The Boat Girls

by Margaret Mayhew

  Pip said kindly, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll find it quite easy after a while. You’ll soon be running across.’

  Names were called out over a loudspeaker from the depot offices. ‘Calling Ron Burbridge . . . please report to the office for orders. Calling Alfred Carter . . . please report for orders. Calling Bill Stokes . . .’ Engines started up and boats began to leave. By mid-afternoon, though, Pip was still waiting for her orders. She was giving them a lesson in knot-tying when the call finally came.

  ‘Calling Miss Rowan, calling Miss Rowan. Please come to the office for orders.’

  Pip rushed off on her bike and Janet started grumbling again.

  ‘I think it’s shocking, don’t you . . . the way they expect us to live in these disgusting conditions? Nobody warned us what it would be like, did they? And that woman seems to think we should just put up with it. She keeps saying we’ll get used to it.’

  Frances said, ‘You can always leave, if you want. Nobody can make you stay.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. But they should have warned us before – it’s not right.’

  Pip came racing back, clutching papers. ‘We’re to leave at once. Limehouse. Steel billets arrived from America. Frances, you help me with the engine. Janet and Prudence, you go ashore and be ready to undo the stern ropes.’

  Cetus’s engine thumped into life and smoke puffed out from the chimney. Pip called to them from the tiller.

  ‘You can untie us now – then you two hop aboard the butty. We’ll tow you on cross straps, close up, so there won’t be any need for you to steer.’

  They moved off, went under a bridge and turned sharp right into another arm of the canal with Pip honking a horn loudly as they went round the corner. Before long it started to rain and Janet went down to shelter in the cabin while Prudence chose to stay at the butty’s stern, getting wet. For one thing, Pip and Frances were out in the rain so she felt she ought to be as well, and for another she was glad to be away from Janet and her never-ending moans. It was fascinating to be journeying along the canal, seeing the backs of buildings instead of the fronts and looking into windows. A girl at an office desk lifted her head to watch them go by; Prudence could see her wistful expression through the sooty glass. That was me at the bank, she thought. I was just like that.

  They carried on slowly but steadily along the canal under more bridges, through Greenford and then Perivale until they reached Alperton at dusk where they stopped for the night. The boats had to be tied together, side by side – Pip called it breasting-up – which meant running about in the rain and grabbing hold of slippery ropes and trying to remember how to tie them properly. To Prudence’s relief Frances and Janet were given the job of walking across the planks to the fore-end.

  When, at last, it was all done, Pip cooked the supper on the butty cabin stove – baked beans, spam and potatoes, with tinned rice pudding heated up for afterwards. They ate round the let-down table and finished with cocoa made with evaporated milk and some digestive biscuits. It was very snug with the doors shut against the rain and the dark, the curtain pulled across the little porthole, the brasses gleaming in the electric light. Prudence thought that the supper had been rather nice; Janet, however, hadn’t thought so at all. The minute they got back to their own cabin on the motor, she started off again.

  ‘I’m still starving. I don’t know how they can expect us to do all this work if they don’t feed us better. I thought we’d get extra rations.’

  ‘We get extra tea and sugar.’

  ‘I meant meat and butter and things like that.’ The paper bag rustled. ‘Lucky I’ve still got one bun left.’

  She chewed away ravenously. Prudence wondered if the prospect of extra rations might have been more of a reason for Janet volunteering for canal work than the threat of preying soldiers. The last of the last bun went down in a noisy gulp.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve made up my mind that I’m not putting up with it. We got soaked to the skin, doing all that tying up. Enough to give us pneumonia. I’m leaving first thing in the morning. Soon as it’s light, I’m off. There’s an Underground station right by here – I spotted it when we arrived. I’ll get the first train and if you’ve got any sense, you’ll come with me.’

  ‘We haven’t given it a proper try yet.’ She sounded a lot more confident than she really felt. ‘And I think we ought to.’

  Janet was emptying drawers and cupboards and repacking her suitcase. ‘Suit yourself. But I think you’re barmy, if you stay.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you tell Pip that you’re going?’

