The Water Road

Introduction

The year unfolded apocalyptically enough. Forty days and forty nights was a mere shower compared to the wettest year since records began in 1766. While rural England was still reeling from B.S.E. and salmonella, over the winter engorged rivers broke their banks, homes flooded and livestock drowned. Seemingly overnight England had become Florida Keys without the sunshine.

Then, sixteen days before I was about to set sail on my four-month circumnavigation of the greatest national concentration of waterways cut solely for navigation in the world, another disaster hit. Foot-and-mouth was discovered in Northumberland and spread across the country like tabloid gossip. Virtually the entire canal network was closed down for the first time in more than two hundred years.

God clearly had it in for us – pestilence, floods, plagues, hurricanes, hailstorms and train crashes (the Old Testament missed that one). They were all signs. A whale even washed up on a Sussex beach. What more proof was needed? The country was at the end of its rope. All that was missing was a great fire.

Funeral pyres were duly burning across the country as I eventually got under way six weeks behind schedule. Fields grazed by sheep for a thousand years were empty, tourism had fallen into the abyss and the stock market was about to crash. It was clearly the end of the world.

I slipped the moorings to the sinking island and sailed off into the parallel universe of the canals. If mainland England was currently damned to hell, the canal network was blessed to heaven. The inland waterways are the retreat of romantics and eccentrics, a water margin where the best of England is preserved and a new future is being dreamed.

There were many reasons for my 900-mile journey by traditional narrowboat. The renaissance of the canals and attendant resurrection of inner cities suggested this was the moment for a waterborne English pilgrimage. The turn of the millennium and my own half-century also required marking in some way. But perhaps the greatest motivation of all was a desire to understand a conundrum that had puzzled me on my brief earlier visits to the canal. Why is it that on some anonymous high street just fifty yards from the waterfront people hurry past each other seemingly persecuted by life, and yet those same people walking the canal towpath smile and greet everybody they meet? Sailing through England’s back door, over the next four months I hoped to discover the nature of that spell.

In September I would return home just in time to watch the Twin Towers crumble. The apocalypse was alive and kicking. There were lessons to be learned and I’d seen the writing in the trembling water.

A Four-month, 900-mile Journey through England

1

High Tide

The Tidal Thames

I’m slowly lowered into the dank bowels of the lock. The upper world with its bedlam of cars, trains and humans is lost to the tumult of rushing water. Caroline is straining at the leash, desperate to squeeze through the raised paddles and be off. I tighten my grip on the rope to the lock’s holding bar. Eventually the great moving walls to the river swing back and I enter the vast belly of the Thames.

Unlike the empire builders turning left on the ebbing Thames with their unslakeable thirst for open water and new colonies, Caroline, my 50-foot hired narrowboat, is snatched like a twig by high tide and spun to the right. It feels like it’s been an eternity coming, but I’m finally under way, barrelling up the ancient salty river to England.

‘But why do you want to go?’ That had been my twelve-year-old son Max’s first question when I initially broke the news of the journey. His eyes were x-rays, boring through the muscle and fat looking for the cancer of betrayal in the bone. How do you convince a twelve-year-old that there’s nothing suspicious about saying you love him on the one hand and that you’re taking off for four months – ‘That’s for ever!’ – on the other?

‘I just have to do it,’ I answered limply.

‘Who’s making you?’ Max asked the unanswerable.

There are no grey areas in childhood. The world is flat: you either want to do something or you don’t. Max cuts through bullshit like a diamond through paper. Throw in some philosophical waxing or middle-aged angst and his eyes simply turn up the heat.

I grabbed a lifeline. ‘You’ll come and visit some weekends and maybe you can stay for a week during the holidays.’ Max lifted an eyebrow to signify – what? – distrust? Resignation? Acceptance? Who knows. Whatever it was, he turned on his heels and returned to the greater certainty of his PlayStation.

