we closed in on the ship’s stern. It was probably the glaring lights from the ship, that had prevented us from seeing the other disaster that was waiting, until it was almost too late.

My friend was first to notice the white froth at the rear, of what had become a monstrous vessel. It was now scarcely fifty yards in front of us with the gap closing fast and we were soon staring at the blades of two enormous propellers that were slowly rotating like giant egg-beaters and into which we were centred. The following seconds were a blur of controlled activity as I strove desperately to redirect the dinghy away from the propellers.

We hit the rear edge of the vessel with a bone jarring crash just a few feet from one of the propeller tips. The impact was so violent that it threw us in a heap at the bottom of the dinghy, losing the inboard oar in the process.

It was from this position that we saw the vast rising cliff of steel above as the current pulled our dinghy around the ship’s edge and along its great length.

Where were all those ropes and ladders that always festooned the sides of the galleons in our comics? Without them, how were we to board this vessel and start the great adventure we had planned?

As speedily as it had come, the mighty ship retreated from our vision and then disappeared completely.

We were soon in the fairway of a great river that was discharging its pent-up waters seawards behind a receding tide. Using our solitary oar like a canoe paddle, I made what progress I could, towards the side of the river from which we originally came. The only things that now indicated its presence were the distant twinkling lights that quickly diminished in number as we headed towards the sea. An over-blanket of low, dark clouds had now shut out any light that may have come from the sky. Then, in what seemed a remarkably short space of time, the mist blotted out all the shore lights and it became so impenetrably black, that for all we knew we were already at sea.

We began to have some disagreeable feelings of sensory deprivation, apart from the feeling of gravity. Even that played tricks at times. Having been separated from all our usual auditory and visual references – it seemed like a black cotton wool limbo land where time stands still

All through the night we paddled and baled like automatons, until at long last, a faint lightening of the sky gave enough vision to take stock of our surroundings but, all we saw were the low grey clouds and murky waters encircled by mist.

Hours later and to our right, we saw the vague outline of land peering at us through a break in the mist. We were ecstatic and surprised to find ourselves at the side of the river that I had hopefully paddled towards throughout the long night. However, hopes had to be put on hold, because as more light and less mist were to reveal, there was only deep, treacherous mud as far as the eye could see.

The paddling continued as we hugged the muddy shoreline, pulled along by the current. It was the sharp eyes of my friend, that noticed the rickety ‘Heath Robinson’ wooden causeway that led landwards across the mud. A dredger, sitting low in the water was moored at its river end and the current was carrying us towards it.

As we got closer to the dredger, it became apparent that we would arrive beneath a porthole at eye level, so eventually we could see right into a cabin. Its interior was lit by a hanging lamp, which swung from side to side with the motion of the vessel revealing a man fast asleep in a chair. We made contact with a loud crash and saw the startled man leap to his feet. As anger would no doubt be quick to follow, we hastily scrambled on board and down the rickety causeway towards terra firma.

Disregarding the receding shouts of the angry man behind us, we revelled in the feeling of something firm beneath our feet that wasn’t constantly rolling about, although, it took time for our wobbly sea legs to get the message. We knew there would be a marathon walk ahead but that was a minor concern after our previous experiences.

Naturally, the details of our miraculous escape were the only topic of conversation, amongst which, was that of the ship’s excessive height out of the water. This was finally resolved to our satisfaction that it was unladen and the rotating propellers accounted for, by mechanical repairs being undertaken. Another possibility we reasoned, was that the propellers might have been put into reverse, to help compensate for the tidal forces imposed on the anchors.

It was late that evening when at last we reached a point where we could board a train for home and slept for the first time in 36 hours in the station waiting room.

Taking courage in ‘both hands’ (not that there was really any available option), I returned home and luckily, nothing was said. Neither, strangely enough, were there any questions as to how my time had been occupied during those missing weeks or, the police informed of a missing child, so it remained my secret.

In later years, I traced the progress of our little boat. It had drifted past the Halstow marshes during that night and finally made landfall on the Isle of Grain. If we had missed that dredger boat then we would have entered the open sea and soon swamped.

The Shadow’s Familiar, fails again

One weekend, because there was no school, my father drove me to a timber yard where he instructed me how to use a paint spray gun and start the electric air compressor by the side of it. After that, I was shown the timber to be sprayed with pink primer.

“It needs to be thinned,” he remarked, producing a can of petrol, which I remember thinking as he left, was not a healthy combination.

It seemed to go well, until later, when I got a bit careless and the lid on the quart of paint container (affixed to the top of my spray gun), fell off. It dumped a quart of petrol-thinned paint on top of my head and I changed colour from head to toe in a sticky mess. Goodness knows what people thought as a strange, sticky, pink figure made its three-mile journey home but at least I had escaped becoming a human torch.

Doodle Bugs

I was peeling potatoes on a sunny day in our garden, unaware that a German V1 rocket with fuel now exhausted, was silently homing-in on our street. It arrived with a violent ground shock and a bang that deafened the ears, followed by a blast of air that took the glass out of the neighbourhood windows. At the end of our road, a great black oily column was rising swiftly like a living, animated monster, twisting and turning skywards. I never did find my peeler or the potato.

It became common to see the noisy V1s scooting over us on our way to school. Sometimes they ran out of fuel and started circling downwards which naturally, frightened the whole district because in circling lower and lower, one could never be certain who was going to be its victim, until the big bang went off in another place.

On another occasion, when my friend and I were camping, we had an unpleasant close-encounter with a V1. We had risen early to find ourselves enveloped by dense fog that would take a while before the sun burned it off. Suddenly, there was a loud swishing sound, followed by a large fog-free area opening up in front of us through which passed, a large, black, ground-hugging form of a gliding V1 bomb. It was scarcely a hundred feet from where we had just dropped flat. Oddly, we never heard a sound from that moment on. It must have been picked up on a vagrant breeze and travelled on a very long way without exploding when it came to earth, otherwise we would surely have heard it.

Wartime men create wartime boys

The Entrepreneur

My war zone was at home and a place to keep away from whenever possible, so for that reason I had to introduce some fun and adventure (often misplaced) into my life in the wider world.

For several years, I had earned a few pence occasionally at the local scrap yard, sorting bottles by colour –ready for recycling. That changed when I made a big discovery whilst wandering through the local fields. I found an old shotgun practice range; its dry sandy soil was thick with spent lead shot. The price board at the scrap yard had shown a very high price for lead, so I was in business!

I carried kitbags of the stuff to the bottom of my father’s junk filled builder’s yard, where I had built a small rudimentary furnace out of house bricks where a fierce coke fire was burning. A