  ‘Not likely! She’d give me a long lecture. Anyway, I’ve a perfect right to leave if I choose.’

  They made up the two beds, Janet commandeering the larger one that came down from a cupboard across the back of the cabin. Prudence took the bowl off its hook and poured in some warm water from the kettle. She washed her hands and face and cleaned her teeth and then went to tip the water over the side into the canal. When she came back Janet was already in bed and asleep – a big snoring hump under her eiderdown. She sat down on her narrow side bunk, twisted and turned to get out of her clothes and into her nightie, and then wound her hair up in curlers before switching out the light. As soon as she lay down, she realized that she’d forgotten to kneel and say her prayers, so she said them where she was. God bless Mother and Father and keep them safe from harm. She paused, listening to the piggy snores. And please give me courage. Help me to walk the top planks and do everything else all right, and don’t let me give up, like Janet.

  Janet was up at dawn, bumping and banging around. She had gone to bed in her clothes so as soon as she’d rolled up her bedding and put on her coat, she was ready to leave. Prudence helped her haul her things out of the cabin and onto the bank. It had stopped raining and there was a clammy mist hanging low over the canal.

  Janet gave her a pitying look. ‘Poor you, staying here. You’ll be sorry.’

  As she stumped away without a wave or a backward glance, Pip’s head popped out of the butty cabin.

  ‘Gone, has she? Oh well, I can’t say I’m too sorry. You’re not thinking of leaving, too, I hope?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s good. Come over and have some breakfast as soon as you’re dressed. It’s all ready.’

  Frances was stirring a saucepan of porridge on the butty cabin stove. They ate it in bowls with syrup drizzled over the top and evaporated milk poured round the edge. And they had cups of tea and thick slices of bread and margarine and jam.

  ‘We needed a decent breakfast,’ Pip said, lighting a cigarette. ‘It’ll be a long day and it’s going to be hard work with one short, but we’ll manage it. It’s rather a useful training stretch between here and Limehouse, actually. A bit of everything for you two to experience – bridges, locks, a tunnel, bends, mud and lots of traffic. We’ll go breasted-up all the way, except for the tunnel where we have to single out. You can stay on the butty, Prudence, so you won’t have to worry about steering just yet. Frances will be on the motor with me, so she can get some practice at it. After we’ve loaded up, you’ll take a turn with me. But before we leave, I’ll have to phone the office to see if they can arrange for a replacement trainee to meet us somewhere.’

  She disappeared ashore to make the call while they washed up the breakfast things and put them away.

  ‘Good riddance to Janet,’ Frances said. ‘Pip guessed she’d go, sooner or later. She thought you might go with her – that she might talk you into it. I bet she tried to.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you stayed.’

  As soon as Pip came back they untied and went on their way, Prudence alone in the butty which was tied alongside the motor. The canal snaked its way through London, meandering past back streets and houses, under road bridges and railway arches, past parks and pubs and shops and more streets, offices and factories, a school, a hospital, a cemetery. People stopped to watch them from bridges and men whistled at them from windows and workshops. Loa
ded boats were coming up from the docks: Grand Union Canal narrowboats painted in their red, white and blue, other boats in different company colours and great barges towed by horses, the bargees lolling at their tillers like kings.

  The locks were terrifying: the thud and clang of the heavy gates, the slimy walls, the whirling, churning water. There were several close together, and, each time, Pip handed over the tiller to Frances and jumped ashore. The lock-keepers helped with the gates and with the winding and unwinding. What exactly they and Pip were doing was a mystery, but the water rushed out and the boats sank down, and the lock walls grew deeper and darker and slimier.

  Further on, there was the tunnel – even more frightening. The boats had to be singled out to leave room for others coming the other way, and the butty was now towed on a short rope behind the motor so that Pip and Frances were the boat’s length ahead of Prudence. The headlights gave hardly any light and icy drops of water kept plopping onto her hair. The noise of the engine was so loud that nobody could have heard her shout if anything had gone wrong.

