by Marie Browne
Like Charlie, Amelia and Huw had some comments to make about the state of the boat when they arrived, and were understandably not too ecstatic when they realised this was not going to be a weekend’s holiday and they were expected to actually do something to help us out. We all set off toward the builders’ merchants. It’s not as if you can park a boat right outside a shop, well not in Ely anyway, so there was an approximate ten-minute walk to get the wood, which Geoff said would be an ‘easy saunter’, even with Huw and himself carrying five lengths of 12-foot by 2-inch by 8-inch pine between them.
It didn’t sound easy to me, so Amelia and I left them to it and took Sam shopping; a good excuse to drink coffee and have a chat. Arriving back about an hour later, we were a little concerned to find that Geoff and Huw were still out. Amelia tried to ring Huw but there was no answer and we hung about in the boat waiting to find out what had happened. Another half an hour and there was a thump, a groan and the sound of voices. I stuck my head out of the door and was relieved to see Geoff loading the wood onto the top of the boat.
‘Where’s Huw?’ I asked.
Geoff nodded toward the ground and grinned. Poor Huw was flat on his back on the grass and breathing hard.
‘Tough trip?’ I asked.
‘No, not really,’ Geoff laughed. ‘These teenagers have no stamina.’
I’m not sure whether or not teenagers have stamina, but what I am sure of is that Geoff and I have toughened up considerably since starting this trip. I can now carry a 25kg bag of coal on my shoulder, from the car, up the flood defences and down a flight of steps. In my previous life, I would have been lucky to get it off the ground.
Geoff definitely has more lumpy bits (more bruises and bits missing as well), but the accumulation of muscle and good health is most noticeable; it’s amazing what you take for granted living in a house, a simple thing such as bringing in a week’s shopping is now an exercise in weight-lifting over distance. Gone are the days when you leave your car boot open and just scuttle backwards and forwards with one small bag in each hand.
With the wind blowing rain into your face, you only want to make one trip, four bags in each hand, out of the car park, up the road, a three-minute walk over the flood defences (usually in the dark) then down the other side, and a logistics exercise trying to get all the bags of shopping off the bank and into the boat without dropping anything in the water. Every single simple job takes far more effort. The silver lining to this cloud? More exercise, better health, actual muscle, greater stamina and weight loss. There are also: wet feet, mud covering everything and a whole new range of swear words from which to choose – ah, the good life!
Little things mean so much more. The wood that Huw had sweated and griped over made the most fantastic set of steps I had ever seen – they weren’t particularly pretty to look at, being plain, functional and over-engineered like most of Geoff’s creations, but having those steps meant that we could just walk down to the boat without the death defying slide, fall and drop that was rapidly becoming the bane of our lives. In the dark, the whole exercise had been doubly dangerous.
The day the steps were completed, we treated ourselves to four small, solar-powered, garden lights which we positioned, two at the top and two at the bottom, one at each corner of the steps. Standing in the gathering darkness, we watched them come alive and light our path – it was magical; no fancy light display ever received a better reception.
Herbert particularly liked them, as they warmed in any small amount of sun, and he would sit for hours soaking up that warmth and guarding ‘his steps’ from the hated dog next door. New neighbours had pulled up about a week previously, and Dion and Charlie brought with them a spaniel puppy called Jake who, quite frankly, was a ball of over-friendly energy. He just never stopped – how they put up with him in a confined space I’ll never know – but for all his energy he certainly didn’t have a mean bone in his body.
Herbert took one look at Jake’s obvious, frivolous youth and abundant energy and loathed him on sight. He would guard the steps, lifting his head as Jake approached, attempting to fix him with a gimlet stare and snarling the dog equivalent of ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’. With one wall-eye and only three teeth, he didn’t look nearly as menacing as he thought he did. As Jake passed by, Herbert would wait until he was level, then would leap up, hair afluff, and scream at him, so it was slightly ironic that his much loved and guarded steps caused his next major dunking.
It was a beautiful morning, cold, with a weak sun that caused the frosted banks to glitter. Sam and I had decided to take Herbert out for a drag, thinking it might be one of the last sunny days that we would see. So, muffled up in coats, wellies, hats and gloves, we had been walking for about ten minutes when Herbert did his usual trick of flopping over on to his side and playing dead, which means ‘I’ve had enough; I want to go back to my nice warm bed.’
Sam was complaining about cold feet and I really couldn’t be bothered to argue with either of them, so we turned and headed for home. I gave the lead to Sam to hold, as neither of them moved very fast. However, as soon as Herbert realised where we were headed he leapt up and shot off ahead, his extendable lead whirring as he bounced through the long grass with Sam crashing along in his wake, giggling furiously.
He stopped and kindly waited at the top of the steps for us to catch up, then took off again. The steps being comparatively new, Sam and I were still negotiating them with care and probably didn’t move as fast as Herbert was hoping we would. So when he jumped for the back of the boat, Sam was still at the top of the steps.
