Chapter
1
The Birth of Endeavour
I felt trapped. A tiny spider
was spinning its web on the outside of the window.
I breathed on the glass then wrote my name in
the misted pane. What to do?
People were talking. Dark, excited
words.
“Shall we cut his throat
or shall we feed him to the sharks?” said
a guttural, evil sounding voice.
“Make him walk the plank,”
said another, then a chorus of shouts and clanking
steel. “Aye, the plank, the plank,”
I heard.
“The plank it is then,”
said the voice. “Bring the boy aloft. Bugabee,
you can do the honours.”
“Aye, aye cap’n.”
I watched with widening eyes as a great grizzly-bear
of a man, his mouth shaped in to a rotten toothy
grin, advanced towards the door. The crew began
to shout and whoop and so did we until the scene
collapsed before us, fading quickly to a grey
rectangular screen.
The blue sea, the gently swaying
ship and its expectant crew all vanished in the
flick of a switch as this boxed ocean world was
suddenly replaced by the larger box of our sparse
living room with its PVC window frames, brown
velvet curtains and a flame-effect gas fire.
This pirate haven in another
time and another world had been transformed to
the bland and ordinary here and now. Standing,
hands on hips, like a gatekeeper between one world
and the other was my stern-faced mother, her long,
dark hair tied in a bun. Wisps of hair fell down
beside her cheek in a way that was fashionable
in the seventies, a time before I was born and
a time which mum had never really left.
“Mum, you can’t switch
the telly off. They’ve captured Tom, the
cabin boy. We need to know what happens,”
I said.
“He escapes. Do you really
think he’s going to be dismembered by sharks
on children’s television? I need some peace
and quiet. I’m talking to your Auntie Sue
on the phone and can’t hear myself speak,”
she said. “I’ve told you before. No
day-time TV. Now go out and play in the fresh
air. You could go to the park.”
Fresh air? What was that? I looked
at the others, the Grant boys - Pat, Vince and
Badger. We all rolled our eyes except Vince, the
youngest, who followed mum out of the room asking:
“Mrs Johnson what does dismembered mean?”
It was no use protesting. We
knew the Johnson house rules. There were a lot
of nos in our house – no sweets, no TVs
in bedrooms, no computer games, no toy guns, or
as the Grants would say, simply “no fun”.
“It means they’ll
tear him limb from limb,” said Vince, triumphantly,
as he pattered back, clutching in one hand his
“sniggly”, an old woollen cardigan
that he would rub across his top lip for comfort.
In the other hand he was holding a half-eaten
sausage roll. Tell-tale flakes of pastry coated
his chin and tee-shirt. “And that’s
what your mum says she will do to us if there’s
any more noise,” he said, prodding the sausage
roll towards us.
“Turn it back on,”
said Badger. His scrawny legs dangling idly from
the arm-rest of the settee while the rest of his
gangly frame lolled across the cushions. “No
chance,” I said. “What about your
house?”
“We can’t go there,”
said Pat, the oldest of the brothers. “The
telly’s packed away. We’re flitting
tomorrow remember.” Yes, I thought, they’re
flitting. Another box, a removal van, was coming
to take them away.
“The park then,”
I said. “What’s it doing outside?”
“It’s raining.”
A few slashes of water were streaking the window
pane.
“It’s only a shower.
Let’s get some rope. Badger you could be
Tom, Pat could be Bugabee and Vince could be the
crew. I’ll be the cap’n”.
“No Mo,” said Pat,
“A girl can’t be a pirate captain.”
I fixed Pat with what I imagined
was an ironic stare. “Who’s rope is
it?”
“Yours Mo. Well it’s
your mum’s clothes line really.”
“Anyway you’re wrong
about women pirates,”I said. “There
was Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Vicious, they were.
Anyone who questioned their commands was flogged.
Let’s put it to the vote.”
“Whoosh for flogging Pash?”
said little Vince who always seemed to get the
wrong idea. His cheeks were bulging with half-chewed
sausage roll and he sprayed crumbs across the
carpet as he spoke.
“No, Vince, I didn’t
mean that,” I said. “Who’s for
me as the pirate captain?” Badger and Vince
both raised their hands with me.
“There’s only one
Mo Johnson,” said Badger.
There was too. I’m what
relatives who want to make a point about my single-mindedness
call an “only child”, as if that explains
everything. No sisters and brothers, you see,
therefore I must be a brat. I’m fifteen
now but I was twelve years old on that rainy day
in Netherfield, a sooty Yorkshire town on the
edge of the Pennines. For generations before us
the town’s stone buildings had been bathed
in thick black smoke belching from the mill chimneys
that sprouted from the valley floor. “The
sparrows fly backwards around here to keep the
soot out of their eyes,” my nan had said
in her booming voice. The mill weaving sheds had
clattered so loudly that weavers like nan had
developed strong voices to make themselves heard.
