by Marie Browne
‘What does that mean? “no comebacks”,’ I asked.
‘It means that if the survey is poor or if there are any issues that arise from the survey, we can’t ask him to drop the price any further, although we can still pull out of the sale altogether,’ Geoff explained.
‘Oh.’ I stared into the last inch of my tea and tried to think about what all this meant on a grander scale, but being completely exhausted from my crying and shoe-slinging marathon, I found it really hard to make head or tail of the whole situation.
‘So what do you want to do?’ I turned to face him. ‘If the survey’s bad, at least we can pull out.’
Geoff shook his head ‘Your call,’ he grinned, ‘what do you want to do?’
I stared at the dents in the wall and ran my finger around one in the carpet. This was, I realised, a very last opportunity to get out of this. I knew it and Geoff knew it.
Stealing his hanky, I blew my nose hard and drained the last of my tea.
‘Call the surveyor,’ I reached down and, grasping his hand, completely failed to pull Geoff to his feet. ‘Tell him we need a quick appointment, the less time I have to stay with your mum the better.’
Twenty-four hours and two crying bouts later, we had managed to pack a desirable four-bedroom detached house (with large garage and a range of outhouses) into one transit van and the boot of my car.
Actually, we had managed to pack the absolute essentials into one transit van and the boot of my car. Everything else was either squashed into storage, cluttering up my father’s factory or peering at us mournfully from the top of a very, very overloaded skip. We had also, over the last two months, become very intimate with eBay and a lot of friends had picked up some great, if slightly embarrassing, bargains.
I deliberately didn’t hang around to say goodbye to the house. A four-hour drive to my mother-in-law’s in Cumbria with a tired, stressed child and an ancient, smelly, narcoleptic dog with a weak bladder was going to be difficult enough without the added trauma of another bout of tears, and anyway, I’d had enough of crying. What was done was done. There was no going back now.
Chapter Five
What Do You Mean, You’ve Never Driven a Narrow Boat?
LILLIAN, GEOFF’S MOTHER, WAS great. She made us all welcome and did what she could to try and ease the weird transition we were all suffering. The two weeks we spent with her felt like a holiday.
The holiday feeling became a problem in itself, as, although this interlude felt like one of our normal six-monthly breaks, I knew that it wasn’t and kept thinking ‘won’t be long till we go home’ except that we had no home to go to, and every time I realised this, I had to go and have a lie down.
We drove back to Braunston to meet up with the surveyor on August 28 and, for once, the gods were smiling on us.
Happy Go Lucky was in a dry dock and out of the water, and she showed every single one of her 23 tonnes; standing beneath her and looking up, she looked huge.
The surveyor went over her with a fine-tooth comb and gave us a monetary value which was worth more than the asking price and far more than our ridiculous offer; she was sound, dry, had a good solid hull, an efficient if slightly underpowered engine, and plenty of ventilation. The only thing he could find that could possibly cause a problem was that there was some play in the tiller, but a set of shims, he explained, should sort that out. He also mentioned that the propeller was possibly a little undersized for the length of the boat. He agreed that it was going to take some work to make her beautiful and she would probably handle like a pregnant cow but really it was only hard graft and a bit of TLC that was needed.
With the survey complete, he asked what we had offered for her, lost his eyebrows in his hairline when we told him and informed us we’d had a huge bargain. He shook our hands and was still grinning as he climbed out of the dry dock and wandered back to the office. How strange, a nice surveyor; obviously house and boat surveyors are a completely different species.
With his departure, silence descended as Geoff and I looked at each other. It was quite a comfortable and hopeful silence and would have been enjoyable if Sam hadn’t chosen that precise moment to fall into a large, oily puddle. We dragged him out, dried him off and decided to get some lunch.
If you ever go to Braunston, walk through the marina and take a left turn down the canal, and about a hundred yards up the tow path you will come across a small restaurant boat called Gongoozler’s Rest. I suggest you order a bacon sandwich and chips; the bacon sandwich is superb and the chips defy description. They were so good that a year on Sam was still asking to go back and have some more.
