by Georgie Hall
*
‘Here’s a house, here’s a door. Windows 1 2 3 4. Ready to knock? Turn the lock – it’s Play School!’
Like many fathers in the early seventies, mine kept such a low profile through my early childhood – working crazy long hours, as it transpires – that the first older male figure I strongly attached to was Brian Cant, presenter of the BBC’s long-running show for Gen X tots, Play School.
‘Ready to play, what’s the day? It’s Tuesday!’
That soft, kind voice, smiley face and thatch of red-gold hair were my comforters. I’d have followed him to the end of the rainbow through the round window, square window or, on very special occasions, the arched window. Humpty Dumpty, Big Ted, Little Ted and Jemima were soulmates. (Hamble the hard, rubbery doll with the fixed stare gave me nightmares.)
I was an early Play School junkie, hence a habit of recognising former presenters in vintage film and television plus a lifetime’s soft spot for gentle golden-haired men with persuasive voices.
Our hero today is no Brian Cant, but he knows the tropes.
Treat a woman like a child and she will often behave like one: trusting, adoring, innocent.
*
One tap of a spanner and a double-handed manly twist is all it takes to get the screw-bar to release the lid of the weed hatch which he prises off to reveal a green rectangle of water. He pulls off his kayaking gloves and thrusts them at me. ‘Don’t lose those. Better have this too…’ He pulls off a chunky gold ring.
I examine it while he’s fishing around down there. I’ve seen a ring like this before, I’m certain.
He gasps as his tattooed right arm goes in. ‘This water is freezing, ladies. Ah, Jesus!’ He screws his face up. ‘This is hard work, girls. This is brutal. I promise you. Good job you little ladies didn’t try this.’
Summer and I obligingly reassure him he’s being incredibly brave and strong, handing across a spanner and screwdriver when he asks, nurses to his surgeon.
‘This prop is very badly compromised, I must warn you.’ His voice is life-or-death serious. ‘Get us a knife, angel pie. Great legs, by the way.’
‘My name is Summer and I’m not interested in your opinion of my legs, thanks!’ She fetches a serrated knife from the galley. From the glint in her eyes, I think she’s quite tempted to plunge it between his shoulder blades.
While he uses it to free up and pull out handfuls of tangled reeds from the prop, followed by fishing line, plastic galore, frayed rope and rags, I get plenty of time to check out the tattoos on his right arm as it emerges each time: a barcode, a Roman numeral date and an Aston Villa lion.
Putting them all together, I’m back in the Picasso, being chased down by a Portaloo lorry. You deserve to die, you mad old bitch.
Surely not?
I look at the ring again. Is our kayak hero the driver who road-raged me? Or is my recall a bit woolly as usual? I can’t be certain enough to call it, the memory fog too dense.
‘There’s something else… caught…’ He’s delving his arm deeper, the water up to his shoulder. ‘Just need to free… GOT IT!’ He pulls out a bra, still relatively intact, vamp red and big-cupped. ‘Will you look at that beauty? I’d like to meet the bird who lost this.’
‘If she’s drowned in the river, maybe you’ll get lucky?’ Summer says with a maniacal little laugh.
‘You’re feisty, sweet cheeks!’ He laughs too, not getting it, and asks her how old she is. ‘Fourteen, fifteen? Legal?’
For once, Summer looks too outraged to speak.
‘Is the propeller free yet?’ I demand in a tight voice.
‘As a bird, love.’
Summer and I catch eyes, feeling the irony.
Hatch closed, he pushes us off the bank with the bargepole as easily as an inflatable gliding through a swimming pool, and then manfully elbows me aside to start the engine himself and check she’s running smoothly, telling me where I’ve been going wrong. ‘Too much throttle through your turns, you see; my old lady did the same on the Norfolk Broads. Women drivers, eh?’
He takes back his ring and gloves and turns to give Summer a hot look, saying, ‘All right, angel? How about I row alongside for a bit to make sure your mum doesn’t ground her again?’
She glares at me and I realise she’s still too angry to speak.
