Narrow Margins

by Marie Browne

  The village shop was quaint, pretty and utterly devoid of anything remotely resembling real food, so settling on sausage rolls for lunch we spent a fruitless 15 minutes searching through their freezer for microwave meals that at least paid lip service to nutrition. We failed, and began a new search for ‘just possibly edible’. Carrying our basket of fake food and chemicals, we wandered dispiritedly up to the counter.

  ‘Do you have a can opener?’ Geoff asked. The girl behind the counter glanced up and waved vaguely to the far right corner.

  ‘Hmm, over there,’ she muttered.

  ‘We found the place where they should be but there was just an empty space,’ Geoff explained.

  ‘Oh well, probably not then,’ she started ringing up our goods.

  ‘Do you think you might have one out the back?’ I prompted.

  ‘What? Oh no, we won’t,’ she went back to her till.

  ‘Do you know where we might get one?’ I asked, through rapidly gritting teeth.

  ‘No,’ she said, without looking up.

  ‘So there’s no one here that knows where we can get a can opener?’

  ‘No.’

  I opened my mouth to say more but Geoff trod on my foot. Heaving a sigh that I hoped spoke volumes about poor customer service, I gave up and wandered back down the aisle to look for more plasters.

  Being unsure of the state of Happy’s water tank, we had elected to drink bottled water and were going through it at an alarming rate. Five litres lasted us about two days; admittedly we were also cooking with it, cleaning our teeth with it and making vast amounts of tea and coffee. We had purchased the shop’s entire stock of bottled water; unfortunately this meant that Geoff had to carry it, as, when I tried to lift the rucksack we’d packed the ten bottles into, I failed. Geoff, of course, lifted it with ease and took two of the bags of shopping. I still think he had it easy, I had one bag of shopping and Sam, who, like the little yellow bird from the Peanuts cartoon, finds it impossible to move in a straight line. It doesn’t matter in which direction you walk, he is always a quarter-step in front of you, causing you to side-step or stop suddenly as he bends over to look at something interesting on the ground. I honestly don’t know how he does it.

  After about a quarter of a mile of this strange, slow, whirling progression of Sam walking and Geoff and I dancing around behind him while trying desperately not to step on him, Geoff decided that the water was getting a bit heavy and I agreed to meet him on the boat, as soon as Sam finally decided to walk in a straight line.

  It took about half an hour, but with his fifteen steps to my one I decided that he was getting a fair amount of exercise and seemed content, so, even if he was soaked up to the thighs and filling his pockets with unidentifiable objects, I didn’t really mind. We could see Happy in the distance when the weather finally made up its mind what to do for the day and by the time we arrived back at the boat we were drenched from head to foot.

  The rain eased off again by about two o’clock and after a tasteless, slightly plastic lunch we headed toward Gayton Junction. We had planned to stop there and fill Happy with diesel and water; we also needed to purchase the environment agency key and windlass that were required for the next leg of the journey. I was looking forward to an early mooring and a long hot shower.

  As we neared the turn into the Northampton branch of the Grand Union Canal, I re-learnt the main lessons from our training; a large narrow boat takes time to get up to a decent speed and then takes three times as long to slow down; and a large narrow boat cannot be leaned at speed around a sharp curve like a motorbike.

  The turn into the Northampton Branch is a good, sharp 90-degree turn and I was going way, way too fast to make it, especially as, by the time I worked out that we actually needed to turn, Happy’s nose was just past the nearside bank.

  There is a lovely plaque that I really must buy at some point that sums up my whole attitude to stressful situations. It sagely states: ‘When in trouble, or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!’ I realised that I was supposed to turn left and, without changing the engine speed at all, just threw the tiller far right. The effect of this ...? Well, not much really, the bow began a slow turn toward the left, so now we were travelling at speed and heading toward a concrete wall on the far side of the turn.

  Panic! Slam poor Happy into reverse. Effect? Nothing! At the speed we were travelling it would have taken at least twice our length to slow down.

  Panic more! Look quickly at the tiller, hard over, can’t do anything there; check accelerator, hard in reverse; engine screaming, can’t do anything there.

