Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (6 page)

Monica took me to the abbey for communion—inexplicable splendour of air and light and stone. Beau Nash’s tablet explains dryly that as the social leader in Bath he had the advantage of God, who is untutored in fashion or degree.

Monica has a genius for churches—Saxon churches in the woods, Victorian sunbeams. Memorials: a widow buried with her sons in the First War, a pilot lost over the North Sea. When I read the dead hero’s tablet I could feel the cold.

And I was playing in the street again and saw the Junkers 88 bomber and the two Messerschmitt 109s coming in over Pembroke Castle (
In here Terry, now, now, now
) and on Llanreath hill the oil storage tanks explode, and all the fire and the bursting smoke.

AS WE WERE LEAVING BATH A TALL THIN OLD guy came along the quay. He had blue eyes with a sea mist, looking at something over the horizon. I’ve got a narrowboat, he said—I sailed it across the English Channel twelve years ago. My God, I said, you must be a hero. He smiled inside his beard. It’s not everyone does it, he said. I have met someone who has sailed the Channel, said Monica, and shook his hand and asked if she could kiss him. I can’t believe it, I said, that I’ve met you—was it in all the papers? Most of them, he said. Was it hard, said Monica, was it dangerous? Pretty hard, he said, and pretty dangerous—I planned it for years. But I had the time—the captain of a container ship doesn’t always have much to do. So I studied the charts and the tides and did the modifications and everything was fine. Did you enjoy it, I said, or were you too scared? I was scared all right, he said, but I enjoyed it—so did my son, who came with me in his motor torpedo boat.

DOWN INTO THE RIVER AVON AND YO-HO-HO for Bristol. A tidefall marked the banks. We moored for lunch by Fox’s Wood and way up under the trees a large group in dark blue was intent on a close ritual. Perhaps boater-murderers, end-of-the-worlders, whippet-racers practising without dogs. After a couple of hours we decided they were probably scouts. But where are their hats, I asked Monica, where are their neckerchiefs, their woggles? Where are their socks with their little tabs? It’s illegal to scout without a proper hat. Everything’s changing, said Monica, and they’re not going to ask if it’s all right with you.

Jim set off to destroy the local wildlife. He had caught nothing that had not already passed over Jordan but he always made a fuss and a scurry and often some jet fighter zoom and swerve. When he returned Monica said Oh look and his front foot was bleeding and he couldn’t walk. We burned down the current towards Bristol and at Hanham lock a notice asked us to report to Steve. We stroked his cat in the lock office and Monica told him about Jim and Steve insisted he drive us to his vet.

The waiting room was full. Dogs, cats, fish in jars. A girl with a cardboard tube—her pet snake or a pair of ferrets. Jim looked around, dividing the patients into those he could chase, those he could impregnate, and those he could eat. He rolled back his lips and made for a hamster. Foiled, he settled on his haunches, licking his foot and looking pathetic.

On the surgery table he shivered and rolled his eyes. Goodness me, said the vet, it is a little vippet. And he has lost a nail, poor vippet. Ah the vippets, they are always injured. A vippet, when he runs he goes mad. He bandaged Jim generously. Is he too thin? Monica asked—he’s getting thinner and thinner and people are stopping me in the street. There are bits of him you can see through. The vet pinched Jim’s bum and Jim turned and looked at him accusingly. He is a vippet, said the vet—they are born to be thin, they are born to run, but see the muscles. That is a strong vippet, das ist ein fit vippet, das ist ein gut vippet.

Steve drove us back to the boat. I will show you the memorial to my dog, he said. Oh Lord, I thought, he’s a nutter, he’s going to show us his dog’s headstone at the bottom of his garden. There it is, he said.

By the road was a cream stone erection in antique style, some thirty feet high. Not bad, eh, said Steve. Not bad at all, I agreed.

She was half Labrador and half Alsatian, said Steve. I used to know what she was thinking. When she went I put on my yellow fluorescent jacket, and took a spade and went to the little plot behind the old gates to the town. No one sees you in a fluorescent jacket—you are an invisible man. So her memorial is the old town gates. One day I will go invisible again and put a bench there.

