by Peter Helton
‘It’s like a loft conversion in here,’ I said.
‘It’s called a cratch. It’s where fodder for the horse that pulled the boat was kept. Now with most boats this bit is just covered with a tarp you can roll up but this one has wooden sides.’ He undid a couple of bolts on the port side and leant against the wooden slope. The entire side swung up on a hinge. ‘You can prop it open and it’s like a covered verandah. Neil had it built. Other side opens too. He used to sit and watch birds and things.’ He closed and bolted the cratch side and turned to a low double door below the triangular front window. ‘Under here is the water tank, and this is where your gas bottles are kept.’ He unlocked the gas locker and showed me where the bottles lived and how to switch over from one to the other. ‘When the gas runs out, which will happen in the middle of your shower, you’ll have to switch bottles. And remember to buy a new one at the next opportunity.’
Back inside, I idly opened cupboards and pulled out the large drawer under the bed. ‘What was your friend’s name again?’
‘Neil. Neil Jenkins.’
‘What happened to all his stuff?’
‘I think the police got rid of it, but everything that belonged to the boat, so to speak, stayed here. All the kitchen gear and all the things needed to run it.’ In the kitchen he opened a cupboard and was rewarded with an avalanche of cheap pots and pans that landed at his feet. He dumped the lot in the sink. Another cubbyhole revealed crockery, and there was a kitchen drawer holding a sad assortment of mismatched cutlery that looked as if it, too, had been bought cheaply forty years ago. From another drawer he produced a hand crank. ‘You’ll need this,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘Make sure you don’t drop it in the water.’
‘Don’t tell me I have to start the engine with a hand crank.’
‘It’s a windlass, you nit, for raising and lowering the paddles.’
‘It has paddles?’
‘In the locks! To let water in and out! Admit it: you’ve never been on a bloody narrowboat.’
‘True.’
‘Any boat?’
‘Pedalo, Lake Windermere, 1972.’
‘Christ.’
When Jake lifted the engine cover in the back, he squinted down at it and started humming – Jake loved ancient engines – but my own heart sank. Looking over his shoulder, the only thing I recognized was a bank of large black batteries, four in all. The rest could have been an engine or an industrial mincer or a sewage pump for all I knew. Bits of it were furred and corroded metal; other bits were painted in a faintly green colour that used to be fashionable with Soviet car makers back in the 1950s. ‘That,’ I said, disheartened by the sight, ‘is the boat’s engine?’
‘It is. It’s a diesel engine, made by Lister.’
‘I thought they made mouthwash.’
‘That’s Listerine. Stop mucking about and pay attention. It’s a Lister SR2 – remember that, in case you need a part for it or whatever, though they are very reliable. It propels the boat via that shaft down there.’
‘How come this engine is so tiny?’
‘Because boats float. They used to tow these with one horse, remember? Hence towpath. And that was when they were fully laden with coal or whatever. Not only does this little engine power the propeller, it also charges these four batteries. Now, this one’ – he tapped the first – ‘is your starter battery. It’s only to start the engine; it doesn’t do anything else. The other three are what’s called “leisure batteries”. They run everything on board – lights, fridge, water pump, radio, TV, what-have-you. It’s all twelve volts.’ He straightened up. ‘Now for the moment of truth. I had Gary charge the starter battery.’ He produced the boat’s keys, tied to a lump of wood that had the boat’s name burnt into it.
‘So they floats if they falls overboard?’ I asked.
‘Arrr.’ Pirate talk had started. He turned the key on the control panel, lights came on, and after a few seconds he turned it further to start the engine. It whirred, coughed, banged and belched black smoke which drifted on the water, then started puttering away like a small tractor. ‘Well, shiver me timbers, she’s alive. We’ll let her run, charge the batteries.’ There now followed a lengthy induction into the intricacies of boat life. I listened impatiently while imagining Verity disappearing into the three thousand miles of inland waterways.
