You dream up these crazy schemes and when it all gets real you start to lose your nerve, said Monica. Look at Dave and Nice Amy in Portsmouth, and Captain Rob, and the Wayfaring Stranger, and Michael. The Yanks won't shoot us—they will look after us, and Jim too. The pork skins will be waiting in Portsmouth, whatever pork skins might be.
But we must not forget, I said, for eleven hundred miles, that their pork scratchings are not our pork scratchings, and their gods are not our gods.
IN STONE WE ORGANIZED A FAREWELL LUNCH-TIME party and a lot of people came. Our daughter Lucy made a speech and everyone said it was much better than I would have made. Peter and Karen from Canal Cruising told us they had never seen wiring like the French wiring on the Phyllis May and my how they laughed. Peter said he had taken the engine out and serviced it very thoroughly and Karen gave us a silver St Christopher medal for the ignition keyring just to make sure. We talked with our friends of all we did together thirty or forty years ago and agreed it could have been yesterday afternoon. Cousin Ken, who had seen us off to cross the Channel, gave us a bottle of champagne to open if we reached the Gulf of Mexico.
Next day the papers were full of stories from Florida. A lady had been sitting on the bank kicking her feet over the water and they found her arms inside an alligator. A scuba diver had gone down into the canal and not come up. An alligator with one eye had jumped on a jogger and pulled her into the water. There was an 87 per cent chance of a major hurricane, and the hurricane season would begin a fortnight before we arrived. Last year had been the worst year for hurricanes on record.
We must take a positive view, I said—
How can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods?
Let's go and see my mum and dad.
DOWN THE SOUTHERN END OF STAFFORDSHIRE is Albrighton, a little town with a church and chestnut trees.
Before our family was broken up in the war we had chestnuts in our drive. The candles were white and the leaves were soft. Then one day the candles went out and the leaves yellowed and frayed and cartwheeled away.
I collected the washing-up liquid from our camper van, and a trowel and a brush and scissors. I walked up the path. The headstone had been infringed by the sod, as if the earth were pulling it in. I bent over and cut into the grass and heaved it away and then I got some water and poured it over the stone and scrubbed it. The letters came up white—Together again. I knelt down.
I am not going to ask you any favours, I said, it is a long time since I visited you and I don't deserve any. I just want to say that I think of you a lot and will think of you however far I go and whatever I do.
They came into my mind as if they were not quite connected with me or with the earth but they were right by me just the same. I felt their sweetness and their specialness, the ways in which they were each themselves and no one else.
It was no use asking them for luck—they did not care about beasts or tempests, illness or accident, breakdown or loss of will. What did it matter to them? Very soon we would be together again.
FROM STONE YOU GO UP THE MODDERSHALL Valley, then turn right into Cotwalton, backing into gateways to let the tractors by, and you park and walk up Summerstreet Lane.
Stiles: a rising path, across fields, into the sky. Look back and there through faintest blue is Shropshire: the Wrekin and Wenlock Edge. Jim swept round the horizon like a second hand, and came back heavy into oxygen debt, staggering and grinning. At the top of the hill, six hundred feet up, the bluebell wood—annihilating all that's made, to a blue thought in a blue shade.
Monica and I talked about Stone.
In Stone I can pretend I am retired, said Monica, not a full-time manager of crazy expeditions. I can play bridge and visit my children and my grandchildren and go down to Stone Master Marathoners. I don't have to organize a mooring for tomorrow night or send a chapter of our book to London from the middle of Burgundy on a mobile phone that doesn't work and we don't have to cross the Channel or sail an inland sea in a storm and I am not scared half the time.
There are the brick terraces, I said, and the canal and the river and the pubs, and the Christmas lights and the service at the cenotaph. And the Stone Festival, with the steeplechase and the Dog Derby that you and I invented thirty years ago. In the spring there are daffodils, and in Stonefield Park the primula in heaps of crimson and gold.
It was all so beautiful after London, said Monica. Remember that poem you wrote for our first Michaelmas—
The trees trawl the wind
For angels
They stand among the leaves
Gold faces calm
At sunset they blow
Across the sky
In shining hurricanes
Fighting the dragon
Bearing our pain
Their blood falls
As gilded rain
Tell me Mon, what are you looking forward to most in the USA?
I can't think of anything, said Monica.
• • •
Attention Kerry Finch, Store Manager, West Marine,
Norfolk, Virginia
Dear Kerry—In February you kindly helped us choose our new anchors for the Intracoastal Waterway. This is to confirm we would like you to get two of 401596 for us to pick up shortly after June 20th. We will need chain and rope too.
Kind regards, Terry and Monica Darlington
Dear Terry—Nice to hear from you. For each anchor you would need about 1 eft of 3/8 chain and perhaps 250ft of rope.
Thanks, Kerry
Dear Kerry—Can you check your last sentence? I looked up eft, thinking it must be a nautical term, and it seems it is a newt. Nothing wrong with newts of course.