The Tidal Thames

That first abrupt conversation took place in autumn 2000. Now, as I make a start of things out on the tidal Thames, it’s early spring 2001 and the world feels as huge as it did when I was a small boy. An old lighter barge strains against the current making for the still-gaping jaws of the Blackwall Basin Lock and its journey’s end. A tour boat swings wildly round my stern, returning upstream having completed its London story. Caroline rolls in its wash, engine growling, tiller reluctant to bring the boat to heel. The buffeting unceremoniously reminds me of the rules of water navigation: keep to the right and stay put. There is, however, another rule, one that’s not in the manuals but which overrides the first: bigs rule the water just as they do the playground.

Right now Caroline feels like a leaf on the Amazon. Like countless sailors before me departing the capital, my stomach is in emotional knots. ‘So why do it?’ I hear my Max asking. The excitement, bubbling along with the tide, answers for me. I am ditching the virtual highway for the sensate world of escape. Some who measure the world in betrayals and deficiencies may well see my journey as just another midlife crisis, an indulgent and selfish abandonment of Max, his fifteen-year-old sister Larne, and my wife Susanna. Those of a more restless, more generous disposition may be gentler judging why I simply had to make the trip.

Riding the tide, London is a flick-book of images. In minutes the unloved £750 million Dome birthday cake with its lopsided never-lit candles gives way to exuberant screeching gulls piping me through the seaport of Greenwich. Down by the jetty are the diminutive Gipsy Moth and lumbering tar-black Cutty Sark. High above them, in the royal park the red time-ball of the Royal Observatory plummets as it has at 1 p.m. every day since 1833 as a reminder to shipmasters to adjust their chronometers. I look down at my own watch, vibrating on a wrist glued to the tiller. Six minutes slow. I leave it as it is.

At this same moment no doubt, a battery of camera-toting tourists are capturing loved ones straddling the Greenwich meridian, one foot in the western hemisphere and one in the east – irrefutable proof for empire builders that the world expands outwards from Greenwich. The line they straddle marks the zero meridian, the beginning of time. It also marks the beginning of my journey, the casting off from Greenwich mean time in search of English slow time.

Where I’m heading, into a spider’s web of canals known collectively as ‘the Cut’, I’ll have no need of longitude or latitude. On a couple of previous weekends pootling the margins of England by narrowboat, I’ve already discovered it to be a world no less magical than Alice’s, a secret network as powerful as ley lines. The Cut’s history, gouged in the British landscape deeper than the chariot tracks left by the Romans, is a hidden garden flashed with kingfishers and colourful traditional narrowboats; a parallel universe ringing with the laughter of water gypsies, the thin cries of bats, and the booming Stygian silence of tunnels.

Over the next few months, Caroline will carry me on a single continuous figure of eight from Greenwich up through the Midlands and across the Pennines before returning south. What would take fourteen hours to drive in a car, will take one-third of a year by narrowboat. The route I travel will be as much James Brindley’s dream as my own for it was his eighteenth-century utopian vision of a Grand Cross of man-made waterways linking our major cities to the sea via the main navigable rivers of the realm – the Thames, Severn, Mersey and Trent – that gave wing to the industrial revolution and the current network.

The timing of my journey, it seems, could not be better. The current renaissance of our inland waterways is being heralded as the New Golden Age of the Canals: waterfront cities are being reborn and as many miles of canal are currently re-emerging annually as opened at the height of late eighteenth-century Canal Mania.

Just as I have no need of longitude or latitude to navigate my course through back-door England, neither do I need rocket science to operate Caroline. To hire a narrowboat, you don’t even need a driving licence – you simply aim the pointy end the way you want to go and stop when the canal does for its arcane ritual of lockgating.

Yes, anyone can do it but anyone can just as easily make a complete arse of themselves too. Particularly if, like me, you’re sailing solo. As a novice with just a handful of days boating under my belt I dread the crowds attracted to locks spotting me dropping a rope into the drink or smashing into a gate. Mooring has even greater potential for humiliation – attempting not to knock the flower boxes off roofs of parked boats nor scratch freshly painted hulls, while veteran boaters line the banks, arms folded, shaking their heads despairingly at every new incompetence. Then of course there’s the possibility … probability … of falling in the canal itself.