  The further they went towards the docks, the smellier and uglier everything became. Slums and skinny children in dirty clothes with dirty faces playing on the towpath, broken glass, rubbish bobbing in the water – old tyres, tin cans, a drowned cat horribly bloated with legs stuck in the air. Rubbish dumps, scrapheaps, bombed buildings, and, to her horror, more locks, more clanging gates, more swirling filth and slime. Finally, they came down into Limehouse where they tied up alongside other boats and barges, end on to the high wall of the dock. On the other side of the basin, she could see the hulls of seagoing ships and, tethered in the skies above, silver barrage balloons.

  Pip went off and came back to say that they wouldn’t be loaded until early the next morning.

  ‘We’ll have a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll get the boats ready. The stands and the top planks and beams have to come out and the holds left completely empty. We’ll start with the motor boat and you can both help me and learn how to do it. Tomorrow, after we’ve been loaded, we’ll have to sheet up. That means covering the cargo completely with waterproof canvas sheets. If it were coal we wouldn’t need to bother, but as it’s steel we must keep it and the boats dry.’

  They clambered down into the holds and Pip showed them how to take out the stands and top planks and how to knock out the beams and unscrew the rigging chains. They collected up stray brooms and mops and tools and put them away. They also collected bruises and splinters. When at last they had finished, Pip announced that, as a reward, she would take them to a Chinese restaurant for supper. They climbed up the vertical iron rungs in the wharf wall and walked out through the dock gateway into a dark street, groping their way by torchlight past shuttered shops and bomb sites and black alleyways.

  The restaurant had crimson walls decorated with writhing golden dragons, paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling and a doorway at the back covered by a curtain of coloured beads. The beads moved with a tinkling sound and a tiny Chinaman appeared. He wore embroidered silk robes, a black hat on his head and slippers on his feet and, as he turned to show them to a table, Prudence saw a thin pigtail hanging down his back like a piece of tarred string. He kept nodding and smiling and speaking to them in a funny sing-song voice but she couldn’t understand a word.

  Pip said, ‘Mr Lang suggests the noodle soup. And the pork foo yung. And maybe some special fried rice and mixed vegetables and bean curd in black bean sauce. Does that sound all right for both of you? He cooks it all himself and it’s usually pretty good.’

  The curtain beads tinkled again as Mr Lang left the room. Before long, more customers came in – dock workers and a group of foreign merchant seamen. The three of them were the only women in the place, but Pip knew one of the workers and chatted to him across the room. The sailors were gabbling away in some strange language and one of them kept staring at Prudence.

  The food, when it came, was served in different dishes and nothing like Prudence had ever seen or tasted before. The foreign sailor kept on staring; she could feel his pale-blue eyes fixed on her all the time while she was eating the funny food and trying to listen to what Pip was saying about what they had to do the next day. They were to be up before dawn to have breakfast and be ready for loading as soon as it was light. Once loaded, they would have to put the beams and stands and things back and do the sheeting-up. It sounded like an awful lot of hard work.

  Pip said to her, ‘Before we leave, I think we ought to try and get something warmer for you to wear, Prudence, otherwise you’re going to freeze to death on the cut. There are some seamen’s shops in Commercial Road. We’ll see if we can find a jersey and maybe some trousers instead of that skirt – they’ll be off points and very cheap.’

  When they left, the Chinaman bowed low to them with his arms tucked up the sleeves of his robes. As Prudence passed by the foreign sailor at his table, he gave her a look that made her blush.

  She slept on the narrow side bed again, though she could have taken down the cross-bed if she’d wanted to. The bed felt damp after all the rain but Pip had lit the stove for her to warm up the cabin and it was nice to lie close to it, seeing its friendly glow in the dark and listening to the water slapping gently against the sides of the boat. She wondered if there would be an air raid. The Germans always went for the docks, didn’t they? That was why there were all those barrage balloons floating about. And the docks must be very easy to find because of the river; she’d seen the burned-out buildings and the rubble lying all round the docks. But the siren didn’t go and after a while she stopped worrying about German bombers and thought, instead, about the sailor. No man had ever looked at her in that way before. Mr Simpkins’s creepy sidelong glances had made her skin crawl with disgust, but the foreign sailor’s stare had made her insides flutter with a quite different feeling.