I soon learnt that none of the things you take for granted in a house happen on a boat unless you make it happen. The gas for the water heater and cooker came on board in bottles, but if I wanted electricity, I first had to make it by running the engine. There was a solar panel on the roof which worked well in the summer, not so well in winter, but it had been covered by tarpaulin so the leisure batteries were pretty empty. Water had to be taken on at watering points and was moved around the boat by an electric pump. No electricity, no running water.
‘What about the toilet? I suppose that goes straight in the canal?’ I asked, remembering the taste of canal water.
‘Ooooh, no. Dishwater and the water from the shower goes in the canal, but sewage goes into a tank. When it’s full, you’ll have to pump it out. It’s ever such fun,’ he promised. He showed me the keys I would need to access water and sewage disposal, and then told me about locks. I must have looked doubtful because he fished out a biro and drew me a diagram on the back of an envelope. I asked a few questions which revealed my lack of understanding. ‘All right, all right, I’ll get you as far as the Kennet and Avon back in Bath; by then you should have got the hang of it. I hope you’ve got your credit card polished – the tank’s nearly empty. You can refuel at Saltford Marina.’
Jake arranged for Gary to drive his Jaguar to Bath, then, after having checked the boat over, allowed me at the controls. There seemed to be only the one lever. ‘How many gears has it got?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be daft. When the lever is upright, like now, it’s in neutral. You push the lever forward and the boat goes forward. Push it back and it goes backwards.’
‘Where’s the brake?’
‘Give me strength! Boats don’t have brakes! You must think ahead. You slow down in good time, and if you need to stop in a hurry, you go into reverse. In short bursts or you end up going backwards. And remember you can’t steer when you’re going backwards.’
‘You can’t? That’ll make reverse parking tricky.’
Jake scrunched up the envelope and lobbed it over his shoulder. ‘I can see this will take longer than I expected.’
I tried to ask an intelligent question that Jake, with his love of engines, would enjoy answering. ‘How many horsepower has it got?’
‘About fifteen at full revs.’
‘Really? Wow. What’s her top speed?’
‘About seven miles per hour. Only the speed limit is four.’
‘Four?’
‘Four. But you’re supposed to slow down when you pass moored boats or your wake will make them rock about. And you have to slow down before you get to the boats or your wake will still hit them.’
I summarized. ‘OK, let me get this straight: I’ll be going at four miles per hour?’
‘Yes.’
‘Slightly less than walking speed?’
‘Indeed.’
‘But I will have to slow down whenever I see a moored boat?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Then why don’t I walk?’
‘You want to walk instead?’ Jake asked dangerously.
I pretended to think about it. ‘Mmm … don’t think so.’
‘Then go and cast off! And don’t let the lines trail in the water!’ As soon as I had climbed back on deck, Jake pushed the stern away from the bank, then steered us into the middle of the Feeder and aimed the bow at the lock.
My introduction to the demands of boating was deceptively gentle. The lock-keeper living at the lock-keeper’s cottage (where else?) had left the lock gates open. The Avon is tidal but the tide was in our favour, which meant that we could sail straight through. Jake moved the boat gently thr
ough the open lock, the sound of the boat’s puttering engine reverberating from the brickwork. There was no sign of the lock-keeper. ‘And you won’t see many of those on your journey,’ Jake warned. ‘You’ll be doing the locks yourself, and I don’t mind telling you, it can be quite a palaver if you’re on your own.’
‘Not to mention dangerous. It killed your friend Neil.’ Jake grunted dubiously and kept staring ahead. ‘What?’
For a while he did not answer as we encountered a weir, which he gave a respectful berth. We were now on the River Avon, which was far wider here than I had expected. I should have felt elated to be on the move, but Jake’s mood had darkened and it was rubbing off on me. ‘Here, you take the tiller. Do everything slowly. Yeah, precisely not like that – really slowly.’ I had tried to avoid pointing the bow at a group of ducks and made the boat jink dramatically to the left. I mean, of course, to port. ‘Ducks will get out of your way, you nit; you can’t run them over. Nice and easy on the steering. It’s not like a car where the front changes direction and the arse follows. With a boat, you move the rear and the thing sort of pivots. It’s like pushing a pencil around on a table.’