IT TAKES A WHILE TO SAIL INTO THE CENTRE of Bristol, and half a roll of film. Passing through Steve’s lock we had entered the floating harbour. The harbour doesn’t float, the boats do—I wish people would say what they mean. We moored on a pontoon in St. Augustine’s Reach, among masts and bright buildings: crowds on the quays, the sun, the seabirds flying. That evening as Jim dragged and stumbled along the quay the very drunks raised themselves in the gutters to cry out and shed a tear.

Ring the pilot, said Monica, we’ll go down the river Avon and up the Bristol Channel. And we’ll ring Beryl and Clive and they will come with us. I’m not going back up the Kennet and Avon canal. Remember the vandals, remember the locks, remember the bridges, remember the flies. The flies, I thought, the flies.

But listen to this leaflet, I said, from the harbour office—

The Severn estuary has the largest tidal range in Europe, up to 14.8m at Avonmouth, with stream velocities up to 8 knots. Canal and river craft are strongly advised to avoid spring tides. If your engine fails you will be carried along by the tidal stream with little or no control of your boat. In severe cases craft can be literally rolled over and over on the sandbanks.

It’s the September equinox now, I said—it’s the spring tides.

SLEEP WELL, ROBIN? I ASKED CHEERFULLY. There was the dog, said Robin—it was dreaming, and the clock, it was chiming. I thought The poor dog hardly whimpers as he chases across the fields of heaven and the clock was chiming the watches and this old guy is supposed to be a sailor.

Next to the armchair where Robin had chosen to spend the long watches of the night where all is sin and shame Jim came out of his kennel, stretched, grinned, and farted. From the cabin came the early morning noises of Clive and Beryl, and Monica began to offer breakfast. It was four o’clock in the morning and very dark.

The water in the harbour was fast asleep with all the lights out. Robin had said we would get under the bridge before the Avon lock with our wind generator up but we couldn’t and Clive was shouting Stop her there Terry for God’s sake. We sucked to the side of the lock like a matchstick in a bath and sank to the level of the river. The keepers held the ropes—Nice boat, nice flowers—and went home to bed.

In the gorge there were lights in the air and lights in the water and we were sailing on ink. I steered with Robin at my elbow. He was tall and skinny, and he had put on a Breton sailor’s hat.

Clifton Suspension Bridge was a luminous ribbon in the sky. Be careful no one jumps on you, Robin warned, and they piss on you too. I could think of one or two who would get up early to piss on me from Clifton Suspension Bridge, but their chance passed them by. Gently down the Avon on the ebb of the biggest tide of the year, eight miles of Parker Quink Permanent Black.

The M5 to the west goes over the river at Avonmouth. A dismal highway over yards and wharves, but now an arc of light from horizon to horizon, white and gold, on matchstick pillars. In the river shining vehicles sped
to the island valley of Avillion, where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow
. Behind us the sky had turned pink and lavender.

Under the bridge and across Avonmouth harbour, past South Pier Lighthouse, and into the Bristol Channel. We turned left, going away from Sharpness. Narrowboats are not made to put out to sea, certainly not on a spring tide, and the tide spat and slapped at us and the
Phyllis May
bucked and swayed. Jim began to whine—What the hell’s going on? Beryl pulled him out from under the table and stroked him as he looked at her in despair. May there be no moaning of the Jim when I put out to sea.

I wondered if Jim had more sense than I did, and I hung on to the tiller as the waves and the current yanked at it and I felt scared and sick. We wallowed south-west along the coast and turned inside the Portishead breakwater, watching the tide rip by, sending fingers to snatch us and throw us spinning into the Atlantic. Through the sea lock, into the marina, and as day broke we fell into our beds and chairs and kennels and went to sleep.

Twice a day the Severn fills, the salt sea-water passes by
. In eight hours we would be out on the new tide, which should carry us up to Sharpness lock, and on to the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, where the sea can’t get you any more.

At Portishead the estuary is five miles wide, narrowing to one mile at Sharpness. The first bridge is at six miles, and the second at ten miles, and Sharpness is twenty miles away.

