The terrifying day William Golding saved his family

Of course, boats were different. My father regarded boats as a mixture of his world and his father’s — a focus, perhaps, of the opposition between them. That was part of their attraction. During our land-bound summer holidays we hired or borrowed sailing dinghies, and day sailing was a good compromise from my point of view. But my father’s need for adventure, for voyages, was becoming ominously noticeable.

So, in the winter of 1955-56, we went to Rochester to look at another boat. Wild Rose was a converted Whitstable oyster smack, built in 1890, her delicate name touchingly at odds with her appearance, like a stevedore doing embroidery. She was massively built, about 40ft overall, and broad in the beam.

My parents bought Wild Rose for £300, and at once they had to spend great amounts on her. This was normal in our family with any large purchases — houses, cars or boats — since my parents found bargaining boring and embarrassing. In any case, my father was a sucker about boats, at least until 1967, and he lavished things on her, though fearfully. He bought her a Red Ensign, a proper one. He bought lots of wonderful new rope, and chunky if rather dim port-and-starboard lights made of copper.

Sailing was an experience of extremes. Some of it was terrifying, but there were nights when we sailed along the silvery path of the Moon, or watched the Sun go down in a stupendous array of colours. We were aware of the sea as something unique, a vast creature, indifferent but alive. Sometimes you saw a swirling curve of green light, awash with phosphorescence from microcreatures. But these moments were not the point for my father. For him it was the sense of voyage, the use of his skill and imagination. And his formidable strength.

It has struck me only recently that perhaps he was never scared, despite the many close shaves we had. I was scared a lot of the time and I was not imaginative enough to realise that he was different. He was in charge at sea, and liked it that way.

So, in July 1956, we gathered up our sleeping bags and clothes, our provisions and a couple of books each, and drove down to Southampton, to Kemp’s yard on the River Itchen, just below Northam Bridge. It was always a shock opening up the boat. It had a particular smell — a very specific mixture of oil, bilge water and decay. In Wild Rose there was always some forgotten scrap of food, obliterated by a thick covering — fine grey-green needles of mould.

The very next day we set off. We moored in Yarmouth, a nice little port on the western end of the Isle of Wight. There we waited for a fair wind and a good forecast, both of which we unfortunately got.

It was a fine afternoon, with a brisk northwesterly that was supposed to moderate after blowing us safely to Cherbourg. A few miles out from Yarmouth the engine began to cough. Then it stopped and would not start again. The wind became obtrusive, and the sea rose unpleasantly in great heaps. My father fastened safety ropes around the shrouds of both masts, and his cheerful, active demeanour became more abstracted. Then the dinghy, which we were towing astern, slowly filled with water. Once full, it began to drag Wild Rose’s stern down after it. Waves began breaking over our deck.

My father took his seaman’s knife and cut the painter of the dinghy and it vanished astern, soon lost in the distance among the acres of green waves. I began to wail. My father, under great strain and just possibly frightened himself, lost his temper.

“I can stand either the weather or you,” he shouted.

I looked at the swirls of white rushing past. I wondered what it would feel like to drop down into them. After all, there was no choice about the weather, so clearly I should jump. But I decided to wait. I remembered that my father was occasionally wrong, sometimes even foolish. I went below, crying messily. I was suddenly feeling dreadfully sick. This was a blessing. Lying on one of the bunks in the main cabin, retching over a pudding basin provided by my superbly practical mother, I noticed the rising storm, but vaguely. She kept things going below, making hot drinks, pausing occasionally to throw up. My father was seasick too. He and my brother took turns to steer. David was not quite 16, and apparently free from sickness, but he later claimed — we would beg him not to say this — that he had swallowed it down.

I was not allowed back on deck. Perversely, it was a sunny afternoon, and from the companionway I could see heaps of brilliant, jade-green sea, wind flecked and piled far above the stern, as high as a house. Then the vast waves would sink under us, and I would see instead a wilderness vista of white and green stretching far away. We were utterly on our own. Even I could see that. I looked at David. He was sitting on an upturned bucket in the sunshine, steering with one arm around the tiller while the wind whistled in the rigging, and the sails were drum-taut. I saw to my astonishment that he was utterly happy.

Neither my mother nor I was strong enough to hold the tiller, so my father and brother did it all. After a few hours on watch, one of them would spend a half-hour dragging the handle of the pump up, shooting the bilge-water over the deck and out through the ports.

Even so, the floorboards in the cabin were awash. Wild Rose was taking in water. My father and David steered the boat and pumped her bilges the whole of that desperate night. Mercifully, Wild Rose stayed in one piece.

At some point my father and David had a conference. They agreed that we could not make for Cherbourg, under sail, in the dark, beating against a foul wind — for by now it was southwesterly. To the east of Cherbourg is the port of Barfleur, small, hard to find and on an exceptionally rocky coast. To the west are the sinister waters round the Channel Islands. We needed to endure the storm longer. We must stand off, east, across the Baie de la Seine, well north of the eastern corner of the Cherbourg peninsula — and then turn southeast for a safer patch of water close to the beaches of Normandy. And then we would wait.

So it was that, at some stage, during the day that followed that long, long night, Wild Rose began to make easier weather of it. I think I may even have slept. Vaguely I remember the sound of the anchor chain rattle-rattle-rattling for a very long time.

