by Peter Helton
The George looks like the archetypal English pub: ancient (it used to be part of a thirteenth-century monastery), covered in ivy and with wood smoke rising from the chimney. It stands opposite the village church and churchyard and has a resident ghost. What more can you ask? After carrying the bike down the few steps to the forecourt, I left it leaning against a bollard, unlocked since I hadn’t thought to bring a bike lock. By now the excitement of owning a bicycle had waned to the point where I decided not to be upset if someone made off with it while I was inside.
Inside! Give it twenty minutes of wind and rain, throw in some mud, a damp saddle, protesting knee joints and a runny nose and ‘inside’ becomes an idea suffused with the promise of shelter, warmth and human comfort. All of which the George Inn was happy to provide to the solvent cyclist. The place was virtually empty, but it was dry, there was a blazing fire despite the warm day and you could barely hear the howl of the wind through the tiny windows and two-foot-thick walls. After handing me a yard of kitchen roll, taking my order for a pint of Guinness and providing me with a menu, the barman remarked on the remarkable wetness of my attire. ‘You picked a bad day – thundery showers all day. Supposed to get quite stormy later, too.’ When he had finished cheering me up, I sat as close to the fire as was possible without bursting into flame, and while my clothes steamed in the delicious heat, I perused the menu. Which was extensive and took me an entire pint to read through. My problem was that I wanted to eat virtually all of it. Since I found myself in a traditional English country pub, however, I plumped for Asian-Spiced Duck Croquettes followed by the Beetroot, Feta and Horseradish Risotto. Both turned out to be excellent and instilled in me a marked reluctance to leave the fireside just to cycle back to town through the rain. Yet the barman repeated his lugubrious forecast of even worse weather later on, and so I forced my reluctant carcass back out into the rain.
The cracked leather of the ancient saddle had absorbed all the rain water it could and gratefully transferred as much of it as possible to the seat of my trousers from where it progressed by reverse osmosis to my underpants and beyond. It took all but three minutes of towpath cycling to restore me to the sorry state the staff of the George Inn had laboured to cure – wet, aching and grumpy. Imagining Annis floating at this very moment in a tropically heated indoor pool did nothing to cheer me. The wind was at my back now, pushing me along. I got my head down and pedalled furiously. Verity in her narrowboat could have steamed past me wearing nothing but a Victoria sponge cake and I would have neither noticed nor cared. I was the only idiot soul out here, I thought angrily, who hadn’t listened to the weather report. With the rain on my back and anger in my calf muscles, I was making short work of the stretch between the George and Sydney Gardens. I had become more confident too and barely slowed down as I negotiated the low bridges, scattering sitting ducks as I did. The bridge in Sydney Gardens, however, had something more solid than ducks under it. Since I had last passed through it, a homeless man with all his worldly goods had taken shelter on the narrow path under its vaulted span. It was the first real test for the bike’s brakes. And they were useless. They squealed and slipped as I cycled over the edge of the towpath straight into the canal.
There are two types of ‘getting soaking wet’: there’s the metaphorical one you use when you complain about having been rained on and the literal one when you get immersed in water long enough for your clothes to absorb the maximum amount of water they are capable of holding. The latter requires a completely different set of swear words, which the echoing vault of the bridge magnified while I flailed around in the dark water in a panic, trying to stay afloat while my sodden clothes and shoes weighed me down. As I scrabbled for a slimy handhold, the homeless guy tried to help by grabbing me by the hair and yanking on it. It took me a while to find suitable words of gratitude for this. Eventually, I managed to land on the towpath like a wet fish gasping for air.
‘Shit, man, you cycled right in!’ said the homeless man.
‘Nothing gets past you. Thanks for helping me out. For a moment there I thought I was going to drown.’
‘Most unlikely. The canal’s only four foot deep. You could just have stood up, you know.’
