Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Page 3

  The waterways pioneers Tom Rolt and Robert Aickman fought near to the death over whether their Inland Waterways Association should concentrate on the past heritage of the canals or their leisure potential. I think Aickman was right, and let’s keep putting our money on the future – there is plenty to be done. Have you ever tried to find a toilet pumpout in Chester, or a pub in Little Venice, or navigate from Reading to Devizes?

  But Tonk tonk tonk went the Russell Newberys. There were twenty-eight of them in the canal basin at Ellesmere Port. Colourful boats smart for the rally, with their grey-haired owners chatting and waiting to go through the lock and turn right on to the Manchester Ship Canal.

  The PM2 was not turning right – she was turning left towards the Mersey, where she would tackle the four-mile crossing to Liverpool. Monica had timed our departure to catch the tide. The only trouble was there were twenty-eight Russell Newberys in our way Tonk tonk tonk. It had to be the only moment of the year when the Ellesmere Port lock was impassable.

  It was three years since we crossed a great water and the experience of fear had not changed. It makes you feel you are falling apart from the inside. It builds up and builds up and then vanishes as you begin your adventure. This would be at Eastham Lock three miles west, where you lock out on to the Mersey and head towards the Liverpool docks on the other side. I knew that there were sandbanks – one was called the Devil’s Bank – and there were currents and if I got to Liverpool and tried to bring our fifty-eight feet into the narrow entrance to the docks the current could rip me away and out to sea. Waiting for the Newberys, knowing that we could miss our tide, made us extra nervous. Tonk bloody tonk – come on, come on.

  But the Newberys cleared five minutes before our deadline and we set out into the basin of Ellesmere Port, long purged of all gear and detail – just a pond, and I leaned on the throttle and made for the corner where the canal heads to Eastham Lock.

  This was no twenty-foot cut – this was the Manchester Ship Canal, fifty yards across, as wide as any man-made canal we had sailed in the USA, the water black and the banks heavy with greenery. It was high summer and noon but cold and dark with a wind. We moved slowly, the dogs quiet below.

  Monica’s little hand-held radio squawked and fizzed – our proper marine radio on the Phyllis May with its roof aerial had burned – and Monica asked it what it wanted. There is a ship, she said to me. Eastham Lock wants us to slow down and hug the shore.

  And coming out of the haze towards us a ship, a small ship but a ship, and I swung in to the side and it came near and it passed and it was full of people and we waved furiously and they waved back, looking rather surprised. The Manchester Ship Canal, the great ship canal, artery of trade, had come to this – one ship full of gongoozlers to shiver the black mirror of the cut, and a narrowboat the size of a Players Number Six to wave at because there was nothing worthwhile to do on the Manchester Ship Canal any more but gongoozle.

  We pushed on, and in the way things do at sea the distant lock unveiled its detail reluctantly through the darkness at noon.

  A mess of sheds and gear right across the canal, then a light on a pole, and then two red lights one above the other. Now we knew which gap to head for. We dallied outside the lock and the lights changed to green and we entered. There seemed to be no one at home and the wind blew us across the lock, which was sixty feet wide, and wedged us under a wall.

  The lock-keepers came out of their little huts. These were not chatty British Waterways staff – these were seamen – sweatered and sou’westered and taciturn and What is this tiny painted bugger doing here?

  They shouted and pointed and somehow I levered the PM2 off the wall and on to the correct side and they took our bow and stern ropes.

  Over the lock wall I could see the estuary, the long yellow Devil’s Bank, the fogged outline of the shore three miles away, and the waves running before the wind, shining black, and we waited in the lock a long time, and I was afraid.

  A hundred yards behind us the gates of the lock were closing and we sank three feet, taking our time. Then the gates on to the Mersey opened and I turned to wave to the lock-keepers but they had gone back into their sheds so Sod them and down with the throttle and we were out of the lock and into the flood which swung and thumped and made swallowing noises under our hull.

