Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Read online

  Monica can work the auctions on the internet and soon an ice machine arrived in a cardboard box. It was expensive and the size of a small fridge. We filled it with water and pressed its buttons and it whizzed and clanked and hummed and rattled and after a long time brought forth a handful of caterpillar-shaped pieces of ice. The mountain has laboured, I said, and brought forth a mouse.6

  We found room for the ice machine in the bedroom on the PM2. It’s a ridiculous machine, said Monica. Our friends will mock us.

  We can tell them it’s an ironic ice machine, I said, to provide laughter and a talking point, no serious purpose, no good for anything. The PM2 – the boat with an ironic ice machine and two ironic whippets.

  Jim and Jess and I were in a corner of the Star, waiting for the winter to end and treating my disease with a couple of pints and two bags of scratchings between three and this old chap came in. By God, he said to his friend, we had some parties. Most weekends it seemed. In each other’s houses. We lived in Marlborough Road. The music, the music – sixties, when the music was best. Home brew of course. Much cheaper than pubs and off-licences. And strong! And the pretty wives, always up for a dance and cuddle. Yo ho, that was the stuff! Wonder if they do it still.

  I thought – That was the next street to us. It was certainly going on in our street too. I bet it was going on all over the country. The lights going up, street after street, people liberated from the fifties, able to afford alcohol, hooray hooray, party after party, dancy dancy, hold me sailor, squeeze me tight.

  Making your own wine was a way of consuming the countryside, its smell, its colours, its wetness, its heat. The crispness of dandelions, the blood of the elderberry, the grip of the crab, the drowsy elderflower. I would as soon have a glass of Monica’s elderberry wine as any beaker full of the warm south.7 I remember how proud Monica was when she got a letter into the Amateur Winemaker, and I remember the home brew magazine where each picture of the editor showed him fatter and fatter, then he died.

  Whether it was the parties or the spirit of the times I don’t know but all our partying neighbours became very close. Everyone joined the local drama group. We would go on holidays together.

  Associated with our less than orderly evenings there was a certain amount of jiggery-pokery as sex moved with clumsy haste from being illegal to being obligatory. Monica and I would flirt cheerfully with our beautiful neighbours but a Welsh low church background fits you ill for adultery. And those who strayed did not seem happy about it.

  But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,8

  Yea, all the time, because the dance was long

  * * *

  One of our neighbours came across with a Sunday Times magazine. There are poets, in Liverpool.

  Roger McGough was supervising his class when I walked in. He looked at my poetry and asked if I would like to read with him and his mates that evening.

  It was a cellar and there were a hundred people. Roger read, and Adrian Henri, and Brian Patten, and there was some jazz. Then me.

  I read a few pieces about Stone and then some animal poems.

  I am a fish9

  And I live in the wash

  Of waters that pour

  Over the weir

  Where my body ends

  My head begins

  Oh I’m smooth and I’m sharp

  Like a bullet with fins

  I’m a real work of art

  But I have been told

  Although I’m so sharp

  I’m a little bit cold

  I was recalled for a second go later in the programme.

  I am a rook9

  And I live in an oak

  I’m black you know

  From beak to toe

  All I can say

  Is caw caw caw

  I suppose in a way

  I’m a bit of a bore

  The Liverpool Poets were charming. Brian Patten gentle and withdrawn, Roger the steadying hand, and Adrian bumming a lift.

  We drove around Liverpool most of the night, stopping here and there and finishing in a party. Adrian said they had become famous a few days ago and they were off to London and would I like to come. But I was not writing their sort of poetry and I had three kids.

  Back home no one would publish my poetry. Encouraging notes written on rejection slips were fine, but they were written on rejection slips. And after a while I had said all I wanted to say celebrating Stone and its countryside, my main theme.

  Driving home along the A34 I would see his face, long and white, in my headlights, and his shining eyes and his flapping shirt and white legs as he laboured up the hill and he was a moth transfixed by the light.

  But today this is broad daylight and here he is beside me as I toil up the hill back to my house – my neighbour, Fred. Glad to see you jogging, he says. The way you live you need the exercise. You and your parties.

  I did not know what the word jogging meant.

  I got fat, I explained, because I had two jobs at once, being a lecturer and running my research. Working too hard – no exercise, too much booze. I lost a couple of stone dieting and now I want to get fit. I used to be fit – rowing – but there isn’t much of that round here.

  When you get to thirty-five, said Fred, your arteries start to harden and you have to work hard to keep healthy and alive. When did you last see a fat old man? We’ll start a jogging club like they have in America and get you and some of your fat drunken friends fit so they might live a bit longer.

  All manner of men, twenty or thirty of them – trades-men, shopkeepers, lecturers, workmen, a vicar, a judge. All my friends and all my friend Stanley’s posh friends. Twice a week we would meet in the changing rooms of the local school and head out into the incomparable Stone countryside – we were the first jogging club in Europe.

