by Peter Helton
Vince knitted his brow and looked unconvinced. ‘But it’s your boat?’
‘Borrowed it off a friend.’
‘He must be a good friend. And how are you planning to finance a life on the cut, then, if you don’t mind me asking?’
Vince appeared to be a better detective than I was, since he would soon know more about me (or the lies I was telling him) than I did about him. I was glad I could point to the pile of painting gear piled up in the front of the boat. ‘I’m a painter. Thought I might paint views of canal life.’
‘Nice work if you can get it. So where are you heading?’
I really should have thought of some sort of story. ‘Erm … I … erm, thought I’d let the canal take me wherever, since I have no idea what’s out there. How about you?’
Vince stroked his beard. ‘Slowly drifting up north. I’m not in a particular hurry either. This smells good,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘What are you making?’
‘Spaghetti carbonara; I thought it would be an appropriate dish to start with.’
‘What, you’re making it from scratch?’ He abandoned his cigarette and came over to watch. ‘It’s all tins and packaged stuff with me; I never learnt to cook properly. Used to have a wife for that kind of thing,’ he added more quietly. ‘But I can afford to eat out quite a bit. Lots of good pub food along the canals,’ he added in an upbeat tone.
‘You’re not poor, then?’
‘Evil landlord,’ he said without taking his eyes off the cooker. ‘I’m renting out my house in Bath to tourists in the summer, students for the rest of the year. I won’t go hungry in my old age. I’m hungry now, though. What do you mean, this dish is “appropriate”?’
‘Spaghetti carbonara is named after the carbonari – coal sellers. Imagine you’re a boatman a hundred years ago – no fridges back then. But what goes into a carbonara is wine, garlic, smoked bacon, eggs and parmesan, all of which keep for a long time without a fridge, and making carbonara takes about as long as it takes to boil pasta.’
‘Really? Then I want to learn it.’ Vince watched my every move as I whisked eggs in a bowl and grated parmesan into it. ‘You should be a TV chef with your own show. The Narrowboat Kitchen – I can see it now.’
While the pasta cooked, I fried the chopped bacon with a couple of cloves of unpeeled garlic, and doused it with a shot of white wine. I poured the drained spaghetti into the egg mix and stirred like mad, then tipped it into the frying pan with the bacon and gave it a final stir. ‘There, done – twelve and a half minutes.’
Vince was wide-eyed. ‘OK, I’m impressed now.’ We wolfed down mountains of spaghetti as though we had been hauling coal up the canal since dawn. ‘You could always open a caff on your boat – this is good grub. I mean you could charge a fiver for this no problem and it took you twelve and a half minutes to do. I’d definitely pay a fiver for it.’
‘Any time.’
‘Rename the boat Dreamkitchen. I can see it now.’
We cast off at the same time and I followed Morning Mist and the evil but appreciative landlord Vince up the canal. Another aqueduct at Avoncliff was also teeming with visitors. There was a weir and the ruins of a mill below. I had no idea what the mill used to do, but it seemed insane to have all that water power go to waste instead of making free electricity with it. My own power situation looked rosy; the engine had charged all my batteries, and even if I should decide to park up for a few days, my solar panels would be more than enough to keep my pumps, fridge, hairdryer and radio going. Both my gas bottles were full, so were diesel and water tanks, and the sewage tank was still gloriously empty. There was enough food on board for many a carbonara and there seemed to be no shortage of pubs along this canal. I had a sudden feeling of having run away from school or even of having been set free. No man is an island, John Donne thought (though he had a crater named after him), but I thought perhaps a man could be happy on a floating island, catching dreams in a saucepan. Until, that is, he sees a lock gate looming ahead.
I had worried about doing locks by myself, although thanks to Jake I knew how to do it now, but with Vince going in the same direction we could share the lock and the work. On a sunny day the lock at Bradford-on-Avon attracts a lot of people, or gongoozlers, as Vince taught me to call people who watch narrowboats going in and out of locks, under bridges and through aqueducts. We had to wait for someone coming out before squeezing both our boats in side by side. Vince did all the paddle winding while I stayed on the boat and a couple of helpful onlookers opened the top gates for us when the lock was full. Every other person was recording this momentous event on their mobiles, which brought home to me the fact that you could run (well, sort of) on the canals but couldn’t hide since you remained in plain view, at least while the sun was shining. Wind and rain would, of course, swiftly restore a degree of anonymity. Soon after having come through the lock, we passed Free Spirit, the friendly cruiser. It was moored along the towpath on the left but nobody could be seen on deck.