This made me feel even more of an idiot. The homeless guy was probably in his fifties, though the street tends to age people rapidly, so he might have been younger. His name was Dan. He had been on the streets for years and, as I found out, he was well organized. His survival kit included a tiny camping stove with a little blue bottle which hissed under a homemade two-handled cooking pot fashioned from a catering-sized tin of baked beans in which he was heating water. With the sunshine cancelled, I now shivered beside the stove while we waited for the water to come to the boil. When it did, he crumbled an economy chicken stock cube into it and stirred it with a homemade spoon. When he offered me a small tinful of the broth, I was truly thankful and told him so. Despite having a most excellent lunch inside me, it was the economy broth, possibly made with canal water, that slowly restored my will to live, but I realized I would have to move on soon if I didn’t want to catch my death. A tiny curve of the front wheel was sticking out of the water, probably buoyed up by the pneumatic tyre. I reached down and yanked the bike out of the water and presented it to the homeless man as a gift. ‘Be warned, the brakes are useless.’ Then I marched off into town. Rain still fell monotonously. At the railway station it managed sufficiently to disguise the true nature of my muddy wetness for a taxi driver to ferry me to my own car while I left puddles in the back of his. With the heater on full, I steamed towards home and my bottle of Laphroaig. I had some serious thinking to do.
If only I could have stopped shivering and throwing up, it would have made it easier. While probably not a ready source of cholera, canal water is nevertheless not recommended for drinking. I had only swallowed one mouthful but apparently that had been enough to turn me inside out. I spent the night in the bathroom, having got tired of running back and forth between bed and toilet bowl. By mid-morning I successfully held down a piece of dry toast. By the afternoon I could hold down a conversation. I called the Bath Boat Hire Company and asked about renting a boat from them.
‘How long did you want the boat for?’ asked the friendly voice.
‘I’m not really sure.’
‘The longest we hire out boats for is a long weekend.’
‘Ah.’
‘And how many people in your party?’
‘It’s just me.’
‘Out of the question. We never hire out boats to single-handed boaters; too much can go wrong, especially negotiating locks. Virtually all fatal accidents on the canals happen in locks. Just one other person would be enough and we’d be happy to accommodate you.’
So much for my only brainwave all day. I called Annis. ‘So I went for a cycle ride,’ I bragged, ‘and a swim.’
Once she had stopped laughing, she professed to be deeply impressed with my new fitness regime. ‘OK, so cycling is not your thing. How about a monkey bike?’
‘What, one of those tiny motorbikes for kids that make you look ridiculous?’
‘Precisely. That would work and it would fit into the Jazz. Tell you what, why don’t you go up to Jake’s, find out whether he has managed to find the parts for my Norton yet and while you’re there ask him? He’s bound to come up with something. But under no circumstances ride the Norton down the towpath. See if he has a little step-through moped you could use …’
‘I haven’t,’ said Jake. ‘What’s more, it’s illegal to ride mopeds on the towpath. The first boater who sees it is going to report you. Anyway, it’s just a shortcut to swallowing more canal water. If you are trying to find a boat, what you need is a boat.’ He was leaning in the door of his workshop, wiping his hands thoughtfully on a fifty-year-old oil rag.
‘I tried to hire one but no luck.’
The day of thunder had passed, the sun was back and everything seemed possible once more. ‘Well, as it happens, I know where you could lay yo
ur hands on one.’
‘With an engine?’ I asked suspiciously. ‘I’m not rowing up the canal.’
‘Of course with an engine; you can’t row a narrowboat.’
‘A narrowboat? You mean like a houseboat?’
‘Indeed. I happen to own one.’
‘You? I didn’t know you had a narrowboat. In fact, I seem to dimly remember your better half poo-pooing the idea of narrowboats, camper vans, caravans and anything else not connected to the national grid. Not to mention sewage system.’
‘All true and well remembered. But I sort of inherited the thing. Remember last April when they found a dead boater in the canal?’
‘Yes, bloke found bobbing in Lock Thirteen. Unlucky for some, as the paper put it tactfully.’
‘That was him – that was Neil. Sally and I had met him on our one and only narrowboat holiday in Wales. We didn’t really know what we were doing and he was single-handed, so we sort of loosely teamed up, did locks together and so on. And you’re right, Sally hated it. Too small, too narrow – I mean, it’s called a narrowboat; she should have expected it. Sally is more of a widebeam, if you’ll pardon the expression …’
‘Not sure she would. How about generously proportioned?’
