Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Page 6

  Slug taught me to use the concrete not the abstract, the Germanic word not the Romance, the active not the passive, and he had good judgement though he was hard on Tennyson and Milton. He cast me in heavy roles in the school plays, and introduced me to BBC Wales where I acted in radio programmes. (My Pembrokeshire accent – Durrlington – did fine for the boy who threatened Heidi.)14 Slug stayed close to me, took an interest in me, was jealous of me and bullied me. I am not sure my being a foot taller than him helped our relationship. Once he struck me across the face in the classroom and I went to the headmaster and handed in my prefect’s badge, which was not accepted.

  My school career came to an end after a row in the corridor with Slug. The headmaster suggested that having got into Oxford I did not have any reason to be at school and because I was an unpopular and disruptive element I should hand in my prefect’s badge again and this time he would keep it and I could go home.

  I guess I was a problem student and a right arrogant little bugger and towards the end I am not sure I was in my right mind, but these were mature professionals and I was unimpressed with them at the time and am unimpressed still.

  The headmaster died shortly after. He was in his fifties. They said it was cardiac asthma but I reckon it was all too much for him. Slug went full term and died recently. Some people liked him, or at least appreciated his good taste. I saw him once after I left school. He came up to speak to me in the street and I walked past him.

  * * *

  Ahead the crews of three narrowboats, all shouting.

  You can’t wash your boat at a water station when people are waiting!

  Yes I can – you have no right to speak to me like that – I was born on a boat! I have come across the Ribble and I can’t have salt water on my boat!

  There is a queue for water and you are washing your boat. That’s selfish!

  If you looked after your own boat better it would not look such a mess!

  We took our place in the queue for the water station and as it unwound the people from the shouting boats came along crew by crew to tell us what bastards the others were.

  When we arrived at Tarleton we went for a walk to look at the Douglas River. Tomorrow we would sail down it for an hour and come out into the mighty Ribble and sail that for an hour and then squeeze along Savick Brook and then break free on to the Lancaster Canal. This river passage is called the Millennium Link. It opened in 2002 and until then the Lancaster Canal was cut off from the UK system. You book your passage months ahead and only six boats are allowed at one time. The tides in the Irish Sea reach forty feet so the moon has to be in the seventh quarter and it is not a bad idea to fit in a bit of prayer and fasting the night before. A line of six boats was moored waiting for the crossing.

  A hundred yards ahead a big bloke in a blue T-shirt was standing in the middle of the lane looking at us. He stood there until we were upon him then he slipped to one side. He rematerialized on the bank of the river, looking at us. As we went back to the boat he looked after us all the way.

  This north country is a funny place, said Monica. Mad women and canal rage and stalkers. Perhaps they are all mad up here – perhaps it is because of the emissions from the power stations, or perhaps the money for the health service doesn’t reach this far.

  A chap standing on the bank watching the river go by – look at that current, he said. My engine is only twenty-eight horse. I’ve never been on a river and we’ll be swept away and I have been married six weeks. Snuffed out after six weeks – am I being fair to my lovely wife?

  He was about sixty. He wore a tweed jacket and a camel waistcoat and dark corduroy trousers and a hat with a rather wide brim and a leather belt with loops for his windlass. He wore a green paisley cravat. His greying beard was shaved five centimetres from his face and not one hair was longer than any other. He was what a narrowboater would look like in the pages of Vogue. He was beautiful. He had spent a long time on his dress and toilette, as if expecting to die.

  Think about it, I said – your boat is forty-five feet and you have a twenty-eight-horsepower engine. We went to the Gulf of Mexico with a sixty-foot boat and a forty-three-horse engine. Do the sums – your power:weight ratio is better than mine was.

  It was the first time I had ever used the term power:weight ratio, and I felt pretty good about it.

  Look down there, he said. Were the currents in the Gulf of Mexico moving as fast as the Douglas River?

  No, I said.

  Were they moving anything like as fast anywhere along the way?

  No, I said.