Although I was glad to be puttering along with a quasi-companion for a while, it became immediately apparent that not having told Vince about why I was here had one major drawback. Soon after the Bradford lock, we passed a boatyard, Sally Narrowboats, without stopping. Verity on Time Out could be in there, using the services, taking on fuel or pumping out her sewage tank. Telling myself that this was far too close to Bath for her to still be lingering there, I shrugged it off and followed Vince. We cruised through the suburbs of Bradford which could be glimpsed here and there, and then out into countryside where we managed to find a temporary mooring late in the afternoon. We were now back in the country, and the only sounds to be heard when our engines finally fell silent were the faint gurgle of the canal, the splashing of a drake on the opposite shore and the lowing of cattle that stood half hidden from view behind a belt of trees.
‘Better get an early night tonight, Chris,’ Vince told me. ‘Quite a few locks to get through tomorrow; we can do them together – saves a lot of work and water.’ With that he disappeared inside Morning Mist to ‘open a can of something’. Whether it was beer or ravioli he had in mind he did not say.
I had always wondered why drinks were measured in alcohol by volume. Now I knew. Being quite partial to a can of something or other myself, I had considered stocking the boat with beer for the journey, but a swift calculation had revealed that I would have to jettison the two-seater sofa in order to accommodate a meaningful amount of it, so I had given my credit card a workout and bought a case of drinkable red wine and a bottle of supermarket Scotch which took up a lot less space while promising the same degree of inebriation. I opened a bottle of red and made a start on it while I cooked myself a simple supper. Vince no doubt would have called it a culinary marvel but I called it lamb in a mushroom sauce with leeky mash and braised red cabbage (from a jar, Polish, very good).
Darkness was gathering outside by the time I had recovered sufficiently from my ill-conceived waste-not-want-not approach to eating mashed potato that I could move again without groaning and thought I’d go and check on the stars. We had made fast on the towpath side of the canal. No doubt there were boats somewhere in the gloom to either side of us but they had sunk into darkness. When I say ‘check on the stars’, it was a mere figure of speech; I was shamefully ignorant about astronomy and therefore childishly delighted by what I saw above me, without the interference of frankly useless knowledge about what they were called or what superstitious people thousands of years ago thought they represented. God’s warm bits, someone once called them, and I preferred to think of them as that. Out here, without a single lamp post to bleach out the night sky, the display was suitably awe-inspiring. It was so dark that without a torch you could easily come to grief or at least get a wet surprise. Just in case, I had left one light on inside the boat. Morning Mist, however, lay completely dark and no sounds emerged from the boat when I stood quietly beside it for a moment. Perhaps Vince had taken his own advice about an early night. There was an odd smell in
the air, as if from a crowded chicken shed. One minute I could smell it, the next minute the night breeze had carried it off into the distance. Without any plan other than to walk on solid ground for a bit, I set off down the towpath towards the very faint glow that was suburban Bradford. Not even five minutes into my solitary stroll, my torch, which had been living in the boot of my car for the past year or two, dimmed. Telling myself that the starlight reflected on the water would be guide enough, I carried on for a while until I saw or thought I saw two swaying lights on the path, still a hundred yards or so ahead of me. I lifted my dim torch towards them and, as though in answer, the lights disappeared. Perhaps there was another boat moored there and the crew had just returned and turned in. A few moments later my torch dimmed dramatically. I put Not Leaving Without Spare Batteries on my not-to-do-on-a-narrowboat list and turned back just as my torch beam became completely useless. Small noises behind me more than once made me turn, but I could see nothing that I could marry to the tiny clicking noises that I thought I could hear from time to time. I was glad I had left a light on inside the boat because it told me how much further I had to grope. When I reached the mooring site, there was still no sign of life on Vince’s boat unless you counted the faint smell of roosting chickens. I stood very close beside Morning Mist and thought I could hear a gentle snoring coming from a porthole near the rear.
