Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Read online

  The sheep fell over and Jess grabbed her by the neck and began to shake her. Wool began to fly about. Jim jumped down on to the ice and both dogs began to threaten the sheep. The sheep called for help at the top of her voice. The noise was terrible.

  I had a whistle and blew and blew and shouted and shouted. I was only ten yards away but the bank was steep. Jim came to me reluctantly and I tied him to a bush, where he barked like a fool and began to gnaw at his lead.

  The sheep was spinning slowly on her side as Jess plucked her like a turkey. Jess would pull out some wool then fall over and scramble back up and come in again. There was blood on the sheep’s neck.

  A dark presence at my shoulder – a big chap. This was private land and he had to be the farmer. He probably had a gun and was going to kill us all. Hello, he said.

  OmiGod, I said. Is that your sheep?

  Yes, he said.

  Shoot the dog, I said. It’s your right. Give me the gun and I’ll shoot her myself. OmiGod. This is not acceptable. It’s all my fault – I have an untrained dog. I am so ashamed. OmiGod. What can I do? I’ll give you money.

  Whippets are not supposed to bark much but Jim sounded like a hound of hell. Jess was barking too and skidding around and the sheep was getting more bald.

  The light was going out behind the clouds. The snow was blowing off the bushes. The dogs, the sheep and I were steaming.

  The farmer went away and came back with a pole about twelve feet long. It just reached the sheep. I poked the sheep and it spun away. I tried to reach Jess but couldn’t. I was shouting and shouting and whistling and whistling and waving a pork scratching and the dogs barked and barked and Jess fell over and got back up and went for the sheep again. It was almost dark.

  I’m going in, I said.

  Careful, Gaffer, said the farmer.

  The bank was steep but the snow cushioned me as I slid down, kicking at the ice to break it, and sank up to my chest. I was so relieved to be doing something to end this standoff from hell that I did not notice the cold. I did notice the mud – it was like standing in two feet of rotting treacle. I swept with the pole across the top of the ice and pushed the sheep nearer the side, then against the bank and the farmer grabbed it and put it on the bank and it ran off and the farmer caught Jess.

  I stood armpit-deep in the stinking mud and water and ice. It’ll die, I called up to the farmer – the shock, the bleeding. OmiGod it’s all my fault – I haven’t trained my dogs. You’ll have to tell the police and they will come and kill them both.

  Bit of blue, she’ll be fine, Gaffer. Whippets, eh? Used to have a greyhound cross – the one they call the long dog. Lovely nature.

  I wriggled up out of the pond like a marine dinosaur that had decided to evolve as a land animal but was not sure it was all going to work out. Perhaps I had used up all my blood sugar in grief or perhaps the bank under the ice was impossibly slippery but it must have taken five minutes. The farmer pulled me up the last foot of ice and slime. You are a gentleman, I said.

  I got to Jim just as he snapped his lead. You get home, Gaffer, said the farmer.

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon and night had fallen. The ice cracked on my clothes. The dogs shivered and whined and stumbled, frost on their muzzles and ice on their coats. When we came up against anyone I hid like a spy. We worked our way from corner to corner. I smelt like the Grimpen Mire.12

  It is not unknown for me to drop in at the Star or Langtry’s on the way home with the dogs so Monica had not been worrying, but her eyes widened as I stood at the kitchen door.

  Black mud up to my thighs, with a few highlights of dead vegetation. I was cased in ice, and my Breton sailor’s cap was topped with snow like a birthday cake. The dogs looked like monstrous rats made of sugar with bright eyes staring. Jess had blood on her muzzle. Both were trembling and whining.

  You look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon!13 You smell terrible! And the dogs – why are they covered with ice? Poor Jim looks exhausted and Jess looks half dead. What have you been doing? How can you do this to poor innocent creatures? Have you had an accident? Got into a fight in the Red Lion? I can’t trust you even to go for a walk. You went mad and tried to drown them!

  You must be patient, Mon, I said. Things are not going well for me just now. In fact I think it is time to consider our position on a number of matters.

