The Thames River Police are a helpful lot, so I left the kayak on their Hammersmith pier and stayed overnight in a friend’s nearby flat. The next morning I returned and made good use of the fest ebbing tide to get down to Wesminster where, again, the river police let me use their pier. Now I had to get serious; I had no equipment or food supplies.

I moved around through swirling rain collecting my stores. At Harrods I found a fine Li-Lo inflatable mattress. The Boy Scots Shop provided a Silva compass, a cooking pot and stove, a very cheap cotton tent and a spoon. At Woolworth’s, I purchased a plastic Pac-a-Mac rain jacket and in the King’s Road, I bought an army blanket and all my food – dry biscuits, powdered soups, tins of spaghetti, sardines and condensed milk, and a good supply of tea and sugar. By now I was down to ten pounds cash to see me through to my second semester at the Naval College, starting in seven weeks. There I could look forward to good meals again at Her Majesty’s expense. But, for now, I must enjoy my modest victuals and make them last.

The next day, it rained intermittently while the wind tore through the streets of London and whipped the surface of the Thames into whitecaps. There were forecasts of gales at sea. In the afternoon the wind dropped and I took off from Westminster Pier.

Nicholas was there to see off. He had made a deal with a London newspaper, The Daily Express. “They’ve agreed,” he said, “that if you reach Paris entirely on your own steam, starting from London, they’ll pay you 50 pounds for your story on arrival.”

I was astonished – and grateful, for as Nicholas had said, “You’ve got no money, next to no clothes, and how in heaven’s name do you imagine you’re going to survive in Paris when you get there? And how are you going to get back, that’s what I would like to know?”

He was right, of course, and we arranged that he would send some clothes for me to pick up at American Express in Paris. And we agreed that I would phone him when I got there. A good friend.

"...for as Nicholas had said, "You’ve got no money, next to no clothes, and how in heaven’s name do you imagine you’re going to survive in Paris when you get there?"

So my journey began. As I passed the Houses of Parliament, my father appeared on the river bank with his camera. He got a good shot of me leaving London, thanks to Nicholas, who alerted him.

We passed under the Tower Bridge in great style. Traffic was stopped and the twin spans were raised to the vertical. It wasn’t done for me and my kayak, but for an empty cargo vessel displacing some two thousand tons, which towered above me, riding high out of the water with its Plimsole line in full view. As for us, we were displacing about 250 pounds, of which I weighed 150.

We moved with the tide and half of London’s flotsam down to Greenwich. From the river I had a splendid view of the two small domes built by Wren in the exact style of his masterpiece, Saint Paul’s Cathedral. He’d tried to build the big one down here at Greenwich, but wasn’t allowed to because it would have perturbed existing architecture: Elizabeth The First’s hunting lodge and Henry the Eighth’s hospital for sailors were designed to be viewed from the River Thames in perfect symmetry, even though the hunting lodge is set back a full half mile from the hospital, which fronts the river. I knew all this because the hospital is now used by the Royal Navy, and was my current home.

The river was getting much wider and behind its banks there were open marshes instead of factories.