What’s making me anxious at this moment, however, is not locks or mooring. It’s the fact I’m doing the toughest stretch – the tidal Thames – first, and according to my Nicholson guidebook no hire companies allow their narrowboats onto the river. Well, mine did. But what does that say about Adelaide Marine?

Along with the anxiety, and the emotional rollercoaster I’m riding leaving my family, I’m also on the crest of a tsunami of optimism and excitement. A lethal cocktail. And right now things are moving at a pretty hairy pace. In a couple of hours I may well be pootling at 3 m.p.h. along a tideless canal with plenty of time for swapping tea bags and chat, but for the time being steering demands constant adjustment, particularly each time Caroline is picked up by a powerful slipstream and partially turned.

From beyond the muddied banks of Deptford Creek comes the crunching sound of unwanted cars being pummelled in a breaker’s yard. Beyond it stands the seventeenth-century Mayflower pub, named after the ship that sailed from its moorings to invent the modern world. A few hundred yards further on, the waterfront gallery of the Angel overhangs the river. This is where the Mayflower’s captain, Christopher Jones, bought supplies and a crew, and where Captain James Cook holed up while preparing for his antipodean adventure.

A police launch skips past, barely touching the water, creating an instant wash of guilt. A swarm of helicopters buzzes overhead. As I make another long serpentine loop with the river, Tower Bridge soars above me, an airy castle from a children’s book across which hordes ebb and flow between work and home. After the Tower comes the architectural stew of the City and the gun-grey menace of H.M.S. Belfast. I sail on through sun gulleys with ominous rain clouds stacked on the horizon. On the left, the converted warehouse of Hay’s Galleria, where tea clippers once unloaded from India and China, is filled with office workers munching on bagels and sipping lattes in trendy cafés beneath a glass-roof atrium. The pages of the flick-book keep turning.

The wash from Caroline funnels across to a small Mississippi mud beach where two boys, aged ten or eleven, are skimming stones from broken pallets beside a half-eaten sheep. Above them stands the preposterously small replica Golden Hind in its puddle at the corner of the Old Thameside Inn. Alongside it is a sign – ‘The World Encompassed 1577–1580’. Nearby, a man is sitting astride the embankment wall, blowing on each individual crisp from a Walker’s packet as if they’re steaming chips, before popping them into his mouth. On the steps down to the mudflats from the Founders Arms, a black man and a white woman are passionately entwined, a Yin-Yang mandala. It feels wonderfully springlike and optimistic.

I’m growing in confidence, looking around more, taking in the sights, when suddenly the engine breaks back into consciousness. It’s making funny – funny as in strange – noises. Over the next few months I’ll learn to be more sensitive to Caroline’s moods and complaints. For the time being I try to ignore her belly grumbles.

I start picking up occasional snatches of music, and even loud conversation, from the bank. One voice reminds me of a teenage girl I’d heard a week earlier standing outside the Tate Modern screaming at her father, ‘Where the hell were you? I was worried!’ Dads do get lost.

Leading from the Tate Modern, the ethereal Millennium Bridge, the first new river crossing in central London for a century, floats above me, its aluminium vertebrae on the move, a giant sci-fi stingray leaping from the water.

The drizzle that has intermittently pattered on the deck becomes more insistent. Clouds have thickened, rain is now hammering down, and the enveloping darkness has transformed the river into steel corrugations. I think back to the illuminated skyline I strolled under that night a week ago outside the Tate Modern when a heavenly fire seemed to burn above the city. That was when I first started thinking about omens. What was the saying? Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight? I don’t know if we have shepherds any more.

I let go of the tiller and make a snatch for my waterproof. By the time the tiller’s back in my hand I’m heading towards the northern bank. Fortunately nothing’s coming.