The lead reached the end of its roll and Herbert reached the end of his tether ... literally. He was jerked, cartoon-like, back in mid air; Sam was pulled forward down the steps and I grabbed his hand in an effort to prevent a headlong fall. I held my breath and lurched us both toward the boat, in the vain hope that Herbert would still be capable of some forward momentum. No such luck. Straight down and into the river; again. Making sure that Sam was on flat ground, I rushed down the steps and hauled Herbert out by the lead. It was at that moment that a man walking his own dog along the flood defences stopped and studied poor, dripping, freezing Herbert dangling from his lead.
‘I didn’t realise there were dogfish in this river,’ he calmly stated. ‘What are you using for bait?’ Oh ha ha bloody ha.
With the steps and the new gangplank in place, the next job was to install our wonderful and hideously expensive new wood-burner. We had purchased a Morso Squirrel, having heard good things about them. This wonderful contraption had been sitting (cold) in the boat for about a month, and I was beginning to get tetchy about the whole thing.
Geoff had been putting off the installation, knowing that he would have to cut a circular hole in the top of the boat for chimney access. So, as usual, we had faffed about, putting down the tiled stand for it and arguing about where to locate it and so on. But we had got to the point where there was no logical reason to put it off any longer. With our building problems in the bathroom and the issues we were experiencing with the central heating, we were honestly expecting something horrible to happen and were quite amazed when the whole thing went off without a hitch.
Geoff measured where the flue was to go, drilled a pilot hole, and then cut a circle out with a jigsaw (he actually went through about six blades, the metal on the roof of a narrow boat is pretty thick), attached chimney to flue, flue to stove, sealed around it and that was that, completely painless.
With winter breathing down your neck, a roaring fire is great on so many levels. Obviously it is warm, but it is also living and moving and creates a homely glow and a great noise. It added a whole new level of luxury to a boat that, apart from a wonderful bathroom, had nowhere near enough.
A good wood-burner can really kick out some heat and, within days, we had worked out how to bank it overnight, ensuring that even when we woke up early, the lounge area was warm and inviting. We had actually managed to get it all instal
led and working two days before Charlie’s next visit was due – aha changes that could be seen and felt; a weekend of approval, how nice.
Chapter Nineteen
Christmas
AS I AM SURE I have said before, Geoff is a man of lists; he likes to have a plan. Unfortunately, we were now so far off our original plan, we had to sit down one evening and completely write a new one, and that sort of thing just upsets him. He kept veering back to the original plan and I had to ‘look’ at him for a while, until he concentrated on the new one.
We were also beginning to understand why we had been told time and time again that it was a bad idea to live on a narrow boat while you are restoring it; there are just too many problems, especially when children are involved. We had discovered a whole list of things that are problematic with a child: there’s the school run; there’s the fact that at the end of the working day everything has to be cleared before Sam sets foot back into the boat as he can do a fair amount of damage to himself and his surroundings with power tools, especially when he’s trying to ‘help’; there’s the fact that living on a boat means just that – living – quality time with your child, nutritious meals at regular intervals, going out, friends, birthday parties, etc. All the ‘stuff’ that goes on in normal life doesn’t stop just because your parents have fallen out of the sanity tree and hit every branch on the way down.
We tried very hard to keep firmly in mind that Sam never asked for this, he never wanted it, and he had given us very little in the way of trouble about it, a fact for which I will be forever grateful. So these were our excuses why, with two weeks to go before Christmas, we still only had one room completed.
Geoff had built a new sofa in the saloon where we could sit by the fire. It was an ingenious thing which lifted and moved, revealing compartmentalised storage space; there are obviously times where being a pedantic, obsessive compulsive is an asset. With the new sofa, which had been installed a little to the left of the front doors, the original bathroom space had become a distant memory and we had finally reached a point where we knew the upheaval was going to become vast and poor Sam would be moved about the boat like a pawn in an extreme chess match.
The new layout of Happy would mean that the old kitchen, which was at the very rear of the boat, would become our main bedroom, one of the old bathrooms and half the next cabin had already been made into the new bathroom, the other half of that cabin and half of the next one would be merged together to make Sam’s new bedroom (half of which we were currently sleeping in), the next three cabins were scheduled to become an open-plan kitchen, dining and lounge space (Sam was currently sleeping in the first of these). So, the dilemma was: how to move people around to give them some living space while each of these rooms was being destroyed and walls were being moved.
It was finally decided that we would start with Sam’s room. We did this for two reasons – firstly, it was in the middle of the boat and we figured that we could work out to each side; secondly, and probably the more important, was that it would give Sam a place of his own where he could escape the noise and fuss that was consuming the rest of the boat. There was also the odd little room right at the very front of the boat, but as we hadn’t come up with a decent use for that yet, we decided to just leave it as a nice warm ‘snug’-cum-television room, yet another place that Sam and his toys could escape to, without being in danger of having something fall on him.
But, as it was only two weeks to Christmas, we convinced ourselves that it would be better to wait until the New Year before starting anything major. We were away in Cumbria for the best part of the holiday and then, moving back down the country, were due to visit my parents in the Midlands. There seemed no point at all in starting anything new.
