Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Read online

  We don’t press on to Leeds, but drop into the River Aire – muddy, high banks. A few miles and hard left up on to the Selby Canal – we are heading for York.

  To ease my shingles I was wearing a pair of Polaroid glasses. These show the clouds without the glare of the sky. Each crease, each crevasse, each crag is revealed, each separate shade and shadow. You can climb the blunt peaks and walk in the valleys.

  The New Junction Canal has a primitive, empty beauty, but the Selby Canal has the lot. Foliage droops over it, flowers smile from the verges, birds charm from the trees. It has slow curves, and long stretches beckoning you ahead. The water is clear. In the Selby Canal the water is as clear as gin.

  Polaroid glasses take the reflections off water and let you see down into it. Under the Selby Canal there are cities of vegetation – pancake leaves give great platforms, level under level, from which spaceships might lift. Green bushes give cover to wait for the Klingons and you dart out and blast them and run for the shadow of the water lilies, because the Klingon radar will not reach you there. Now give her some wellie – let’s have lots of time-warps and we will whizz through the caverns of outer space and we will be the masters of all the green cities.

  At Selby you look over the lock into the River Ouse, which at six o’clock in the morning is very wide and very deep, and very fast, and a very long way down. Heidi and Tony in the lock with us – The vippets are below?

  Echo their German shepherd stood on the back counter, his orange eyes with their lion strangeness seeming to look in as well as out.

  Twenty miles to York.

  You feel the currents most as you come out of the lock, then soon you are settled on the tide pouring up the muddy stream from the North Sea and the Humber and Tony is leading and with Tony as cruise control we settle down to muse upon life and the universe. The trouble is Tony keeps changing his speed – I am either up his back or being dropped off behind. On a long cruise you should set your speed and forget it – if you change you should first have to get written permission from British Waterways. I pushed the throttle down to catch up again.

  There was a grinding and the boat tipped to port, nearly going over. The grinding went all down the hull and out under my feet and the boat swung the other way and did a bit more grinding before I could get her out in the stream again.

  Was I on the inside of a bend?

  Look, I’ll be straight with you. You have got to understand that in this low country there are lots and lots of bends and meanders in the rivers – hundreds in fact and it is really all bends and meanders and it is not natural, not intuitive, to hug the outside line and sometimes you forget – you are bound to forget, especially if you are full of medication and an idiot.

  Oh see over by the bank – lots of outrageous old boats hung with tin sheets and tarpaulin and ladders going up the bank and shacks – a riverside city for people who like living in hulks and shacks and perhaps are poor or not favoured in their wits.

  As we get nearer to York Marina, south of the city, the boats get cleaner and bigger. They are mainly plastic cruisers, and here are some big beauties that could set out to sea any time, and hold a lot of gin in their great marine refrigerators.

  * * *

  Research Associates had many hundreds of customers, and lovely blokes and ladies most of them were. Some were not, of course, and I suppose they are in some ways the more interesting.

  As our firm traded through the seventies and eighties Monica and I saw the terrible deaths of many of our large and world-famous corporations such as Leyland, British Shipbuilders, Bedford. These organizations were aware that something was wrong with them and were interested to find out just what it was and what they should do about it, until you told them, and then they weren’t interested any more.

  I remember going with a couple of my senior people to give a presentation to Leyland at their plant about the prospects for the Range Rover in Germany. I would not normally write about studies which we carried out in confidence, but that Leyland company does not exist any more and it was a long time ago.

  We arrived at the plant at 10.30 as arranged and were asked to be kind enough to wait in reception. There is a board meeting and then it’s you.

  By 12.30 nothing had happened and I began to realize what was going on. I took my chaps – one was a girl chap – out to a good hotel for a long lunch and we returned and took up our station in reception. At half past four we were told the board was ready.

  The boardroom was full of junk. No one had been interested to have it cleared out. I was used to clearing out and tidying the room for our presentations to failing firms and public bodies. Once in British Telecom I refused to use the lavatory provided. I was offered the lavatory used by the board and that was fine.

  Among the junk was the Land Rover board, half a dozen men, looking murderous.

  We began our presentation. The company’s distribution system in Germany was scruffy and low-grade – not suitable for a luxury vehicle. We showed photographs of vehicle dealer outlets crouched in dirty corners of industrial estates, and we showed the proud Mercedes outlets. We told the board that the Range Rover was not trusted for its reliability, and that many Germans were scornful of British engineering. There was little advertising support in the German market. We showed a breakdown of vehicle sales by price band and we forecast for the Range Rover the next year a static sales picture, perhaps two thousand vehicles.

  The half a dozen men began to throw the furniture at us.

  Did we not realize that all their forecasts were based on four thousand units a year? Did we not realize that they had been selling Range Rovers for a long time and knew what they were doing? Did we not realize that they were a new board and they had come in with guns blazing to sort out the firm? What did we know? Who was this young man who spoke German and had done the interviews, and that girl who had done the forecasts? They are not vehicle specialists! We understand that the first draft of the report that you sent us had spelling mistakes in it! Spelling mistakes and we are spending tens of thousands on this research!

