I Cancelled the Boat Before I Knew Why

It was meant to be the highlight of the holiday: a booked half-day pleasure-boat trip, out to see the seals, the kind of thing you plan the week around. The children had talked of nothing else. We were on the quay, tickets in hand, life jackets being handed out, the boat bobbing prettily at the steps, and I was as excited as they were.

And then I wasn't. Standing on the quay, minutes from boarding, a reluctance came over me that had no source and would not be reasoned with — a heavy, physical unwillingness to put my children on that boat, a dread that thickened the closer we got to the steps. I have racked my memory for a trigger, some subconscious cue — a smell of diesel, a listing hull, a crewman's worried face — and there was nothing. The day was calm, the boat was full of cheerful families, the operator was licensed and reviewed and ordinary. There was no reason. There was only the dread, mounting, until it became unbearable, until the thought of my children on that water was a physical sickness.

I pulled them out of the line. To their absolute fury — and I mean fury, the injustice of a lifetime, tears and stamping and a resentment that lasted the rest of the day — I said we weren't going, made up something about my stomach, and steered two sobbing children away from the seals they'd been promised while a boat full of other families cast off without us.

I felt monstrous. Irrational, cruel, a mother ruining a holiday over a feeling. I bought ice creams by way of apology and endured the sulking and privately questioned my sanity.

The boat took on water about an hour out. A hull problem, the reports said afterwards — nothing dramatic on the surface, a fault that opened up at sea, the boat settling lower, the radioed mayday, the scramble of the lifeboat and a fishing vessel that happened to be near. Everyone was rescued. Nobody drowned; it was, the local paper said, a lucky outcome. Cold, frightened, soaked families lifted off a sinking pleasure boat into other boats, children among them, in open water, in a situation that could very easily have gone the other way.

My children would have been on it. My children, who cannot swim well, who I would have been trying to keep afloat and calm in cold water while a boat went down under us, are instead furious about missing the seals and eating ice cream on a safe stone quay, because a dread I could not name and cannot explain made me haul them out of the boarding line minutes before they became part of a mayday.

They forgave me when the news came through. My eldest, who is old enough now, asked me how I knew. I told her the truth: I didn't know. Something in me did, and it didn't tell me why, it just told me no, and I have never been more grateful that I listened to a feeling I couldn't justify over the reasonable, licensed, ordinary evidence of my own eyes.