The On A Shout blog
by 'Captain' (writer) Dave Windass
Captain's Blog #3
It’s 2006. And I’ve gone to Spurn for a chat to let the lifeboat crew know that I’m writing a play about a lifeboat crew on Spurn. “It’s not about you,” I tell the lifeboat crew on Spurn. At that point I’m not sure if it will or won’t be about them, but I thought it best to at least sound convincing, focused and as if I knew what I was doing.
I was introduced to the handful of RNLI crew in attendance at this historical moment when artist met subject matter as “the writer of this ‘ere play” and then passed a mug of tea. Now, compared to those that do the physical and dangerous work of saving lives at sea, writers are wusses. So when I was passed my tea in a very girlie pink mug that contained nary a mouthful of tea, I thought it best to accept my place in the pecking order.
So, yes, 2006. I’m sat looking like an artsy dandy with a pink mug, struggling to get a finger through a very small handle. We had our meeting and I asked some questions, took heed of the fabulous responses and wrote some notes. Then, before I had chance to say, “I suppose at some point I should come out for a ride in the lifeboat just to see what conditions you lads have to put up with are like,” I was being offered a ride in a lifeboat. I think I said something like “erm” in response. Or perhaps it was “oh”. Either way it was nothing too articulate. “I...erm...I can’t. Can we do it another day? ”
And thus started a long-running saga which involved me putting off the many and various invites to go out for a ride in a lifeboat that came my way. Not just any old lifeboat, but a Severn Class lifeboat, worth around £2m. I couldn’t get to Spurn, I was tied up with the day job, I was busy writing a play. Well, that’s what I said. What I really meant was, “I’m very, very scared.”
That was 2006. 2007, well, that was a whole different ball game: It was down to Spurn Point to experience the ride of a lifetime.
As if Mother Nature had developed an acute understanding of my reaction to the sea, I was blessed with ridiculously calm waters on my day with the crew. Nice weather or not, a lifejacket had to be slipped into, crutch straps an’ all. Then, once I’d firmly buckled myself and my crutch in to this luxury inflatable red and black essential, I was asked by one of the crew to slip back out of it as it was his. Ah well. Once upon a time, I was told, lifejackets were optional on calm days. But that was in the dark days before health and safety reigned supreme.
Once down the jetty and safely on board, we were given a full tour of the Tardis-like Severn Class Pride of the Humber; a miraculous craft, make no mistake, and the wheelhouse a technical extravaganza. A mesmerising explanation of the electronics - radar, GPS, laser chart plotter, echo sounder and other mysterious devices, accompanied by the essential aid to sea-faring - a hot cuppa - was followed by a below deck inspection where we got a sneaky peek at her gleaming twin 1600 bhp Caterpillar engines, the unfathomably large seating area and a toilet which, more often than not, is spurned (no pun intended) in favour of “going over the side”.
Then it was back up top, for the hotly anticipated but, frankly, rather scary "I'll chuck it about a bit" moment. In reality, the chucking it about a bit moment was much more fun than it had been made to sound and an impressive display of what the Pride of the Humber is capable of. Coxswain Dave demonstrated how quickly you can bring one of these impressive crafts to a halt when you're belting along at 25 knots.
Coxswain Dave also gave an impressive display of his trim-tabs, demonstrating how the pitch of the Pride of the Humber can be adjusted to suit the conditions (given that the water was ridiculously calm, there were not a lot of conditions to deal with but I got the idea).
An hour and a lot more information jotted in a notebook later and that was that. We were sat having a cuppa outside the cafe that Dave's wife Karen runs, met a couple of the young children that live here too and Dave did a nice monologue about the importance of his pager, how his clothes are always ready to leap into at any minute and explained how, when they're stood at the checkouts in a supermarket and a bell rings, the crew always jump thinking it's the bell back in their house on Spurn.
It isn’t a job that these people do, it’s definitely an extreme way of life.We drove back up the 3 mile road that provides access to and from Spurn. It’s a road which was, on this occasion, a heck of a lot bumpier than the Humber and the North Sea had been from the comfort of the Pride of the Humber.What a day! What a lifeboat! What an experience! I can’t believe I had been putting it off for so long.
Captain's Blog #2
Long before On A Shout was even mooted I suddenly
developed a fascination with water. Not entirely unexpected that this
would happen to a bloke from Hull, given the flood plains and the
important role the Rivers Hull and Humber have played in the history
of the city. But, quite unfathomably, I'd managed to get through many
years of my life being completely oblivious to our waterside location.
When I were a lad, as northern stereotypes like me are prone to say,
Hessle Road was more about bagging a bargain from Setams and Aubreys
than it was a home to the fishing fraternity, who'd not so much moved
on as become an extinct species after being unceremoniously dumped
on during the Cod War.
Water and me didn't really get together until around five years ago. I found myself walking by the Humber. Not very often, initially, but the frequency and length of these journeys increased. Sometimes, I'd take my children with me. "Boring," they would announce, as they sulked while I looked at a mud flat and took notes. "Don't you find it inspirational? Doesn't it just send your mind racing about the possibilities of life, the universe and everything? Look what Mother Nature's given us here!" They would look at me. And then ask if we could go and get some fast food.
When I wrote a little-seen play called Kicked Into Touch, which was about the 1980 all-Hull Rugby League Challenge Cup, I spent a lot of time kicking my heels beside the River Hull, making both a literal and a pretentious writer's metaphorical journey from west to east and back again as often as I could. Wherever I turned it was water, water everywhere. Inevitable, then, that the wet stuff would soon rear its head more obviously in my work and that I could justify all the walking and staring at the horizon.