We sat on the public seat, next to the canal, the sun was shining, smiling people were wandering past and saying hello. We relaxed there for about an hour, eating bacon butties, feeding the ducks, drinking huge mugs of tea and discussing hare-brained plans for the future of Happy Go Lucky. It was at this point I began to think maybe this wasn’t such a daft idea after all.
With an end to one kind of vagrancy and the start of another finally in sight, we made the journey back to Cumbria to await the clearance of our cheque and to sort out exactly which articles we could pack into poor Lillian’s loft from those which were essential for actually living and would accompany us into the boat.
It was at this point that the problem of finding a mooring became all-encompassing. Knowing that we wanted to live near Cambridge, we had taken a couple of trips down there to see friends and to view boats that were for sale around East Anglia. One of these boats had been moored in a small marina just outside the city. I had taken its number and from Cumbria I gave them a call.
Throughout the whole boat hunt escapade, every single person we had spoken to had either told us we were bordering on insane, informed us of the impossibility of finding a mooring or just laughed in our faces.
‘Get your mooring sorted and then buy a boat to fit it,’ one elderly and weather-beaten boater had told us. So, as usual, we were doing everything backwards and against advice. I took a deep breath and dialled the number.
‘Hello,’ a deep voice answered on the second ring.
‘Oh hello, um I wonder if you could help us, we are looking for a mooring.’ I held my breath expecting the person on the other end of the line to begin choking or giggling maniacally.
‘What size mooring?’ was the reasonable response.
Breathe out. ‘Erm, 70 foot,’ breathe in and hold breath again.
‘Phew, big bugger, eh? You a live-aboard?’
Breathe out and panic, oh my God what do I say? We had been told by people, who looked like they knew what they were talking about, that you never, ever tell a marina that you are a live-aboard, but I’m the world’s worst liar. Argh, what do I say? What do I say? Breathe out.
‘Erm … Yes?’ Deep breath, and hold it ...
‘Oh, OK, the only one we’ve got in that size is an in-line mooring but it’ll have electricity. We charge £26 per foot, per year, split into quarterly payments; if you want to book the space, you will have to pay the first instalment now.’
Breathe out, panic again, argh! What to do?
‘Erm, great, yes, thank you, will you take a card?’ Hold breath again, although I’m not sure why at this stage of the conversation – maybe I was expecting a shout down the phone of ‘Gotcha, of course there aren’t any moorings available, you muppet!’ but what I got, was ...
‘Yep sure, that will be … oops, hold on a mo …’ the sound of calculator type clicking echoed down the phone. ‘Yep, £460. I’ll just get the machine.’
By this time I was completely bewildered and went through the rest of the negotiations in a bit of a daze. When would we be turning up? Two to three weeks? Fine, just give them a call two or three days before we arrived and they would make sure it was all ready for us to move on to.
I gave the lovely, wonderful man both mine and Geoff’s details and after dealing with the other bits of red tape, assured him that I would call before we got there and t
hat was it. One phone call, one mooring, completely stress-free.
If I had known at the time how lucky and coincidental the timing of that phone call was, I would have probably become very religious on the spot; however, I didn’t find out until some months later that the only reason we got a mooring was that someone had left in a hurry, exactly ten minutes before my call. So instead of becoming a nun, I just became very smug.
I took a few deep breaths (just to make up for the ones I hadn’t let escape throughout the phone call) and, acting as nonchalantly as I could, wandered into the living room. Geoff looked up at me from his book.
‘No luck, then?’ he asked.
I dropped onto the sofa and picked up the paper.
‘Hmm? Oh no, it’s fine, all organised, one mooring with electricity waiting for us when we get there. I had to pay the first quarter in advance, is that OK?’
‘Sure,’ he agreed and looked back down at his book. ‘What?’ he threw the book down. ‘You got one? How?’