We spent the next week filling Happy with tacky fairy lights that flashed and changed colour; we also managed to find the smallest Christmas tree in the world, I think the sad-looking little thing only stood 12 inches high. We over-decorated it and balanced it on a box. From the outside, and with the curtains open, Happy looked like a floating brothel. Sam loved it and would curl up under a patchwork quilt in the front cabin listening to a Christmas carol CD and watching the lights flash.
I have never faced a Christmas with so little money. With three children to find presents for, Geoff and I set a firm budget, decided to forego presents for the two of us and just concentrate on the kids.
Amelia, although disappointed that this year wasn’t going to be full of useless, expensive presents, each one forgotten and cast aside in the excitement of opening the next, seemed to understand and accepted our reasoning. I was so proud of her when she tentatively asked for a new coat, but I felt really sad as well. I wanted to buy them rubbish, I wanted them to have the piles of useless glittering presents that they had come to expect. Damn it all, I wanted the piles of useless glittering presents that I had come to expect.
I spent a miserable Saturday afternoon Christmas shopping in Cambridge and, after spending a couple of hours battling with the rabid, unhappy shoppers and another hour battling with equally rabid but more homicidal than unhappy drivers on the A10, I squelched over the darkening flood defences with a scant few bags, a headache and a very heavy heart.
As I approached the boat, I noticed how pretty she looked with the lights twinkling in the front cabin; the fog gathering around the windows changed colour with the reflected lights, giving Happy her own front-end aurora borealis; the scent of wood smoke wafted toward me through the damp air and I could hear Sam and Geoff, singing loud, mostly off-key, carols. With me out of the way for the day, they had been packing up the books left by the previous owners to make room for our own and had taken them to a second-hand book store. They had made more in book sales than I had spent on presents, so they were righteously happy when I clambered in through the door.
Over the next couple of days, Sam and I had a fantastic time making Christmas cards on our wobbly table. By the time Charlie arrived on Saturday, we had a complete range of glittery, tasteless, blobby and unidentifiable cards. These we made envelopes for and sent them on their way to unsuspecting friends and family. With Charlie’s help, we spent that weekend making fudge and hijacking a friend’s cooker to bake Christmas biscuits and other poorly shaped goodies. It was a lovely weekend; we were all sticky, glitter-covered and felt slightly sick from too many ‘taste tests’.
I was surprised to find that, when pushed, the kids didn’t actually want anything much for Christmas; Charlie wanted some roller skates and Sam a new computer game. They were far happier just puddling around making things, laughing, throwing things at each other and making a mess. We discovered that Sam can really cook and Charlie has a superb eye for package design. By the time Sunday evening rolled around, they both plonked themselves onto the sofa, next to a huge pile of homemade presents that we intended to give to the family. Exhausted, and even after a bath, still slightly glittery, they both proclaimed it the best weekend ever.
Christmas and New Year sped past. It was strange to spend time in a house again and I found myself staring out of the window, missing my early morning dose of fish lips in the mist. I also found myself automatically throwing the toast crusts out of the window; luckily my mother thought that I was feeding the birds.
‘We do have a bird table, dear,’ she grouched, as she rushed around sweeping them away from her immaculate patio.
Within days, it seemed, Sam was back at school and we were faced, once again, with the plan. The weather was cold, wet and grey. Snuggled up together in front of the fire, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do anything more than make tea and sit around discussing what we ought to be doing.
As we were retiring to bed after yet another fruitless evening of watching mind-numbing rubbish on the telly, Sam woke up from a nightmare and, as he was unwilling to be consoled, I settled him in bed with Geoff and prepared to sleep in his room for the night.
I couldn’t get comfortable – the whole bed felt clammy and damp. Putting this down to Sa
m being frightened and probably a bit sweaty, I didn’t really give it much thought, but it felt so horrible that, eventually, I decided to get up and change the sheets.
Stripping Sam’s bed down was always a bit of a pain as the mattress had to be standing on its side to enable the sheet to be put on, so, at two in the morning, I was buried under a heavy mattress struggling to replace a fitted sheet. I lifted it up on to its side and, leaning it on the wall, bent down to pick up the sheet. As I began to stand up the mattress toppled and landed across my back and shoulders.
It didn’t hurt, but it was absolutely soaking. The whole underside of the mattress was completely sodden, and turning the main light on to get a better look I noticed that the wooden board that made up the mattress base was also covered in water; it had obviously been like this for some time as dark patches had appeared on the underside of the mattress and it had a mouldy, musty smell. I picked the whole thing up and, after dragging it through the boat, slung it as far as I could down the gangplank, leaving it in the dark to be dealt with in the morning.
Grimacing and trying not to give in to the need to wash my hands in Lye, I wandered into our bedroom and poked Geoff awake. I dragged him into Sam’s room and showed him the still soaking but mattress-less bed base. He decided that, as the base was solid, the moisture had nowhere to go and no way to evaporate and this had probably been building up for ages. He was far more sanguine than I about the whole thing and, yawning, gave me a kiss, assured me that we would deal with it in the morning, and staggered back to bed; I slept on the sofa.
The mouldy bed pushed us into action again. The next morning we examined all the mattresses and found each one to be in the same condition as Sam’s. I was amazed that we hadn’t noticed this before, then had minor hysterics and refused to sleep on any of them.