  You learn early on in research and consultancy to keep cool under fire and my chaps did very well. These are the outlets, these are pictures of the senior respondents we interviewed – very informed people, these are the vehicle segmentations by price. What evidence do you have, sweet sirs, that you will double your sales next year with a weak distribution system and an unreliable product? Could it be reverse accounting, I suggested, setting your sales to the level you need to finance what you want to do rather than looking at the market and then calculating the sales?

  Bloody amateurs, said the board. We are being advised by young men and girls and Mr Darlington who is not always polite. You should be ashamed. We will pay your bill but we will not use you again and we cannot recommend your services to others. Two thousand – that is an absurdly low forecast. You have no idea of what this new board can accomplish.

  They sold nineteen hundred. There was never any way they were going to do better.

  These fantasists were the sort of people running our big industries at that time, the industries that one by one failed. And now German companies are making the Range Rovers, the Minis, the Rolls-Royces.

  Industry and trade were unfashionable, low-class activities compared to the law or education or the Civil Service or the BBC and the best people avoided those careers. So second-raters had risen from the ranks to fill the boardrooms. They lost control of the workforce and lost control of their finances. This cancer must be cut out of our economy, said one customer of a failing engineering industry.

  One day Research Associates was telephoned by Doulton, the pottery company. We are angry and disappointed, Mr Darlington. We are sitting in the boardroom waiting for your team and you are nearly half an hour late. You are supposed to be specialists in business efficiency. It’s a disgrace. Why are you not here?

  We are not there because you have not asked us.

  * * *

  The only w
ay to approach a city is by water. The water is why it is there in the first place, and its shape, its purposes, are revealed as you approach. The old warehouses, the quayside pubs, the remains of the docks, and over the top the Minster.

  No quays for pleasure boats and then just the other side of the city centre some rings and a sort of wharf.

  I would like to take some York councillor along the quay where I went for a walk and nearly fell down a hole into the river and see if he can make it along the quay safely. With any luck he won’t and I will pull him out and save his life and he will go back to the council chamber and say Complete refurbishment, water, electricity, pontoons, a laundry and a convenience store and a nice sculpture or two and room for a hundred boats because a great city with a great river deserves an inland pleasure port at its centre.

  Here we are – the chap on the bank looks friendly – holding out his hand to take a rope. In his other hand a bag of pork scratchings and a bottle of champagne. Where’s Jim? Where’s the narrow dog?

  What a welcome!

  John is a fan and he came on board for a chat.

  In my Father’s house are many mansions, said Jesus Christ.

  Some of the mansions are in the roof of York Minster – up there in the incense and between the woven stone where music dwells lingering8 – how was that ceiling ever built? It could not have been made by human hands – it is too beautiful, too high.

  The choir was visiting from Rugby. On the left was Mama Cass and in the centre Michelle Phillips9 – from the Mamas and the Papas. They sang like angels and I tried with no success to keep my thoughts pure about Michelle Phillips, the lovely hippie Mama. The voices rose into the roof and bounced around its pillars and valleys and fell down again, even sweeter than before.

  The sermon was delivered by a toff who had a toff’s voice and thought like a toff and no doubt walked like a toff. He was a long way down at the altar and we were back here by the door with the Japanese but the sound system was good. The toff made it clear he wasn’t very interested in being here (toffs never admit they are very interested in anything) but as he found himself addressing a crowded congregation on Ascension Day he could spare a few thoughts for those ignorant people in the USA who had said The Rapture was going to happen today and the righteous would ascend to heaven but it didn’t happen so sucks to them ho ho. I’m going now – I’ve got a lot of interesting things to say but you will have to come to my next sermon on Sunday and it has been mildly amusing talking to you ignorant fuckers.

  I have walked Jim in many counties, and in France and the USA, but I have never seen a lovelier field than here in York. A raised path and you look down on ten acres of level green, where Jess and lion-eyed Echo tore about. No living creature is faster than Jess but Heidi’s German shepherd is strong and agile and Jess runs in great circles so he cut the corners and gave her a good game. I do not know what he would have done if he had caught her.

  Jim had met a terrier, a puppy. He wrestled with the puppy and chased the puppy and tried to mount the puppy. Someone told me once that a puppy seems to a male dog rather like a girl. We stopped that nonsense but Jim was in love.

  He stayed with the puppy after we had set off home and I had to go back for him. The Lady Who Knows about Whippets was right, I said to Jim, who was pulling back and whining. Come on – you have got no idea – you are useless.

  York seethed with tourists and the sun shone and we untied our ropes and let the bow come round slowly in the current and there were Heidi and Tony ahead and we followed them down river. We were going home.

  Past Naburn Lock the Ouse is tidal and the mudbanks were high and the tide was low. As we pushed down, the tide pushed up, getting fiercer and fiercer. And towards us in the centre of the stream a river of strangeness came at us, thumping and threatening. There is the arm of a drowning man, helplessly waving. Look, that’s an alligator – I would know it anywhere. Here comes a chest of drawers. Snakes ten feet long writhing and knocking – knocking, how can snakes knock? The antlers of a stag, half a piano, truckloads of firewood, all streaming down on to us. What if some of this flotsam gets round the prop?