Kind regards, Terry
Morning Mr Darlington—Ha ha, I am sorry, the last sentence should have read 12ft … not 1 eft! I agree nothing wrong with newts!
Kerry
Dear Kerry—The chain and rope sound just right, and can you get us in a couple of efts? The small green ones with the spotted orange bellies if you can. And two jam-jars, please, and some string.
Yip, T
• • •
Good heavens, said Monica, it's a parcel of pork scratchings—they are from Andrew, the gentleman who does the canal web-log Granny Buttons. How nice—he must have sent for them specially. There are two sorts—Kettle Style Pork Cracklins, with Rinds Attached, and Fried Pork Rinds, which are puffy ones. It says they are made in Henderson, North Carolina. This English packet I bought to take with us says—
If not in good condition and within the sell-by date please return it to us with the wrapper—we will gladly replace and refund postage.
The American one says—
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16
There's no arguing with that, I said.
I opened the packet of Kettle Style Pork Cracklins and Jim appeared from behind the skirting boards. No, Jim, I said—no pork scratchings at home. These have been sent us for literary purposes, so we can report to an astonished world about American pork scratchings. You can have one or two in the pub tonight.
They look like ours, said Monica, and they are hard like ours, but not quite as crunchy and they taste of maple syrup and barbecue smoke.
I went to the cupboard and got the salt and poured some into the bag. In England they bang in the monosodium glutamate, I said—no messing about. If you are going to eat rubbish you may as well do it properly.
Jim started to whine. No, Jim, I said, and that's final. I put the bag on the sideboard, right at the back.
Where is that bag? asked Monica later.
We found it under the table, empty.
Jim lay in his kennel—the eyes of Princess Diana, the legs of Sebastian Coe, the mind of Ronnie Biggs.
MANTOVANI, SAID MONICA, MANTOVANI! I'M NOT having Ma
ntovani on my boat. They play Mantovani in supermarkets in Turkey. I know what you will do—put it on loud and drink too much beer and I'll wake up at two in the morning and you will be asleep in your chair with Jim alongside you and Mantovani pouring all over my new carpet like treacle.
Mantovani is a serious musician, I said. He was academically trained, and his father before him. His cascading strings were not done with an echo-box—he scored every note. He was enormous all over the world.
He's not being enormous on my boat. And what on earth is this? The first ever British hit parade—the hit parade of nineteen fifty-two! Who wants to listen to a hit parade of nineteen fifty-two?
I do—I was seventeen—it is the soundtrack of my emotional awakening. Nat King Cole is great, and Frankie Laine made a solid job of ‘High Noon’. And Jo Stafford sang ‘Jambalaya’ and she sang ‘You Belong To Me’.
All right, but why Johnnie Ray? Who cares about Johnnie Ray the crying crooner? Do we have to keep alive for half a century the memory of a deaf homosexual?
That's a cruel remark, and personal and quite uncalled-for. Beethoven was deaf, and Benjamin Britten was no ladies' man. ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ with the Buddy Cole Trio is art at its most high, and ‘Let's Walk That-A Way’ with Doris Day is great.
I don't know how you expect me to live with stuff like that for a year in the wilderness, said Monica. In Mid-Wales we had choirs. In London I was under Sir Malcolm Sargent.
So were a lot of ladies—Elizabeth Jane Howard, the enchantress who helped save the waterways, said she had hardly got into the room before Flash Harry had his trousers on the floor. The answer is country music—the American parallel universe where we can both be at home. Johnny Cash and his ‘Ring Of Fire’, and Crystal Gayle talking in her sleep, and Dolly Parton always loving you, and Kris Kristofferson with your head upon his pillow and Bobbie Gentry—a man could make a fool of himself over Bobbie Gentry. And Glen Campbell in Galveston, where he used to run.
Yes great, but I thought Galveston had been swept away.
They built it again so Jim Webb could write his song.
What about Emmylou Harris, said Monica, telling us that love hurts—the CD you keep under your pillow?
Emmylou was right, love hurts. It hurt me like hell in nineteen fifty-two, but when I met you love became very good indeed.
Smooth talker, said Monica, you can have your Mantovani.
Son of a gun, I said, we'll have some fun, on the bayou.
• • •
JIM LAY ON THE SOFA SIDEWAYS, HIS HEAD AND front legs over the edge, as if he had melted. He looked like Salvador Dalí's watch in that painting Persistence of Memory, but this was Persistence of Whippet.
Do you remember you used to call him baby names when he was a puppy? asked Monica.
I didn't call him baby names, I said. No point getting soft. He's just an animal. But he was the first dog I had that was mine—the others were yours, or the family's.
You used to call him Daddy's Little Moon-mouse.
I may have called him Daddy's Little Moon-mouse once or twice, when I was feeling sentimental.
Sentimental as an eft. And the kids heard you call him that and they used to come and tell me and we would laugh.
It's not good for kids to make fun of their father, I said—they will grow up rejecting authority.