‘That’s really not necessary.’ I manage another polite smile. Paddy would do no less to help a stranded boat than he has, I remind myself, and give him a bottle of the Moet in thanks, which he’s thrilled about, paddling off with a shout to tell us that we’ve made his day. ‘Especially you, baby doll! If Mum wasn’t around you’d be in danger, beautiful!’
‘Yeah, and you’re a fucking sexist, teen-baiting DICK!’ Summer screams after him, which spoils the moment somewhat, although he pretends not to hear it, paddling on.
‘That was a bit ungrateful.’ Following behind slowly in The Tempest, engine pitch-perfect once more, I’m jubilant to be on the move again. I’ve only lost an hour or so. I can still do this.
‘Ungrateful!’ Summer’s still feeling unforgiving. ‘His eyes were never off my body and did you hear him: “angel pie, sweet lips, love, bird, baby doll”?’ She turns to me furiously. ‘Why did you give him champagne, Mum?’
‘I was being polite. He helped us out of a tricky spot.’
For this, I get a kindly meant pep talk about my assertiveness. As an evolved Gen Z addressing the outdated X model, she says women like me believe ourselves to be self-assured because we complain all the time – about our husbands, our kids, our health (she doesn’t mention menopause but I’m guessing that’s a big whinge too), the service in restaurants, etc – and yet we’re ultimately prissy nihilists. ‘That man was openly sexist and a bit paedo, but you even rewarded him.’
I feel my deafening silence get louder. Summer is right, the kayaker did ogle and objectify her. And while that angered me, I dwelt more on being ignored and overlooked. Don’t Flatter Yourself. You deserve to die, you mad old bitch. What a minefield this world has made for women.
‘If I meet him again, I’ll tell him just what I think of him,’ I promise.
‘That’s hardly going to happen. We stand by our actions not our intentions, Mum. You justified his sexist language. I thought you had more balls.’
*
It came as a big surprise to me at school that French nouns are gendered into boy/girl. My vocabulary lists had separate changing rooms: windows and doors, female; floors and ceilings, male. It turned out the same was true in Italian and Spanish, and those clever forward-thinking Germans even factored in a third gender somewhere between the two. I now know Latin is the culprit of much of this, but I was spared that educational torture, partly because I attended a school that didn’t require me to possess a mortar board and penis and partly because the eighties saw the introduction of the Modern Languages General Certificate of Education – O levels in old money – and Latin got phased out as a subject, much to my father’s chagrin. (Chagrin come from the French noun, chagrin, which means sorrow or grief; it’s male, le chagrin, as coincidentally is happiness, le bonheur, whereas madness is always female: la demence, la folie, la rage.)
The fact that English nouns are gender-free thrilled teenage me. Forget le, la, el, il, der, de, das. We say the. Neutral. Doors, windows, floors and ceilings can all party together in one big room of ‘the’. It’s gender-free, it’s the, the, THE. Let’s party!
But all too soon I saw that there is still a marked sexual divide in our lovely ungendered language. And that’s fine when it’s balanced, the ying, yang thank you ma’am/sir of girls and lads, ladies and gents. Women get referred to by more than ‘lady’ through our lifetime, however – tart, bird, cow, scrubber, bitch, to name just a few – and our body parts are coined to refer to both genders, none very positively: cunt, pussy, twat, tit. Barely skimming the surface there. I’ve never felt that cock, dick and bellend quite balance that up. And then there’s balls. Balls are a good thing. Having b
alls is entirely positive. Hooray for balls! Except women don’t have balls. Why can’t we have a positive piece of our anatomy to represent being courageous and powerful in our own right? The clitoris, perhaps, or the ovaries – or if that’s deemed too ‘cis’, then why not boobs? Yet ‘it took boobs of steel to do that’ somehow doesn’t feel right; I can’t see Ant Middleton shouting it at female participants of SAS: Who Dares Wins.
*
We’re powering downriver. I have the tiller in hand, the wind in my face, and the desire for another loo break firmly in check.