Nowadays the mills were silent
and most of the terraced houses around had been
pulled down. Some of the biggest mill buildings
had been converted into shops or apartments and
some had been cleaned so that the town centre
was a chequer-board of honeyed and blackened stone.
My grandpa used to say: “Where there’s
muck there’s money.” As the mills
had disappeared so had the wealth. Nothing ever
stays the same. In old faded pictures of Netherfield
you could see shops with tea-kettles and pots
dangling by their doors and proud shopkeepers
standing with their thumbs tucked into the sides
of their aprons. Many of those same shops today
were empty as people flocked to the out-of-town
shopping centres or travelled in their cars to
out-of-town jobs.
We lived on the fringe of the
town in a modern detached house on a modern detached
estate called “Collingwood” among
thoroughly modern detached neighbours whose prime
concerns in life were their neatly manicured lawns
and gleaming company cars. Except for the Grants,
of course, who were regarded by their neighbours
as “not quite our sort of people”
and shunned by most people on the estate apart
from my parents who were equally shunned for maintaining
their close friendship with Mr Grant and the three
Grant boys – Pat, Vince and Badger - who
lived just three doors away from our house. Their
house cost less than our house because it had
three bedrooms whereas our’s had four. Three
bedrooms, three boys and a father, compared to
our four bedrooms, two parents and a daughter;
where was the sense in that? They were snug. We
rattled.
My full name is Molly Anne Johnson
but my dad called me Mo as soon as I began to
walk. I’m what you might call a typical
teenager and three years ago at the time this
story began I was a typical pre-teen, dressed
mostly by GAP (when mum was buying my clothes)
or by French Connection (when I was paying from
spending money). I liked to wear tee-shirts and
jeans and apart from my long hair I was usually
dressed not that much differently than the Grant
boys
The boys came round to our house
a lot in those days after their mother had left.
Mary Grant had run away with the family doctor.
Everybody knew about it. It was the talk of the
estate. Mum and dad said they were shocked. The
boys didn’t talk about it much. They still
saw their mother at weekends but opted to stay
with their father when the divorce came through.
I liked their mum, so sociable; too sociable,
I suppose. I liked Bob more. He was a fireman
with strong shoulders and a kind, sad sort of
smile. He was a quiet type, not the party animal
that he married. He worked odd shifts but somehow,
with the help of friends and relatives, he managed
to make things work.
Bob was one of those men who
could put his hand to anything. He wasn’t
my real uncle but I called him Uncle Bob just
the same. At the time he was building a big yacht
down in Netherfield’s canal basin, miles
from the sea. The locals called it “Bob’s
folly” but that’s not the way the
boys or my parents saw it.
“If Bob says he’s
going to sail that boat across oceans then he
will. It’s as simple as that,” said
dad when I asked about the boat. Across oceans?
What a thought. We knew that the canal network
connected Netherfield to the sea eventually but
the sea was a long way off. As for the other side
of an ocean, neither I nor any of my friends could
imagine it. I had been to Spain once but the Grant
boys had never been further than Lyme Regis on
the south coast. Their idea of an adventure was
a game of crazy golf.
Uncle Bob moved quickly. He resigned
his job at the fire station, sold the family home,
and put the furniture into storage. That rainy
day when mum interrupted our pirate film was the
last that the Grant boys would spend in Netherfield.
The next day Bob was taking them to stay with
their grandparents for a while in Whitby on the
north-east coast until the boat was finished.
I didn’t even get the chance to wave them
off. They were gone before breakfast.
Bob returned that evening with
some suitcases and moved in to one of the spare
bedrooms. Mum explained that he would be staying
with us for the time being. I would miss the boys.
I had grown up with them. Badger and me were the
same age. Pat was a bit older and Vince was the
youngest. Many years ago Uncle Bob had persuaded
my parents to join the local sailing club. That’s
where I met his boys. We used to race each other
in our dinghies on the reservoir. The dinghies,
called Optimists, were shaped like shallow baking
trays, each with a single sail. Badger’s
boat had a black pirate sail with a white skull
and cross bones on each side. He fancied himself
as a pirate.
In the past two years mum, dad
and me had been sailing a larger yacht at sea.
My dad had bought it and kept it most of the time
in the harbour at Bridlington. He’s called
Rory and he’s an office worker. He manages
a biscuit factory, wears charcoal grey suits most
days and drives a metallic pearl-blue Volvo. Or
he did before everything changed. My mum is a
teacher and very matter of fact. I can’t
say we are the best of friends every minute of
the day. My name, as I’ve said, is Molly
but most people call me Mo. That’s all you
need to know about names for now, except for “Badger”
Grant whose real name is Jim.
