The Berlin Shadow by Jonathan Lichtenstein

Author:Jonathan Lichtenstein [Lichtenstein, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner UK

4.2

For our summer holidays we would camp in the small town of Dale in Pembrokeshire on the west coast of Wales, my father towing his tiny home-made dinghy, Sal, behind us on a trailer. Dale is situated on the edge of a large sheltered bay. To the south lies a headland, St Ann’s Head, beyond which lies the Irish Sea. Each year leaflets were given out warning people not to sail a dinghy beyond St Ann’s Head for two reasons. The first was that the swell was much larger and far more unpredictable beyond the headland’s protection; the second was because oil tankers sailed past it in order to dock at the deep-water port of Milford Haven. There their oil was pumped directly to the newly constructed refinery through which nearly a third of the UK’s annual oil supply was unloaded. The proximity of the oil refinery to the port was linked to the recent development of supertankers that had started to come into service, tankers so large that they could carry millions of gallons of crude oil. These tankers took twenty minutes to come to a stop and their hulls pushed out a huge wake. It was this that was particularly dangerous to dinghies. As the leaflets noted, ‘It can easily capsize a small vessel.’ As well as this, supertankers have very large propellers or screws that, as my father explained, ‘are so powerful that if you go too near to the oil tanker’s stern the current caused by the propellers drags a dinghy under the sea’s surface’.

Perhaps because of these warnings my father always sailed as close as he could to any of these supertankers. ‘What an incredible vessel,’ he would shout out as we sailed directly towards one of their matt-black hulls. ‘It’s colossal!’ he would carry on. ‘It carries over 2 million gallons of oil! Two million gallons! Let’s get a closer look.’ To his delight some of them would sound their horns to warn us away. ‘Did you hear that?’ he would shout laughingly as the sound waves crossed the water.

I was seven when I was taken sailing, and at that age I couldn’t swim. Although I wore a life jacket I knew that if I fell into the sea I would drown. This is because I had to wear thick woollen jumpers to keep warm and these would fill with water if I fell out of the boat or it capsized. I knew this because my father kept telling me, ‘Don’t fall in, those jumpers will fill with water and drown you.’

Just as he relished the adventure of sailing in his home-made boat, the waves crashing over us, the boat needing urgent bailing out with a small plastic bucket used to make sandcastles, the violent swings and turns of the sail, the cold Welsh salt air turning my fingers blue, so I dreaded it. Where I was terrified if a large wave hit us, he was exhilarated and would call out to me with a huge grin, his hair dancing around his eyes in the wind, ‘This is the life.

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