Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Read online

  The very heart, the very centre of our voyage, and we were crouched between threats on a deserted waterfront, among dirt and disappointment. And what should have been the wharf, the heart and centre of Wigan, was a failure and a reproach.

  But the chef and the Chinaman were a lot of fun, and as we sailed away unharmed we concluded that in Wigan you get friendly attention in a public house and will not necessarily be attacked. Perhaps the tourist office can do something with that.

  Or perhaps this from Monica’s write-up in her parish magazine –

  On the Boater’s Christian fellowship list I found All Saints Church up in the town with Holy Communion at 9.30. What a contrast! A beautiful church in wide grounds with flowerbeds. Cream paint and angels everywhere with gilded tips to their wings. A stained glass window by William Morris – four angels surrounding St Christopher as he carried the Christchild. The New English Hymnal full of the dear old hymns I know so well. And the warmest welcome I’ve had all boating year. I went back to the squalor of the canal singing praises. The real Wigan was there in that church among those friendly faces.

  * * *

  It would be a withered soul who would not enjoy a night in a motel with a beautiful spouse, a bottle of local wine, a cut of smoked swordfish, and a joint. We were Picasso’s giants, running in slow motion along a sounding beach which was Monterey beach because it happened in Monterey,15 a long time ago. Lucy was in her basket in the bedroom and sometimes I was here and sometimes I was not here, and I thought What happens if there is a fire?

  Even a few seconds in the fourth dimension do not make good sense when you have to protect your chromosomes for future generations.

  I never took dope since, apart from a quiet drag with Howard Marks,16 the famous criminal and international cannabis smuggler, but that was nearly fifty years later and it doesn’t count because Howard Marks makes his own rules and yours too.

  When we were old we would attempt the East Coast in a narrowboat but now in our youth our great green Ford hummed down the West Coast staying firmly on land. We had joined the Royal Road in Oregon a thousand miles before and we were closing on Los Angeles, to change our lives. We were going to a slum to see a miracle.

  Simon Rodia

  Funny little guy17

  Built him a tower

  Six storeys high

  Launched him a ship

  To hunt down the Lord

  In a desert of slums

  Flowered his word

  Built him a church

  With masts so high

  That they draw down tears

  From a pitiless sky

  Didn’t know what he was doing

  Too mad to care

  He climbed like Jacob

  Through the holy air

  Here the birds sing sweeter

  The air tastes good

  While the gutters of Watts

  Choke with blood

  From piles of junk

  This simple fool

  Made him an image

  Of the human soul

  Watts County, Los Angeles, is wide roads, low tatty houses, gas stations and hamburger joints. The sun blazes on the dust, and the roads reflect it back. Thirty-four people had been killed in riots last summer, and a thousand injured and Watts set ablaze.

  We drove along a littered street and the towers stood like grey pylons ahead – mystic, wonderful. We stopped the car and an African-American gentleman let us in. We were in someone’s back yard.

  Are you an artist? I asked.

  We are all artists.

  As you enter the Watts Towers18 the air seems to cool. The yard has become a ship, bearing us forward and up. Every part of the walls and the structures is encrusted with glass, shells and ceramics, gleaned from the rubbish of the city. A drinking fountain, offering no water for the body, is concrete set with hundreds of green bottle-ends. Just overhead trellises of iron cased with cement are jewelled with tiled fragments, shells and broken glass. The two central towers rise over a hundred feet, linked with interlaced iron bars, all decorated. The towers are circular like the spires of a church.

  I never had a single helper. A million times I don’t know what to do myself. Some of the people say what was he doing? I had it in my mind to do something big, and I did. A million times I was wake up all night.

  I sat down and wept.

  It was so simple – If Simon Rodia, the immigrant who had nothing, could do this – I could do something. I could at least have a go. Do something, do something, Terence my son, and if you can’t find anywhere else where you are happy – do something, like Simon, in your own bloody back yard.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ASTON

  Stone-next-the-Sea

  The spiders were gathering round

  He fastened his teeth in my neck – Dad didn’t say much – The fastest narrowboat they had ever known – Old Joe Guyer pissed in the fire – Gold and silver poured from the heavens – A life-saver’s embrace – An ironic ice machine – The lights going up street by street – No one would publish my poetry – The first jogging club in Europe – The Stone Steeplechase and the Dog Derby

  THEY HAD NOT met for seventy years and the boater had no thought of anything but the cool morning and the greenery and the dogs ahead and the boat that hummed alongside, heading for Manchester. How blessed I am, he thought, all going so well, and a shadow slipped out of the bushes on the towpath behind him and folded its arms around him and whispered Hello again and fastened its teeth in his neck.

  The next day the side of my face was covered in small sores. It had swelled up and I looked like the Fungus Man from Outer Space. No amount of wine would drown the pain.

  You have shingles, said the specialist at the Manchester Eye Hospital – alongside your good eye. You poor chap. You have had chickenpox as a child and the virus hibernates in your nerves and then when you are old it comes back as shingles and infects a branch of your nervous system. In your case the branch affected is the one that runs up your arm and your neck and up the side of your face by your good eye and finishes exactly halfway across your scalp – here, feel where it stops. You are going to have a bad time.