  I think it is time you got out of my kitchen, said Monica. Go into the garden and dump those clothes and get the dogs’ coats off. Poor little devils. Trying to drown the dogs!

  Let me have a shower and I’ll tell you what happened, I said, and this evening we will have a serious talk.

  I’m not coping, Mon – our lovely dogs, and I get them into dreadful life-threatening and humiliating situations. I can’t get a book published. I am not at all sure I want to go off on damn silly expeditions any more. We’ll sell the Phyllis May. I’m bored with boating. I’m bored with writing. I’m bored with everything. I was stuck in a swamp and that is just how I feel – stuck in the bloody Grimpen Mire like Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  You are not happy unless you are writing, and Sherlock Holmes did not get stuck in the Grimpen Mire – he had more sense.

  But what can I write? I don’t want to write and no one wants my new book anyway.

  They fle from me that sometyme did me seke14

  With naked fote stalking in my chambre.

  I have sene them gentill, tame, and meke

  That nowe are wyld and do not remembre

  That sometyme they put theimself in daunger

  To take bred at my hand

  But what have we got to prove, Mon? We have three lovely kids and lots of grandchildren. We made a success of our business and have written two bestsellers and run fifty marathons and know how to make elderberry wine. We are seventy-five for God’s sake. What’s the point? We’ve been there, done that, and are wearing life’s T-shirt. Time to hand our chips in over the green baize and pocket our winnings and drain our glasses and push back our chairs and walk off down the street between the flashing neon lights, skipping over the puddles, never to be seen again. To everything there is a season15 – a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together. A time to be born and a time to die. To die, to sleep …16

  What do you mean, to die? Go to Switzerland and commit suicide? But we are not ill! We can sell the Phyllis May but I don’t want to commit suicide – bugger that.

  But there is nothing left remarkable17 beneath the visiting moon.

  I’ve got my bridge and the church.

  And I’ve got nothing.

  There is something dreamy about the way fireflies move – in slow arcs and as you focus on them the dark hedges blur behind them. Those camping holidays in France, and then of course the glow-worms in the hedge on the steep hill up to Cosheston in the war. But the glow-worms were a green light and the fireflies in Brittany purest white, not like these, which are the colour of blood. And they are speeding up now and whirling round and the door of the Phyllis May exploded and she began to roar like a Bunsen burner and it was no good thinking of childhood or holidays – here we were down at Canal Cruising boatyard and the Phyllis May was in flames and it was a winter night and the boat next door was going down and there must have been twenty firemen in yellow jackets and why the hell weren’t they trying to save something, instead of standing back and hosing water up and over and on to the roof and shouting?

  An electrical fire – the dolt in the next boat had gone to London leaving his boat unsafe. His boat had gone, of course, and a third boat which was the home and held all the possessions of a chap who lived in the boatyard.

  Are you insured? I asked.

  No.

  Next morning we came down again and I held Monica close. The shell of the Phyllis May was buckled and in the bottom there was a foot of charcoal. The smell of oil and paint and smoke.

  All her bright golden hair18

  Tarnished with rust,
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  She that was young and fair

  Fallen to dust.

  What did you feel like when you watched your boat burn up? asked a journalist. I thought it was the silliest question anyone had ever asked me, apart from the lady in North Carolina who wanted to know if the world looked very broad after a day in a narrowboat crossing Pamlico Sound.

  There were a lot of journalists and TV cameras. My son Clifford had emailed from Boston Massachusetts to say we were the second item on the BBC world news website. I guess it was a quiet day.

  Monica was crying. People have been telling us for ten years we would lose her and they were right – we lost her while we sat at home watching television. Lost our lovely Phyllis May.

  People walking across and sympathizing – the police wanting to know if I had upset anyone recently. I’m always upsetting people, I said.

  Then they came back for two more interviews because they didn’t believe I was joking and thought they might have solved the crime of the century. Horseman, pass by.

  Can we do the interview now? asked the TV lady.

  Yes, I said, but give me a decent plug for my books. Might as well get something from the wreckage.