The kids are over forty, said Monica, and they have always rejected authority and they learned it from you. Look how you got expelled from school.
I wasn't expelled—the headmaster and I came to an agreement. But oh look at Jim, isn't he sweet when he lies like that. Last weekend he could hardly stand. It was the trembling and he wouldn't eat and the vet was shut.
I wondered if he was upset because I had washed him in the bath, said Monica, after he had covered his neck and ears with cowshit. Or if he had realized what was going on. I know what he would think about going down the Intracoastal Waterway.
I was afraid we would lose him, I said. Like our retrievers when they got that infection. They didn't complain, they just died. Jim was worse than them—hopeless and shivering. How can you have Narrow Dog to Indian River without a narrow dog? If he died we could get another one but it wouldn't be Jim. I know he is a bugger, but he is our bugger. We might get a whippet that liked boating, and that would be nice, but then there would be nothing to write about. It would be like Don Quixote with a hero who was a practical down-to-earth sort of bloke, or Moby-Dick about a whale that wasn't very big and was quite fond of people or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde about a chap who got a bit irritable now and then.
When Jim was nearly better Monica discovered a hole in his throat. When he had rubbed his neck in the cowshit he had become infected.
He realizes we are going boating again and tries to cut his throat, I said.
He's all right now, said Monica, he is practising his sleeping.
Jim had turned over on his back and pushed one leg into the air. His paws quivered and his eyes were part covered by membrane, and he yipped and chased rabbits, cutting them off from their warrens in the sky.
Jesus Ears, I said.
JIM AND I WENT TO ASTON LOCK TO LOOK OVER the edge of the world—what spires, what farms, are these? South along the broad towpath, Jim running ahead, sniffing the grass and jumping. The May trees were hung with snow. The wind was perfumed, and the Gulf Stream had softened it and the mountains of Wales had cooled it. I would miss that wind, that coolness, more than anything else. When you are cold you can cosy up to a fire or to a girl. When you are hot there is nowhere to hide.
Derek came towards us, walking from Sandon. I introduced Derek to Stone Master Marathoners thirty years ago. He runs faster than me, and he is older than me, and he is thinner than Jim. Derek crouched and rubbed Jim behind the ears and Jim tried to enter his body by his armpit.
Borrowed your book about France, said Derek, couldn't get into it. When are you off?
In three weeks, 19th June. The boat went off yesterday from the yard in Stone to Liverpool, no problems. When we loaded her in Carcassonne to bring her back from France the crane driver dropped her and knocked the top off the gatepost, but here they are professionals.
There was a programme on telly about alligators, said Derek. In the mating season they leap out of the water and pull you in and twist round and round to tear your limbs off. You are not going to be in Florida next spring are you?
Yes, I said.
If I was you I'd take a gun. Nice little sixteen-bore would be fine. Those reptiles are fast—they bask in the sun and store energy like a battery. You have one shot and if that doesn't work it's the twisting. Their teeth are covered with deadly bacteria so if you get free they follow you round and wait for you to die.
Thanks Derek, but carrying a gun will only encourage violence.
They won't need encouragement, not in the spring. Have a good trip. And watch Jim—to an alligator he would be a pork scratching. When you come back you'll get fit again and I'll race you up the hill in the Outlanes like I always do, and perhaps one day you'll be lucky. I'll be eighty before long and I might start to slow down. I think you can get sub-machine guns in the States for domestic use.
He shook my hand and wished us luck and we said goodbye and Jim and I walked on.
When I looked back Derek was firing an imaginary tommy gun into the cut, braced against the recoil, his face without expression, like Alan Ladd in The Great Gatsby.
THE ICE STORM
Virginia
Jim in the Crate — Ziggy Is Immensely Strong — The Virginia and the Monitor — Phyllis May at Mile Zero — The Ice Storm — We Have Lost Control Before We Have Started — Desert Boots — Heartworm — The Screaming Eagles — Total Systemic Collapse — A Cruel and Senseless Crime — The Designer Handbag — Farewell Party — The Sopping Air and the Blasting Sun — The Fatal Shore — Something Awfully Wrong
WE COULD HEAR JIM BARKING BEFORE WE GOT to the door of the luggage terminal. There was his travelling kennel and a huge
fan blowing right at it and an overweight gentleman sitting by the fan and Jim barking. We stood there drenched with rain and sweat and Monica gave the gentleman the papers for Jim's release.
Jim had been twelve hours in the crate, because there was no room for the plane to land at Washington and it had flown round and round until it ran out of gas and it had landed at Baltimore and then flown back to Washington. You would think they knew we were coming, said Monica.
All the journey I had worried about Jim. What if they forget to put on the heating and he freezes? What if they didn't pressurize the hold and he explodes? What if they forget about him because he is the only dog on board? Is he frightened? What if he wants to go to the lavatory? What if they lose him? What if he gets stolen? What if he dies?
Narrow Dog to Indian River Page 2