‘She’d clout you for that, too. Neil and I exchanged postcards and emails and chatted about engines. Neil lived on his boat – he was what they call a continuous cruiser, no fixed berth. He’d always ask when we were going to take our next boating holiday. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wasn’t going to happen. Anyway, all of a sudden he said he’d had enough of the boat life. He was up north at the time and said he was coming down to see me. Then he started saying he wanted us to have the boat. Said it several times. I thought he was going through some kind of bad patch and I’d talk him out of it when he got here, but the day he got here was the day he died. Apparently, he fell off the boat in the lock, knocked himself unconscious on the side of the boat and drowned. Not uncommon, the coroner said. And after all was said and done, and there were no relatives, and they had seen his emails saying he came to give me the boat, the police released it to me. Didn’t know what else to do with it.’
‘Where on the canal is it parked?’
‘Parked? You don’t park a boat; you moor it.’
‘OK, where’s it moored?’
‘It isn’t. The canal people lifted it out of the lock. I’ve got it in storage.’
I looked around at the outbuildings. ‘Where?’
‘Not here, you daft bugger; it’s sixty foot long and we’re ten miles from the canal. It’s on a trading estate in Bristol.’
EIGHT
For two days I had to cool my boating ardour while Jake was busy in his workshop. It was the middle of September and we had uninterrupted sunshine and ice-cream weather; the newspapers were full of the usual talk of an Indian summer. I marvelled at it when Jake drove us in his wine-red MK 2 Jaguar to Bristol, windows wide open.
‘Did you get to see your boating friend before he died?’
‘No, Neil did call me on his mobile, though, only an hour earlier, which made it hard to accept at first that he was really dead. I mean, I know it’s stupid but I kept saying “But I only just talked to him”, I was that shocked. He was going to tie up below the weir, you know, below Pulteney Bridge – that’s what he had been aiming for in all those weeks it took him to come down from the north. He sounded incredibly excited, but not in a good way. A bit hysterical even. And his emails, too, had been a bit weird. “I’ve got to get off this boat” and “perhaps I’ll buy a house in Spain”. He had never talked like that before; he had always given us the impression that boating was his life.’
‘How did he survive on the canals?’
‘Tiny army pension. Got badly injured in a training exercise – invalided out. That’s what he lived on. He said the money wasn’t enough to keep him alive on land so he lived on the boat. A water gypsy. If you don’t have a fixed mooring, you have to move on every two weeks or so. I couldn’t bear living like that, without roots or neighbours, but he said he loved it. Which made it so surprising that he wanted to give the boat away and was thinking of moving to Spain.’
‘Perhaps the weather up north got to him.’
‘Yes, but in one email he talked of buying a house in Spain. What with?’
‘Must have had a windfall.’
‘He didn’t mention it and the police found he was barely solvent. No, it’s a mystery. Oh, here we are.’
Jake turned into a sad little trading estate beside the Feeder Canal where nothing much appeared to be happening in or around the corrugated-roofed buildings, several of which had ‘TO LET’ signs on them. It was hard to believe that we were close to the centre of Bristol; the Floating Harbour was only a mile or so down the road. Between a welding specialist and a signwriting workshop stood three long landlocked shapes propped up on railway sleepers, all narrowboats. Two were partially covered with a multitude of tarpaulins and yellowed plastic sheeting; a third was a mere shell, covered in rustproof paint.
The chap who ‘looked after’ Jake’s boat had a workshop in the same unit as the signwriters, yet I could not quite make out what kind of business his tools, paint pots, work benches, cables and wooden boxes amounted to. His name was Gary. He was a slightly podgy forty-year-old guy wearing a faded orange beanie, denim jeans and jacket, and ancient work boots. He made us tea in mugs so filthy and chipped they would have made Dan the homeless man shiver with revulsion. I just carried the thing around with me without putting my lips to it while we walked up and down admiring the hull of Jake’s boat, sixty feet of rust-pitted blackness. It was called Dreamcatcher. Jake went all misty-eyed over it.
