Narrow Margins (8 page)

All dressed up and ready for a ‘relaxing' evening, the boys boiled out of the boat and hung about looking menacing. Sam chose this point to take an evening stroll as well; it took him all of two minutes to find a soul-mate in the shape of an 18-year-old lad called Jes with more tattoos and piercings than I have ever seen on one person before. Watching them closely, there was a sharp intake of breath from both Geoff and myself when Sam happily poked Jes in a lip piercing, but there was no explosion and after that they spent a happy half hour discussing each piercing and tattoo in depth:

‘How much did that one hurt? Does it go right through?'

The youth workers, after watching them both for a while, smiled and explained that Jes had a little brother who he had been missing, so he was probably enjoying himself, and we could see that Sam certainly was. The pile of clothing and the sounds of pained awe from Sam grew as Jes unveiled more and more of his coloured or pierced flesh. Jes was down to his shorts, when, laughing at something Sam had said to him, he looked up and caught my eye. I raised my eyebrows at him. He blushed and, looking down at himself, called a halt to the proceedings; I felt he had more to show, but had decided to keep it all under wraps for my sake.

I was very grateful to him as I was unsure I could have coped with the subsequent questions from Sam who was obviously in complete awe and had found a hero. I listened to him cataloguing Jes's decorations: ‘I'm going to have one of those, and one of those, and one of those ...'

It was at this point we discovered the first of our ‘forgotten items'. Trying to fill Happy's tank with our hose, we found that we were missing a specific nozzle that would attach our hose to the tap. Luckily the youth workers came to our rescue and lent us theirs.

Since we had managed to reach the mooring much faster than expected, we decided to press on. As we waved goodbye and headed toward the top lock, their lost boat turned up with the occupants in fine form, waving, grinning and shouting loudly; ecstatic that they had caught up with the other part of their little band, but even in these high spirits they were quite happy to stand around and help us with our first lock.

Watching the harassed youth workers rushing about, trying to stop the high-spirited lads from pushing each other into the canal, it struck me that it was an unlikely crowd to restore my faith in human nature after the earlier confrontation; but restore it they had. Maybe if there had been people like these long-suffering and ever-hopeful youth workers in Mr Blobby's past, his current personality might never have existed at all.

At the bottom of the flight of locks, a cold wind had picked up and it had started to rain. We found the first place into which we could drive a mooring stake and there we stayed, snug in our warm boat, listening to the wind, rain and the occasional grumble of thunder.

Mooring up on a whim had seemed very romantic at the time and it was only when we poked our heads out of the boat first thing the next morning that we found that we had moored about 50 yards away from a bend in the M1. Sticking our heads out of the boat, we were buffeted by the roar of the traffic and deduced that it may not have been thunder at all. But the previous night's weather, real or motorised, was completely forgotten as we settled down to make a full cooked breakfast only to discover that we had forgotten to bring a can opener.

Chapter Nine
A Can Opener – a Can Opener – 
My Kingdom for a ...

S
EPTEMBER
10
DAWNED BRIGHT
and blue, filled with the promise of a completely lock-free day. However, the sunshine lasted for exactly 20 minutes before the rain, feeling it hadn't quite expressed itself adequately the night before, decided to return for an encore. Geoff clattered off down the boat to wade through our boxes in search of waterproof clothing, and I approached the diesel hob with some trepidation. Half an hour later, life on board Happy was ... not.

Geoff had worked out that we had carefully packed all the waterproof clothing in a box, marked it up with fluorescent ink and then just as carefully failed to read it and had stuffed it into storage with, no doubt, other carefully marked-up boxes containing things we needed; the can opener had probably climbed in by itself just to irritate me. I had had a futile 30 minutes trying to get our newly ‘fixed' hob to light, then stay alight, and then stop howling, and I had also cut myself trying to get into a can of cheap beans with a chisel and hammer.

‘What's going on?' Geoff yelled at me over the screaming of the hob. Biting down another curse, I stopped hopping around the kitchen in pain and waved my bleeding hand at him in a complete snit.

‘This stupid cooker won't light and then when it finally does light, it just makes this horrible noise. I thought those two idiots had fixed it – what the hell's the matter with it?'

‘I don't know,' Geoff yelled back over the banshee-like howling, ‘I'm not a
cooker
engineer.' The howling reached new heights and I took my typical line with technology and started thumping it with a wooden spoon. Geoff reached past me and just turned it off, then wrestled the spoon out of my grasp and held it out of reach. A diesel hob does not turn off quickly due to the glow plug; it should just gently cool down and then turn itself off completely. This one just screamed until it had no more energy and then whimpered out into oblivion.

As the noise dwindled away, Geoff and I stood, alternately staring at the hob and glaring at each other. Sam wandered into the kitchen with a pile of Lego.

‘I'm hungry,' he announced.

‘Tough,' both Geoff and I snapped. Sam, not at all sure why he was being shouted at, looked up from whatever fantastic monster he had been building, took one look at my blood-covered face (I had used my cut hand to push my hair out of my eyes while shouting at Geoff), burst into tears and rushed off down the boat. Geoff hurried after him to apologise and assure him it wasn't his fault and I went into the bathroom to find a mirror and remove the incredible amount of horror-film-type gore that had plastered itself to my forehead; we had muesli for breakfast.

About an hour later, the rain had abated enough for Geoff to don a normal coat and head us off toward Bugbrooke. We took turns at the tiller for about an hour each while the other either tried to unpack some more boxes, or blackmail Sam to come out of the half-emptied box.

As it was lock-free, the morning passed with very little of note. The countryside would have been pretty if it hadn't been sulking under grey skies and moisture-laden air. The weather couldn't make up its mind so it stayed in limbo – one of those classic English days that just sits there and, imitating a lot of people, irritates you with its indecision and grey apathy.

At about one o'clock we pulled into Bugbrooke. Geoff had noted from his map that about a mile away, in the village itself, was a small shop where we should be able to replenish our dwindling stock of fresh food and, we hoped, obtain a can opener, thus enabling access to our huge stock of canned goods which weren't dwindling at all. Now that I was terrified of losing a limb and had condemned the hob, we were really down to microwave meals which was far from ideal.

The walk from the canal into the village was pleasant and refreshing. Sam, denied a steady downpour in which to get wet, made up for it by leaping gleefully from puddle to puddle.

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, did 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.