Frances, steering the motor at the first lock, took the boat in much too fast, reversed the engine too late and crashed into the gates at the other end, sending waves of water slopping over the top and pots and pans and china flying round the cabin. And when Rosalind brought the unbrakeable butty in alongside, also too fast, Prudence, who had flung herself and her rope desperately onto the lock-side to check its headlong charge, dropped the rope so that Aquila, too, tore on and hit the far gates. When she had finally retrieved the rope she made the mistake of tying it to a bollard, as for an uphill lock, so that as the boat sank down, the rope snapped. They did little better at the next lock where the butty rudder came dangerously close to getting hooked up on the stone cill and was only saved by quick action from Pip, who rushed to drop and wind paddles and refill the lock.
That night they tied up at Leighton Buzzard and Pip took them to a pub where she said they might be able to get a hot bath. There was a bathroom with a bath, but the water was tepid, the room icy and the disappointment as bitter as over the fish and chips. They took turns, scrubbing the worst of the dirt off, and hurried back to the warmth of the cabins.
For the next part of the trip things went a bit better. It had stopped raining and they were gradually getting more used to handling the boats, their muscles hardening, their bodies growing stronger. Every day, they learned more things. How to recharge the dead battery which had to be dragged out from under the butty side bed and lugged to the engine room while the newly charged battery was heaved back in its place. How to clean out the bilge pumps and the well-named mud box which filtered water from the cut to cool the engine. The box filled up with a disgusting black slime that had to be scooped out by hand and flung over the edge. Couplings on the shaft had to be regularly checked for loose nuts and bolts and the rest of the shaft inspected. This lay, inconveniently, under the motor cabin floorboards which had to be taken up, a cap unscrewed and the inside rammed with thick yellow grease.
They’d also learned the trick of how to get from one boat to the other, without slowing down. Changing from the motor to the butty was quite easy. You hopped off at a bridge-hole where the cut narrowed and waited for the butty to come along; the reverse was more difficult. It meant getting off the butty at a bridge-hole and racing along the towpath to the next bridge before the motor reached it.
When they were not busy working the boats, they were kept busy with endless domestic tasks – refilling the coal boxes, making up the fires, swabbing away with the rag mop, scrubbing the hatches, polishing the brasses, black-leading the stoves, cleaning fenders and ropes, chopping firewood. And like foreigners in a strange land, they were learning the language. The boaters had their own words for things: the helm was the elum, the top of the butty rudder the ram’s head, the sausage-shaped fenders on the motor’s stern were tip-cats, and so on.
At Fenny Stratford lock they got their rations at the Red Lion shop – tinned milk, cocoa, sugar, tea. They bought some fresh vegetables as well and filled up the four-gallon water cans at the tap. From Fenny there was another long pound of four hours before the next lock and then an iron aqueduct carrying the canal thirty feet in the air over the river Great Ouse which the boaters called the Pig Trough. The parapet on each side was no more than a foot or so high – not nearly enough to stop a heavy boat from going over – and the crossing easily the most frightening part of the journey.
A two-hour-long pound followed to the bottom of the seven locks rising to Stoke Bruerne, and they shortened the butty’s snubber to work their way through them. There was little time to admire the canal-side village – the cottages, the church, the Boat Inn, the fine row of poplar trees along the towpath – before they plunged into the black mouth of the Blisworth tunnel, two miles long. In horse-drawn days, Pip told them, the narrowboats had been taken through the tunnels by leggers – men who lay on their backs and pushed the boats along by walking their feet against the tunnel walls.
They tied up that night at Heyford and were off early the next day working through the seven locks at Buckby. At Norton Junction the canal branched off in one direction towards Leicester, while they turned left towards Braunston, through another long tunnel and then six downhill locks. The canal split in two directions again – right for Coventry and the coalfields and to the left, which they took, for Oxford and Birmingham. There were no more locks until they reached Napton Junction where the canal divided yet again, and they turned onto the Warwick & Napton Canal towards Birmingham and thirty-two more locks spread out ahead.
They were beginning to get quite used to the whole procedure when Pip gave them the bad news that the next fifty-one locks were a different design from the ones before – wider, deeper, with paddles on the side of the lock instead of on the gates, and even heavier balance beams made of iron instead of wood. At Leamington they tied up outside the gasworks, but the smell was worth it for the fish and chip shop close by, which provided not only mountains of chips but big portions of crisp, golden fish, sprinkled with salt and vinegar and wrapped, mouth-burningly hot, in many sheets of newspaper.
At Warwick they filled up the water cans again before they came round the corner to the foot of the Hatton locks, rising before them up the hillside – a giant’s staircase of twenty-one locks to be worked through and suffered through, one after the other, and every single one against them. And it was raining – a misty drizzle that would hamper their vision and make everything slippery.