  What is the prognosis?

  Good.

  How long does it last?

  Could be weeks, could be years.

  Doctor, the pain is awful – harsh and raw – and painkillers don’t work. It feels as if some creature from a distant and hostile galaxy, some alien the size of half a pineapple, has fastened itself on the side of my head and is eating out my brains. You have got to give me something or I will lose my reason.

  We don’t know much about specialized pain control – we are an eye hospital. See your doctor back in Stone. There are new drugs.

  I was driven back to Stone clutching my sick bowl. At home my old friend would tighten his grip and I would drop into a chair or sit on the side of the bed trying not to sob.

  The doctor explained that the pain of shingles hits the nervous system direct – normal painkillers can’t touch it, but the pharmaceutical industry had produced special drugs that act like tranquillizers or hypnotics. I looked up one of the new drugs and found that it was used in northern Canada for recreational purposes.

  For the next month I could not eat, or sleep, and my eyes hurt all the time. I lost a stone. Time slowed to nothing as I fought with pain and nightmares.

  In the morning I would stumble over to the window and look out on Stone promenade, with its row of pretty lamps. The sea was always calm and shining and the sand was clean on the little beach. Ripples lapped on it slowly. There was never anyone around, because it was winter – no shops, just lawns and beds planted ready for the first warm days. There were no birds. I looked out, following the inlet towards the ocean, letting my eye run along the hills and headlands, and forgot the pain for a moment.

  In the bathroom the spiders were gathering. Not quite spiders, a bit more like centipedes, the size and shape of large paperclips. They ran around the bowl and up th
e walls and across the carpet, and when I went back to bed they came up from around my feet towards me. But when I stared at them they backed away.

  My mother came to see me, and my dad. Mum was very chatty, though worried about the shingles. My dad looked a bit waxen, and didn’t say much, but as he had been dead for twenty years I shouldn’t complain.

  Do you realize you are going mad? asked Monica. You have not made any sense for ten days. Spiders, and the duvet coming up at you with lizard heads. Stone-next-the-Sea. Talking to your parents. You are raving. When I came back from handing over the boat to Roger and Dave you were lying on the floor shouting. I was terrified.

  I must have gone to sleep, I said, and then the pain woke me and it had gone dark and I couldn’t remember where I was and the pain was awful.

  Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.1

  Our friend Dave came to visit – my mate had those pills, he said, new ones, same as you. Sent him bonkers.

  We read the leaflets from inside the pill boxes. Side effects – seeing, hearing, or feeling things that are not there, confusion, depression, swelling of the extremities, incontinence, impotence, farting. We flushed the pills down the lavatory except those that they used in northern Canada. (Canadians are generally moderate people.) Stone soon returned to its place as one of the towns in the UK furthest from the sea and the spiders disappeared (I rather missed them) and the lizard heads too and my mum and dad returned to their reward in heaven.

  The pain? It was worse for a time and then it eased a little. Six months later it still hurts and I can write for only an hour a day. The specialist said my eyesight had returned to twenty twenty. I thought you had to have two eyes to be twenty twenty, but twenty twenty sounds pretty good to me and I am not complaining.

  And the boat – Roger and Dave got her back safely. I think they may have visited a public house or two on their way and enjoyed the trip. They said the PM2 was the fastest narrowboat they had ever known, like running on Teflon, and she leaves little wake. Roger said he had made a list of design faults and would send it on to us. It hasn’t arrived and that would have been an example of British irony. He meant to say there was nothing much wrong with the PM2, and we think he may be right.

  So she lies in the lovely new Aston Marina in Stone, on our favourite stretch of canal, waiting for the winter to pass and the voyage to York to begin.

  * * *

  Dr Lewis’s chair was an important chair, black leather with chrome, and his office was important too; wide and shadowy. Dr Lewis himself was pretty important as well – the principal of the Stoke-on-Trent College of Technology. He was small and pink with white hair, like a prawn. Old Joe Guyer pissed in the fire,2 he said.

  The fire was too hot so he pissed in the pot, I replied.

  We both chanted –

  The pot was too round so he pissed on the ground

  The ground was too flat so he pissed on the cat

  And the cat ran away with the piss on his back!

  Was Joe Guyer around when you were there? asked Dr Lewis, when he had stopped laughing.

  Yes, for a while, and then he died. We used to look in through his windows at the corner of Milton Terrace. Awful mess.

  No harm in Joe Guyer.

  I wonder did someone look after his cat?

  You must have come to Pembroke Dock Grammar School in the forties, said the doctor. Long time after me. Basil Davies was your uncle, wasn’t he? Bit of a boyo. He did the funeral arrangements for the firemen who died at the tanks. I remember how upset he was, although he was an undertaker. But everyone was upset – they were only young chaps. Look, Mr Darlington – we can’t pay anything like you are earning with Lever Brothers. But a senior lecturer works only twelve hours a week. There are three months of holidays. And we quite understand you want to do three years and then be a writer. There will be an interview with the councillors and the head of the Business Department. Marketing people are not easy to find. How serious are you about a post here?

