The sea! The sea!(THE STRAGGLER)

ONE day some years ago I was arguing with a Viennese friend about poetry. Though a well-educated and cultivated person, my friend claimed not to "get" poetry. How could that be? I protested. Don't we all respond quite naturally to strongly measured and evocative lines? Listen ... and to make my point, I quoted Tennyson's "Break, break, break, / On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!" "Oh," she scoffed, "you English, and this huge thing you have about the sea!"

Is it really true? En route by cruise ship from Bermuda to New York, I look out of my cabin window at the North Atlantic, trying to summon up some atavistic emotions. The sun is close to setting in a clear sky. My cabin is near the front of the ship (which is to say, the bow) and on the left-hand (which is to say, port) side, so that the sun is heading down to the horizon at my right. Between it and me is an impressive bright road of reflected sunlight on the water, as in some kitschy seascape painting. The water itself is, I would guess (having very little experience of the deep Atlantic), rather calmer than usual, inducing almost no motion at all in the ship.

I stare, I summon up, to no effect. Huge thing? The hugest thing in my consciousness is anticipation of dinner, which my cheerful Hungarian cabin steward--I may develop a Central European theme here--should be bringing any time now.

By English standards I am anyway a hopeless landlubber, having been raised about as far from the sea as it is possible to get in the mother country--about 60 miles. I am told that I was taken on seaside trips as an infant, but my first actual memories are from age eight, when my family rented a "caravan"--a tiny mobile home--on the cliffs above Hunstanton in Norfolk. There I explored the mud flats and rock pools of the Wash, that square bay that terminates the eastern bulge of England, a body of shallow water in which, as every English schoolchild used to know, King John lost his crown jewels. I recall being disappointed by the sea, which I had been told was blue and fierce, but which at Hunstanton was brown and sluggish. So many things turn out like that.

My subsequent relations with the sea were mostly unsatisfactory. I spent a couple of years in the Sea Cadets as a teenager, but geography demanded that most of our seafaring be done on a local reservoir. Only our annual camp featured actual sea, and even then we were housed at HMS St. Vincent, which is not a ship at all, but a land barracks in Portsmouth. The most naval thing about the place was a tremendous mast at one side of the parade ground, with rope ladders we were made to run up and down.

My naval career ended when I failed my oral exam for promotion to Leading Seaman. I can still remember the question that scuttled me. Suppose--asked the examiner, a properly bearded old seadog with four gold stripes round his sleeve cuff--suppose I wished to tow a length of timber behind my boat, to season it in the water. What kind of knots would I use to secure it? ...