I sail under Hungerford Bridge and Charing Cross Station. Later that evening I’d read in the Evening Standard that just a few hours before I passed it, a train ran amok hitting buffers and gouging a ten-foot hole into the concourse. The country is in the grip of Mad Train Disease after Mad Cow, Mad Weather, Swine Fever and Foot-and-Mouth.

As I approach Westminster Bridge a police launch does a show-off water plough to bring itself alongside Caroline. What have I done? ‘Work’s being carried out on Westminster Bridge,’ a uniformed man shouts across. My neck muscles relax. ‘Only one section’s open. Follow the green, not the red, arrow.’

‘But I’m colour-blind,’ I shout back.

The uniform stares long and hard, assessing whether I’m just a loser or trying to take the piss. ‘Follow the arrow and avoid the cross then. You’re not cross-blind are you?’ He smiles. If I was trying to be clever, he’d got me back with interest.

Just as I’m about to pass under the bridge I catch sight of my friend Nick Crane with his battered old Olympus shooting pictures of me and Caroline. Once through the far side, I slow and look up again. Nick’s waving frantically between camera clicks. I wave back and suddenly my Conradian sense of destiny awaiting in the water margins of England is waylaid by the river police. An inflatable carrying ten frogmen slaloms alongside. I slow the boat. With the engine purring, I can now hear sirens seemingly coming from every direction, and above me helicopters are playing out scenes from Apocalypse Now.

I remember with a shock it’s 1 May – May Day. And May Days are not what they once were. The city is heavy with paranoia. Eight hundred demonstrators have gathered on bikes at King’s Cross. In other parts of town Anarchists, Greens, and common-or-garden anticapitalist foot soldiers have assembled. Six thousand police officers are on duty and another three thousand are waiting in the wings in case things turn nasty. Buildings have been boarded up and Westminster schools closed for the day. What has most bearing on my own present situation, however, are the hundreds of protesters milling about on the other side of the Houses of Parliament I am now idling outside.

The frogmen in the inflatable are clearly patrolling the building and, spotting an anarchist cyclist on the bridge – Nick – and his mate in the boat – me – exchanging signals beside the seat of British government, reasonably enough assume an attack is imminent.

I smile and raise a hand as greeting. The flat faces circled by sinister rubber hoods are expressionless. I smile some more. Not a flicker. They come in closer and escort me past the neogothic pinnacles of Parliament, the House of Lords and Westminster Abbey and don’t quit – with another showy turn – until Caroline slips beneath Lambeth Bridge.

It’s half an hour before I stop looking over my shoulder. The abandoned Battersea Power Station, known the world over to Pink Floyd fans, floats past, followed by a hundred-foot-tall Peace Pagoda with gilded Buddha and wind chimes. Caroline sprints between the towers of two medieval parish churches at Putney Bridge marking an ancient river crossing, and passes a string of rowing clubhouses. Ahead, a boat, crewed by six females, is powering towards me on the wrong side of the river with only their muscular backs to guide it. I move closer to the bank to accommodate them. Bad mistake.

It’s then that I first hear fingernails being dragged across a blackboard. Thankfully the sound vanishes. Whatever it was trying to get in below decks has gone. Then it returns, just as in every schlock-horror movie. The next time it stops, so does Caroline. A swarm of butterflies takes off inside my stomach. The engine panics, straining for escape. But we’re going nowhere. A wave hits the side of the boat and Caroline lists ominously.

The river is a bubbling cauldron and there are no other boats about (the rowing crew is probably back in its boathouse now enjoying a cup of tea). I try to accelerate into the centre of the river but we’re as beached as the whale I recently read about washed up on a Sussex beach. I try reversing. It seems to work. I’m moving. In reverse, however, it’s impossible to have any control over direction and within seconds the sand bar has us again.

I have only just started my great escape and already I’ve been snared. I put the boat into forward gear once more and turn the tiller from side to side. Not an inch. Caroline snarls. What would Harry Houdini do?