Summer’s inside, checking on Lady and her puppies and talking to Ed. I’ve asked her to tell him we’ll stop at the next village to try to break him out of the bathroom without damaging the patented toilet catch. It’s about two miles downstream, with two more locks to negotiate en route.
Alone on deck, I stifle yawns, roll my shoulders and swear a bit, punchbagged with exhaustion.
I’ve forgotten to switch my phone back to Do Not Disturb, and as soon as my network’s signal reappears, it lets off a firework show of notification alerts in my boiler suit’s pocket.
Lots of messages stripe the screen, the names making me highly anxious: Paddy, Jules, Lou and even the Agent-Who-Never-Calls – please let it be a casting call-up from Greg Doran and Erica Whyman! Others are from the estate agency, a couple of theatreland friends, my neighbourhood WhatsApp group. The real world is out there.
The first message from Paddy was sent three hours ago, informing me that the online grocery delivery has lots of substitutions and am I OK with short-date tomatoes? A second, within the last half hour, says New Neighbour wants him to go round this afternoon to quote for kitchen, but he’s cleaning our windows first and can’t find where I’ve put the indoor squeegee? Both are short and terse with battle tension, but also reveal he has no idea I’m here on the Avon, I realise with relief.
Nor does he know that Ed was sick on the school coach – possibly deliberately – and stowed away. He doesn’t know Summer ran away from a very fake wedding to join us.
The enormity of this deception daunts me. I send a terse reply: Squeegee under utility sink. Slight change of plan here. More later. Ex
My sister has sent a list of links to resources about the menopause. Lou has sent a dancing Bananarama GIF captioned YOU CAN DO THIS with How’s it going? underneath. I send a hasty thumbs up back to both. The message from the Agent-Who-Never-Calls is a generic one with holiday dates when she’ll be unavailable to clients (as opposed to just unavailable to me). The estate agency wonders if I’m free for more guided viewings (no mention of Matteo and the mill flat).
There’s nothing from Miles at all, thank goodness.
A new message notification from an unfamiliar mobile makes me jump. Matteo doesn’t have my number, I remind myself as I open it nervously, but it’s just Lottoland reminding me that tonight’s Euro jackpot stands at a hundred and twenty-three million pounds. Must buy a ticket.
This just might be my lucky day.
*
It’s not that I believe I’ll ever win the jackpot, not in my heart. But for that lapse of time between buying the ticket and not winning I like to let myself dream I might, allow myself to imagine I’ll have no more money worries, indulge myself looking up properties we could buy, holidays we could have, charities we’ll start up, the treats we’ll give to friends and family. And to me, those few hours of fantasy are worth every penny. Paddy says it’s a waste of money, but for the same amount he splashes out on one pint in the pub with his mates, I get hours and hours of happiness. I call that jolly good value.
*
‘Bidford Grange Lock (or Pilgrim Lock),’ Summer reads from the Avon Navigation Guide in a breathless younger-Royal gush as we approach it, ‘was hand built with thousands of steel reinforced concrete blocks by the men from Gloucester Gaol.’ Her spoilt-brat voice is a superb pastiche and I realise (belatedly) that she is auditioning these descriptions to show off her range. ‘Although the site was soft, floods frequent and avalanches commonplace, the resulting structure was effective and pleasing to the eye. Oh my God! Floods and avalanches. So excited!’ She pulls on her shoes ready to jump out to set the gates as we approach.
An elderly foursome are enjoying a tea break on folding chairs by a moored narrowboat, putting paid to my plans to nip behind a bush for a discreet wee. The menfolk predictably rush forth to help Summer, whose double standards annoy me. ‘You are so super kind!’
Too tough for all that little-lady talk, I man the tiller, silent and brooding as The Tempest descends. The gushing water noise is not helping my two-mug-full bladder. I try to run a few pelvic floor exercises to keep it at bay, but it’s not so much a floor as a mezzanine level these days.