‘Aren’t we supposed to be on the left anyway?’
‘What? No, on waterways you sail more or less in the centre but pass other boats on the right side.’
‘Now he tells me.’ Being in control of a sixty-foot boat – that’s eighteen metres if you’re so inclined – and virtually all of it in front of you was as exciting as it was scary.
‘You’re doing fine,’ Jake grumbled. ‘It bugged me, Neil dying like that. I mean it worried me. He’d been on the water for nine years, I think. Continuously cruising around. Can you imagine how many locks he must have gone through? Tens of thousands of them. What he didn’t know about boating wasn’t worth knowing and yet he drowned in a lock.’
‘Accidents can happen to anyone,’ I said feebly.
‘Yeah, but most of them happen to people like you. Neil didn’t seem the type. He showed us how to do locks – we did a lot of them together, sometimes side by side if there was room – and one thing he always insisted on was wearing life jackets when doing locks. I thought it made us look like complete amateurs, but he insisted. Not while cruising around but before doing a lock he’d put on his life jacket because if you fall into a lock, with the water surging around you and hardly any space between the boat and the walls, even a good swimmer can drown. And, get this: he said, “What if you fall, knock yourself silly and go in the water? You’ll drown before you come to.” And that is precisely how he died.’
‘Wasn’t he wearing his life jacket?’
‘No. It was found lying in the boat. On the floor.’ In the silence that followed, the engine puttered, ducks paddled near the riverbank. Standing on the deck of the dead man’s boat, a feeling of foreboding came over me. At the time I thought it was no more than apprehension about my ignorance concerning canal boating, but I should have listened to it. Looking back on it, perhaps I should have jumped and swum for it.
‘Did you tell anyone about this? That he usually wore the jacket?’
‘Oh, aye, I gave evidence at the inquest, but the consensus was that Neil was not himself, that he had become mentally unstable or depressed and had begun to neglect things.’
‘But?’
‘But it still bugs me. Neil was such a happy soul; he really gave the impression that by moving on to the water he had realized his dream and he’d never want anything else. His boat was totally organized, super tidy – Zen-like, you might say – neat like a British army kit laid out for inspection. But when I saw the boat after his death, it looked like a tip.’
‘Had the police searched the boat to find any clues? Perhaps that was where the mess came from.’
‘Possible, though they don’t usually break crockery and just leave everything lying around. If Neil was having some sort of nervous breakdown, then I can’t think what had driven him to it.’
‘People who live alone can get peculiar. Loneliness can do that.’
‘Then make sure you hold on to Annis; you can’t afford to get any more peculiar than you are. But Neil didn’t feel lonely on the canals. He was a chatty guy, he knew plenty of people on the water. When we cruised with him, he often ran into other boaters he knew, exchanged news, and we’d sometimes go to the pub with them. Pubs played quite a big role on our boating holiday – there’s loads of them along the canals.’
‘That’s what I was hoping.’
Once we had steered away from the subject of Neil’s death, Jake began to cheer up again. ‘That’s another thing Sally didn’t like about our boating holiday – too many pubs, not enough museums.’ He breathed in deeply and sighed contentedly. ‘Shame, I could do this all summer – laze about on the canal, cook simple meals or eat at the pub, have a few pints …’
‘Yes, I look forward to some of that. Sure you don’t want to come?’
‘Don’t tempt me.’
After only half an hour or so on the river I was surprised by how soon the steering of the boat began to feel natural. We encountered little traffic at that end of the river, which meant that once I had snapped out of panic mode, I could enjoy the scenery and the extraordinary lushness of the countryside as we drifted through a nature reserve and past Hanham Green to our left. But even at this gentle speed, it did not take long before my heart sank into my boots when the first lock came into view.