I try poling off the sand bar. The crowd on the bank that had been just two bored construction workers has grown to twelve or thirteen people who’ve interrupted their towpath journey for a bit of entertainment and to bear witness to an unfolding disaster in which a boat sinks after an epic struggle and its solo, sad occupant is drowned. As they listen to the item on the evening news, they will be able to say to whoever they share their lives with, ‘I was there. I saw it.’

After maybe twenty minutes of deepening despair, I eventually manage, through a sequence of forward and reverse moves, and chance, to manoeuvre Caroline so she faces downstream. By putting all my weight on a pole at the stern, I slowly inch back the way we came. Free of the sand bar, I turn in a wide arc upstream and promise Caroline there and then never to leave the middle of a river even if the QE2 suddenly looms above us.

I have now almost been arrested and almost sunk. It’s enough for one day. At Brentford, I pull off the river, following a sign welcoming me to the Grand Union Canal. It’s taken three and a half hours to get here from Greenwich. I’m exhausted but still high as a kite. I’m at the end of river time and I won’t see the Thames again until I’m on the final leg of the journey, travelling downstream from Oxford’s dreaming spires.

I enter a short creek and sail straight into Thames Lock, disturbing a woman in her twenties who’s attending flower boxes lining the wall. It’s the last manned/womanned lockgate I’ll encounter until I reach Wigan.

As Caroline and I rise from the maelstrom of the river up into the sanctuary of the Cut, I ask her where I can moor up. ‘Anywhere you fancy. Pull up along on the near bank and pop back for a cuppa if you like. I’ve got another hour till I knock off.’

I can’t believe my luck. I entered the English canal system two minutes ago and have already been invited to tea. I’ll soon discover that hospitality and the Cut go together like love and marriage once did.

I moor up, stash my map, guidebook, spectacles and waterproofs, bolt the back cabin from inside and exit the fore-end, padlocking its doors as I go. In minutes I’m sitting in Anna Ward’s skinny lockside cabin with a perfect view back to the Grand Union as it clambers out of the Thames. The canal is a millpond. James Brindley, the father of the inland waterways, likened water in a river ‘to a furious giant running along and overturning everything’. He found, however, when he created England’s first arterial canals that ‘if you lay the giant flat upon his back, he loses all his force, and becomes completely passive, whatever his size may be’.

There is something of the retro-mod about Anna’s short, parted hair. Her flat moon-shaped face, however, is interrupted by a ring through one eyebrow, she has a small heart tattooed on one hand garlanded with stars, and her neck is tracked by musical notes dancing above a stave. She is dressed in a British Waterways black sleeveless jacket and tapered green trousers. Anna moves easily and comfortably round the ten-foot by three-foot hut. As she connects the kettle to a plug socket on the floor, she tells me she has only been a lengthsperson – ‘men call it lengthsman’ – at Brentford a year. ‘Before that I was based at Little Venice. Before that I was a coach and lorry driver. Before that a motorbike courier … There, you have my whole history now.’

Anna’s clearly a well-rounded bloke, as happy shinning up ladders in a lockgate as she is tending her flower boxes. Having temporarily disappeared behind a cloud of steam, she reappears with two mugs of milky white tea and settles herself into a chair opposite me.

We quickly discover we have common roots in Chiswick: a bedsit I endured for a year in the seventies was located a couple of hundred yards from Strand-on-the-Green where Anna swam, fished and explored away her childhood.

She pulls out of her jacket pocket a crumpled packet of Cutty Sark tobacco and expertly conjures a roll-up which she then offers me. I decline and ask about the work. ‘I open the gate two hours either side of high tide. Outside that punters have to book a passage by ringing ahead and giving an estimated time of arrival.’

Opposite us, no more than twenty feet away, is the red brick wall of Anna’s two-bedroomed flat for which British Waterways (B.W.) docks £170 out of her £1,100 monthly earnings. When she gets a long weekend or week off, she usually joins friends on their boat on the Kennet & Avon, near Hungerford.