  How I surfed the fields lady10

  Green fields lady

  Breaking at the top

  In showers of trees

  The lane bucked under me

  Nailed with primroses

  How I surfed the fields lady

  Green fields lady

  How I surfed the fields lady

  Move move move

  We would run three to six miles and then go up to the Brushmaker’s Arms in Oulton and get pissed. Our resting pulse rates dropped into the sixties. The optimal amount of exercise – forty minutes twice a week – and the jocund company made us healthier than any exhausted athlete.

  As the symbol for our shirts I chose the great bustard, which is the world’s heaviest flying bird. It is not very good at flying so most of the time it rushes about the moors on foot. It has large bald thighs. In the mating season it will nearly turn itself inside out to show its brightest plumage and attract the female. Rather like our members really.

  We were a happy club with a high standard of locker-room banter and abuse.

  Look at those shorts! What poncey little shorts! Are they your wife’s knickers?

  No, they are your wife’s knickers!

  Innocent days – what we were doing was new and fun and good for us. Old men forget, but when old joggers meet we smile and remember with advantages11 what feats we did that day.

  These were the times when runners were mocked in the street. I would not myself lean over a fence and mock a man mowing his lawn or shout at someone walking his dog, and I was damned if I would put up with disrespect because I was jogging. I developed my own response. I would walk slowly up to the offender and stop six feet from him and pause and look at him. Usually the colour would drain from his face – I am a big chap, and ugly. Then I would suddenly flap my arms at my sides like a monkey and shout WAH WAH WAH! I would pause a moment then run on. It never failed and one day in Galashiels I got a round of applause from bystanders in the town square. Had some oaf come after me he would probably not have caught me because I was fit, and that was nice to know, but it never happened.

  Fred Wrigley was a recognized athlete of talent and he had thought of the club so he was t
he club captain. His job was to shout at the joggers on the runs to add a bit of drama and in the locker room he offered manly athletic advice. I was the secretary, who did the organizing. Our runs got longer and longer and included field and lane and road – there were not many cars in the early seventies. We developed our own names for our runs, and grew our own culture and hierarchy, with our own heroes and jesters, the swift and the halt.

  I set up a run in relay to Llangollen and back. We were received in the council chamber and to the delight of the lads an address of welcome was read. Next year we ran from the top of Snowdon, and the next year from the Eiffel Tower. After that one I went to bed for a week.

  We became involved with the Stone Festival. I found an old race in a history book and plotted a course through the water meadows and across the Trent – the Stone Steeplechase, which runs to this day, and then Monica and I established the Dog Derby on the same course.

  The club grew to forty, fifty.

  But where do we go from here? How do you follow the Eiffel Tower? Could we try our luck in athletics? But the jogging club was a jogging club and the joggers were not interested in racing.

  I resigned as secretary and began to drift away. Unfortunately there was nowhere to go. I was not a fast runner and stood no chance on the local athletic scene. I took up gardening and clearing waste land but missed the friendship and the banter. You might turn up the odd hedgehog but they don’t have much to say.

  I missed the company, the popularity of club office.

  I flapped in the wind like a pair of wet drawers.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WILLINGTON

  Sunlight Crowding through Tall Windows

  Like everything you have ever loved

  A little academe1 – A mistake of forty thousand pounds – Loathsome creatures couple in the bilges – A reproach to the colours of spring – Sideways to a strong wind – My solicitor was in jail – How do you know I’m Roger McGough? – Plaisir d’amour – Lights for only three days a week – We will barbecue your dogs on the lawn – A sweet opiate – The cathedral of trees – Everything you have ever loved – My wife wet herself – There are two types of anteater

  BEFORE LONG MY business had expanded from a corner of Monica’s dressing table to a little room off the lounge. I glued cork tiles to the wall and bought a copper lampshade to hang over my desk. I bought a stencil machine for four pounds. The Research Associates team was working hard. We all billed our hours at the same rate but as I did more hours after a couple of years I had saved quite a lot of money.

  With reports drying all up the stairs and secretaries sitting in the lounge I asked my builder if he could extend the house. But Terry, you have already got one extension – you have pushed this house to its limit – have you thought of moving?

  We looked at just one house. Georgian red brick, on a hill looking down the Trent Valley. The long hall, the sunny kitchen, the bay windows, the stables with the hooks where you hung the torches to guide your carriage. It was the most beautiful house in the town, and one of the biggest. It was called The Radfords. I had a photograph of Westfields and you could hardly tell them apart.

  A couple from our local gang agreed to buy the house with us. There were nearly thirty rooms and plenty of space.

  I had recreated my past – two families in a country house, but this time Hitler and the Air Ministry would not take it away.

  We will have a commune. Our house shall be a little academe. We will show the world how to live and share and work together. We will have a compost heap and gas the rats with exhaust fumes. Monica and I will see our love flower in these high rooms with our sweet friends and the children on the wide lawn.

  These two

  Emparadised2 in one another’s arms

  The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill

  Of bliss on bliss.

  You have done it now, said my accountant. The deposit on The Radfords has taken all your cash, and you have got no new consultancy coming in. Five weeks and it’s all over. I kept telling you but you say you are not interested in money because you are an arteest. Well, now you are a busted arteest.

