Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Read online

  One evening we sat in the boat and two grass snakes came swimming by in their fresh green and yellow summer skins, more beautiful than Cleopatra, more graceful than whippets.

  Put a snake down on flat ground and he will bugger off as fast as he can. He throws a loop out to the left and one to the right and the loops travel down, with other loops following them, until his whole body is driving him ahead. Now imagine that movement in water, with the snake relaxed, the loops smooth and symmetrical running down his body – a swimmer on the surface comfortable and graceful, with no surly bonds of earth6 to break the harmonic of his path.

  On the Llangollen Canal the country became hilly and it started to rain, as it does when you cross into Wales. But it was a fine day when we flew our cruiser two hundred feet into the sky on the cathedral legs of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, and tried not to look down too often because inches away was the void, then the stones in the bed of the Dee, and the green water tumbling.

  On the way back we came across one of those narrowboats moored by the cut – you know, the ones that look like sewer tubes and go on for ever and have flowers on the top and quaint people live in them. The old chap asked us in and his wife made us a cup of tea.

  Incredibly they lived on this boat, moving round the canals mooring to mooring like the Flying Dutchman. They were sweet and grey and old and doddery and past it as you would expect at seventy, but happy and proud of their tube and its flowers on top and roses within. I thought of our lives over the shopping parade in Chessington and the filthy trains and the terrible people I worked with in Lever Brothers’ head office and my heart ached.

  Audlem is near Market Drayton, and I am pleased to report has a number of public houses to this day. On that day we went in at lunchtime. We found ourselves in someone’s front room – sofa, table, carpet, ornaments.

  The effect of the smell of a room on a townie who used to live in the country – the damp straw and plaster smell of his grandma’s cottage – it reaches inside him and says Come back, for Christ’s sake, come back.

  Then someone put a tape in the player, just for us, and played a set of tunes they had put together themselves. They played it because we were welcome there. We did not have to push through a drunken crowd to reach a bar spilled with beer.

  We went back down to the boat and the sun shone on the fields and on the cut and on that day unknown to my conscious mind I decided this was my country and I would live here.

  In those days the soap companies were the biggest of all advertisers. Lux toilet soap spent the equivalent of twenty million pounds a year, but was struggling to hold its place at the top of the market. Nine out of ten film stars use Lux was the slogan and the advertising agency was J. Walter Thompson.

  I never got on with JWT. I respected the creativity of the company but there were so many snobs and drunks. I didn’t feel easy with them – they were always boasting, poncing about. Do you do much ocean racing, Terry? I wasn’t sure they felt easy with themselves. One senior man I had known had just fallen from a high building.

  Life is for living, Terry, one of the Lux account managers explained to me one evening, when I turned down the third gin and tonic. He spoke as a man of some experience would talk to a little child. He died quite soon afterwards, a victim of the third gin and tonic.

  Anyway here I was, the new Senior Brand Manager in charge of Lux toilet soap. I asked to see the current commercials.

  Pamela Tiffin?7 I said. Who the hell is Pamela Tiffin? Are we going to have the housewives of Britain rushing out to buy Lux because Pamela Tiffin says she uses no other? You must be joking. Is this the best you can do? I have never heard of Pamela Tiffin. Aren’t you supposed to have a man in Hollywood who is friends with Princess Margaret and sleeps with all the big stars? Can’t he get us a few people someone has heard of?

  Pamela Tiffin is a very beautiful and talented lady, Terry, and unfortunately Robin Douglas-Home8 has killed himself.

  Oh Lord. Poor chap. But look, let’s start again – do some research. Ask a couple of hundred housewives who they think are the most beautiful women around and then go and sign them up. And no more commercials with unknowns pouting into a dressing-table mirror like tarts waiting for a John. I never saw such boring bloody stuff. This is the sixties – let’s have some action. Let’s make some noise.

  You have to give it to JWT – they did just fine. Petula Clark9 on a bateau mouche in Paris, Kathy Kirby10 at the Palladium, Janette Scott11 on a white horse, Claudia Cardinale12 whizzing round the Colosseum.