  We were being pulled about – the currents outside the lock were conflicted and I could not set a straight course. The tide was still running up the river and the wind was hard from the north-east. Wind over tide – a choppy, disorganized sea. An hour of this is not going to be very nice, I thought – I wonder if any water is coming in at the front.

  Monica was beside me holding her chart down on the roof. It cracked and flapped but Look, there it is – the green buoy.

  And there ahead was a green buoy and beyond it a red buoy and further again the tiny ghost of another green buoy – just like the navigation buoys we had learned to follow on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

  The PM2 settled as we came into the main current and bridged the short waves as a narrowboat will and I pushed down the throttle and began to reel in the buoys, one by one.

  Just pop down and check there is nothing coming in at the bow, I said. She still has those little inland scuppers smaller than letterboxes so she won’t drain very quickly. And I hope the dogs are OK.

  The scuppers are all right. And the tranquillizers are working, said Monica. A bit of moaning, that’s all.

  May there be no moaning4 of the bar, I said, when I put out to sea, and I pushed the revs up to two thousand and it was all coming back – this is Tits Magee,5 conqueror of the Atlantic coast, to whom fear is a stranger; Tits Magee who circumnavigated the globe in red satin, accompanied only by a newt in a jar. Bring on the white horses!

  But the tide had passed the flood and begun to run out and the wind was following and there was no more choppiness, no more confusion. I can see on the Liver Building the Liver Birds grow from fleas to cutty wrens6 to sparrows to Liver Birds – whatever Liver Birds may be – and watch the sharp and shapely buildings rise around them, and this is the red buoy where I turn right across the stream.

  I am heading for the lights of the lock though not getting any nearer – that’s how it is at sea – and suddenly you are there and the current sweeps you away downstream past the entrance and you half turn and claw back and it gets you again and swings you away and somehow you avoid hitting the wall and you are in the throat of the lock and the red light has gone green and the gates are open and you are in the North Countree, in a new world, on your way to Wigan Pier, and a strange and beautiful country it seems as you look through the docks to the city centre skyline.

  * * *

  Drowsed with the fume of7 aviation fuel I was born into a disintegrating world.

  My father was a sergeant instructor at Cranwell, Lincolnshire. Both my parents delighted in me as a baby, though my mother had chosen to call me Carol Ann, and when I arrived had no name for me so called me after her doctor. Laughing over this story with the principal and the English tutor at my interview (you are Irish, Mr Darlington?) got me into Oxford seventeen years later. It’s a funny old world.

  Despite my mother’s best efforts, including photographing me in drag – I looked really pretty – I grew up a boy and in due course an enthusiastic heterosexual like my fathers before me.

  Mum and Dad had met at Sunday school in Pembroke Dock, a military town in a forgotten corner of Wales, a corner so beautiful that I will not tell you where it is. Dad’s father was a chimney sweep and Mum’s father a night-watchman. Willy-nilly grew they, divinely formed and fair.8 They were more beautiful than Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford – their features were more regular. I did not inherit their looks – I was an ugly little bugger with an overbite and a residual chin, though I looked good for a short time when I was nineteen.

  When the war began my father was posted away and my mother and I went to Pembroke Dock to live with my grandfather. His terrace hous
e looked out on Pennar Gut, a shining inlet three miles long running into Milford Haven. At one end Pembroke Castle and at the other a brood of elephantine fuel oil tanks on the side of a hill.

  My grandfather was kindly and distant, like the king of a far country who had come to Pembroke Dock to die. He was big and handsome and had one eye. Most of the time he sat by the fire in a striped shirt with no collar and a waistcoat with his friend Fred who came round every day to sit on the other side of the fire.

  Sometimes Grandpa called on God’s wounds like an Elizabethan – ‘Zounds9 ’oman’ he would say to my mother, innocent of what he was saying.

  He had three stories to tell, from his boyhood in his home town of Landshipping up the river and from the dockyard, and he told them over and over. The stories were family possessions, to be brought out and enjoyed, and that is what you did in the evenings before the radio arrived on its wire from the little hut on the hill.