  I’m looking for a house. Where is the best area to live?

  I live in Stone – very pretty, seven miles down the road. Last twitch of the Pennines before the plains of the Midlands and Cheshire. Twenty-minute drive. No traffic problems in Stoke-on-Trent, of course – it’s a linear city.

  And a dirty city, I thought, and a dying city.

  As I left the dark office Dr Lewis called – The ground was too flat so he pissed on the cat.

  And the cat ran away with the piss on his back, I called back.

  Dr Lewis fell off his chair.

  We couldn’t afford a house in Stone so we bought one in Walton, which is the area alongside for people who can’t afford a house in Stone. The roads were not yet made up and the houses were made of cardboard but they were roomy and our bedroom on the hill looked down the Trent Valley towards Stafford. Lucy learned to walk in the garden and we awaited our second child.

  The countryside was so green that the light itself was green. The air was wet and soft. The hills were real hills but not big enough to loom or threaten. Each tree was a work of art and often set in generous space. The sun sank more slowly than in London, with displays of duck-egg blue and rose unmatched in any oil painting. When the evening sun gilded the rain, gold and silver poured from the heavens.

  We wandered enchanted – we wanted to consume the scenery, to possess it utterly, to know every path, every view.

  At the North Staffordshire College of Technology I taught at several levels, beginning with the dispossessed – HND students who had failed to get to university. I tried to cheer them up with humour – their sad faces broke my heart. In the lunch hours I would go to Cauldon Flower Park.

  A seed floats through3

  With the sun in its hair

  Between the trees

  In Hanley Park

  God, his touch as sure as ever

  Washes the sky with superb attenuated blues

  And with his other hand

  Fires the bare bushes with sheets of yellow flowers

  I developed my own course for managers. I had no business degree and my consumer marketing experience did not transfer well to manufacturing industry, but I blundered on, relying on workshops and conferences and export missions. Marketing was in fashion and I won a lot of consultancy work. Not from Stoke – a swamp for the dying trees of the pottery industry – but from Birmingham, Manchester, Crewe. I was approached by the Department of Education, who wanted me to go to Harvard.

  My head of department was a real gent and sometimes I would see Dr Lewis around the college. The fire was too hot, he would shout.

  I put together a group of lecturers from my college and Keele University. We called ourselves Research Associates, and carried out market research jobs, mainly for my consultancy clients. On this frail craft when my three years was up I launched out to enrich the canon of English poetry.

  * * *

  The wind came across Stone’s new marina like a knife. Winter was here – an inverted Tupperware bowl for sky and the frozen spire of Aston church could not pierce it. We were not far from the field and the sheep and the dread pool where my hooligan dogs had disgraced me a year ago. As for the farmer, may flights of angels4 bear him home from the pub and roost on his roof.

  Aston Marina is new. It has everything you would dream of in a marina and one or two ideas of its own. There are two basins, each with a hundred pontoon berths. It has a humpback bridge. It has a farm shop that sells olives and smoked cheese and a bistro with Peroni, which is the next best thing to beer. There is a round platform where you can sit and do nothing and watch the boats doing nothing, and little Cedar Houses where you can go and mess about with your girlfriend. The marina staff will lay down their lives for you.

  One afternoon I was manoeuvring the boat and Monica and the young Dockmaster were holding ropes. They were pulling the boat in when the rope came off the cleat and both were thrown into the water, which is deep. Monica brought into play the technique of treading water
that she had learned before we crossed the Channel, and was just about staying afloat. The Dockmaster made no attempt to regain the pontoon but turned towards her and took her in a life-saver’s embrace and paddled with her to safety.

  We had not been to the PM2 for two months. The shingles in its fury had kept us at home. Now on this freezing day we reached the boat and heaved the dogs inside. They hate the boat and today it was sepulchral – cold and wringing damp. There are few colder places than a cold boat – it takes three days to warm one up. It feels damp, said Monica.

  And indeed twenty degrees of frost in December had smashed all the plumbing fixtures and the water tank was empty and the bilges were full and the cabin floor by the bed was squish squash.

  We set about reclaiming our second home – pumps, dehumidifiers, stove, fan heaters, a giant American fan, the central heating, and after a month it was habitable again.

  Time to install the ice machine.

  We had obtained at Christmas a book about cocktails.5 Cocktails were once considered a sophisticated way to drink and reading the cocktail book you get a feeling for our Art Deco past. Many cocktails have stories attached – like Pink Gin, which relies on bitters found in a cupboard in a ship’s surgery. In the thirties new cocktails were discovered and noised abroad and talked about as if they were more than a way of getting drunk before dinner.

  Most cocktails taste sweet today, and I cannot understand the habit of shaking them with ice – you leave half the drink in the ice. In our household you have them in a glass with ice added. Not that many of our friends will drink them anyway.

  We built up a store of rather exotic spirits to support our cocktail hobby and look forward to six thirty when we can choose from our cache of vermouths and bitters and spirits and conjure up tonight’s ice-cool treat. But on the boat, on the super-efficient PM2, we have no freezer compartment in the fridge.