Turtle Diary

9 William G

Briefcases. Businessmen, barristers carry briefs. When I was in advertising we always talked about what our brief was. Brief means letter in German. Brief is short. Life is a brief case. Brief candle, out, out. In the tube there was a very small, very poor-looking man in a threadbare suit and a not very clean shirt, spectacles. He made a roll-up, lit it, then took from his briefcase a great glossy brochure with glorious colour photographs of motorcycles. Many unshaven men carry briefcases. I’ve seen briefcases carried by men who looked as if they slept rough. Women tramps usually have carrier bags, plastic ones often. I carry one of those expanding files with a flap. Paper in it for taking notes, a book sometimes, sandwich and an apple for lunch. The apple bulges, can’t be helped.

I took the tube to Surrey Docks, the 70 bus from there. There were some children on the bus singing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and they seemed to spin it out very slowly. I found myself waiting, waiting for ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head, chop, chop, chop!’ which arrived in due course and very loudly.

At Greenwich I went straight to the Port Liberty model after the guards at the door had looked into my envelope and found no bombs. They have to take precautions, that’s understandable. A place like Greenwich is a temptation. The greenness and the stillness, the augustness of the buildings and the observatory dome almost make one want to set off a bomb just out of respect.

There seem to be more children than there used to be. Always lots of them about even on school days. Children seem to be the permanent population while adults drift in and out and fall away. Each year the schoolgirls in their white knee-socks seem more erotic, more secretly knowing, one thinks probably nothing would surprise them. There are always children at the Port Liberty windows. I looked over the shoulder of a girl who must have been about twelve, the scent of her hair was in my nostrils. I don’t know where my daughters are now. I don’t know if Dora’s remarried. Someone pressed the button and the three-minute sequence began. The model sky grew slowly dark. Such a perfect world, so small and yet so full of distance. A long time ago I copied the signs that tell about Port Liberty:

APPROACHING PORT LIBERTY BY NIGHT

When night falls the navigator has to rely on the navigation lights shown by other vessels to avoid colliding with them and the lights shown by buoys, beacons and lighthouses to keep him in safe waters.

A confusion of fixed and flashing lights confronts him when he approaches a port but trained to interpret the various light colours and sequences in conjunction with his chart he can safely identify and follow the correct channel into port.

What you can see

The lighthouse on Patrol Point, whose white light is visible 20 miles out at sea, occults once every 30 seconds, while dead ahead can be seen the white light of the Landfall buoy, flashing every second.

A steady red light over a steady white light near the Landfall buoy identifies the pilot launch waiting for our arrival with a pilot ready to board and assist us through the channel to the anchorage.

The white masthead lights and green starboard navigating lights of a large vessel can be seen moving down the main channel, while the navigation lights of a smaller ship are visible coming out through the secondary channel.

Three white lights in a vertical triangle indicate a dredger working at the inner end of Crusher’s Bank and that it is safe to pass on either side of her.

The masthead light and port and starboard lights of a small craft off our starboard bow indicate that she is heading towards us. The edges of the main channel are marked by the flashing lights of buoys, and further up the river the lights of fixed beacons can be discerned which assist the navigator to keep in the deeper water. Model made to the requirements of the Department of Navigation by Thorp Modelmakers Ltd.

There were the lights fixed and flashing, each in its proper place in that perfect night miniature and vast. Then the night faded, there was sunlight on the distant hills of the port, sunlight on the water before me and on the vessels coming and going, and I was:

APPROACHING PORT LIBERTY BY DAY

When a ship approaches port the navigator has various aids to help him.

He has a chart of the area, which he keeps up to date by Admiralty Notices to Mariners, issued weekly.

He has leading marks and the international system of buoys and beacons which mark the channel which he will have to follow and which he has to look out for as he approaches.

In most ships he usually has an echo sounder to indicate to him the depth of water and a radar set to supplement his eyes if visibility is poor because of fog or rain or falling snow.

What you can see

Imagine you are standing on the navigating bridge of a ship approaching the estuary of the River Line and Port Liberty.

The Landfall buoy marking the entrance to the channel is right ahead of you and close by you can see the pilot launch displaying its distinguishing code flag waiting to put a pilot on board. Steaming out through the main channel is a 12,000 ton cargo vessel and astern of her a coaster is about to pass through the secondary channel used by smaller craft.

There is a fishing boat heading out to sea off Plushers Point and at the inner end of Crusher’s Bank a dredger is working.

Port Liberty can just be seen around the bend in the river and the buoys marking the main and secondary channels into the River Line and up to the quay are clearly visible.

Model made to the requirements of the Department of Navigation by Thorp Modelmakers Ltd.

So clear and sharp, Port Liberty. So precise and real. Realer than anything else I know. Of course it doesn’t exist. There’s no such place. There is no River Line, no Crusher’s Bank, no Plushers Point, no Port Liberty. The chart and the soundings, the channel markers and the buoys have no counterparts in the full-size world. Port Liberty is a fiction invented by the Admiralty as Fig. 67 in the Admiralty Manual of Navigation Volume I, and the National Maritime Museum commissioned a model of it.

There’s more to the model than meets the eye. I once got in touch with Thorp Modelmakers Ltd and was astonished to find that the tiny fixed and flashing lights are not actually on the tiny vessels, the lighthouse, the buoys. I couldn’t believe it. The scale was too small for that, I was told. The lights are underneath the model and there is a system of mirrors derived from an old theatrical illusion called ‘Pepper’s Ghost’. The night window is a mirror and the lights fixed and flashing so perfectly, each in its proper place, are not in fact where one sees them. I think about it often.