Gary ran his hand along it. ‘Needs blacking again soon, but the hull is in good nick,’ he said as though he was trying to sell it to us. ‘For a boat of this age,’ he added.
‘This age’, as I found out, was circa forty years. I knocked on the steel hull; it sounded extremely solid. Seeing that amount of steel, which is usually hidden by the water, made it appear very heavy to me. ‘How on earth are we going to get it into the water?’ I asked.
‘Oh, the crane is on its way,’ said Gary, checking the time on his mobile. ‘Should have been here by now.’
The crane turned into the yard not two minutes later – a huge lumbering black-and-yellow thing with a telescopic arm strong enough to lift a house. It was less than two hundred yards from the storage site to the water of the Feeder Canal but a sixty-foot load hanging from a crane needs a lot of securing and moving very slowly, as I found out over the next hour and a half of standing uselessly around. Traffic stopped on the Feeder Road that runs alongside the canal for twenty agonizing minutes while the crane slowly swung Dreamcatcher over the canal, with Jake standing in the stern of the boat itself, looking piratical with legs wide apart for balance. The crane driver knew his business and dropped the boat gently on to the water. And lo! It floated and it did not sink. I had already crossed to the other side of the canal via the bridge at Netham Lock so that Jake could throw me a line. I heaved on it and found that the enormous boat moved much more easily than I had expected, considering its size. Dreamcatcher, despite the dippy name, had been painted in classy racing green, with cream trim and black decks and railings. Jake clambered along the side and hopped off with another line and soon had her expertly tied up below the lock-keeper’s cottage. He showed me how to do a rope hitch which allowed me to tie up and untie the boat quickly. I said ‘ah’ and ‘great’ and ‘that’s useful’ and instantly forgot how he had done it because I was far too excited. I couldn’t wait to get on board. Of course, I hadn’t quite told the truth about my narrowboating experience when Jake had asked if I had ever been on one, so when he showed me over the boat, I said ‘refresh my memory’ and ‘remind me how that works’ a lot. He very soon realized I was completely at sea. So to speak.
‘Right, we’ll do this stem to stern, or rather the other way around,’ he said, exasperated at my
ignorance. ‘Just as well it doesn’t take a genius to work a boat. What we’re standing on is the stern deck. You’re lucky – not all boats have one. The railing will stop you from falling overboard every five minutes. Underneath this’ – he stomped his foot on a hatch – ‘is the engine. We’ll get to that later. This’ – he pointed to a polished wooden handle about a yard long at the very back of the boat – ‘is the rudder. You push it to the left and the boat moves right, push to the right and it goes left. These’ – he pointed to a control panel nearby – ‘are your controls. I’ll show you those when we start her up.’
At last I was allowed down a few steps into the inside of the boat. I found I had just a hand’s breadth of headroom above me, and the width, as Jake pointed out, was seven feet and four inches. He moved about the boat as though he had lived on one all his life. It smelled musty and dusty and the sunlight bounced off the grimy windows. The interior was completely panelled with wood, floor to ceiling. ‘Yes, solid oak – that’s how they used to do them, not plywood like in the modern boats,’ he said proudly. The first area we had stepped into consisted of a two-seater sofa on the left, shelves on the right, followed by a stove with a long stove pipe disappearing at an angle through the roof. ‘That’s what heats the entire boat. It’s very efficient. Burns anything.’ Next came the galley. It had everything a kitchen needed, except space. It had a cooker, a small fridge and a Belfast sink. When I idly turned a tap, nothing happened. Jake slapped my hand and closed the tap. ‘Water tank is empty, of course.’
There followed a small dining table with two-seater benches to either side, and then a door on the left. Beyond it the corridor was very narrow and quite dark until Jake opened a door on the right. ‘Shower and khazi in here. Small basin.’ I stuck my head in. Everything in here, including the toilet, seemed to be not quite life-sized and it looked as if the fittings were the 1970s originals. Forward of the bathroom came the bedroom, a queen-sized bed on the left, shelves, a narrow wardrobe and another door, this time on the right. Jake unlocked it and went through; I followed and found myself in a space with steeply sloping sides, a window in each, and a triangular window at the front.