‘Hanham Lock is Lock Number One on the Kennet and Avon,’ Jake said. ‘And we’ll teach thee ’ow to use them locks right ’ere, arr.’
We approached the lock, tied up and walked up to it. To say that negotiating locks is a bit of a palaver had been an understatement. Jake was a hard task master. Since I was expected to sail Dreamcatcher alone, he just stood beside me, pointing and telling me in pirate speech to ‘lift them paddles, open this here gate, arr, like that’ and so on until I had the boat in, the lock filled, the upper doors opened and Dreamcatcher out again. It wasn’t that difficult to understand, just quite a lot of work to progress seventy feet upriver. ‘Now if there’s no one wanting to use the lock on this side, then go back and close the gates.’
At the time it was still new and interesting and the sun was shining, so I didn’t worry. Proud to have done it all by myself, albeit to instructions. The nearby weir scared me a bit, especially after Jake’s many predictions of doom should I get too near one, and I marvelled at how people could be so brave to moor so close to it. Or so deaf. There were two riverside pubs that looked tempting, but we had business upriver and puttered on past the Old Lock & Weir and Chequers, which were both doing good lunchtime trade. Tight bends soon tested my navigational, erm, skills. We were going upstream against the current, which meant that to achieve even four miles per hour needed quite a bit of throttle and more careful steering than on the placid waters of a canal. The landscape changed to lush watery meadows on one side and steep wooded slopes on the other. When we got to the next lock at Keynsham, overlooked by another pub and their patrons, Jake made me do everything by myself without comment. A boat had just come out of the lock which meant I could just putter in, make the boat fast, close the gates and raise the paddles with the windlass which, by the way, is a heavy lump of metal – winding paddles up is good exercise. ‘There’s one thing that can scupper your plans,’ Jake warned. ‘Dropping your windlass in the water. Without it, you’re stuffed and going nowhere. If it happens, you’ll have to dive for it. You don’t want to have to dive in the river. Or a lock. Or anywhere. So don’t drop it.’
I gripped it tightly. ‘I’ll try to remember.’
Next we stopped at a water point and filled Dreamcatcher’s water tank. By now there was enough charge in the batteries to run the water pump and therefore use the loo, which went a long way to endear the boat to me.
I approached the next locks with even greater trepidation, my hands aching from gripping the windlass as if my life depended on it, glaring at the cill markings and getting a lot more ex
ercise than I had bargained for on something that sounded as relaxing as ‘river cruise’ or ‘boating’. Under the twin-arched bridge 211 (they all have numbers, helps you work out where you are), then three more locks before finally we approached Saltford Marina. I had hoped Jake would take over, but he just stood with arms folded and grinned sadistically as I crawled into the marina, expecting to crash into every boat I saw. I landed us at visitor moorings with a bump, a scrape and a groan, lots of backward throttle and apologies, but Jake seemed unconcerned.
The place was large, with sixty-odd boats of all types: white fibreglass yachts, narrowboats and widebeams. As I looked about at the rows of narrowboats moored one next to the other like cars in a car park, I realized that what they saw from their windows was not the lush countryside or the river but the windows of the boat next to them. But we would be here for only a fleeting moment, I thought, until we once more roamed free on the river. It was over an hour later that I stood again at the tiller, weak-kneed, wearing my brand-new blue-and-orange lifejacket and still holding the receipt for my refuelling. ‘Two hundred and forty litres!’ I said incredulously, perhaps for the tenth time. ‘You could have warned me.’
‘Now you’ve got a full tank, you won’t have to worry about fuel again for months; you can use as much electricity as you like – just run the engine. Relax, and get us out of here. I’ll have Gary waiting for me with my motor in Bath.’
Seeing the country from the river was so different that I often lost all sense of where I was. Jake was better at it and kept up a running commentary for my benefit. ‘That bridge coming up is where the A4 crosses the river. Next up is Bath Marina in Newbridge and the bridge in question is called New Bridge, would you believe it? Which it was in the eighteenth century. You’d think they’d rename the thing …’