  PANIC! Scream at Geoff through the engine room and just watch the wall rapidly come toward us. BANG!!! Luckily for the family, the boat and the wall, we hit at a slight angle. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had hit it nose on. The wall wouldn’t have given way; Happy is well buffered with a thick rope fender that covers the thick steel bow, so the only things that would have moved would have been us. Even with the bump we took, I was thrown forward into the engine room and both Sam and Geoff were knocked off their feet.

  It was very lucky that they had been standing in the bow cabin so had landed in Sam’s ‘nest’, a little shaken but not broken in any way. Unfortunately the same couldn’t be said for a fair amount of our poor crockery. Happy’s nose rebounded off the wall and out into mid-stream bringing the mid section of the boat into contact with the corner of the wall.

  BANG! I was still in the engine room, trying to get back to the tiller, so was thrown sideways into the still screaming engine. I found out later that Sam and Geoff hadn’t actually managed to regain their feet before the second impact so they were fine. We did, however, lose the last of the crockery that had been gamely hanging onto the shelves after the first impact.

  This last collision straightened Happy back up and also had the secondary effect of slowing her right down, so, bruised, battered and more than a little shaken I managed to climb out of the engine room and take control once more. Geoff staggered out on to the back and asked if I was all right. I showed him the scrapes and replied that I would mend.

  He then gave me a ten-minute lecture on the dangers of being a speed freak. How embarrassing, told off for speeding in a narrow boat, I could hardly use it as a getaway vehicle. I could just see the headlines: ‘Speed demon in slow-speed chase down the Grand Union Canal’. The police would have to be chasing us in pedalos. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour at this point, I went to clear up the debris, but before disappearing I completed a quick head count of smirking spectators – about 30, yep, pretty much what I expected.

  We finally reached Gayton Marina at four-thirty and filled up both water and diesel tanks. We had a huge diesel tank and £130 later were still filling up. Geoff left me with the diesel pump while he went to the office to sort out the key and windlass.

  ‘Are you sure you can cope?’ he asked, and the look that he gave me before he walked away left me with absolutely no doubt that he felt it was unlikely I could do even this simple job without messing it up. He had already spent a good five minutes inspecting our impact points for damage and there had been a fair amount of head-shaking and tutting over the scrapes and the (very slight) dent he had found.

  The plan was to moor up for the night just past Gayton. A good night’s sleep meant that we would be bright and fresh, ready to face the 14 locks of the Rothersthorpe flight early in the morning.

  As we turned toward the flight, it was obvious that the Northampton branch was nowhere near as heavily trafficked as our recent travels. The banks were rough and uneven and the tall river plants grew a fair way out into the main flow of water. Moving at a snail’s pace we desperately looked for a suitable mooring, but, being used to man-made wharfs and tow paths, nothing looked right. We were still searching when we hit the top lock of the flight at 5.20 p.m.

  ‘What the hell do we do now?’ I shouted at Geoff over the rising wind.

  ‘I don’t know, d
id you see anything that even looked vaguely like a mooring?’ he shouted back.

  ‘No, and even if there was I’m not sure we could turn her here.’ I looked around. ‘And we sure as hell can’t go backwards.’

  Geoff groaned. ‘We’re going to have to go down – and as fast as possible.’

  Fourteen locks, all against us, oh what joy and rapture. I tried to make the best of it by thinking that at least we wouldn’t have to face this tomorrow morning and could probably have a lie-in.

  The threatening rain hit us full force at about lock ten. We had been doing three locks each, running ahead to set the next lock while the previous one was emptying. The wind picked up further and Happy was blown about like a paper boat in a puddle.

  I have always felt that this is the one thing that is really unfair about narrow boats, 23 tonnes of steel should be able to withstand a little side wind but, the reality is, it can’t. Even a gentle wind can blow you about, and, of course, the more wet and exhausted we became, the more difficult she was to control.