We called him Badger because
of all the badges he earned in the cub scouts.
He was good at practical stuff like his father
who taught him things for new badges while his
mum would complain about the sewing. Maybe that’s
why she left.
Badger and me were best friends.
I liked Pat too but he tended to keep his distance
after I had blacked his eye when he made fun of
my clothes. He said I was more like a boy because
I never wore skirts except the one I was made
to wear at school. I suppose it was a lucky punch.
When I look back now perhaps I was too aggressive
sometimes in those days but a woman has to stand
up for herself. That’s what my dad told
me and my dad was generally right about everything.
At least that’s what I
thought until the day he was made redundant a
few weeks after the Grant boys had left. Redundant.
I had never heard the word before. It sounded
such an important word and it was - for dad -
for all of us in fact. But when I say “important”
I don’t mean important in a good way. It
was important in the way it changed our lives.
I’m certain now that in the long run it
was a good thing, but it didn’t feel that
way at the time.
Mum had come to collect me from
school in the car. I was walking out of the porch
when she came up to me and gave me a big hug which
was unusual. Then she stood back and placed her
hands firmly on my shoulders, fixing me with her
“listen to me young lady” look that
usually meant I was in some kind of trouble. “Your
dad’s been made redundant. He doesn’t
have a job anymore. Things are going to be different
from now on,” she said.
“Is this true dad?”
I said, trying to hold back the tears when we
got home. “What does mum mean? How will
things be different?”
Dad sighed. He seemed to have
aged since breakfast time. His tie was slung over
the settee and he had a glass of whisky in his
hand. That was unusual too because dad never drank
during the day. He was greying slightly but still
had most of his hair and, apart from a thickening
of his waist, he still seemed quite trim and fit.
Surely losing your job didn’t have to be
the end of everything?
“There are things you need
to know, Mo,” said dad, putting his arm
around my shoulders. What mum says is true. Things
will have to change. We’re still paying
off a big mortgage so we shall have to sell the
house and the boat. The car has to go back to
the company.”
“So what?” I said,
unable to fight back a sudden feeling of sadness
and fear. I couldn’t stop the tears any
longer. “I can’t stand this place
since the Grant boys went. Who do these people
think they are?” I was feeling angry at
dad’s bosses. Dad had worked his socks off
for that company. He knew the biscuit business
inside out. Custard creams, jammie dodgers, ginger
nuts. He sold them all but rarely brought them
home. That was one reason why we never had sweets
in the house. Neither he nor mum could stand the
sight of sweets and biscuits - too much a reminder
of dad’s work.
Now he was out of work. I knew
why because he had talked about it before. One
of the bosses, an accountant who was good with
numbers, had worked out that the company could
save thousands of pounds if it replaced one of
the biscuit ingredients with something cheaper.
But the biscuits won’t taste the same, dad
had argued. Nobody cared about that. That was
the top and bottom of it. Dad wanted to make good
biscuits. But the miserable cheese-pairing bean-counters
in charge of his company just wanted to make more
money.
What’s the point of making
money if you can’t buy nice things with
the money you make because someone has decided
to save on the very stuff that makes a thing nice?
Do you understand my point? Gran would call that
cutting off your nose to spite your face. But
they don’t use language like that in big
companies. Instead they talk about productivity
and rationalisation which is all about trying
to do more with less.
“It’s not fair,”
I said and threw a cushion at the wall.
Dad told me to calm down.
“I know that things are
going to change for the better Mo. I didn’t
like that job anyway. Who cares how many short-bread
fingers it takes to supply every supermarket and
corner shop in the north of England? Not me, that’s
for sure. And you’re right about this estate.
It’s goodbye to lawns and company cars,
for a while at least. Come with me. Let’s
go down the cut. Your Uncle Bob’s been busy.”
The old boatyard alongside the
canal had been built for a world of industry and
trade. The canals were to be the transport web
that would link all the towns and cities together
in the industrial revolution. Then came the railways
and the waterways were left to the leisure craft
such as the brightly-coloured narrow boats that
lined the Netherfield canal basin. Apart from
the reds and greens of the narrow boat the cobbled
yard was dominated by a large steel hull propped
up on wooden supports. Lines of rust stained its
sides. Bright orange sparks were flying in to
the air. As we approached suddenly from behind
the steel there emerged a robot-like head, other-worldly
and alien like that of a Cybernaut. Uncle Bob
raised his welding mask and broke into a grin.
“Hi Rory, Hi Mo,” he said. “It’s
nearly ready. The mast comes tomorrow and then
we can start the painting and fitting.”
“Well,” said dad,
running his hand over the raw steel shell, smudging
the rust that had freshly crusted from recent
rain. “What do you think? Welcome to your
new home.”
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