  The insurers were prompt and gentlemanly, and explained that the hulk of the Phyllis May would probably be sold to people without much money who would fit it out and live in it. So she would have a good end. But the moving finger had written19 – nor all our piety and wit would lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all Monica’s tears wash out a word of it.

  The foot of charcoal was the quilt my Canadian friends gave us when we left Toronto. It was the painting of the shrimp boats that I bought in Beaufort South Carolina for Monica’s seventieth birthday. It was Frank Collis’s painting of the poplars near Hoo Mill. It was our hi-fi with the Mordaunt Short speakers. (Sir Mordaunt the Short was one of Arthur’s knights, our son Clifford would say, and then we would laugh – he always said it and we always laughed.) It was the little printer. The William Morris curtains. My Ricard sign from the Left Bank, the long thin poster of sport fish from the Gulf of Mexico, the Gullah painting from Gone with the Wind20 country. The log-box with Phyllis May on the front side and Kiss Me Again on the backside.

  But most of all the very body of the most elegant steel shell on the cut – the Jonathan Wilson design that Mike Partridge, the boat painter for whom the boat was built, had adjusted by half-inches to give the flow from front to back, the low bow, the rise at the stern, the tumblehome, the look that was proper for the Queen of the Waterways.

  Our poor buckled Phyllis May had crossed the Channel, banged across the Étang de Thau on the Camargue in a storm, braved the Albemarle Sound and the Pamlico Sound on the Atlantic coast, crossed Lake Okeechobee in Florida in fog, and driven out on to the Mediterranean and on to the Gulf of Mexico. She had stayed strong and dry and tracked like a darling and her engine had never missed a beat.

  You know, said Monica, I am not happy for things to finish like this.

  Fuck no, I said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MERSEY AND LIVERPOOL

  Paradise Street

  A strange and beautiful country it seems

  They’re not going anywhere – A serious boat owned by proper canal people – The northerners will think I am a sissy – Tonk tonk tonk went the Russell Newberys – The wind blew us across the lock – Swallowing noises under our hull – I was born into a disintegrating world – Rivers of flame running down the hills – What arsehole adjusts the carburettors of bombers? – You came down the Mersey on your own? – The whippets shivered as I let them slip – Paradise Street – The smoking room in the Titanic – Sunshine through the golden chain

  Lines on the Loss of the Narrowboat Phyllis May by Fire in the Yard of Canal Cruising, Stone, Staffordshire – by Jim, Ship’s Whippet.

  I never loved the Phyllis May1

  She rolled, a drunk in pain

  Day after day, day after day

  Across the leaping main

  When she went up like a flare

  I bounced and barked with glee

  They’re not going anywhere

  And they’re not taking me

  But I haven’t seen a lucky day

  Since I left my dear mother

  Just when I thought I was OK

  The buggers bought another

  IN TWENTY YEARS narrowboat design has developed in a number of ways, few of them important, but together the advances make a more comfortable boat. Of course nothing can be done about the absurdity of a craft that is only seven feet wide, but do you want to go through the locks or not?

  The Phyllis May was sixty feet long, the most common length in the eighties, but the modern boat tends to be two feet shorter so she can sail on the northern waterways of the UK, where for reasons not revealed to me the locks are not as long as everywhere else.

  The modern engine room is more compact, so the two feet lost in the length is not noticed inside the boat. And the machinery is much more accessible. In the Phyllis May if I wanted to clear the prop or do any maintenance I had to strip naked, grease myself all over and crawl on my belly like a snake. In the PM2 I lift the floor and please myself.

  Two people can now stand on the back counter, and walk straight over the top of the engine to the bedroom cabin (the cosiest place on earth) then to the bathroom with a toilet that whizzes and gurgles and does not smell. The shower would be big enough if I could lose a couple of stone. The galley leads without interruption into the twenty-five-foot saloon. As on the Phyllis May, no dinette or cupboards split up and cramp the interior.

