Free Narrow Dog to Carcassonne by Terry Darlington Page B

ARE PLACES WHERE THE CANAL IS crowded—Great Haywood near Stone, Little Venice in London, Braunston Junction on the Oxford Canal. But normally it’s the loneliness, doctor, the loneliness and the ducks. We sought a mooring at Braunston—the junk shop, the pub, the butcher, the church on the hill. Early communion on Easter Sunday—the new minister, her voice gentle, enough people there, not all old.
    After deciding the width of the canals the eighteenth-century engineers chose to have as few locks as possible and to follow the contours. But contours do not go anywhere in particular and sometimes the navvies digging the cut found themselves back where they started or further away and the investors were writing letters.
    The Oxford Canal around Fenny Compton is so tortured that I looked up from the tiller and saw the
Phyllis May
going round the bend in front of me. But perhaps I was distracted, because we had sailed past a moored boat called
Elizabeth Jane. Jane Howard was so beautiful that continuous problems arose
, wrote Robert Aickman, saviour of the waterways.
Little in the way of completely normal business was possible when she was in the room
. I set out backwards to have another look at the narrowboat
Elizabeth Jane
.
    When I sail the
Phyllis May
in reverse there is snaking and roaring and smoke and sometimes I get a good crowd. I covered the hundred yards to the moored boat and stopped in a whirlpool of foam. The couple tying things on the roof looked at me. Elizabeth Jane, I shouted, oh ho, well done. There were giants in those days, eh? The Inland Waterways Association and all that—Tom Rolt the dreamer, and Aickman the activist. Hated each other of course. And Elizabeth Jane Howard—campaigned for years with Aickman, snuggled up in his narrowboat. She was married to Peter Scott but he preferred blokes half the time so she took up with Aickman but he was mad half the time so she married Kingsley Amis but he was drunk half the time. Always got it wrong, Elizabeth Jane. Absolute cracker—good writer too—could have had anyone in London. In fact she had one or two. All those toffs and artists after the war knew each other of course. And fancy you calling your boat after her—marvellous idea—I agree we must show respect.
    Elizabeth Jane is my wife’s name, said the gentleman on the boat. We don’t know any of your friends. He and his wife went inside their boat and drew the curtains. I dropped into forward gear. It had started to rain, and it was still raining when we got to Oxford a fortnight later.
             
    ST. BARNABAS IN JERICHO TOLLED THE SMALL hours and I stared at the ceiling. I had been reading a life of the novelist Angus Wilson, who took a hundred pages to go mad and go incontinent and die. At breakfast Monica said I’m bored. Yes, I said, I think I am too.
    The rain won’t stop, said Monica, we’ve got colds and we can’t breathe and we can’t run, we’re getting fat, it’s freezing and the wind is blowing us into the bridges. The towpaths are muddy, the grass and trees are soaking, the spring flowers have drowned. I can’t move the lock beams because I’m too little, the lift-up bridge lifted me up into the air, I dropped your new aluminium lock key and your best flowered jug over the side. The cut is deserted and lined with rotting boats, the pubs in Thrupp wouldn’t have Jim, the fish restaurant in Jericho didn’t have any mussels, the mussels I bought in Oxford market were off, we have run out of logs and I miss my kids and my grandchildren and my friends in Stone. There is no one to talk to and no one has rung us and no one has e-mailed us and I’m frightened about crossing the Channel. We could be months in London, like a dentist’s waiting room. We’ve done this canal before, we’ve stayed in Oxford before. You wanted to live full-time on the boat—you must be mad. I’ve got cabin fever. When I go, which could be quite soon, I want to be cremated—I’ve had