  I can quit now, I said to Monica. Lux toilet is the market leader again.

  Terry, this letter says you have been selected to go to Canada for six months. You will have to tell them I am pregnant – will they pay for me and the baby?

  * * *

  Monica does our planning and had arranged the whole of our narrowboat trip up north when I was stuck in the Grimpen Mire of a Stone winter. So the river crossings and the lovely Lancaster Canal had been a surprise to me.

  Two things I had expected were Morecambe Bay, because the canal would pass within a couple of hundred yards, and the Midland Hotel, where I knew I would fall in love.

  We walked down from Hest Bank to Morecambe Bay. We had to cross a main road and the railway line to Glasgow, and it took half an hour.

  When we got to the beach the sky was darker and the bay was endless and empty and I was oppressed by ghosts. Ghosts on the sand,13 lying drenched and still, or erect and turning in the mist. Their faces were pale and I knew they were shivering and I could hear their cries for help. It happened just there, over there.

  No one had protected them, the twenty-three young people who were drowning, and no one would come to save them now. The forty-foot tide in the huge flat bay was like a galloping horse and the February wind was like a knife.

  The incident highlights the need to ensure sensible health and safety arrangements are in place for all workers in Britain.

  Justin McCracken, Head of Operations for the

  Health and Safety Executive

  But aren’t you and your mates the chaps who are supposed to ensure sensible health and safety arrangements, Justin? Why did you not challenge the gangmasters? Because Morecambe Bay is a public cockling ground? Because they were illegals, because they were Chinese? Because, like so many government regulatory agencies, you did not do your bloody job?

  Monica had gone ahead over the dun and black platforms of mud covered with yellow grass. Between the platforms were run-offs and channels filled with mud. Jim and Jess strained and whined – we were going to play The Game.

  A dismal shore – rocky, muddy, broken, ugly. Out towards the sea, mud, mud and a grey horizon – Grange-over-Sands breaking the line to the north – and to the south the Midland Hotel a tiny white blur.

  Monica was almost out of sight and the dogs were screaming. I let them slip and Jess went ahead, dodging and swerving to follow the grassy knolls, flying where no ground was beneath her. As she crossed a dark background her brindled coat vanished and there she was again, her white socks flailing. Jim swerved and raced after her but halfway he stopped – I’m an old guy now and what the hell?

  When they went to look for the Chinese cockle-pickers they found twenty-one corpses spread around the whole bay. Most had left the vehicle but a few remained with it to die. Two were never found.

  It was dusk and the air was cold and four miles out the tide was gathering speed.

  We reached Tewitfield, which wasn’t very much, just a turning point, near a main road, but green and pleasant with services. We had reached the northernmost northern point of the English canal system. There was a bloke already moored there. Ho ho – we know who he is, he said.

  The bloke was in what I can only call a wide narrowboat. That is a narrowboat which is twice as wide as a narrowboat. As the locks are broad or none round here, wide narrowboats are quite common. A narrow narrowboat has barely room to stay alive but is slim and elegant. A broad narrowboat has bags of
room and looks like a cowpat.

  Yes, it is him.

  And you are you.

  Indeed.

  And that is Monica?

  No question, and this is Jess.

  Read both your books – got them on board. Will you sign them?

  To get a signature people will mail us their copies at home, bang on our roof from the towpath, chase us along the cut. It is much nicer than being ignored.

  The Midland Hotel Morecambe is on the south side of Morecambe Bay. Nothing is out of reach of ghosts, but their influence is scarce felt here, just a quiver of cold now and then, a shape darkly on the far sands. The Midland Hotel Morecambe has its own powerful ambience.

  One of the few defences we have against time is to make something very beautiful. The Midland Hotel Morecambe is small – forty-four bedrooms – well enough placed on a sandy and pleasant part of the great bay, but not on a towering headland, not even isolated from other buildings. The Midland Hotel makes its own space, its own rules.

  How simple it all is – this is just right, this adds up. Energy is mass times the square on the speed of light. The building is not complicated, not brutal and stupid and blundering like the apartments on Lancaster canal basin. How simple, how easy it all is.