Naturally, water figures a lot in On A shout, which is a fictionalised account of the lives of the lifeboat crew based at Spurn Point. Indeed, Spurn is in constant danger of being cut off from the mainland and totally engulfed by waves. To go to Spurn is to be immediately inspired by the people that choose to call such a unique and windswept place their home. To just live there would be cause for a pat on the back in itself. But to live there as part of a commitment to saving lives at sea, well, it deserves the biggest plaudits imaginable. These people are truly heroes of epic proportions, they go into battle with an untamable beast, if what they did for a living wasn't so patently real, you'd swear it was mythology.
Drama, I got to thinking as I stared up the jetty and eyed the unmanned Severn Class lifeboat rolling around in some powerful waves, is just here. And the main protagonist? The sea itself.
I still had no idea what the play would be, just that there was something waiting to be written by somebody and, as long as I could suggest it before anyone else, that that someone could be me. Ideas are funny like that. You don't really know what they are until, whoosh, they've slapped you in the face. There's a lifeboat here. There's a lifeboat crew and their families there. There's a lot of history. There's a lot of sea. Writing it down now it seems so obvious what the play about Spurn was really going to be about.
I am not, of course, the first writer to look to the waves for inspiration. I won't bore you with a list but, suffice to say, Homer and his Odyssey well and truly pipped me to the post circa 800 BC. Speaking of which, there's a painting based on this myth at Hull's own Ferens Art Gallery. A long, hard look at Herbert James Draper's 'Ulysses and the sirens' (1909) left me in no doubt of the lethal ways of the sirens trying to clamber on-board Ulysses' boat.
For several weeks of what we writers like to call 'research' but that is, in fact, procrastination or, for the most part, simply staring out of the window, I grappled with some odd notion about the connection between the impossible-to-resist sea sirens and their repeated ode to Persephone and the modern day siren that blasts when the Spurn crew are called to a rescue. As part of my 'research' I also read a lot of Tennyson. Alfred, Lord Tennyson - surely he could have rearranged his name to make it more user friendly - loved a sea narrative and, for a while, in Tennyson, I found a friend to guide me through the deep dark murky waters of a play outline.
Captain's Blog #1
On A Shout, started fermenting at the back of my mind quite a few years ago. I'd been sent to Spurn by a newspaper and instructed not to come back until I'd interviewed a few people about how the place was on the brink of falling into the sea at any second.
I'd visited Spurn before - it's a kind of low-budget seaside without amusements for people like me from Hull, isn't it? - so I knew that the only people I'd be bumping into were bird spotters, Humber Pilots, the lifeboat crew and a bloke wanting to charge me for the privilege of driving down a bumpy and broken concrete road.
When I got to the business end of the Point I plucked up the courage to knock on RNLI coxswain Dave Steenvoorden's door. Dave, who didn't know me from Adam at that point, very kindly invited me in and made me a cuppa while I tried to think of the kind of hard-nosed questions that ruthless journalists would ask. I fumbled about for words for three-quarters of the cup of tea, smiling at Dave, who must have been thinking he'd made the biggest mistake of his life opening the door to this shady journalist.
Dave told me a few stories about life at the place where the Humber meets the North Sea. He told me about family life, about the worry of getting cut off from the mainland, about his life before becoming a crew member. We didn't really touch on life as a lifesaver - that would all come later. I slurped back the last of the tea, went to talk to some bird spotters and eventually skulked back into the office with a bulging notepad, a few vague ideas about a feature for the newspaper and an inkling that me and that mysterious, other-worldly place beyond and even further back than the back of beyond were far from done.
Fast-forward a few years, to 2006, not too long after my play Sully had finished its first run, and I'm back at Spurn. Again. This time, though, my thoughts had started crystallising. Mainly because they had to - Hull Truck had asked me to come up with a treatment for a play that amounted to a bit more than the "Erm...I wouldn't mind writing something about an East Yorkshire Lifeboat crew and Spurn. Not sure what yet" that I had at the time. But I knew that those people at Spurn were interesting people.
I had, after all, drank a cup of tea in Dave Steenvoorden's house - I may even have used his toilet - and I'd once said hello to contemporary RNLI legend Brian Bevan (one of the most highly decorated lifeboatmen in the history of the RNLI, no less).
How hard can it be? My diary on the date of this creative return to Spurn noted that it is a "Desolate place, constantly battered by the elements but, today, very pleasant and calm. Full, as it always is, of twitchers trying to spot Marmora's Warblers amid the seagulls and seaweed and walking three abreast down the too-narrow single lane road with an attitude that suggests that they have the right of way over my car because they wear camouflage shorts, are carrying an obtrusive and ridiculously large pair of binoculars and haven't washed their hairy legs for weeks."
Naturally, I was generalising about bird-spotters, many of whom don't have hairy legs. Yet still I wittered on: "The last time I was here it was late autumn and it was a much scarier environment - you felt that at any moment the Point could be carved from the mainland by a crashing wave and you'd be forced to become an RNLI crew member to work your passage
home."
So what did I do upon my return to this most remote of peninsulas? Did I write On A Shout there and then whilst wandering through the buck weed? I did not. For starters, the play that didn't yet exist had a different title then (that's all it had). So I did what I'd read that other writers do. I sat and stared and thought about what the play could be about. And then I thought I'd better go and scrounge another cuppa from Dave Steenvoorden. He wasn't in.
Header Image © Louise Buckby - Games Boys & Console Cuties 2006