Pip insisted on them eating before they began the climb, and shared out the lock-wheeling and steering equally between them. It took them more than four hours to reach the top where Prudence crumpled to the ground like a wet paper bag and Frances and Rosalind collapsed like rowers after a race. Pip cooked supper for them that night – her speciality Boat Stew of tinned meat, potatoes, carrots and swedes, all in one big saucepan. But they were too tired to eat it.
An eight-mile-long pound the next day helped them recover from the Hatton locks. The five locks at Knowle seemed almost nothing by comparison, though the winding gear was stiff and the gates so heavy it took two to shift them. Joy of joys, there were no more locks between them and Tyseley where they were to unload. There was, however, Muck Bend which lived up to its name, as Frances learned when she took the corner too fine and sent Cetus straight into thick, slimy mud. Aquila, following dutifully behind, kept going, and her slackening snubber wrapped itself round the motor’s propeller blades. It was just as well, Pip assured them calmly, that they learned to deal with the situation sooner rather than later, since it was bound to happen to them again. It was also just as well that, once they’d succeeded in unravelling the rope from the blades, a pair of boats came by with a steerer who not only gave them a snatch off the mud, but also gave them a smile and a wave as he went. They had learned another lesson: that boat people would help.
Tyseley Wharf, near Birmingham, was ugly and depressing. Trees and fields gave way to tin sheds, factories, warehouses, trams rattling and clanging and urchin faces appearing over bridge parapets to aim spit and stones. The towpath was an evil place, choked with soot and smoke, the roaring foundries beside it like gateways to hell. At the wharf where they tied up, the boatwomen were scrubbing away at their washing, their children playing in the dirt, their dogs nosing through rubbish for scraps of food. Unloading wasn’t due until the next day so they went to the pictures in the evening and ate sausages and chips in a steamy dockside café. That night they listened to big rats scampering across the cabin roofs.
A heavy overnight frost froze the top cloths and the strings, and undoing them for unloading was a long and painful struggle. The boat people, who had somehow undone theirs with ease, watched in silence.
After the steel had been taken off, they spent the afternoon sweeping out the holds, and swabbing down the boats. When they’d finished, Pip broke the bad news that instead of going back the way they’d come and then branching off to Coventry to pick up the coal, they had been given orders to take the Bottom Road. The Bottom Ro
ad, they soon discovered, meant three days of negotiating foul, undredged water and eleven locks oozing with black slime, so narrow they could only take one boat at a time. Cetus went ahead alone while Aquila had to be bow-hauled from lock to lock. They took it in turns – one to steer and one to drag the butty on the end of a long cotton line wound over the shoulder, stumbling along, harnessed like a beast of burden on a towpath black with soot, sharp with cinders and slippery with horse dung. A horse-drawn boat, loaded with coal, met them, and the boatman stopped his horse and let the line sink in the water so that the butty could cross over it.
At Hawkesbury Junction they tied up for the night and took the tram to the public baths in Coventry where they paid ninepence each for a towel, piece of soap and the use of a bath. They stripped off their filthy clothes and submerged themselves in steaming hot water. But the pleasure of being clean again was short-lived, and they might as well not have bothered. Pip had been given orders for them to be loaded the next day at Longford wharf, a few miles away. It was a dreadful place: black coal shovelled and carted and carried by an army of workmen, black dust hanging like a pall, and a traffic jam of motor boats and horse-drawn boats converging in chaos. For two hours, fifty tons of coal avalanched down chutes into the two holds, the boats sinking lower and lower under the weight. When the avalanche finally ceased, the coal had to be spread around until it was evenly distributed to Pip’s satisfaction: an uneven boat was a nightmare to steer. Then they had to sheet up again. In dry weather the side sheets would have been enough to keep the water out of the hold, but this was winter and Pip decreed that top sheets had to go on too. And, before they left, the boats had to be washed clean, the cabins swept out. Washing themselves was the worst job of all. The gritty coal dust clung to their skin, coated their hair, irritated their eyes, tasted in their mouths.
The trip back to London, which would have taken a mere few hours by train, took a week. Seven more days of steering into banks and getting stemmed up on the mud, of snarled-up propellers and underwater snares, of battling with locks, of shredding fingers and gashing limbs and cracking heads, of dirt and mud and frost and wind and rain and such tiredness that they fell asleep the second their heads touched the pillow, and sometimes before.
The coal was unloaded at Croxley paper mills by Rickey and they brought the empty boats back to the lay-by at Bulls Bridge Junction early one evening. When they’d smartened the boats up yet again with more swabbing and scrubbing and polishing, they were free to go home for six days. Six days to sleep and rest and take baths before the second training trip. They packed their bags and took their bedding up to the store.
It was Frances who suggested that the three of them should celebrate their arrival and survival by having a slap-up dinner in London. The head waiter at the Ritz Hotel would remember her from visits with Aunt Gertrude which might be a good thing, considering the way they looked. They washed hands and faces in kettle-warmed water but nothing would remove the ingrained dirt and grease, and nothing could be done about the neglected hair, or the cuts and bruises, or the state of their clothes. Rosalind, alone, cut a certain dash in her breeches and boots, her swirling green cloak, her Robin Hood hat and her silver earrings.
