20 miles
Not far, but a long way
The schoolboys climbed some steps near the front of the ferry. There were very few people outside on deck because the weather wasn’t very good and the sea was quite choppy. Most people were inside, watching the water running down the windows while nursing cups of tea, or coffee, or perhaps a glass of Dutch courage before hitting continental roads.
Outside, the boys were excited. It was a school trip that had begun early the same morning when the day boys were dropped off at school, while the boarders had been bouncing off the walls for hours in excitement. Mr Farwell had brought his cine camera so that it could record the moment when the coach set off down the school driveway, followed, a few seconds later, by the coach stopping so that Mr Farwell could get off and retrieve the camera in question for the rest of the trip.
The journey to Dover from Dorset in the turd-brown coloured Bere Regis coach had been long, about five hours, and uneventful, only marked by a pause for breakfast at Fleet Services on the M3 – jam rolls distributed to everyone and wolfed down on a grass verge outside the coach.
Now on the ferry, at the top of the stairs, there was a gate. The boys pushed the gate open and went through. Beyond, there was another stairway leading even higher. The lads pressed on, up the stairs quickly to what was basically just a small landing which appeared to serve no useful purpose. The views were good though, a bit like a convenient crow’s nest, designed just well enough to give them, briefly, the impression that they were on a pirate ship rather than a Sealink cross-channel ferry.
An announcement crackled out over the Tannoy. It wasn’t very clear, something about please leave the area, but nobody was really listening, they were getting caught up now with their ideas of pirates, and were going on about who they would force to walk the plank first. There was a good list of teachers who probably wouldn’t last long before being sent to feed the fishes, and they’d be followed by a fair number of fellow pupils too.
Which was probably a bit unfair, but schoolboys can be like that.
The Tannoy crackled out again. Something about boys in the fo’c’sle. It clearly had nothing to do with our pirates, who had no idea what a fo’c’sle was and were wondering if they could find a sword that looked sufficiently menacing, and possibly a parrot too, which would be much more exciting that the seagulls that were circling overhead, in increasing number, as the ferry moved closer to the French coast.
Ahead of them, Cap Blanc-Nez was now close. Almost, but not quite, close enough to touch, and as the ferry swung about 15 degrees to port and started sailing parallel to the French coast, the speakers crackled into life again.
The voice was no longer one of those reassuring ones used by airline pilots when they’re telling their passengers that they’re about to crash. You know what I mean, when they say something like “assume the brace position” while making it sound like you should also just assume you don’t need to worry about tomorrow’s breakfast. No, this voice was rather more military. The sort of voice an NCO would use when he was telling his scruffy new charges that they needed to do a hundred press-ups before then cutting the lawn with scissors. Blunt scissors.
The very military voice caused the boys to fall silent from the very first syllable. Suddenly it was like they were back in the classroom again, like that time when Miss Bird had managed to get into the room without anybody noticing (who knew there was another small door in the back corner?), and had then shouted at them all for not waiting, in complete silence, for her to arrive.
The military voice continued. “This is an order. Will the schoolboys who have climbed to the area that is out of bounds, the schoolboys who have ignored the signs. The schoolboys who are in the fo’c’sle – the forecastle – leave the area now. That is an ORDER!”.
One of the boys, let’s call him Clements, looked around, slowly. “Guys”, he said, “I think he means us. Fore castle. That sounds like something at the front of the boat. And we’re at the front of the boat, and nobody else is here. We’d better leave”. Some of the others didn’t look quite so sure, but from beneath them came the sound of boots on steps, and shortly afterwards a member of the ferry’s crew appeared. He wasn’t smiling, and he wasn’t very talkative either. In fact he just grunted and pointed.
The boys knew exactly what he meant, and climbed back down, carefully, to the deck where another member of the crew was waiting. The pupils, slightly scared at this point, could see that they were very close to Calais harbour now, and luckily for them there was no time for anything further to be done. They would escape meeting the man with the military voice as they were directed towards the vehicle decks, where their fellow pupils were already queuing.
When they got back to the coach, the teachers counted everybody on. Each of the boys who had been on the fo’c’sle had the impression they were fixed with a stare when it came to their turn. Was it just a feeling, or was that silent stare something more, perhaps a warning that they’d need to be particularly careful, especially well behaved when they reached their final destination, Rambouillet, in just a few hours.
At least there wouldn’t be any evidence, the cine camera hadn’t spotted them, so they had basically got away with it, and they’d always remember what was, for many of them, their first trip across the Channel to France.
If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to simply buy me a ferry ticket (contributions may in fact be used to buy a trip through the tunnel, which was nothing more than a pipe dream when the boys were caught on the fo’c’sle, instead, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).
I love the photo of the hovercraft!
School trips by ferry remind me of school days (Berry's or Harding's Coach from Taunton to Plymouth then a Britanny Ferry to Roscoff and on to St Brieuc).