  Keep going, try to avoid some of the big stuff – look, the tide is slowing. Soon we were bumping through a stationary Sargasso Sea of junk, and then it all began to run back out towards the sea, and we were travelling with it at the same speed, so we could forget about it.

  Nice day – river a bit bendy, but the secret is relax and let the boat find its way. Let the boat do the work – it will find the stream. The number of boaters who fight the currents and the wind. A sensitive boater, an arteest like me, uses the forces and currents of nature as his friends, and reaches down to find that mystical connection with the world that – watch this one – Oh Lord!

  The current running hard on the outside of the curve caught me and pulled me under the trees and bushes hanging off the bank. They scratched along the boat.

  I was on a tight right-hand bend in a current. If I pushed the stern in, the back of the boat was going deeper into the dark and hostile canopy, and if I pushed it out the bow did the same. The stream thrust me in further – four knots flat against the side of a fifty-eight-foot boat. Work out the foot-pounds in that one. I was being held hard into the canopy and dragged through it and had no control of my boat. To use the phrase favoured by my old rowing partner Dave Morgan of Llandaff, I was buggered, literally.

  It was all happening so fast – a thick branch swept down the roof and took off a chimney and came at me and now a sixty-pound anchor was coming at my chest at four knots. Sometimes when dreadful things are happening you become transfixed and just stand looking. I became transfixed and just stood looking, like a tit in a trance.

  The anchor hit me on the chest. I fell down on the back counter, my Breton sailor’s hat flung wide into the stream. I reached up and pushed the tiller hard to the right and the branch was gone over my head. The anchor had jammed in the hatch just before it had the chance to break half my ribs and sling me into the river.

  Mercifully here was a bit of bank with no trees. The bow hit the bank and I carried on pushing the tiller and the stern came out and then I straightened the boat and gave it full revs and it struggled out into the stream. Tony ahead was beginning to turn round to rescue me and I waved him on. I carried on down the river, bare-headed, the boat hanging with branches like a hippy festival.

  I made a bad entry to the lock at Selby, banging and thrashing. I used to be able to do this. Lock-keepers would congratulate me, not talk to me as if I had started boating on Tuesday. OK, OK, I’ll take her into that side and of course I’ll be careful – I’m always careful. What makes you think I’m not careful?

  All down the port side of our new boat there were scratches. Oh hell, it’s a contact sport. They’ll polish out. Could happen to anybody.

  Monica was very kind and has said almost nothing so far, but I couldn’t help wondering if the loss of my captain’s hat was some higher power trying to tell me something.

  At Knottingley we tied up to a fence just above the lock, and around us was desolation. Empty factory sites, broken walls, barbed wire.

  Monica wanted to buy a Calder and Hebble handspike.10 We didn’t know what a Calder and Hebble handspike was but the book said that it was essential. Among the desolation was a big shed declaring itself to be the terrestrial headquarters of a shipbuilders and marine engineers. Monica went into the shed. The shed was empty, waiting for a ship to build.

  A man shuffled towards her from the junk and shadows at the end of the shed. He was smiling broadly and his eyes shone. Monica asked him if he could sell her the handspike. Oh no, we don’t do that sort of thing here.

  Monica did not wait to enquire what sort of thing he did here.

  Meanwhile I was away up the towpath with Jim and Jess. A pleasant lawn and here is the towpath, narrow between these low garden walls and the canal. And look, along the towpath – roses, lupins, delphiniums, granny bonnets, foxgloves, valerian, ox-eye
daisies, peonies. Coming into Knottingley off the river it looked like a hell-hole but someone has planted two hundred yards of the public towpath as a cottage garden.

  When Monica and I lived on a shopping parade in Chessington, Surrey, behind us there was the railway embankment. Late one evening I dressed in black and took ten packets of seeds from Woolworths and climbed through the wire and shook the seeds all along the embankment.

  None of them grew.

  Monica did not want to moor by the beer garden at Horbury because some nasty people might come into the beer garden and talk and then fight and knife each other and knife us and knife the dogs. I like to hear people talk, I said, and took my rope ashore and through the ring on the bank.

  To make peace I offered to take the dogs for a walk back down the towpath. The dogs came out of the boat grinning. I caught them and clipped on their collars.

  A few people with dogs coming towards us and then nobody. I realized that on one side I had the canal and over there a hundred yards the river Calder. No roads that I can see. I know how practised these whippets are at getting into trouble but they should be fine unless they are attacked by a duck or something ho ho. They are born to run and I love to see them free. I let them slip and they trotted ahead.

  Jess and Jim can disappear at will. Jess will then reappear well in front of you from behind a hedge, regardless of what barriers seemed to lie in her way, and Jim resumes his earthly form just behind you like a pantomime villain. Look behind you!

  I am always nervous when they are off the lead, because of the terrible trouble that they can generate, but this is safe – canal on one side and down there the river – see here is Jess again, back up from the river, and just behind my right knee Jim has taken shape, quieter than a whisper. It’s a gamble every time, but you have to give them some freedom – there they go, down the towpath – we must have come nearly a mile.