They waltzed boldly through revolving doors into the swanky London hotel – or at least Frances and Rosalind did while Prudence, who had never set foot in such a place, lagged timidly behind. The kitbag, the carpet bag and the shabby suitcase were deposited with the porter and if the head waiter greeting them at the entrance to the restaurant was shocked by their appearance, he didn’t show it. Certainly, he remembered Miss Carlyon . . . and how was her ladyship these days? Had they made a reservation? No? Unfortunately, as Miss Carlyon could see, the restaurant was very full this evening but, if they would wait a little moment, he would see what could be arranged. The arrangement turned out to be a table in a distant corner and to reach it they had to run the gauntlet of the other diners – the evening gowns, furs, jewels, black ties, gold-braided and be-medalled uniforms seated beneath softly shaded chandeliers linked by bronze garlands. An RAF wing commander glanced up as they passed.
‘Good God, Frances! What on earth are you doing here?’
Nine
‘WE’RE HERE FOR dinner,’ she said defiantly. ‘The same as you, Vere. Any objections?’
He’d stood up, barring her path. ‘Since you ask – yes. Have you any idea what you look like, Frances?’
‘Well, we don’t have smart uniforms like you, I’m afraid.’
‘Frankly, I’m amazed they let you in.’
‘They’re not as stuffy as you.’
‘Well, since you are in, you’d better introduce your friends.’
‘When you’ve introduced yours. We don’t know him.’
‘This is Hugh Whitelaw. From my squadron.’
The fair-haired RAF officer, who had also risen, shook her hand. She said curtly, ‘This is Rosalind Flynn, and this is Prudence Dobbs. We’re trainees together.’
Her brother was issuing orders to the head waiter, taking over in his usual bossy way. More chairs were being brought, more places set.
‘Luckily, there’s room for you to join us.’
‘We’re perfectly happy on our own, thank you, Vere.’
‘I dare say, but it’s never a good idea for young girls to dine out unescorted.’ Her brother was still blocking her path to the corner table. ‘People are staring, Frances. I suggest we all sit down as quickly as possible.’
Waiters were stationed behind chairs, her brother immovable, more and more heads turning towards them; she gave way, plonking herself down sulkily. Rosalind sat down, too, followed by Prudence who was pink with embarrassment. Rosalind’s green velvet cloak, Prudence’s matted tweed and her grimy gaberdine were whisked away to be hung up. Starched napkins were flourished and laid across their laps, menus brought, another waiter hovered.
Vere said, ‘What would you all like to drink?’
‘We’d like some champagne, please, Vere. We’re celebrating.’
A pause. ‘Very well. Hugh?’
‘Champagne sounds a rather good idea.’
He looked so clean, she thought. Vere, too. Hair, hands, faces, clothes . . . all scrubbed and shining. Whereas the three of them looked a grubby mess. Greasy hair, crumpled clothes, grime . . . she wondered if they actually stank. Almost certainly, considering how little they’d washed in three weeks. She studied the menu and put it down; Prue, she noticed, was still clutching hers like a drowning man. Her brother leaned across.
‘What would you like to eat, Miss Dobbs?’
Prudence said helplessly, ‘I don’t know. It’s in French, you see.’
‘How about some clear soup to start with? Then lamb cutlets afterwards, perhaps? They’re usually very good here. Or would you prefer the Dover sole?’
Vere could be quite kind when he wanted to be.
‘Have you decided, Miss Flynn?’ Her brother had turned back to Rosalind.
Rosalind’s lips were painted scarlet and her nose carefully powdered, but there was a neat little row of bedbug bites down one cheek and a big streak of oil down the front of her leather jerkin. She had removed the Robin Hood hat and her russet hair, released from its bit of string, looked like an abandoned stork’s nest. The chapped and cracked hand that held up the Ritz menu had black-rimmed fingernails and knuckles skinned raw from wrestling with the stiff nuts on the mud box. She smiled brightly at Vere and said in a loud cockney voice, ‘I’ll ’ave the soup an’ cutlets.’
He dragged his eyes away. ‘Frances? What will you have, then?’
The food was ordered, the champagne opened and poured with a flourish. The RAF officer beside Frances said, ‘What exactly are we celebrating?’
‘Finishing our first training trip.’
‘Training as what?’
She told him and he seemed surprised.
‘I’ve never heard of women doing that. Almost everything else, but not working on the canals. Aren’t the boa
ts a bit of a handful for you?’
‘We manage perfectly well, as a matter of fact.’
‘So, when will you finish your training?’
‘It takes two trips and we’ve just done one of them – steel from the docks up to Birmingham, then Coventry for coal and then back again – it takes us around three weeks because we have to learn as we go along. If we learn well enough, they let us take a pair of boats on our own – when we’ve finished the second trip.’
The Boat Girls Page 10