  Start with a colour – white of course. Then a shape – a rectangle naturally. Convex to the sea and concave to the railway station that serves it. Glaze it and take care that the window fittings are simple and flush. That’s right, plenty of glass. Get the window proportions right – height and breadth must balance, and echo the building as a whole. A large atrium – space, space, and some genius artworks, carpet, sculpture – Eric Gill,14 who else? A circular staircase swinging up the four storeys. A terrace at ground level with a glass wall to the sea – that will do for the restaurant. Behind it a long bar looking through the terrace. Round the corner a little circular bar. Here you haven’t much room and every detail must be right – the stools, the counter, the taps, plenty of height. Freedom is what we are after, light and freedom and more lightness and look at the sun on the sands and see how the sky is growing red. After dinner we will walk out on to the promenade into the bay and look out at the rising tide and back at the simplicity and truth of the jewel of the north-west coast.

  Built in 1933 – an RAF hospital seven years later. They are not long, the days of wine and roses. But the Midland Hotel Morecambe has just been rescued and refurbished and God bless her.

  Back across the Ribble tomorrow, Terry, back to the Rufford Branch. That is if the gales will let us. Those big trees are thrashing about – it will be like being at sea.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE LEEDS AND LIVERPOOL

  Simon Rodia Funny Little Guy

  The swell was twenty, maybe thirty feet

  Mid-Atlantic in the mad July gale – Outside the pub with her skirt pulled up – The Toronto Salute – The lights of Yonge Street bold as blood – A long way up for the hell of it – It begins with the creeping – The City Lights Bookshop – El Camino Real – Some gentle people there – A pheasant in a Christmas tree – Wigan Pier is among the most hopeless – You will not necessarily be attacked – A million times I was wake up all night

  I WAS SWEPT up, then down. I hung on to the rail. The swell was twenty, maybe thirty feet. The gulls had all been blown away. Whoops, up she goes. I wasn’t expecting this.

  Down and a crash and a wallow and a bang. She’s taking it quite well, and not skidding sideways. Just up up up down down down. Sometimes you are weightless as an astronaut, and then your knees cannot take your mass. There is a long fetch from Newfoundland to the mid-Atlantic, for the swell to build up.

  Monica sat in a deck-chair in a blanket, looking pale, holding Lucy, who was grinning. Most of the passengers were in their cabins, throwing up. But the pills the doctor had given to help me make it through the night of Lever Brothers were excellent for seasickness as well.

  The little Dutch liner1 Ryndam bashed on, butting mid-Atlantic in the mad July gale,2 taking the young executive and his family to Canada, to help him prepare for international command. But he just wanted to be a poet and live somewhere quiet – perhaps managing a waterworks – a quiet waterworks – a waterworks in the country – where there was plenty of water and not too many pumps or anything, and a staff who knew how it all worked and did everything you asked.

  His second article for Punch was shortly appearing – ‘Off-peak Off-beat’,3 about people who lived on the edge of society and went against the tide. That was a much more important step in his career. But it was wonderful to go to Canada – very few English people crossed the Atlantic in the early sixties.

  Each day stretched to twenty-five hours, with lectures and films and talking with the students and the old folk who gather round Lucy and ask to hold her, and drinking rum and Coke and watching the waves and the wake and waiting for the shore – and after a week there it is, far away on each side.

  Not long ago the U-boats lay under the St Lawrence River like pike. They sank twenty-four ships, taking nearly four hundred lives. Just one U-boat was sunk – Johnny Walker could not reach that far and there were plenty of places to hide along the broken coast. The temperature gradients in the St Lawrence are sharp and salt water and fresh flow close together and the Allied sonar signals were reflected before they reached their quarry.

  In the museum at Liverpool we had seen a torpedo – I wondered why stricken ships went down so quickly, until I saw a twenty-foot torpedo.

  The Battle of the St Lawrence – fought in the currents and the temperature layers against twenty-foot torpedoes and deck cannon. A battle of invisible predator and defenceless prey – terrible, vicious, forgotten.