As we talk, my elbow accidentally knocks over a highly polished brass instrument that is leaning against my chair. I manage to catch it in time. ‘Gauging rod,’ Anna introduces it. ‘Toll men used it for measuring loads ‘cos boatmen would cheat and hide part of their load in concealed compartments. The rods would measure how low the boat was in the water and this’d be compared with the boat’s charts which showed how low she was empty. The difference indicated how much they paid to use the canal. Simple really. All the best things are.’

I ask Anna about a cassette sticking out the top pocket of her jacket. She runs her fingers through her straight, greased hair and stares at it as if suddenly remembering a job she hasn’t done. ‘A demo some geezer sent me this morning. Wants to know if I want to join his band as lead guitar … I might.’ Her freckled face breaks into a smile. ‘Yeah, I might join. Make a fortune, buy a narrowboat of my own and do what you’re doing. Four months … you jammy sod.’

‘Do you get bored here then?’

‘Nah. This is one of only two electronically operated manned lockgates on the London Ring. I’m lucky. Sometimes, too, I get to help people beached on the mud. That’s fun, having to get them off before the tide comes in because if they don’t, get off I mean, it can rush in so fast, the boat sinks … People can be very careless.’

I quickly change the subject as water continues to rush through the cracks, finding every weakness in the lockgate. Although no one has entered it since we sat down, Anna claims hers is a particularly busy lock. ‘Get loads through here and all sorts too. One thing though never changes …’ Anna pauses. I wait. ‘And it’s the same with the manual locks too…’ Again Anna waits, milking my expectation before letting the rope out. ‘It’s always the bloke steering and shouting at the back and the missus, for the sake of a quiet life, playing mate, doing the running about with the ropes and the heavy work.’ I laugh. It’s easy to laugh with Anna. She’s comfortable with herself and with others. ‘In your case, being solo, you’ve got no choice. You’ve got to be husband and wife.’

‘Do you get many like me coming through on their own?’

‘Not many. A few. Couple of weeks back we had a single-handed traditional Ovaltine boat pass through with its old livery and Drink Ovaltine written on the side. Well smart.’ Her face breaks into a smile at the memory. ‘Some of the boats that pass through can be a hundred years old you know.’ I raise an eyebrow and nod my head to show I’m impressed. ‘No, there ain’t that many solos but there are a lot more younger people on the Cut than when I first started coming down. A lot of ’em sell up and live permanently afloat. And they’re not all poor neither. There’s wealthy yuppie types who come through on their all-singing, all-dancing floating palaces with driers, microwaves, stainless steel kitchens, Jacuzzis, the lot. They’ll be having helipads next.’

We laugh. ‘The flashy kitchens are usually down to the wives. The bloke comes home from work pissed off as usual and says all matey like Let’s go live on a boat. The missus groans and then agrees, But I don’t want no crappy work surfaces mind.’ Escape is always preferable with a down landing. Anna pauses and then resumes her momentum. ‘The other thing there are a lot more of is noddy boats.‘

‘Noddy boats?’

‘What you’re sailing. Hire boats. Less working boats, more pleasure boats.’ Anna knows Adelaide Marine, the company I’ve hired from, well. ‘They ain’t the flashest but they’re pretty reliable and they’re the only company that lets its punters out on the Thames.’

Fearing the wrath of working boats, I ask Anna if she has any tips for me on my voyage. ‘There’s no proper freight carriers on the Cut, except up on the Aire and Calder which you’ll do as you turn south after the Leeds & Liverpool. The only working boats on the rest of the network just carry a bit of domestic coal and diesel, flogging it to other boats and waterfront homes. Tips?’ She pushes out her top lip with the bottom and rocks her head from side to side to indicate it’s no big deal. ‘Take your time. Don’t do nothing you’re not sure of – like don’t moor up somewhere when you’re not sure it’s deep or wide enough to get in and out. You can easily get stuck on the bottom and it’s a right bugger gettin’ off. Familiarise yourself with the boat and, as you’re solo, always have a long mid-line close to hand ‘cos you won’t be able to be at the back and the front at the same time.’

