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their summer holiday at Deal as usual, we struck up a friendship with the Macintosh family and among them was a very pretty little girl named Blanche who, very much later, became chief scenario writer to the Hepworth firm, makers of cinematograph films, which up to that date had not yet been invented. It was at Deal and at this time that I had my first self-taught lessons in sailing — afterwards the great passion of my life. I had had an early inoculation when, as a very small boy, I sailed across the Solent from Newtown to Lymington in the cutter Mary (Skipper, Fleuss, of diving-dress fame) with my father and mother. There was a lovely breeze and mother lay full length in the lee scuppers — a picture of perfect bliss. We were delayed at Lymington with a fouled anchor which took hours to clear and it was dark by the time we got outside. Then it fell a dead calm and my father and friend Fleuss each took an oar and gave me the tiller, to my unbounded joy. Whether the skipper gave me the wrong light to steer for or whether I got it mixed up with another one half-way across I do not know, but when we reached the island at dead of night we learned from a coastguard tramping along the beach that we had been swept by the tide far below our proper place and could do nothing until the tide turned again. I wanted to stay aboard and see the adventure out, but mother and I were put ashore and the coastguard saw us home. That was the beginning: that was when the lovely poison entered my blood stream.
When, years later, at Deal mother bought herself a dinghy for me to row her about in, I saw to it that a mast and sail and rudder were included in the bargain. It was a terrible old boat, with a length scarcely in excess of its breadth, like some of the old ladies standing around, and we always called it 'she.' Mother, being musical, also called it the Vivace which was hopelessly unsuitable; Largo would have been much more appropriate. One day I offered to sail the pater and his brother Wheldon to Pegwell Bay for the day. We had the flood tide and a fair breeze from the south and did the passage comfortably.
I was relying upon the ebb tide to bring us home as the Vivace was very little good on the wind. But we hadn't been very long on the return journey when we found the breeze had freshened very much and being now against the tide was knocking up a considerable jobble. Soon we began to take in a fair amount of water. I asked Uncle Wheldon, being the heavier, to sit on the floor to balance us better, which he obediently did though it was three inches deep
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