  In hindsight (always a wonderful thing) we should have said damn the consequences and just spent the night at one of the bigger stretches between the locks; yes, there are big signs telling you that this is absolutely forbidden but in our exhausted state it was more by luck than judgement that we didn’t catch the rudder on a lock shelf and get hung up. Big locks in the dark, battling against high winds and heavy rain, are just hideously dangerous. Luckily we didn’t know any of that, so like a bumblebee in flight, we carried on regardless.

  We pulled out of the last lock at about ten o’clock soaked, frozen, windblown, exhausted, hungry and totally miserable. We were also wallowing in a fair amount of guilt. Poor Sam hadn’t had a proper meal. We had rushed down at various points in the descent to reassure him that all was well and to give him some snacks, but he had essentially been on his own for four and a half hours.

  When we finally moored up, we were so tired that we just threw her into the side and Geoff used the gangplank to get ashore to set the mooring pins. He returned, sodden and exhausted, to find me, also still dripping, staring down at Sam who had fallen asleep in his ‘nest’, all by himself, still unfed. The guilt at being a bad, irresponsible and uncaring parent was almost crippling.

  I left Sam asleep in his ‘nest’ while I dried off and put on my warm, fluffy dressing gown, then, picking him up, I carried him to his bedroom while Geoff made the long-awaited cup of tea. Sam, feeling himself being moved, opened his eyes and smiled, snuggling down into my shoulder. While I was putting him into bed, he held his arms out for a big cuddle. Lying down beside him to acquiesce to his unspoken request is the last thing I remember that night.

  Next morning I was awoken by a fully refreshed and very hungry six-year-old climbing over me. He was trying very hard not to wake me up (this involved his foot in my face and smothered giggles, very loud smothered giggles). Nursing my face, I lay, confused, in Sam’s bed waiting for feeling to return in the shoulder that he had been using as a pillow.

  As you get older, confusion on waking becomes commonplace and an accepted part of the morning routine, but, this particular morning, I was completely adrift from reality. Waking up in pain in a strange room should have been enough to confound me, but when I sat up and looked blearily out of the window, I couldn’t work out why the sky wasn’t where it should be and the world had turned green.

  As a result of our mad rush to moor up somewhere, anywhere, the previous night, we had managed to get Happy in amongst a huge reed bed – the plants were higher than the boat. Sam summed it up, saying he felt like he had been made very small.

  There was a definite loitering going on that morning. We created the world’s biggest breakfast of cereal, cold meats, fruit, cheese and naughty cake, very continental. Sam was very enthusiastic about having cake for breakfast, even if we did have to eat from the plastic lids of large storage boxes due to the lack of crockery. We then sat about, drinking vast amounts of tea out of a couple of old mugs that were discovered shoved into the cupboard beneath the sink, and listening to Sam chattering on about nothing in particular.

  Studying the map, we decided that as the locks were now nicely spaced apart, one of us could stay with Sam, to make up for the previous day. We were also due to stop at a big supermarket in Northampton, where at last we could buy a wretched can opener, get some more water and other bits and pieces; I ruefully added crockery to the bottom of the shopping list.

  So with the sun shining and the horrors of the previous night now a mere memory, we backed Happy out of the reed bed and sauntered on towards the promise of gore-free baked beans.

  Chapter Ten

  I Think I’m Having a Heart Attack!

  SADLY, THE CLOSER WE drew to Northampton, the less salubrious our surroundings became. The dirty, overgrown canal hid, embarrassed, under huge broken lumps of floating polystyrene, so reminiscent of dirty, pitted chunks of ice that Geoff started to hum the theme from Titanic. The banks were overgrown, covered in litter, and we moved between grubby, off-white buildings that faced away from the canal in a huddle of barbed wire and security guards.

  Cautiously feeling our way through the congested water, I held the tiller lightly, waiting for the tell-tale jerk that would signal something was wrapped around the prop, but amazingly enough it never came. Maybe the fates had decided that we had paid for our passage through this litter-choked potential minefield by suffering the trauma from the night before. So, making slow but surprisingly unimpeded progress, we transferred from the Grand Union Canal to the River Nene and moored at lunch time without incident at the Northampton City Quay.