Laughing at his cartoon-like double take, I affected surprise and shock; this was ‘me’ we were talking about, Mrs ‘Anything is possible’ (well, obviously it is if you have no idea what you are doing). As if I could do nothing other than get a mooring at the first attempt, I snorted and innocently continued to scan the paper.
‘Immense personal charm, I suppose.’ I looked over the top of the paper and frowned at him. ‘Um, Geoff? What’s an “in-line” mooring do you think?’
September 5 found us all loaded, yet again, into our still overflowing vehicles and after declining a third cup of tea, the offer of lunch and a second offer of cake and biscuits from Lillian, who was obviously unhappy at the idea of us leaving to start a weird, transient life, we were on our way.
We had already said a slightly relieved goodbye to Herbert who was spending a couple of weeks with Helen. I didn’t think at his age he would have coped very well with being on a boat. Although being on the boat wouldn’t have been any trouble, it was being in any situation that restricted him from getting onto some grass for his fifteen wees a day, which he seemed to need at this point in his life, that would have been the problem. Despite the initial excitement about Happy, Sam wasn’t entirely eager to leave Grandma’s and head off into some weird and hazy future; he, unlike us, had agreed to cake, biscuits and anything else she was offering and I think would have been quite happy to wave us goodbye from the door of her house. He was a little tetchy for the first part of the journey, but music from the Goodies and a hand-held electronic bleepy game soon raised his spirits. By the time we reached Braunston (for the third time) we were all in quite a hopeful mood, although Sam was a little manic and wide-eyed due to an over-abundance of sugar coupled with staring at little moving characters for three hours.
Leaving our tired-looking, over-laden vehicles in the car park, we wandered into the office to finalise all the bits and pieces. I was in such a good mood that Sam finally got his duck and exactly 15 minutes later we were officially ‘Water Rats’.
The marina had allocated us a three-day mooring in the basin; this would give us time to unload the vehicles and generally get ourselves sorted out. Sam and I went to find it, accompanied by Mary from the office.
Mary was an odd character. We had met her on all our previous visits and had never seen her smile; she was also terrifyingly and angrily efficient. I found myself treating her like a headmistress, nodding and smiling at her every instruction, trying hard not to upset her. Geoff had gone off with a very capable-looking man to bring Happy Go Lucky, our boat, our very own boat, around to meet us.
Mary sat us down on a bench and pointed toward the gap in the basin from where we could expect Happy to appear, and then, spotting a confused-looking family over by the brokerage, she handed me the spare keys and necessary bits of paperwork before trotting over presumably to demand that they purchase something or to run them off the premises.
Sam and I sat in the sun and waited, staring in the direction of the boat shed, just waiting for the moment when she would make her first appearance. A faint ‘chug, chug, chug’ was our first indication, then Happy Go Lucky (our boat, our very own boat) gently sauntered into the basin from the canal.
Sam jumped up. ‘That’s our boat, Mum!’ he shrieked, then leaping off the bench he headed toward his dad, who could just be made out, grinning, at the far end.
After six years, experience had taught me to move very, very fast when Sam takes off. I managed to grab him just as he was about to make a, probably unsuccessful, walk-on-water attempt. With this disaster averted we both watched, entranced, as ‘our’ boat was skilfully piloted between others, coming in very slowly to bump gently against the wharf; she looked large and capable and with her faded livery of grey, black and red, very friendly. I swear if that boat had a tail it would have been gently wagging.
Geoff stepped from the back of the boat onto solid ground and helped the capable-looking man tie her to some concrete posts. He thanked him then waited till he was out of sight before giving us a big smile.
I wandered up to him, keeping a tight grip on Sam.
‘Well, how was she to drive?’ I asked, ignoring the tugging on my arm and Sam’s rising screams, informing me that he wanted to get on to the boat. ‘She looked nice coming in.’
Geoff held his hand out to help Sam over the gap and on to the back, stating loftily, ‘I think the word you’re looking for is “pilot” not drive.’
‘Whatever, how was she?’ I frowned.
‘I don’t know, she seemed …stately, but he “drove” her.’ Geoff indicated the retreating figure with a nod of his head and laughed, ‘I’ve never driven anything like this – you’re the one with the water experience.’