On board Dreamcatcher, I locked the stern door behind me, drew all the curtains, turned on the gas and got into the shower. If your idea of a shower is to stand for a long time under a pleasantly hot waterfall for as long as you like, then houseboats are not for you. Nothing short of shooting holes into it will empty your water tank faster than a couple of long relaxing showers every day. The accepted boat routine is: get wet, turn off water, shiver while you use shampoo and soap, then turn water back on for as long as it takes to wash it off. I had left the porthole open for ventilation, and while I soaped myself in dripping unshowering quietude, I thought I could hear again those clicking sounds I had heard in the darkness earlier, only closer now. There were so many new sounds around me that no doubt would become familiar after a while that I paid no attention. The water pump whirred into action as I opened the tap and the shower drowned out all extraneous noises as I finished my ablutions.
Pleasantly tired, I fell into bed in my cabin and dozed off with the window beside me ajar to let in the beautifully fragrant night air. I had no idea what time it was when I woke with a start to complete darkness. It seemed to me that what had woken me was a metallic bang or clank, but whether it had been part of a dream or real I couldn’t tell. In my mind’s eye I saw a colander slide off the pile of washing-up and clatter into the sink. I sank back on to the pillow with a sigh.
‘You stupid moron,’ a voice said in an angry whisper a few inches away.
My eyes snapped open. Stupid Moron whispered back a lengthy reply of which I could only make out the last three words: ‘… sick of it.’ On the towpath right outside my window, a whispered discussion was going on between Stupid Moron and his accuser. I could make out little from the suppressed conversation apart from some emphatic swear words, followed by a clanging sound as something metallic hit the surface of the towpath.
‘How many times are you going to drop that thing? Why not kick his bloody boat while you’re at it, shit-for-brains?’
‘Stop calling me that.’
‘Shit-for-brains.’ The faint crunch of four stealthy feet receded quickly down the towpath, soon followed by the unmistakable clatter of bicycles being mounted and ridden off. I sat up to try to catch a glimpse but all I saw were two receding halos of light. Then they were gone and complete darkness had been restored.
I lay back in the dark and thought about it a while. The towpath was being used by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons, but mainly during the day as there was no lighting at all. Stupid Moron and his friend had left their bicycles a fair way further down the path and then stood making odd noises next to my boat. Which meant they were not there by accident, though the Moron seemed to be accident prone. ‘Why don’t you kick his boat?’ the Moron’s mate had suggested sarcastically, not ‘the boat’ or ‘their boat’. In other words, the two knew Dreamcatcher was occupied by a man. Did they also know who that man was? If they were just a couple of drug addicts looking for boats to break into, then they would break into a boat obviously not inhabited, which led me to believe that the Moron Twins were next to my boat for a reason. It was a long time before I fell asleep, and if I caught any dreams that night, I did not remember them when I woke to someone knocking loudly on my roof.
TEN
‘Breakfast!’
It was Vince, repaying me for supper by bringing over a fry-up of sorts and a mug of tea for me. He watched me eat it while politely blowing smoke from a fat roll-up out of the window. ‘We need an early start, so I took the liberty of making you breakfast. You didn’t seem like a cornflakes man, so I got the frying pan out. I’m afraid everything I eat is out of tins,’ he said in a take-it-or-leave-it tone. The fry-up consisted of warmed-up tinned tomatoes, fried slices of Spam, tinned sliced mushrooms oozing beige water and scrambled egg obviously made from powdered egg which, judging by the taste of it, had come over in the 1940s as part of the Lend-Lease Act.
‘Where on earth did you get the powdered egg?’ I asked.
‘You can still find it if you know where to look.’
‘My interest is purely historical.’
‘I bought loads of it. Lasts for ages.’
‘Obviously.’ Even the milk in the tea was powdered. Despite the bizarre nature of the meal, I made myself eat every bit of Vince’s kind offering and by the end of the ordeal I felt as though I had gained a valuable insight into the deprivations of the 1940s Home Front.