I’d already been given this last piece of advice by several other people when planning the trip. Today I’d first used the mid-line to hold fast in Blackwall Basin lock and I’d also used it when mooring just half an hour ago. I actually managed the job pretty neatly though I say so myself. I had the mid-rope handily placed at the stern so that once into the bank in neutral, I simply stepped off, nonchalantly, with the rope and fastened it to a metal mooring ring before securing the bow and stern ropes.

I’d expected Anna to be more impressed by my plan to negotiate single-handedly six hundred plus locks, plus lift and swing bridges, but she seems to think nothing of it. ‘There’s an old boy on the estate’ – Anna points to anonymous apartment blocks looming above her lockside home – ‘who natters to me about the war years on the Cut. Now that was tough. He’d get paid weekly in the boozer on Friday nights like everyone else and there’d be a right old knees-up. Real community it was then.’ She looks wistful. ‘The war years weren’t bad all the time. Living on the Cut was fun when there was more freight like there was then; all the old boys mucking in together, making bacon sandwiches and tea on the boats. Don’t do it no more though. And it weren’t just men either. Have you heard about the Idle Women?’

I nod my head having read several books written by the Second World War waterway volunteers. Anna looks surprised. ‘D’you know why they were called Idle Women?’ she checks me out. ‘Wasn’t ‘cos they were lazy.’

‘Wasn’t it the I.W. badge on their lapels – Inland Waterways – wasn’t that it?’

Anna nods. ‘They were the Land Army of the waterways. Kept the canals open during the war. Tough they were, too, carrying fifty tons of freight up and down to Birmingham – coal, armaments, all sorts.’

‘Wasn’t their depot somewhere near here?’

‘Very close to where you’re moored. Gone now though.’

I ask Anna if she’s read Troubled Waters by Margaret Cornish, an Idle Woman I’d had the good fortune to meet who’s promised to meet up with me during my trip despite the trouble she has with her 85-year-old legs. ‘Ahh, that’s such a good read,’ Anna explodes, ‘and have you read Idle Women by Susan Woolfitt? I couldn’t believe how unfazed she was when her boat and the butty got mashed when that German bomb hit the Cut.’ I nod my head. Together Anna and I reminisce about the night Susan, Kit and their new recruit Ruth had a hole blown through the side of their boat and the doors torn off.

A little later, back on Caroline, I pull out Woolfitt’s book from the small library I’ve stashed on board. I find the incident on page 98 where the author talks of the sky being lit up like daylight and the boat tipping ‘to a fearful angle’ before her survival instinct kicked in. ‘I remember thinking: Well if I must, I don’t mind being blown to pieces, but to be sunk in the Cut and drowned struggling in the cabin is quite another thing … I raced my thoughts up the steps and out of the door.’ Within minutes of viewing the devastation outside – ‘the fire burning like a furnace over the water and fire-engine and ambulance bells shrilling urgency from all the streets round us’ – Susan was padding back down the stairs; ‘I think we all want tea and if the Primus is still with us I’m going to make some.’ Tea. It’s always tea with the British. If we have a cup of tea, everything will be all right. I settle down with a final cuppa. Tomorrow I head inland.

The cabin feels cold. It will take some time for us to get used to each other, to warm to each other. I feel a tingle of excitement. Tomorrow will be the start of slow time and a journey beyond my own earliest marker, Tommy Steele’s ‘Butterfingers’. Tomorrow, up at the Gauging Lock I’ll sneak through England’s back door into a 3,000-mile network of interconnecting inland waterways leading to heartlands and lowlands, bucolic idylls and satanic mills, engineering marvels as brilliant and complex as the spinning jenny, and tunnels haunted by asphyxiated boatmen. It will be a journey across the face of England with all its exultations and darkness: traditional pubs and rave boats; glorious sunshine and sheeting rain; canals that have been resurrected and enjoying their new summer, and those still abandoned like shameful secrets.