  It was still dark when Frances banged on the cabin door in the morning. The stove had gone out and Prudence dressed as fast as she could, unwound her curlers and brushed her hair. It was easier to do it all sitting down on the bunk. The butty cabin was lovely and warm and, once again, there was hot porridge, thick slices of bread, and tea.

  Pip said cheerfully, ‘Looks like you’ve been bitten in the night, Prudence.’

  ‘Bitten?’

  ‘Bedbugs. Just a couple of bites on your cheek. I’m afraid most boats seem to get them. The company fumigates them regularly, but they always come back.’

  She put a hand up to her cheek. ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s really nothing to worry about. You’ll get used to it.’

  They started the loading soon afterwards. Slings of long steel bars were lifted from the quayside by a giant crane, swung out over the boats and manoeuvred by the dockers down into the holds, almost without a bump. The boats sank lower and lower until the gunwales were only just above the water. Frances was sent to make more tea for the men and Prudence passed round the mugs. The dockers thought it was all a great joke.

  ‘You’ll be after our jobs next, I dare say,’ one of them said to her, grinning. He’d been down in the hold, manhandling the steel bars. ‘We’ll ’ave to look out for you lot.’

  When the loading was done, their work began – the sheeting-up that Pip had tried to explain. Back went the beams and the rigging chains, screwed up tight enough to pull the sides of the boat together. Then the stands had to be wedged into place, the top planks put back, even higher up than before, and fixed with screws and ropes and uprights so they were safe to walk along. Then the sheeting-up began – scrambling about the hold, unrolling the black tarred canvas from the boat sides, uncoiling tarry strings and throwing them over the top planks to be laced through an eyelet on the other side. Tightening those up meant a terrifying crawl on hands and knees along the top planks with Pip shouting instructions from below. The three top sheets, which weighed a ton, had to be hauled out and hoisted up over their heads to cover the hold from the front end down to the cabin, and every top string had to be threaded th
rough a metal ring and tied off all along the edges. Prudence added a lot more bruises to the ones collected before, as well as cuts and blisters all over her hands. Her arms and knees were aching, and the bed-bug bites on her face were itching.

  ‘Well done both of you,’ Pip said in her nicest and most encouraging voice, but Prudence didn’t feel she’d done at all well; she only felt exhausted.

  Pip left Frances to guard the boats and took Prudence off to get the jersey and trousers. The shop in Commercial Road sold all kinds of seamen’s clothes – boots and overalls and trousers and jerseys and vests and long johns crowded the front window and hung from the ceiling inside. The cockney woman at the counter called her ‘duck’ and went off to find a jersey that didn’t swamp her and the smallest pair of bell bottoms. The jersey came down to her knees and the serge trousers had to be rolled up, but no clothing coupons were needed and they only cost seven shillings. Pip said she’d need a leather belt so she bought one for two and sixpence and the woman punched some extra holes in it for her. On the way back to the dock gate, Pip stopped at a phone kiosk to ask about the replacement trainee and came out looking rather pleased.

  ‘They’re sending one to join us at Bulls Bridge. Let’s hope she’s keener than Janet.’

  Off they went again, out of the dock basin and back to the canal, and through the locks – uphill this time – and under the bridges. Frances came on the butty with her to steer and, instead of being tied up close to the motor, they were towed on a rope about ten feet long. The laden boats, sunk so low in the water, seemed to behave quite differently. Frances, struggling with the tiller, kept making mistakes and the Aquila kept charging off in the wrong direction. Once it charged straight into the bank and got stuck firmly in the mud. That was when Pip shouted to Prudence to go up to the front with a long shaft to try and push them off. She had to walk the top planks to get there, carrying a heavy wooden pole that was at least twice her height, like a circus balancing act. It wasn’t quite so frightening with the hold full. If she fell off she’d slide down the sheets into the water, but it didn’t seem nearly as bad as falling headlong into an empty hold. She reached the fore-end safely, stuck the pole into the bank and pushed with all her might. Nothing happened however hard she tried and, in the end, a passing barge stopped and the bargee, a huge man, clambered aboard the butty, took hold of the pole in his great fists and with one shove they were free.