I followed Vince up the early-morning canal in beautiful light and with only the very occasional civilian on the towpath. There was no sign of the Moron Twins and their bicycles. All Vince had told me about what lay ahead was that today we would go up Caen Hill. Going up a hill in a sixty-foot boat is hard work. ‘How are we going uphill?’ I had asked. Vince had described it as ‘a few locks, we’ll do ’em together, less work’. There was little traffic this early, though one narrowboat followed us at a distance. There were several locks to go through before we reached Caen Hill. Each time we passed through one together, the following boat began to catch up with us but did not seem in a hurry. It was a sixty-five foot cruiser stern, painted all over in a shade of blue so dark I had at first thought it was completely black; ghostly pale coach lines delineated the sides. It was skippered by a man so short he could barely peer over the top of the roof. He wore a black T-shirt and black baseball cap, and just as he came close enough for me to read that the name of the boat was Moonglow, he put on a pair of sunglasses. He kept his boat at a respectful distance while we negotiated the lock. There were several swing bridges to go through too, which we left open for the following Moonglow. Even here the dark boat took its time going through, keeping its distance and failing to close the bridges after them, even though there was no other boat in sight. We passed a pub on our right, the Barge Inn, which looked deserted at this hour apart from one shirtsleeved man sitting at a table outside, hunched over a mug of something. He acknowledged my wave with the smallest head movement. Eventually, I could see in the distance a series of locks. Since there was no traffic coming the other way, I drew level with Morning Mist. ‘This is it, then, is it?’ I asked. It looked like a lot of work.
‘Oh, no, this is Foxhangers – just seven locks. Caen Hill is further upstream. You’ll recognize it when you see it.’
‘Just seven locks?’ I complained. ‘How many at Caen Hill?’
‘Erm, hang on …’ Vince did his arithmetic. ‘The Caen Hill flight itself is sixteen locks. With these and the Devizes ones, it’s twenty-nine locks,’ he announced brightly.
‘It’s going to take forever.’
‘Yes, I wouldn’t make any other plans for today.’
As we made our way through the seven locks at what Vince told me was called Foxhangers, half of me still wanted to believe that he was pulling my leg, but after only the briefest journey we arrived at the foot of the scariest thing I had seen on the canal so far: a steep hill and locks as far as the eye could see, reaching up to the blue sky, with a broad path running beside it on the right. No one had told me that things like this existed; I had simply assumed that when the engineers who built the canals came to a hill they would go round it or tunnel through it, like the railways. Had I arrived here by myself without warning, I would probably have scuttled the boat and run away.
It was just beginning to get busy, both with boats and walkers and onlookers. The onlookers had their uses. Some enjoyed opening and closing the lock gates, and even children joined in. The locks had side ponds – if they hadn’t, only one boat at a time would be able to go up and down – and such vast amounts of water were moved down the hill that there was a pumping station at the bottom sending it all up again. We took turns winding the paddles. By the time we were halfway up the hill, negotiating locks was threatening to become a way of life. It felt to me as though this was what I had always done and would do for the rest of my natural. Looking down the flight, as I had now learnt to call it, I could see Moonglow below us, two locks behind, now sharing with another boat. I pointed out our distant followers to Vince.
‘Looks like a coffin to me,’ was his verdict on Moonglow’s paint scheme. ‘Perhaps it’s an undertaker’s. A floating crematorium,’ he said in a ghoulish voice. ‘Get your ashes scattered in Lock Thirteen.’
I did a double take at the mention of Lock 13, but Vince looked in jocular mood and apparently had picked Lock 13, where the previous owner of my boat had died, at random.
Further down, five locks behind, I also spotted Free Spirit, the fibreglass cabin cruiser. Vince had nothing but scorn for anything afloat that wasn’t a narrowboat. ‘See? The thing is so wide the idiots can’t pair up – twice the work. And yet there’s far less space on their tub than even on a small narrowboat. Huge engine and twin screws at the back, but they can’t go any faster than the rest of us. Could, but not allowed. What are they doing on the Kennet and Avon?’