  * * *

  When I go mad15

  Upon my record sheet

  Set down this rhyme

  And then some black

  Or whey-faced quack

  Upon my fate

  May meditate

  Shite, said Colin.

  Arsehole, I said.

  Fat shite – you’ve got four stone of fat on you after the deep insulin. Go home and get it off. You don’t belong here – wasting my time and the resources of the health service.

  You look like Adolf Hitler, I said, with your pasty face and your cowlick. You are frightening the patients. There they are – poor mad buggers lying there and in comes Adolf with the hypodermic.

  I can see Colin now. He’ll be dead I suppose – he was in his thirties. I loved Colin. We spent a lot of time insulting each other – I don’t know why – we just made each other laugh. Mr Pugh was nice too – he ran the ward – he was a big chap, which could be useful in his job. And his number two – Sorry I don’t remember your name but I still think of you and I can see your face and sorry I didn’t say hello when we stood together in the urinal at the Park Hotel in 1954 – I was still a bit forgetful of things what with the electro-convulsive therapy but it came back and you were such a nice guy.

  Whitchurch Mental Hospital was next to Whitchurch Grammar School, and there is no doubt which institution was the more sane. And you can forget One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest16 and Jack Nicholson and Nurse Ratched as far as I am concerned – as I relaxed on my bed enjoying one of Colin’s cigarettes, the storms in my mind had blown out and Whitchurch Mental Hospital was a grand place to be.

  I suppose I had better tell you how I got there.

  When I went home from school I took a job up the road in the Income Tax Offices, playing my small part in the conspiracy to delay the repaying of Post-War Credits17 to the public. It was very boring and the files were covered in dust. And I couldn’t sleep. I would lie awake for hours listening to the night cars coming one by one down the Caerphilly Road. I tried sleeping on the floor and that helped a bit. I tried long walks and that helped too, but one day when I went for a walk I became convinced I was a gull – the one in my poem – and that hallucination lasted for half an hour and scared me. I was very unhappy nearly all the time. In fact I was heading for a nervous breakdown. In fact I was going mad.

  There were enough reasons for this. There was my programme of study for Oxford. I had no experience of writing a study schedule so I covered everything that had ever come up in the entrance papers. Each day there was a reading target – the overload would have sent Professor Leavis bonkers. Then there were my experiences in the war, and there was the accident to my eye. And I fell in love with the girl next door and wanted to marry her but she was not interested. That bit was really bad. Then the tension at school. And of course I am a loony.

  I went down to Cardiff Royal Infirmary and saw a psychiatrist. I told him I felt terrible and he gave me a cigarette and a cup of tea and said You are very ill and must come to hospital right away.

  Thank God, I said, and wept, and let go. By the time I got to the hospital I was raving.

  In the foyer were plants in pots and behind them were black servants whose job was to serve the matron’s obscene desires. I was taken to a small panelled room and there was a bed and as I lay there I balanced on the edge of clouds, I stood in the middle of Dalí deserts wider than the Sahara, I climbed
towards the sun, always frightened and falling. Back on earth at night the devil visited me in the form of a wasp. I put him in my ear and that meant I was a grown-up man now. My parents visited me and I could see they were frightened – Mr and Mrs Darlington you should prepare yourselves – he may not be able to communicate with other people very well in the future.

  Deep insulin treatment18 involves a row of mattresses. Me and my six mad mates lay in a row and we were injected with insulin and passed out. After maybe an hour we were revived and drank pints of glucose in water and then we went back to the ward, nursing our sore arms. We had a lot of these sessions. Dr Capstick was very nice and spoke with me as if I was OK and we were two intelligent people discussing medical issues. I put on a lot of weight.

  Between my teeth19 insert the rubber gag

  Electrodes on my head I see

  Here jerks a modern man

  Convulsively

  Electro-convulsive therapy20 was a funny one – a gag with holes in it to hold between your teeth, and then a blast of electricity and you pass out. It didn’t hurt.