Confusion and the beginnings of panic.
‘What do you mean, water experience?’ I squeaked.
Having deposited Sam through the engine room doors and safely into the interior of the boat, Geoff looked up at me. ‘Didn’t you do a lot of messing around in boats with your dad when you were younger?’ he said.
Panic becoming more pronounced.
‘Dad sails! We had a sailing boat, you know, sea-going, big flappy things and wooden bits that try to knock you into the water when you aren’t looking – and that was 25 years ago, I hated it, I spent most of my time hanging over the side being sick.’ I took another look at Happy, 23 tonnes of solid steel, engine, not a flappy thing in sight. ‘I can’t drive this, pilot this, or whatever – I’d kill us or sink us – I thought you had been on boating holidays.’
Geoff shrugged, ‘Well yes, when I was about 18 and that was 35 foot, nothing like this great lump.’
I sat back down on the seat. ‘So what we are saying here,’ I stated, enunciating carefully, ‘is that we have just bought 30 grand’s worth of boat and neither of us has the least idea how to make it go! How come this hasn’t come up, even once, in conversation over the last three months?’ I really didn’t know whether to be terrified or annoyed and, deciding that neither emotion entirely fitted the bill, I collapsed into a fit of the giggles. Geoff doesn’t ‘giggle’ so he just grinned and then disappeared into the boat calling to Sam that he needed to come out and stop Mummy being embarrassing.
About six o’clock that night we called a halt to the unpacking. As Happy was still in hotel mode, there was no shortage of rooms in which to stack boxes. Sam chose his bedroom (he changed his mind three times) and spent a happy couple of hours playing ‘tents’ in his quilt and unpacking boxes; I use the term ‘unpacking’ loosely, what he actually did was open all his boxes and, taking out each toy in turn, he would play with it inside his ‘tent’ and then discard it by just throwing it onto the floor.
By the time we had, mostly, sorted ourselves out, his bedroom was a war zone, clothes, toys and quilt all mixed together in a big pile on his bed. However, we were so busy running backwards and forwards to the van carrying boxes that we didn’t actually notice until his happy chaos had started to seep into the corridor.
We enticed him out with the promise of pizza and, kicking the detritus roughly back into his room, shut the door on the horror and headed out to eat junk food.
Sitting in one of the local restaurants, Geoff poked at his pizza and stared off into the distance.
‘Waf up?’ I enquired, around a mouthful containing an obscene amount of calories.
‘What?’ he focused on me. ‘Oh, I was just thinking about our lack of piloting experience, and the little problem that neither of us is particularly confident about moving her around.’
‘Confident?’ I laughed. ‘You mean neither of us has any idea what the hell we’re doing, she’s huge, and in our inexperienced hands she could be a lethal weapon to other river users or at the very least a snidely amusing inconvenience.’
Geoff grinned. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.’ He rummaged around in one of his numerous pockets and dragged out a colour leaflet. ‘I was in the office earlier and these were on a stand.’ He handed it over to me. It was a leaflet for ‘Willow Wren Training’.
I read through it, finding they had all sorts of narrow-boat-related courses, everything it seemed, from how to dismantle your diesel engine, to Inland Helmsman (whatever that was), and then handed it to Sam who was desperately trying to read it from under my armpit. ‘That seems like a good idea. Which course were you hoping to do?’ I went back to my pizza.
Geoff leaned over the table and gently retrieved the leaflet. After wiping the tomato sauce and bits of cheese from it, he pointed to the inland waterways helmsman course. ‘This one seems to cover everything we need,’ he said.
I struggled with a particularly large mouthful of pizza for a moment and could still feel it sliding down sideways as I pointed out that it was unlikely that we would get a space on a course for months.
Geoff grinned and busied himself folding the leaflet and stowing it away in his pocket. ‘We got lucky,’ he said and picked up a slice of Hawaiian with extra pineapple. ‘There was a cancellation; he’s meeting us at the boat tomorrow.’