IN THE MERCHANT MARINE THERE ARE TWO hundred words for slow. As we waited at the sea lock a tug entered the other side at the speed of continental drift. I stood at the tiller for an hour with Robin. It was not easy for either of us. The sun was hot, I was nervous, and I was not interested in talking about the immigrant problem. Also I wanted Robin to man the tiller only when there was danger and Robin had decided to sail the boat all the time. And he was falling all over me when I needed to manoeuvre and how can I say to a bloke of sixty-two who had commanded oil tankers You can’t stand there on a narrowboat for Christ’s sake?

When we got out of the lock we were late and Robin told me to go hard. The engine began to bellow and we headed for the first great bridge on the horizon. The sea was blue, and there was no swell.

If we arrived at Sharpness after the top of the tide we would not be able to get into the lock and we would have a night on the mud. The prospect of this, with Jim and Robin aboard, was dreadful indeed. I brought the engine up to eighteen hundred revs, about six knots plus the eight-knot tide. Warp nine—
She cannae take much more of this Captain Kirk—ye cannae change the laws of Physics
.

I have got Sharpness here, said Robin, his VHF radio to his ear—they think we’ll be too late for the lock. I remembered what Joe had said—Run at normal speed, don’t hammer the engine and it won’t break. I put my weight on the throttle handle—two thousand, twice cruising speed. Warp ten—Sorry Joe. In the pandemonium of the engine-room Clive watched the dials and prepared himself spiritually for changing a belt in an estuary on a spring tide.

The lower Severn Bridge crosses the channel where it is three miles wide. It hangs from cobwebs between two white towers. As we rushed onwards it retreated further and further away. Robin had said it would take fifteen minutes to reach it but after half an hour it had almost vanished. Then out of airy nothing it began to take form, inhabiting the sky; the cobwebs turned to girders, the towers to sunny cliffs, and Monica drove the
Phyllis May
under the first of the great bridges.

In the front deck Jim lay in his bed in his life jacket looking like one of those orange-and-black liquorice allsorts. If you can imagine a terrified liquorice allsort then you have him spot on. I had argued a spell on the tiller for Beryl and we were drawing near the next bridge: smaller, simpler, white and beautiful. When I looked back Robin was on the tiller again. My greatest challenge still lay ahead. I had decided to drive the boat under this bridge myself.

I worked along the gunwale and stood by Robin, crowding him, ready to elbow him into the current. He held on to the tiller and put his radio to his ear, nodding and frowning. That’s Sharpness again, he said, we mustn’t slow down. Righto, I said, but you are going to let me take her under this bridge. Robin looked at me, wishing he had been on Clifton Suspension Bridge earlier, but he moved to one side. As we passed the middle of the bridge I gave a wave and a shout.

Up Slime Road we rattled through a soup of sand and gravel, and into deeper water where surges whispered and bubbled—
Just one mistake, just one mistake, break a belt, break a belt
. Robin said It’s going wrong, we are late. He took over again and showed Clive, whom he liked, where a big tanker had caught aground and rolled, lost with all hands on just such an evening. They catch, they catch again, and then they roll, and then they drown.

But the strife was o’er, the battle done. Sharpness would let us in after the blue freighter ahead. We sat in the front deck where the engine could scarce be heard and watched the evening come down. The smoke from a cottage rose straight into the air. The water settled to a rink of opal, overflowing every creek and spilling on the grass.

At Sharpness we waited in the stream while the freighter passed into the lock. Another demonstration from the merchant marine, that foster-child of silence and slow time. Then
Squawk
, and
Re-squawk. Come on Robbie boy, we’ll squash your funny little boat in somehow squawk fizz
.

Our bedmate was registered in Estonia and was rather smaller than Jermyn Street. We crept under her side and her crew, fugitives from many a desolate Baltic wharf, looked down with disbelief on the thin boat, the orange dog, the bush hat, the flowers.

The gates opened into the canal and Robin came along the lock. Thank you Robin, I said as we shook hands—you have helped give us one of the best days of our lives.