  Something will come along, I said, and didn’t sleep all night.

  Next morning I called in my secretary to tell her I had decided to change course and perhaps start a grocery business. Just a moment, she said, it’s a call.

  I would like you to join my board, said Alan Elkes.

  Alan Elkes was the millionaire chairman and managing director of Elkes Biscuits, a firm which employed a thousand people. I had done some research for him and chaired a product development committee. He was a small man with a large enveloping personality. I came to love him dearly, then to doubt him and in the end to marvel that he had been allowed to run the firm for so long. (Perhaps it was because he owned it.)

  I was dazzled by Alan Elkes – by his wealth, his warmth, the size of his firm. What I did not do is look back at the history of Elkes Biscuits and its performance. I negotiated a high salary and a two-days-a-week job.

  After just over a year I walked out saying that we had to face the fact that the board was not competent to run the firm. I am sure I was a terrible marketing director, weak and out of touch, but I was not alone in my incompetence. We were tittering on the edge of cash crises all the time. Alan Elkes was a secretive and unreliable colleague, making decisions all too often on the basis of vanity. He had little support from his colleagues. One day the financial director made a mistake of forty thousand pounds in his monthly statement because the production director had decided to hire two hundred people and not told him. Forty thousand pounds was a lot of money in the seventies. But Harry, I said – you saw the buggers coming in past your window every morning!

  At the same time The Radfords commune broke up. There were differences over housekeeping and hygiene, but the real problem was that the lady of the other family thought she was in charge of the commune and I thought I was. The others knew how much money I had and decided that I should give it all to them before they would leave. What the hell, I thought, I have no choice, I’ll make it back, and I forked out.

  They have several times tried to get back in touch and make friends again but you took all my money, my dears, and what do you want of me now?

  * * *

  If you do not visit a boat every fortnight it starts to die. It’s a subtle death – not a clutching of the chest and keeling over like a diving pelican, not a collapsing on the stage like Tommy Cooper. It is an example of entropy – the law of physics that says that any boat left on its own goes to hell. Bacteria divide in the fridge; flies die inside the light fittings; weeds trail from the hull; rust brings your steel out in spots and then begins to eat it. Loathsome creatures couple in the bilges. Your batteries give up. Your panelling starts to separate and your carpets mould over and the stern gland fails and the lungs of your beloved slowly fill with water and she drowns.

  Never buy a boat unless you are intending to live on it for at least four months in a year. Vanity of vanities,3 saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

  We have a boat you know, and you haven’t. We can go on the canals any time we wish free of charge. We don’t have to hire. Hiring is so expensive. Named it after my uncle that left me ten grand. You must come down and drink cocktails on it with us and we can be like the beautiful people in Cannes except we are at Great Haywood.

  Ten grand will get you the first ten feet of a narrowboat. Then it has to be furnished. Add to that three grand for a repaint now and then and three grand a year for mooring and licensing, and a couple of hundred for annual service and a few more hundred for a biennial bottom blacking and a couple of grand for endless incidentals in fittings and clothing. Each time you pump out the waste tank there goes another fifteen quid.

  You see them rotting on the side of the cut, folly after folly: neglected, patched with rust, nettles growing out of the rudder fittings, slowing down all the people who actually use their boats, a reproach to t
he bright colours of spring, collecting the leaves of autumn on their stained roofs.

  You can’t do that to a boat – in the same way that a whippet is human, a boat is alive. They have a personality – they are female of course because they carry you in their belly.

  The Phyllis May was Carmen, with her colours and flowers and exotic past, and the PM2 is Lorraine Bracco, the lovely psychiatrist in The Sopranos – the one in the tailored suit who sat upright and talked softly but you knew that if you were patient and played your cards right, one day, when you least expected it, you would get The Lot.

  The time is getting closer when we shall head north towards York. My eye still hurts most of the time but will probably feel no worse if we are under way.

  We looked around at the jobs to be done before we set out.

  First the brasses. The main brasses on a boat are the ventilation mushrooms on the roof. Whichever way you moor the boat, they are always on the side of the roof away from the towpath and you have to hang on to the grab rail by your teeth to polish them. If you have polished them the day before it doesn’t take long at all. If you have left them for the winter allow an hour for each mushroom. When you are near tears you will see that your mushroom has come up to a greeny silvery gold excelled only by the glow of a new-landed fish. By the time you have worked along the gunwale and climbed back into the boat it has started to discolour.

  Like most boaters I have tried varnishing – and threw the brasses away when the varnish turned brown and would not come off – and I have applied lotions sold with false promises that they would stabilize the shine. Now like most boaters my brasses are tarnished and I live with a small guilt to join the other burdens of a life with so many little shames and failures.

  Very near the PM2 is the pump-out station. Back out of our mooring station and settle alongside the quay and push the hose in the orifice and the money in the slot and five minutes of gurgling and the job is done. Then drop the ropes and back out into the marina and the wind coming from Ireland hits us like a truck.