  After lunch and a huge shopping trip to the local supermarket, we were on our way again. I had spent a happy hour packing away all the new plates and cups and unpacking our exciting new acquisitions; a slow cooker, a three-tier steamer and a baby George grilling thingy. I had deliberately placed them on top of the hob.

  ‘I won’t have to listen to you for a while.’ Then, realising that I had finally started talking aloud to inanimate objects, I went and checked on Sam.

  Sam had recently discovered the delights of the ‘Beano’. He was so engrossed, I had to poke him before he finally answered my questions (talking to the hob had given me just as much response), his eyes sliding back to the colourful characters on the page mid-conversation. I gave up and went back to the kitchen.

  After I had prepared a casserole for dinner, smiling at the simple delight of being able to use real vegetables, I took Geoff a cup of tea.

  ‘How can it be,’ I sat on the deliciously warm roof with my cup of tea and pondered to my slightly nauseated husband – he had slipped a surreptitious pack of five jam doughnuts into the shopping and had eaten them all over the last hour – ‘that a supermarket that size has no bloody can openers?’

  I was still enjoying the sunshine on the roof when Geoff pointed out that the fourth lock of the day was approaching. We had become proficient at locks: pull the boat in, close the gates, make sure all is secure and that you are far enough away from the sill at the rear and then start letting the water out or in depending on whether you are going up or downhill. But this was the first time we had come across a ‘guillotine’ lock.

  When training, Dave had mentioned them as being something to look out for, because instead of nice, gentle winding handles, you have to insert a key in a lock, turn it, then wait while a huge metal door rises automatically and lets the water out from beneath you.

  We pulled in at the mooring, as Geoff wanted to study the lock mechanism before we brought our monster into the pound. When he was satisfied that he knew how it worked, he signalled me to bring Happy round the corner and into the enclosure on my own. OK, not a problem. It should have been a simple manoeuvre – and would have been – if I had actually elected to turn left into the lock, but instead, and to this day I don’t know why, I sailed merrily past and turned right.

  As soon as I was past the lock I figured out what I had done and put
Happy into reverse to slow her down. As usual, she completely ignored me and carried on, preferring, instead, to take up a central position on what appeared to be a huge lake.

  There was open water all around me and a wind had sprung up from nowhere, pushing me further away from the bank. I promptly went into complete panic and did every stupid thing I could think of; first, I put the engine into neutral; now, without propulsion of any kind, the wind had free rein to do what it liked; I dithered, felt sick, put the engine into forward, then changed my mind and put her into reverse, let go of the tiller and stared horrified back toward the rapidly disappearing lock.

  Totally convinced that we were going to capsize at any moment I finally pulled myself together enough to put Happy into forward and begin the necessary 180-degree turn. It is awe inspiring to find out, first hand, just how much space is needed for a 70-foot boat to turn half circle.

  Eventually, after what seemed an hour but was probably about three minutes, she was pointing the right way again, and I managed to relax. I was quite proud of not killing either myself or Sam and finally pulled into the lock. Geoff, still admiring the architecture of the lock, hadn’t even noticed we were missing and was quite surprised when I appeared from an unexpected direction.

  Still nervous and waiting for my heartbeat to settle, I positioned Happy carefully within the lock, threw a rope around a bollard and awaited the now expected, gentle pull forward as the water escaped from under the hull and lowered you into a dark wet hole giving you a good amount of time to study the slimy, weed-covered stonework while you waited for the forward gates to open. It’s quite nice really, five minutes’ peace and quiet to mull over the happenings in your day.

  Not this time. Geoff stuck the key in the mechanism and, checking to make sure I was ready, turned it. The great metal door started to lift, pulling a huge amount of water from under the boat, Happy leapt forward as though she had been kicked in the butt and smacked her nose against the far door, her back end swinging around as a bubbling tide cascaded out from beneath us. Geoff took one look at what was going on and hit the emergency stop button. The lock door stopped and although water continued to pour down to the next level it soon settled and Happy stopped trying to climb the lock walls.