  But the St Lawrence was smooth, and the U-boats were gone, and Hitler is dead, and Doenitz is dead, and you are a young man with his lovely family, it is evening, and look, par ici, Monsieur Terry, un oiseau-mouche – a hummingbird – right there by the rail.

  * * *

  Jim, the original narrow dog, is my whippet and Jess is Monica’s whippet but on the PM2 it’s every man for himself, or every woman, or every whippet.

  Two narrow dogs take up the whole of a narrowboat. They have their little beds how sweet but they spill out of them all over the floor. They lie in the narrowest part of the corridor. They know where you are going to sit for meals and are there when you arrive. They jump you when you are in bed.

  When they cannot sit on you the narrow dogs lie and look at you reproachfully – I am sure if you put your mind to it, master, you could find something nice for the poor narrow dogs – a walk, a treat, some love?

  Jim is pedigree, patrician, elderly (what happened to Daddy’s Little Moon-mouse?), stubborn, bossy but very affectionate, and a grand dog to take for a walk. He holds close and will wait while you chat on the towpath. Jim is a gent.

  If Jess were a person you would find her sitting on the pavement outside the pub on a Friday night with her skirt pulled up. She has no control over her emotions. She loves me and cannot let me be – wherever I go I can feel her wet nose against the back of my knees. In fact I can still feel it when she has gone. I can feel it now. She climbs up me and throws her arms round my neck when I am sitting down or puts her chest on my knees sideways.

  She is dreadful to take for a walk. Yesterday she yanked out of my hand barking and threw herself on a German shepherd that could have swallowed her whole. Whenever she can she runs away, seeking to rid the world of rabbits.

  I took them for their morning walk at Tarleton on the lead and there were rabbits in the lane – hopping about, no harm to anyone. I turned and went back to the boat, but Jess had seen the rabbits.

  That afternoon as I came into the boat Jess came out between my legs and was off up the lane. Monica went after her and came back with Jess limping and bleeding. The vet said she had run into a fence and had a bad cut right by her eye and needed stitches there and elsewhere and took her in and gave her back to us sewn up full of dope with a lampshade round her
neck.

  None was more sad than Jim, who set about licking her carefully and was moved to show his affection in the most obvious way and chased her up and down the boat for days.

  * * *

  It is a truth4 not universally acknowledged that the climate in eastern North America is a bastard. I have choked in New York in August and near been struck dead by cold in January. I have sweated in Virginia and shivered in Florida, been drenched in Georgia and blown about in the Carolinas. Most European settlers in North America died soon after arriving, and it is a triumph of the human spirit that any raised the strength to reproduce themselves. So to you reading these words down the ages and planning to settle in North America I would offer some advice. You may have heard this before, but – Go West, young man.

  Further west than Toronto, for sure. We lay on our bed helpless, the fan whizzing and the sweat lying on us in pools.

  Just a few months later we would pass people in the white streets and they would flash the Toronto Salute – a tap on their ear to warn us that our lobes had gone white and the next stage is frostbite and then your ears fall off.

  Lever Brothers was air-conditioned and carpeted. I learned to offer my fist to the door, as to a large un-familiar dog, so the bolt of electricity could fly from me with a crack and not harm me or those around me.

  The chairman interviewed me on arrival. He was a Brit of traditional cut. In England, Darlington, he explained, we have small houses and small cars, whereas in Canada we have big houses – big houses, Darlington, and big cars.

  The danger with these overseas attachments is that they were seen as a tax-free reward for success rather than a serious matter and you finish up poncing around like visiting royalty, bored stiff. So I asked for a proper job and joined the marketing team.

  My workmates were most friendly, but I could not understand why after four weeks no one had asked me to the pub after work. I suggested an outing one evening. Very pleasant it was, though there were no women in the bar and apparently it was against the law to drink while standing up. The next evening some of the lads went out again. In the morning they stumbled in with plaster casts, bandages. There had been blows, someone said there had been a knife. We did not go for a drink after work again.