I peered through the slatted blind to see what the weather was doing. A Mediterranean-blue sky was parked over the rooftops of Camden. Few people were out and about in the street early. I was the cab driver’s first fare of the day. He didn’t look elated to see me. When I told him where I wanted dropping and why, however, his face lit up and he whipped his cab through the empty City streets as if our lives depended on it.
About 200 punters were gathered at the Tower pierhead, waiting for a signal to board. Cheerful 50-year-old blokes in knee-length shorts and sunglasses, tattooed calves, tins of lager cracked open already. Everyone smiling in the sun. Even the Tower of London looking benign.
A long, mournful blast on a ship’s horn. Embarkation. We funnelled through the pier entrance and down a gangplank and there she was. My first sight of her. The PS Waverley, buoyant in the brimming Thames, patiently waiting for my friends and me to step aboard and make ourselves comfortable in her cosy wooden saloons and on her spacious sun-bleached decks; 239ft long; 57ft wide. Blue and white liveried hull. Rakish black, red and white funnels. Since 1979 the world’s last seagoing paddle steamer. It was love at first sight.
Our destination, three and a half hours away, was the end of Southend pier. We were on a traditional Londoners’ beano to the seaside — a piss-up, in other words. Even the mighty old HMS Belfast tethered to the opposite bank seemed to be looking on with nostalgia and affection at the smart little visitor with the gaily painted funnels. By the time the bobbing tug had manoeuvred Waverley’s stern away from the pier, and the two halves of London bridge were upstanding in a welcoming salute, everybody on deck was on their second pint and commenting favourably on the very reasonable bar prices. Nine o’clock in the morning and we were on a Southend-bound paddle steamer with drinks in our hands and the sun in our eyes. It felt almost holy. I found myself grinning inanely at complete strangers, who grinned back. With surprising smoothness, the Waverley gathered speed to her maximum 18 knots. Waving tourists lined the walls and ramparts of the Tower and London Bridge and we all waved deliriously back.
As the opulent riverside flats and familiar landmarks — the Dome, Canary Wharf, Greenwich Naval College, the Thames Barrier — slid by, I went below to explore. Housed between the paddles was the gleaming 2,100 horsepower, steel-and brass, three-crank engine, exposed in full view between two walkways. The rails were lined with the folded arms and chins of steam enthusiasts staring dreamily at the cranks smoothly rising and falling 57 times a minute. To the gentle hiss and throb of the Waverley’s pulsating heart, I went forward to the largest, most convivial bar to buy another round of drinks.
In this bar, the waterline was disconcertingly at eye level, visible through a row of portholes. The queue for the bar was four deep. It was united in laughter at a huge and sexy woman who was leaning far back and waggling her shoulders, breasts and hips at the handsome barman. Everyone whose eye I caught smiled with sheer spontaneous pleasure at our shared secret. In the gents’ lavatory, a man with unnaturally bright eyes and his shirt off already, said he had come on a Waverley trip to Southend with a mate four years ago, and they’d come every year since, and now this year there were 101 of them.
Back on deck a woman was quietly knitting a hat in the red, white and black colours of the Waverley’s funnels. Luxury apartments gave way to salt marshes. Beyond the spectacular Queen Elizabeth II bridge, the Thames widened considerably. To the south of us we passed a section of salt marsh that is one of the four proposed sites for a new London airport. A man wearing a hat knitted in the Waverley funnel colours kindly pointed this out to me. He was strenuously against the idea, he said, on account of the threat to local wildlife. ‘Look at it,’ he said, gesturing with his hand at the most ideal spot for an airport I’ve ever seen. ‘Nobody in their right minds could fail to see that it would be a crime to build on that.’ I rather think this foolish, opinionated, but otherwise friendly man was about the only person aboard who hadn’t yet had a decent drink.
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