  One of the stories was The Flying Man of Landshipping—

  One day Grandad was drinking in the Stanley Arms Landshipping and the evening was going well. Then one of the men at his table pushed back his chair.

  Boys, he shouted, I am going to fly!

  He climbed up on to the table and raised his arms.

  Yes boys, I am going to fly, and heaven knows where I might land!

  He launched from the table and fell on to the floor and broke his leg.

  It’s how you tell them, of course. The secret with this one is to emphasize the phrase heaven knows and in particular knows, which should be pronounced sonorously and in the Welsh manner, sounding rather like Norse.

  Grandad had written a poem about Landshipping. I remember a verse –

  The cattle that graze on those pastures green

  Compete with the finest ever seen

  And pigs and goats and chickens roam

  A credit to their farmyard home

  All the family and the neighbours were proud to have in their midst one who was a poet, who had been touched by the fire.

  Some evenings he would say to my mother I’m going up to post a letter, but I never saw him with a pen in his hand, except once when I gave him a fountain pen to hold and he looked at it as if it were an incendiary bomb, because it was a technology from a new world.

  There was a bucket in a shed at the top of the garden. I was washed every week on the kitchen table but underwear was not provided. I was hungry a lot of the time, and unhappy. Perhaps I asked too much when others were enduring more, but in school I was bored and bullied and in the night people would try to kill me.

  Pembroke Dock was the most important Coastal Command base in Britain. The Sunderland flying boats, the ones that looked like white double-decker buses, would draw a line of chalk in the Haven half a mile long before heaving themselves into the air. Turning to swans, they banked west, off to hunt U-boats in the Western Approaches and over the Atlantic until their tanks were empty and their crews exhausted.

  Hitler did not think Pembroke Dock was a good idea at all, and when he had captured the French airfields he reckoned he could do something about it.

  Monday 19 August 1940 – three o’clock on a quiet sunny afternoon. I was playing in the road when there was a great noise, and three dark shapes tore hard and low along shining Pennar Gut; just over there, a hundred feet up, swifter than anything I had seen in my four years of life, left to right, from creamy grey Pembroke Castle towards Llanreath where the great oil tanks slept on the hill. As I was pulled into the doorway of number nine there was cracking and huffing and blasting and then it was quiet for a moment and then people started getting themselves together and pushing me back into number four.

  The Junkers 88 and the two Messerchmitt 109s were gone, leaving the fire to foul the afternoon.

  Within minutes the smoke was a thousand feet in the air and the tanks were bursting and the smoke was bursting and the flames roared inside the smoke and you could see it pump and reach and spill and rivers of flame were running down the hills and into the sea and the sirens had started and we were looking at the biggest blaze in the UK since the Fire of London.

  Not a shot had been fired in defence.

  Soon there rained a ghastly dew.10 The washing was black on the lines, the sheep were black in the fields, the earth was black, the air was black. We did not see the sun for a fortnight.

  Over the next three weeks the great tanks burst one by one until eleven of the seventeen were destroyed – thirty-eight million gallons of oil, needed to send our merchant ships to America for food and supplies and power the destroyers to protect them.

  Near the site the heat was terrible. The six hundred and fifty firemen received a thousand injuries. In the town the women would bathe their eyes. A tank exploded and swept five firemen into the flames.

  Vernon Scott of the Western Telegraph interviewed Mrs Addie John for his book Inferno 1940.11

  I saw a fireman, covered in oil from head to foot, coming up Llanreath hill from the beach. He was swaying all over the road like a drunken man. I offered him a cup of tea which he gladly accepted and with great difficulty he pulled off his boots and removed his oilskins. I gave him rags and paraffin to clean up the worst and then, on the doorstep, he washed himself thoroughly with warm water and soap. I gave him his tea but he broke down and wept. I told him he could rest and gave him an old trousers and jacket. He slept on my bed and when I woke him later he told me he came from Tenby. He never did mention his name.

