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Second-chance dad: 'Why I built a boat for my daughter'

Messing about on the river: Gornall and his daughter Phoebe have enjoyed going out in the boat he built - Tony Buckingham
Messing about on the river: Gornall and his daughter Phoebe have enjoyed going out in the boat he built - Tony Buckingham

Pin Mill, on the south bank of the river ­Orwell in Suffolk, was once a busy centre for repairing Thames barges, and is now a sleepy hamlet with rusting and rambling houseboats and dinghies sunk into the tidal riverbed.

The setting inspired Arthur Ransome’s seventh children’s novel, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, and it was in the pink house as you drop down to the riverfront that the fictional Walker children stayed.

Both the book and place are magical to Jonathan Gornall, who as an 11-year-old boy was himself shipped out of run-down Peckham to Woolverstone Hall School, a secondary grammar boarding school mostly catering to poor London boys.

From those early experiences of sailing a boat, to the discovery of Ransome’s books in the school library, Gornall’s love of the sea took hold and became the anchoring point in his life.

The black and white sign of Harry King’s boatyard marks the spot where Ransome had his own boats built. Passed down through generations and still thriving, this is where, under a tarpaulin, dwarfed by the yachts around it, Gornall’s own clinker dinghy sits.

boat building - Credit: Tony Buckingham
Jonathan Gornall built his own boat Credit: Tony Buckingham

It’s a modest vessel but emblematic of huge ambition. Sawed and shaped over the course of a year by his own hands, it is a boat that Gornall hopes will pass on his love of the sea to his four-year-old daughter, Phoebe. “Very few of us look out to sea, or the­ possibility of going out into it.

For me, it’s an entirely other dimension that most of us don’t get to explore,” says Gornall, who through a long career as a journalist has twice attempted to sail the Atlantic. On the first occasion, he almost lost his mind; on the second, his life.

Gornall had thought he would spend his old age sailing around Britain on a yacht, “becoming an increasingly ancient mariner” but then his own story took an unexpected twist. A late-flowering relationship with an old friend saw his own sailing ambitions evaporate, and at the age of 58 he became a dad again.

“One day, we just mutually decided to have a child. And then, suddenly, there we were driving Phoebe back from the hospital,” says the only slightly sea-grizzled 62-year-old.

Love radiates from every word he says about the bold and bright daughter for whom he has built the boat. In part because it was a second chance at fatherhood. He had son Adam in his late 20s, but they grew up distantly, now a source of reflection.

“Getting married and having Phoebe has completely changed me. I lived most of my life responsible only for myself; not really thinking about other people very much. I can get very upset about this or that but, ultimately, it’s sentimentality. Now I think I’ve finally grown up, which is a bit late really,” he admits.

Someone with no real skill can take on something that can appear to be ­beyond him and succeed

Gornall speaks of a life moving from one present to the next, and how ultimately what is left is regret at not being around for Adam as much as he could have been.

“He was such a lovely little boy, but when my then wife went to live abroad I saw it almost as a release from responsibilities,” he admits.

Such late self-knowledge comes with a bitter-sweetness. “Let’s face it, at my age how long am I going to be around? I know 62 isn’t terribly advanced but I had a heart bypass a few years ago. Although it’s fine – I run, I swim and all those things – it’s in the back of my mind. I’ve deliberately not looked up longevity after heart bypass operation because, why know?”

Building the boat, then, was a way to spend time with Phoebe and to give her the childhood he had loved, and also a symbolic stand-in for himself in case of the worst. It has also been a life lesson. He talks of the boat giving her a gift of the sea.

“To look out to the horizon so she can think beyond her current situation and what appear to be the limitations of her life. And to recreate something else for herself,” he says, ­before quelling himself: “That might be a bit of a grand design for a little boat, but you never know.”

If it does all seem incurably romantic, then consider that before this Gornall had zero carpentry experience and had prided himself in being impractical. Two days before he started the project, his wife, Kate, asked him to put up some shelves. “I completely screwed it up,” he says.

Jonathan Gornall - Credit: Tony Buckingham
Jonathan Gornall tells Boudicca Fox-Leonard why he was inspired to built his own boat Credit: Tony Buckingham

It certainly puts the neat, baby blue clinker into perspective (The colour was a compromise, Phoebe wanted hot pink). Made of larch and oak, each plank had to be steamed and then scarfed together, held by copper rivets. It was skin-grazing, back-breaking work: Gornall has no idea how many hours he put into it, in and around writing assignments. “I really dread to think.” But at the end of it all, in April this year, it was ready to be tested. “The first time out I was expecting to go down, but it sailed so perfectly with just a single sail. It just shoots off; it’s been impressive in quite a low wind.”

If the as-yet unnamed dinghy lacks symmetry and has the odd wavy line, then that is precisely the point; that someone with no real skill can take on something that can appear to be ­beyond him and succeed.

“With me, it’s always been about having a go. I failed twice to sail the Atlantic for two different reasons but it was always about trying to do it. Phoebe is not going to grow up and say, my daddy’s a boat builder. She’s going to say, he wasn’t a boat builder but he built a boat; if he can do that, maybe I can do something similar.”

Aptly, Gornall is currently borrowing a rig, until he finds the time and ­energy to build his own. But he and Phoebe have already been out half a dozen times. And arriving from a ­morning at nursery, she assuredly climbs into the dinghy to have her ­photograph taken.

I want her to look out to the horizon and think beyond what appear to be the limitations of her life

As well as the boat, Gornall has crafted an accompanying memoir of his own childhood and the project, How to Build a Boat, which as well as passing on his family history, he sees as a celebration of fathers and daughters; something he considers “a bit of a ­neglected field”.

“Most guys I know get on a train at 6am in the morning to London and they don’t see their kids all week,” he says. Not so for Phoebe, for whom it will be a Swallows and Amazons childhood with camping trips on the Shotley peninsula. “We’ll sail down and pitch up on a beach somewhere and spend the night.”

Phoebe plays in “the magic stream” that runs into the river, and Gornall pauses to recall a photo taken at Pin Mill in the late 1800s: “Two boys playing in the water, splashing about with a boat, while a girl the same age, in a starched dress and smart shoes stands looking at the edge of the water.”

He adds: “I hope Phoebe’s been born at absolutely the best time to be a woman.”

How To Build A Boat by Jonathan Gornall is published by Simon & Schuster (£16.99). To order your copy for £14.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk