All my life I’ve wanted to take a narrow boat holiday down one of Britain’s canals but have never got round to it. There’s always been something easier and more pressing, perhaps even a touch more glamorous than a week spent floating around Britain – a trip to Andalusia, a city break, a train-ride round Siberia – but this year, in my mid-fifties, I’m finally making it happen. With my cousin and both our young daughters as crew members, I’ve shelled out on the rental of a four-berth narrow boat – painted a resplendent red and racing green, a bit like a Hornby train. In late July we set sail, or rather diesel engine, for four days on the Shropshire Union Canal – just a slice of the 2,000 navigable miles of canals that spread over the country, from Devon up to the Scottish Highlands.
When mapping out a trip, it’s pointless to set destinations you couldn’t walk
Partly it’s the look of narrow boats that has roped me in – long, gliding, elegantly painted, and with a plume of smoke often emerging from a chimney. They’re designed, with their galleys, shower rooms and beds, for living in, and there’s just a hint of the gypsy caravan about them too, of the open road and open skies. Though not all still have the traditional castles or roses painted on their sides, each one usually exhibits the craft’s name. The most popular are those you’d expect – Kingfisher, Skylark, Bluebell, Morning Mist – but there are funnier, cleverer names listed too: Ship Happens, Usain Boat, Vitamin Sea and, as reported by one canal writer, Onion Barge G. All these things and the puttering, industrial chug of their engines set something off in me. This could be the start of an obsession.
That I took so long to arrange this perhaps makes me a prime candidate. Narrow boating is designed for the snails of life, the people for whom taking ages to get anywhere is quite natural, on whom slowness, not speed, exerts a pull. The boats – no wider than 6 foot 10 inches, no longer than 72 feet, were originally designed with their cargo to be dragged along by towpath horses, and the speed limit on the canal network is still 4mph (with some canals even slower). This means, when mapping out a trip, it’s pointless to set destinations you couldn’t walk to in the same length of time. Indeed, with all the locks to go through, you’d doubtless get there quicker on foot. Narrow boating, I sense, is about the process rather than any geographical objective. Wherever I’m aiming for, I’m bound on this first trip to fall short – the only destination realistically worth considering being the narrow boat itself, one’s place at the tiller, and that slowly changing, never ending cut of water, with its tunnels, low bridges and overhanging sides.
Perhaps it’s my daughter’s age – ten years old – that’s spurred me on to do it. In a few years’ time nothing will seem less enticing to her than a family plod down Britain’s waterways, and even now she’s bound to spend time staring at a screen (the narrow boat I’ve booked has, like most others and a bit dismayingly – both wi-fi and built in television), but she won’t be able to avoid some of the magic: the sight of kingfishers, dragonflies and river voles, the starry, silent nights, waking up in the morning to the sight of still water through the porthole. We’ll cook in the narrow boat’s galley – improvised meals of sausages and bacon sandwiches – and stop off for supper probably in places like Nantwich and Chester. With a gang of us on board it should be rather like a floating four-day dinner-party.
The canals, they say, are another world, so accessible from this one – most of us live within a few miles of the nearest – but so very different. ‘To step down from some busy thoroughfare onto the quiet towpath of a canal, even in the heart of a town,’ wrote L.T.C. Rolt in his 1944 book Narrow Boat ‘is to step backward a hundred years or more and to see things in a different, and perhaps more balanced perspective… No one who has not experienced it can fully appreciate the unfailing fascination of this tranquil voyaging… the ever-changing scene of trees, hills, fields and farms drifts past at so measured a pace that the eye has full time to ponder every detail.’ Jasper Winn, in his splendid Water Ways, describes the ‘sociability of the canals – inclusive without being tribal, supportive without being regimented… set to the speed of a walking horse or a slow-turning diesel engine.’
Is this true? I don’t yet know, and my main worry is lack of experience. You get a little training from the hire-company, but not nearly enough for me I fear, and I’ve booked a day’s special classes well beforehand. If they can teach me to take a moderately tight bend, tie a lighterman knot (the standard fastening for mooring, I’m told) and – above all – how to operate a lock, it will be money well spent. There are plenty of locks on the Shropshire Union Canal – even a staircase of them in at least one place – and they terrify me. I’ve gleaned what I can from books – about the gates that must be opened and closed, paddles to be raised and lowered, and the crucial importance of stationing your boat well ahead of the lock’s cill – a rear ledge that, if snagged, may virtually upend you as the lock’s water lowers – but reading isn’t much good. I need to be inside a lock and have the bits of it in front of me, with the freedom to make mistakes and an expert standing alongside, ready to click their tongue and seize the tiller if necessary. There are, reportedly, a growing number of accidents on the canals each year – caused by newbies and hirers (snob-speak from habitués for people like me) and the distracting effects of the mobile phone. I don’t wish to be one of them.
As with any new activity, one’s mind is full of doubts. Will it pour with rain? Will the kids once look out of the window? Will I crash the thing, to shaken fists from fellow-boaters, insurance companies and the UK Canal and River Trust? Perhaps the warm days will be plagued by mosquitoes, and the wet ones by dripping rain gear and a litany of complaints from mewling offspring. But I’m ripe for the challenge, already tempting fate by browsing canals in Wales or Ireland for next year’s adventure. It will at least allow me to chug through life for a few days, live out a childhood fantasy, and test the truth of Ratty’s maxim from Wind in the Willows: ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’
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