  The old fit-out was teak and oak. The PM2 is ash – a light-coloured wood too hard to take a nail. The graining is subdued at floor level but when it reaches the ceiling it has flowered in arches and flourishes that would grace a chapel. There is plenty of light because of the colour of the ash and the wide windows, and more again because of the Houdini hatch in the roof. This is a window that opens upwards for a quick getaway. We could have done with that for our journey across the Channel.

  Out through the front door and you are in the bow area, where there are lockers to sit on. And alas there is a cratch. A cratch is an absurd canvas thing like a black tent that fits over the bow and makes it very difficult to get in and out. It is meant to be a faint echo of the old tarpaulins on the haulage barges, and is a bloody stupid idea. Monica loves it and I am trying to think of a way to destroy it.

  Overall the PM2 is very similar to our dear dead darling. The Longport boatyard where she was built is where Jonathan Wilson, who built the Phyllis May, learned to shape his steel shells. The gunwales and the bow are low and the tumblehome (the slope on the sides) is emphatic, giving her a businesslike and marine air. Slow curves add interest to the hull. The engine is marinized from a two-litre forty-three-horse Kubota cylinder block – so was the engine on the Phyllis May.

  But the ambience of this craft is different – the Phyllis May was light grey with a white roof to defend against the tropical sun and two pots on top and a brass tunnel light and roses and castles on her back doors – she was all flowers and fairies. The PM2 is a sad green, a dark old canal green, with a rust-red roof. She has very little decoration. This is a serious boat owned by proper canal people, not a pair of mad old geezers desperate for glory.

  And everything works – a cruise in the Phyllis May, particularly in the early days, was a travelling catastrophe, and it took eight years and a new engine to bring her up for long journeys and sea crossings.

  I would never have a boat built specially – I have heard too many nightmare stories of delays and failures. But the PM2 had been built into stock, by a yard of good repute, and lay waiting for her prince to come.

  We found her four days after the fire and bought her on the spot.

  We’ll go round the north, said Monica – the PM2 will go round the north. The Phyllis May wouldn’t go round the north. And you’ll write a book about it.

  But I don’t want to write a book abo
ut the north, I said. I’ve not been to the north since the fifties. I’m Welsh, naturalized Midlander – different cultures. The Welsh love to talk and tell you all about their feelings. The people from the Potteries want to be your friends and take you to the football and buy you drinks and tell you jokes. The northerners are not the same at all – they are trained from birth to say as little as possible and not give anyone any money. They might not like me. They will probably think I am a sissy because of how I speak. They are strong-minded and not always very polite. The only northerner I know is my old running coach Fred Wrigley, and think of the awful things Fred said to me when I wouldn’t train. And it’s not big enough – the north I mean. I am a semi-global adventurer, used to traversing continents and vast countries, not just a piece of a small country without many canals anyway.

  We’ll start with Liverpool, said Monica – you like Liverpool. You went to read your poetry there with Adrian Henri. We’ll go from Stoke-on-Trent through the Harecastle Tunnel and along the Wirral to Liverpool. And I will organize a crossing of the Mersey.

  You can’t cross the Mersey – there are forty-foot tides, there is something called the Devil’s Bank, and there is no canal link.

  There is a link now, Terry. From the Wirral you can sneak into the Manchester Ship Canal and then out into the Mersey and run down with the tide and lock into Liverpool right in the centre. It will be a good start for your book.

  What can I ever find to write about? There is no book for me in the north – unless I tell the story of my life as well, and no one would be interested in that.

  Your agent David has been on about you writing your memoirs for years.

  Tonk tonk tonk went the Russell Newberys.2 Tonk tonk tonk. I love the old boats with the tarpaulins and the old engines. You have got to love the noise they make – it is like the past coming along the cut to say Come back, come back, it is all still here, tonk tonk.

  But it wasn’t much fun really for the old transport boaters and the modern love of vintage engineering can decay into rivet-counting, bowler hats, waistcoats and canal snobbery. I am not much good at history, having been taught by Minnie Morris at Whitchurch Grammar School, Cardiff, and have no interest in freight carrying long ago. One more account of the Jam ’Ole Run3 in your otherwise excellent canal magazine, dear editor, and I shall cancel my subscription forthwith.