Emerging through the gates, I nudge the lock landing to collect Summer who climbs back on the roof to sunbathe and study the Avon guide as we forge on downriver. Her next impersonation is Katharine Hepburn’s clipped drawl: ‘Bear left as the river splits. Barton Grange to our right was once the site of a grist and paper mill with lock and weir, but is now a golf club. I do so love golf. Do you know Hepburn swung both ways?’ She sets the book aside to look down at me. ‘She was with somebody called Phyllis Wilbourn for three decades. I read it in that biography Granny gave you. She called herself Jimmy. Phyllis was her “secretary”.’
Another deafening silence from me. Katharine Hepburn was one of my first idols, remains so, and her private life is fine kept private if that’s what she wanted.
‘All this reminds me a bit of The African Queen,’ Summer is saying.
It’s a running joke at home how often I still watch it, the classic movie in which a gin-swilling riverboat captain played by Humphrey Bogart is persuaded by Katharine Hepburn’s straitlaced missionary to take his boat downriver in the Congo to attack a German warship. African Queen is one of my go-to movies; just the thought of it gives me a lift. As students, my housemates and I watched it so regularly we still quote whole scenes when we get together. The acting explodes through the celluloid in a film era when acting made chemistry, not the other way round.
I hardly think Shakespeare’s Avon in June compares to the Ulanga River in wartime, but there is something of the puritanical Edwardian missionary about Summer. And I so adore the film.
I can’t resist reviving Bogie’s Charlie Allnut. ‘I don’t blame you for being scared, Miss, not one little bit. Ain’t no person in their right mind ain’t scared of white water.’
Summer looks up from the book sharply. ‘I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!’ Her Rose Sayer is perfection. She knows the lines.
‘How’s that, Miss?’
‘I’ve only known such excitement a few times before – a few times in my dear brother’s sermons when the spirit was really upon him.’
‘You mean you want to go on?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Miss, you’re crazy.’
Letting out a shriek, Summer drops the book and starts clapping. ‘Oh my God, you are so good at that, Mum!’
‘You’re better!’ I clamp the tiller under my elbow and clap back.
I’m not quite sure what’s just happened, but it’s broken us both. We’re a bit tearful and high. An old film script is the wormhole that’s closed the short human lifespan separating our perspectives.
And it makes me bold enough to break my deafening silence. ‘Just as you rightly told me not to live my life through you, Summer, you can’t try to redirect mine, especially those years already lived.’
She nods, sobs, launches herself off the roof to hug me. When I hug her back, ribs are threatened. ‘You drive me bloody mad, Mum, but I love you. I am so proud of you.’
‘Entirely mutual.’
‘Dad’s your Bogie, isn’t he?’
It’s another moment that breaks us. It’s not that Paddy is particularly funny. It is the word ‘Bogie’. Shamefully silly. We try so, so hard not to laugh, but that reliable Finch family female g
iggling fit kicks in like a Heimlich manoeuvre; I have been gifted it with Mum, with Jules and now finally with Summer. It’s so good it hurts.
*
Men who complain women aren’t funny still don’t appreciate that our humour works differently and yet with the same end destination, like charter and schedule flights. Their laughter is all too often a sex, drugs and rock and roll perfect storm, a single glorious endorphin kick: the fast-fire comic whose cocaine-line jokes make a room explode; the one-night stand joker, testosterone loaded and bought into en masse.
I used to make Paddy laugh a lot, and it was the best aphrodisiac in the world.
(And I can’t deny being the one who has lacked humour in recent months, along with hormones.)
To share laughter with women connects us around the globe, no matter whether that humour is silly or sophisticated. We must see the funny side to survive. It has bonded us for millennia, this long haul of weeping giggles, funny bones and mutual adoration. It transcends language and knows no borders. When we laugh together, we can do so for a lifetime.
*
Somebody shouts from the bank that we’re on the wrong side of the river. Pulling ourselves together, we jump to it. The Tempest is passing dangerously close to a line of moored boats and I steer her right.
Summer picks the book off the roof, her voice changing again, now Phoebe from Friends (which she and her gang are all addicted to). It’s a very cute trick, and it occurs to me again that all this accent switching might be her trying to impress me rather than provoke me. ‘To our left is Barton Moorings, and now we are passing several caravan parks. Is that like a trailer park? Why do they site them by rivers in your country?’