  I was in Whitchurch Mental Hospital for months. We had dances in the main hall. They gave us two full-size cigarettes as we went in and I danced with Phyllis, who was small and pretty. She didn’t say much but I guess she was mad as well. It must have been towards the end of my stay because we had a nice time though I didn’t see her again. Then Mr Pugh’s ward and Colin – My God, Colin, are you dead, you shite?

  When we saw Terry leave and he was so well we felt it made our jobs worthwhile, said Mr Pugh to my parents.

  They cashed in their Co-op dividend21 to buy me a coat and the day I left for Oxford I bought a copy of Wide World22 on the station. I was away – I was free – and the sun shone silver on the wider current.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE RIBBLE AND THE LANCASTER CANAL

  The Glittering Path

  My new girl, my special new girl

  He tried to cool his engine by throwing buckets of water – The countryside sort of lies there – You are a hooligan and a show-off – The library, the river, the pub and a Staff Nurse – The Tombstone Shagger – The snorting laugh, the tortured vowels – They are scum – Skin like white porcelain – Cartwheels along the rim of the waves – It goeth neither up nor down – Kipper suprême – Change of husband if you don’t watch out – A fly pressed like a flower – They were going down like ninepins in Lancaster – Permission to step on your gunwale, captain? – His face streaming with blood – Out on to the Gulf of Mexico

  The Ribble Link has rapidly become one of Britain’s best-known waterways, opening up the lovely Lancaster Canal to anyone moored on the ‘main system’. It has especially made a difference to those moored on the Lancaster and their compatriots on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.

  It has, however, also made a difference to the local RNLI stations at Lytham St Annes! In the last two months, there have been five launches to narrowboats using the link. Luckily, all have been resolved without serious injury or loss of life.

  The latest incident was typical of the call-outs that we, as RNLI volunteers, have been increasingly facing. The owner, on his own in the boat, found that his diesel engine started to overheat while navigating the River Ribble on his way to Tarleton Lock. He tried to cool his engine by throwing buckets of water over it, but this failed and the boat foundered on a mudbank.

  Lifeboatman Pete Whalley, report in

  Waterways World magazine

  NO, I HAD seen nothing like the River Douglas as it rushed up itself with the tide, and as we came out of the lock I had to hang on and push the throttle down to keep control, and the six narrowboats left the junkyard of abandoned craft at Tarleton to fester in peace as we fought downstream. Downstream was upstream in a way, because the tide-stream was against us, but I am sure you get my meaning.

  The river wasn’t very wide, and ran between muddy banks topped with grasses and plants that don’t mind salt. Apart from the grasses and plants there is not much scenery on the Douglas, because there are no hills or trees. The countryside sort of lies there, limp and green and damp, intermittently covered with brine, not making much of a statement, no trouble to anyone.

  The Douglas bent around on itself and got broader and the tide rose under us and we saw a little more of the flat Douglas country, and there were two fishermen and some swans, which did little to populate the scene. The river had settled towards high tide and was broad and glittering silver, and with such a royal path and carpets of green at the side going on for ever and five miles away to the left the clouds layered in grey and silver and cream over the Irish Sea, we did not lack for beauty.

  Our problem was one of manners. We were the second boat out of the lock and the narrowboaters on this crossing were following each other, uneasy in these new waters.

  I was catching number one rather quickly – do I pass him? Will that be considered rude? I settled a hundred yards back and thought He must know what he is doing, let him lead the flotilla in.

  But he slowed and then I slowed and then he slowed some more and I said to myself, Sod it I can’t control the boat at this speed, I’ll go ahead.

  Overtaking on water is like everything else on water – it takes seven times as long. We drew alongside and pulled ahead in inches, then moved across and took over the lead, exchanging a manly maritime wave.

