End of a Baltic Summer

‘That is the only church built in Russia during the Soviet era,’ the guide said, pointing at a bleak white building near the shoreline. A few more yards and we could see the full sweep of the Baltic from one promontory of Tallinn Bay to the other. The water had a steely look to it. This was the venue for the sailing events in the Moscow Olympics in 1980, and the grudging attempt at church-building was meant for those athletes who valued prayer. The skyline was a profile of what history has done to this Estonian city: blocks of soulless high-rise flats from the Stalinist era, a clutch of small-scale skyscrapers and docked cruise liners dwarfing the old part of the city.

I had taken the coach from Riga to Tallinn. The landscape was flat; spruce and pine trees; sheets of water; storks ponderously struggling into flight. The border with Latvia was open, policed only by flocks of house martins in the eaves of the border crossing’s roof. I dozed, catching up on the sleep I had missed the night before when I had been reading till two in the morning. Then I had been sailing into the Bay of Tallinn in a 30-foot ketch, tacking into the wind, heading towards ‘the three ships of the Estonian Grand Fleet and the rock and spires of Reval, dim in the rain’. There had been a crew of three – four including me – and the year was 1922. The yacht’s captain was Arthur Ransome; Reval was the old Germanic name for Tallinn; and the book was Racundra’s First Cruise (1923). I had bought my Travellers’ Library blue hardback copy for 40 pence years ago; my diary tells me I read it for the first time in February 1984. In those days I slept better, but there was compensation lying awake in Riga in the early hours with Ransome at the tiller, the ‘Ancient Mariner’ – ‘a very little man, with a white beard and a head as bald as my own’ – and the ‘Cook’ whom Ransome, without a glimmer of guilt, believed ‘was the one who worked her passage’. The male sailors had to be fed after all. Arthur Ransome and I both liked Tallinn, though he would not have recognized what progress has done to it. Strange to think that the Russian Orthodox church, with its onion-domed extravagance, was just two decades old when Ransome, walking through the cobbled streets, past wooden buildings with horsehair in the mortar, under a fortified gateway and up a long slope within the inner wall, was confronted by what he thought of as ‘the fantastic Russian church’. He would have shaken his head at the crocodiles of tourists marched through the old city by relentless guides holding flags aloft, and the swarms of pesky sellers of postcards in the main square. I liked the terracotta roofs, the shadows cast by trees, the way buildings nestled into each other, the climb up through the old town. I liked the great sweep of the bay too, the unexpected blue of the Baltic which I had imagined grey and wind-whipped. Ransome warmed to the city well enough, but it was the sea that held him. At one point in the book he declares: ‘I cannot believe that any man who has looked out to sea from Reval castle rock can ever be wholly happy unless he has a boat.’ There is little about politics in Racundra. Ransome is more concerned with wind and tide than he is with Estonia’s struggle to free itself from the Russian bear. These days, in the Baltic, the struggle for independence is still a recent, raw memory. The culminating event in that struggle in Estonia was the Singing Revolution. Imagine that – 300,000 Estonians gathered together and singing, voices reaching out to defy, then defeat, the occupation. Later, on 23 December 1989, almost 2 million Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians stood, hand in hand, on the Baltic Way, stretching from Tallinn to Vilnius – 400 miles of protest. Ransome opens a narrow but perfectly shaped window on a world that was rapidly disappearing in the years after the Great War, and now seems like ancient history. From the moment you look at the map with which the book opens, with its dotted lines marking the path of the plucky Racundra, and its obscure islands through which the ketch must navigate to make for Reval and Helsingfors, you know that what matters here is the journey – the compass, barometer, canvas and tiller; prevailing winds and anchorages. The voyage takes place as the summer is fading away, and the reader is frequently reminded that a Baltic autumn is just over the horizon. The boat-builder Ransome had commissioned to build Racundra had missed a series of deadlines through the summer and it was 20 August before the boat was in a fit state to sail. Racundra was designed to be a cruising boat in which ‘a man might live from year’s end to year’s end’. She made her new owner inordinately proud: ‘Master and Owner of the Racundra. Does any man need a prouder title or description? In moments of humiliation, those are the words that I shall whisper to myself for comfort. I ask for no others on my grave.’ Ransome, his crew and new boat sailed from Riga in Latvia, bound for Helsingfors (now Helsinki). The plan was to test out Racundra’s seaworthiness as well as to explore some of the more remote Baltic islands. Soon after setting out, we approach the first lonely island with Ransome: Runö, 50 miles out from Riga, where ‘its Swedish seal hunters [are] using words that in Sweden have become archaic, living . . . a life of medieval communism’. Sliding tentatively through narrow sea passages, in shallow water, you can almost hear the scrape of the boat’s hull on submerged rocks. There are fogs and dead calms when time seems to stand still; anxious navigation that comes out right in the end; and days of uplifting and exultant sailing when all seems right with the world. ‘It was a glorious day, bright hard sunshine, with cold in the air, as we get in the Baltic at the back end of the year, a good wind heeling her over to the railing, stiff as she is, and that mighty swell lifting us sky-high and dropping us again into a blue depth walled by water.’ I am there with him, me under a single sheet on a steamy night in Riga, and Ransome and his motley crew, bounding across the Baltic on a day made in heaven. Ransome wrote Racundra’s First Cruise seven years before the publication of Swallows and Amazons, the first of the children’s stories he would write over the ensuing 17 years (see SF no. 18). Previously he had been caught up in the tumult of the Russian Revolution, as a journalist with the Daily News and increasingly as a confidant of the Bolshevik regime. His second wife Evgenia (whom he married in 1924 in the British Consulate in Reval) had been Trotsky’s secretary. Writing about Racundra proved intensely liberating for him. This is a book which gives us a clear insight into where its writer’s future lies, seven long years before Ransome first sent John, Susan, Titty and Roger across the lake in Swallow, bound for Wild Cat Island. The sea, the crew and the resilient Racundra are the chief characters in the book, and they have an endearing charm. We also encounter some memorable people along the way, invariably in a crisp prose that has an ozone quality to it. There is the time when Racundra anchors off Ermuiste, ‘which means “the terrible”, for it is a place of many wrecks’. (Ransome leaves you in no doubt that the Baltic is not for the faint-hearted: storms appear in an instant; ships sink.) Here, amid the tumbledown ruins of a disused harbour, he finds ‘the great golden body of an unfinished ship’. An old man with a face of ‘clear walnut’ is building the ship and has been so doing since the harbour was abandoned, many years before. It is a loneliness that daunts the visiting writer, who leaves the place wondering what the old man’s future holds: will he ever sail in the ship he has spent a lifetime building? Perhaps the most haunting section of the book is the meeting between Ransome and Captain Konga, skipper aboard the Toledo, once of Leith. She is stuck fast on a shoal – a particularly problematic issue in the tideless Baltic – and Konga has been sent by the Salvage Company to oversee her recovery. It is proving a long job. He is living on board in a makeshift cabin scarcely bigger than himself. In splendid isolation, in a winter-frozen sea and through hot continental summers, he fishes, makes nets and thinks of his lady friend in Hull whom he has not seen for twenty-five years. Captain Konga is at the mercy of the sea – he cannot remain marooned forever, and his fate chimes with the fact that Racundra’s First Cruise was written when a great wave was about to engulf a way of life. This is a story where the reader is privileged to stand beside a writer in tight control of sails and prose; where for a brief moment we can share in something that would soon disappear forever. At the book’s end, with papers in order and ‘nothing to declare, formalities . . . quickly over, the ensign hauled down’, Racundra is laid up for the winter. You step ashore, legs still shaky from those days at sea, smelling oil and salt in the air and listening to the tinny sound of halyards thrashing masts, and step back into the modern world, where oversized cruise ships tie up nose-to-tail at Tallinn’s dockside. Still, there is a kind of solace in the slim hardback in the traveller’s pocket, with its tales of the Baltic long ago.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 35 ©  Richard Knott 2012