Finally, we were anchored. Peace and a strange sense of normality came over us and we slept for about ten hours.

When we woke, the sea was flat and oily-looking. There was fog, which lifted occasionally to show us we were within sight of land. My mother made us hot drinks and David and I polished off a whole packet of Marie biscuits. Then the fog cleared, and the wind rose, fastidiously it seemed by comparison with the roaring and whistling of that earlier night. The mainsail was hoisted. My mother took the tiller and my father and brother began to haul up the anchor.

They couldn’t do it. They were worn out, even after a night’s sleep. Instead, they lowered the mainsail, and we sat down to consider. A few hundred yards away there was a smallish trawler, and she began to approach. I realise now her crew wondered if we were sinking. Once within hailing distance, my father explained our difficulty in grammar-school French. Moments later there was an avalanche of boots on our deck, three enormous men in bleu de travail leapt at the chain and within a few minutes the anchor was swinging on Wild Rose’s bow. My father took out a sheaf of multicoloured French banknotes, pour boire, pour les enfants, pour les dames, all refused. It must have been farcical — our ludicrous boat, the bowsprit right across the foredeck, the split wood, torn sails, the much-used pump. Two children and a pretty but dishevelled wife. And my father, who always looked poor, even when he was well off. In the end they took a modest tip, and leapt off the boat again, wishing us well.

Reaching Le Havre, we half-sailed and half-drifted up to the outer mole and made fast to it. There were large notices saying not to do this. Passers-by and fishermen came to tell us we could not stay there. Then, they took one look at Wild Rose and implored us not to move. Someone gave us a wine bottle full of hot coffee. The lighthouse-keeper gave me his lunch. It was a piece of cold, brown steak with a thick ruffle of yellow fat, on a slice of bread. My mother looked at me firmly, told me to say thank you and take it below.

A launch sent by the harbour master towed us into the inner harbour. Later that evening my parents gave me some money, taught me the phrase Du lait, s’il-vous-plaît (which I thought meant “a bottle of milk” so I added “please” to it) and sent me off into the hinterland. A couple of hours later I was restored to my family by a posse of elderly Frenchwomen all in black. Heaven knows how they understood me, or how they found the boat.

Then my father’s ineffably calm colleague John Milne arrived, and this coincided with the locals of Le Havre embracing us. We had dinner with the mayor of Le Havre. We lunched with a pair of elderly ladies. When we were not being wined and dined, my mother and John sat on a pontoon just astern of Wild Rose, chain-smoking and stitching away at the torn foresail. My mother, very pretty, and tremendously chic in a striped sweater and hoop earrings, looked rather like Jeanne Moreau and people would stare. French engineers would come along, shrug about the engine and chat her up. My father astonished John (who had read French at Oxford as well as music) by asking if he should put the bougies (spark plugs) to chauffer or perhaps sécher on top of the Primus, the French for which I have alas forgotten. After a couple of weeks the engine sulkily began to obey instructions, the bowsprit with a new bolt and splinted timbers was back in its right place, and the foresail was patched but usable. With regret, my parents began to plan our return. We had become used to life in France. We have a photograph of the cabin interior. There are four empty wine bottles, one on its side. All are St-Émilion.

My father and I went to look for a bank. My grandparents had been terrified by the exaggerations of the local newspapers, which proclaimed we were adrift in the for three days without food or water. We were never adrift, and had plenty of food and water. It was appetite we lacked. Actually, mealtimes became rather exciting, because we kept the tins in the bilges, and in the storm all the labels had come off. Tinned pears with ham one day, potatoes and custard another. But Grandma and Alec generously telegraphed money to pay for repairs, and the two of us went in search of the authorising bank. We walked for miles — my father got hopelessly lost, as he usually did on land. Our meanderings took us over vast flat stretches of grey rubble. When we found the bank my father pulled my pigtails affectionately while we queued, and I stretched out my hand to pull his beard. He laughed [and] pushed my hand away. Later he explained that to pull a man’s beard was a dreadful insult. I was mortified.

One evening, with a light southerly wind, we set sail for home. How flat the sea was, how calm the sky. The Moon rose, John and my father stayed on deck, and I went to sleep in the fo’c’s’le, with the sound of our progress a pleasant rippling whoosh, under the bow. John had taken some pictures of us and sent them to the Salisbury Journal. The paper chose a jolly family picture, with my jovial bearded father, my lovely mother, David silent but heroic, and me eating. It was a long way from the buried fear and piled-up seas of that night. I see, half a century later, how truly heroic my brother was, and my mother too. And I understand my father. It was all too much, my thin wailing in the middle of those mountainous green waves. We never mentioned it again.

© Judy Golding 2011. Extracted from The Children of Lovers: A Memoir of William Golding by His Daughter to be published by Faber and Faber on May 5 at £16.99. To order it for £15.29 inc p&p call 0845 2712134

Lord of the Flies in numbers

1952 Golding finished his first draft of Lord of the Flies, then titled “Strangers from Within”.

5 Number of publishers that rejected his manuscript.

£60 The advance offered to a “delighted” Golding by Faber and Faber in 1954.

£5,250 Current price for a proof copy of the first edition.

2 Film adaptations: by Peter Brook, in 1963, and by Harry Hook, in 1990.

68 Position on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-99. Critics complained of violence and racism.

20 million Copies sold in the UK.

30 Languages into which the book has been translated.