  When we had been sailing for an hour we came to the great T-junction with the River Ribble. Here you turn right with the tide towards Savick Brook another hour upstream. Although there are acres of clear water it is important not to cut the corner as much of the junction is inches deep. You have to go left down the Ribble and then turn back on yourself in the middle of the stream round the Asland Lamp or it’s a night on the mud for you and the cover of your favourite waterways magazine. One chap chose the wrong date to get stuck and had to leave his boat on the bank for two months, waiting for the next equinoctial tide.

  The Asland Lamp is a great skeletal tripod and on top of the lamp is a cormorant, or should be.

  We rounded the lamp and looked back from the Ribble and saw our companions passing across the mark, at ninety degrees to our course, their windows looking like the pattern on the side of a caterpillar. All the boats were running steady, except for one, which wasn’t running at all because it had broken down on the Douglas and crawled back into the lock. It is always a good idea before a major crossing to check if you have any oil in the engine, and I will try to remember that myself.

  The countryside remained the same, that is to say there wasn’t any, and the river did a bit of splashing and glittering but narrowboats don’t mind a bit of splashing and glittering – in fact they love a bit of action, as long as there is no swell and not too much going on of a sideways nature.

  On the PM2 there is room on the stern for two people. Have a look at the temperature gauge, Mon, I said – I can’t see it from here – I’ll watch the revs.

  I took us to 2000 revolutions a minute. In the dear old Phyllis May the engine would be screaming and jumping off its mounts and the boat would be fighting to get away. But the PM2 felt good. Come on, sailor – bring it on – think I can’t take it? I went to 2500, and the PM2 still felt good. Seventy Fahrenheit, said Monica, and rising fast.

  I pushed the throttle handle right down – 3000 revolutions a minute. Our bow wave was creaming out and there was a maelstrom behind us but the PM2 was holding steady.

  Slow down, said Monica, you are on ninety degrees – you’ll boil her – and you’ve left everyone behind – look, the rest of the boats are nearly out of sight. Slow down, you fool, slow down.

  We turned left into Savick Brook, which looked like a drain for a rather small field, and waited under the sea lock to rise to the Lancaster Canal. Our companions arrived one by one, and did not appear to have taken offence. I suppose they had no more idea of the etiquette of such occasions than we had. New engine, I said to the helmsman nearest to me. Trying the engine. Important to understand t
he engine – safety, you know. Always comes first.

  I would have thought at your age it had stopped mattering who was fastest away at the lights, said Monica. Is it offers of sex you are looking for, from one of the boating ladies not too far into her seventies, or to command the bar at the next pub? You could have blown up the engine and involved others in a nasty and dangerous shipwreck. You are a hooligan and a show-off – the oldest boy racer out of jail. The waterways should be protected from people like you.

  Tell you what, I said, we’ve got a hell of an engine here. A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!1

  * * *

  I crossed my eyes horribly and tried to dribble. I could not get the ring without the finger, I shouted – har har har, har har har. I rose from my chair and lurched around the room.

  Thank you very much, said Patrick Garland,2 and Anthony Page3 caught me as I fell over a chair. I coupled with your mate at barley-break,4 I bellowed.

  I didn’t get the part of the ugly and murderous De Flores in the Oxford University production of The Changeling, despite having one eye and playing the boy who bullied Heidi to a national radio audience. So I took up rowing instead.

  My Oxford life fell into a pattern, with my three years divided between the library, the river, the public house, and the arms of a Staff Nurse from the Radcliffe Infirmary.

  There never was a more boring undergraduate than me. I was not a pale-faced nerd who did nothing but work – I made lots of friends, and belonged to more than one of the elitist college societies, God forgive me. In fact I did almost everything you should do, to an unremarkable level.

  But a top second was easier than a first, the second eight was very fast, and the college magazine was easier to edit than Isis.5 And the lady undergraduates were not half as pretty as my Staff Nurse. If they were they went out with lords, not terrace-house Welshmen.

  My first impression of my college was the pile of trunks in the entrance. Trunks? Here were people who owned trunks, in which they put belongings when they went away – to public school. I didn’t know anything about public schools, but the trunks looked pretty important.