  The Luftwaffe returned to drop more bombs around the target and machine-gun the firemen.

  For three weeks the battle of good against evil wore on. A fireman was interviewed by Vernon Scott:

  We saw a mouse crawl out over the top of the moat. It was coated with oil and seemed to be blind. But we thought Good luck to you you little blighter, you’ve survived so far, and we took it to some grass and left it there.

  The night of 12 May 1941. What pervert puts a whistle in bombs? What arsehole adjusts the carburettors of bombers so they roar in and out? Isn’t it enough to kill people – do they have to feel terror too?

  We were under the stairs. My mother held me close. My grandfather was there in his striped shirt and braces. I can still smell the gas from the meter.

  Uncle Clifford tumbling down from his bedroom, crowding in, his shirt tails flapping. Go back – put some trousers on, said my mother – have you no decency?

  That night thirty-two people were killed and two thousand houses damaged. The military installations were untouched.

  The next raid was the Fire Blitz – thousands of incendiary bombs. As the town burned we were lying in the fields and on the beaches. Four were killed that night. We had a dud incendiary through the roof next door – chubby little chap with fins. Phosphorus – if you put water on them it only encouraged them.

  Uncle Clifford firing his Home Guard rifle from the doorstep did not bring the bombers down. Even little Cocky Roblin could not scare the hell-birds away. Cocky was the air raid warden who patrolled the blackout. He made my mother laugh so much – Oh, Mrs Darlington, Mrs Darlington, I’m shaking like a leaf!

  Cattle machine-gunned in the fields. Houses taken out like teeth. Jigsaws in the rubble. Shrapnel on the mantelpiece.

  Strange images of death.12

  It needed my father to rescue us and take us to paradise.

  * * *

  Liverpool looks at the Mersey over a line of dock basins, each the size of several football fields, two abreast the length of the city and beyond. But the marine traffic moved to container terminals thirty years ago and along the old docks the elder tree grew in the cracks and hung its snow along the wharfs and vandals smashed the warehouses and offices.

  Coming into town from the south the PM2 passed through Brunswick Dock and Queens Dock and Wapping Dock, and switched off in Salthouse Dock, which lies in the centre of the city inland of Albert Dock. A lot of empty water and empty sites on this short passage but no dereliction now and in Queens Dock there were yachts a
nd cruisers and here in Salthouse Dock a line of new pontoons and thirty narrowboats, covered with bunting.

  It does not take boaters long to recognize us, maybe because we have our book covers in the window.

  It’s you, isn’t it?

  No, I am an imposter, and this is my narrow dog Jim, who is also an imposter. And this is my other narrow dog, Jess, who is not to be trusted either.

  Come and drink with us tonight, here on the quay. We have whisky. We are all going out on to the Mersey tomorrow, up to Eastham Lock, and need to steady our nerves. We want to be among the first to try the new link. You came down from Eastham Lock – on your own? What was it like?

  Went right over three times, but they come back up of course. Jim saved us. He is a devil with a baler.

  Are you Tits Magee?

  At your service, madam.

  Have you got your shorts on the right way round?13

  The Albert Dock, between our Salthouse Dock harbour and the Mersey, was the first dock to be saved from destruction by developers and vandals. This happened in the seventies. Now the magnificent basin, with warehouses around, pillared and cloistered, is a Tate Gallery, shops, museums, bars and restaurants. The interiors of the bars and restaurants are modern, black and chrome and dreadful American beers are offered there, but you can eat royally and what is to stop you having a pint first on the waterfront a few yards away, or at the Baltic Fleet, a pub not too far upstream? Development has not yet reached the Baltic Fleet, which brews its own beers and serves scouse on the days you are not there, but I reached the Baltic Fleet and I wasn’t sorry. (We have scouse in Stoke-on-Trent and Stone, but we call it lobby – it is meat and vegetable stew and is very nice. In Liverpool scouse without meat is called blind scouse – bet you didn’t know that.)