I pull out the bed, switch off the light, and turn away from my family.

2

Moving but Barely

The Grand Union Canal

I wake to an overcast sky and the bleariness that’s a sure sign of hangover, imminent illness, or the legacy of sleep broken by capricious giants violently bashing you against a canal bank all night because you left the mooring ropes too slack.

Like Susan Woolfitt, I put the kettle on and, while waiting for it to boil, unpack books from the last kitbag, beefing up my mini-library. Exploring my new home, I discover the living space can work as a continuous flow-through, or by pinning back the toilet doors at right angles, be transformed into three self-contained units. The boat’s design is as simple as it’s ingenious, as practical as it’s magical. Caroline is the childhood den I created from a linen cupboard when we lived in Malaysia, the hideaway I made of a boiler room in an abandoned building in Shropshire, and the dilapidated gypsy caravan my sister and I requisitioned in a Wiltshire wood. As the son of a sergeant in the regular army I was used to upping sticks every two years and the dens were the security blanket I dragged round with me.

The bare facts concerning Caroline are that she was built in England in the 1960s and somehow made her way to France. Abandoned near Narbonne, on the Canal du Midi, she filled with rainwater and sank. Peter Woodley, who’d already bought two other English-built, French-sojourning narrowboats (all France’s narrowboats continue to be British-made), bought the wreck off her English solicitor owner and brought it back to Adelaide Basin in Southall. As Peter’s base, Adelaide, was named after a British Queen (the consort of William IV), he christened the new addition to the family after Queen Caroline of Anspach, wife of George II, who acted as regent during her husband’s absences abroad.

Caroline had had her continental fling and seemed more than happy to be pottering along England’s backwaters, embarking on the real Grand Tour. After so little time together, we’re still on formal terms: I have to check the manual to be reminded how to turn on the heating; and only remember that the gas supply switches automatically to a fresh bottle when an old one runs out, after wasting an inordinate amount of time fiddling around.

All I’m praying, as I warm up the engine and turn the ignition key, is that Caroline has forgiven yesterday’s indignity of running her aground. I need not worry. Like every other day over the next four months, she starts first time with a gruff bark that rises several octaves when she gets into her stride. Within days we’ll be singing a duet.

I slip the mooring and we’re off under a whiteout of cloud. It’s not the most auspicious spring weather, nevertheless my eyes and ears feel reborn. I can’t quite believe my luck at escaping the spray-gun attack of modern urban existence. The day’s planning is simple: follow the canal. Unlike driving on roads where you constantly fret about missing a turn, canal junctions are major events often separated by days or weeks rather than minutes.

As I set out on the water road, cherry blossom drops like confetti and a passing swan bristles its wings into an angelic arc. Beside the towpath in a marine yard, a fire is burning in a tin drum while a Danish flag flutters from a nearby houseboat and a windmill spins manically on a Dutch barge. Within minutes I’m at Brentford Gauging Lock, setting out to investigate, swinging my windlass as extravagantly as a Greek does his worry beads.

The lock, I soon discover, is operated electronically by my B.W. Yale key and I have no need of the windlass. I sail Caroline and close the lower gates but a tree trunk wedges between them like meat trapped in teeth. I reopen them, get back on board, reverse, and manage to manoeuvre the trunk out the gate. I feel rather proud of myself. The rest of the operation is a breeze.

Before resuming my journey, with no deck hands to carry out general duties, I nip down into the cabin to make coffee. While waiting for the kettle to boil, I open the Shell Guide to the Inland Waterways and on the first page of the section on the Grand Union Canal, read ‘From the Thames at Brentford, Middlesex, to Birmingham, Salford Junction, 135m 2f [that’s furlongs to those who still understand them] with 165 locks.’ I freeze. More than one lock a mile. An experienced boater with crew does a lock in ten to fifteen minutes. I estimate it will take the rest of my life to reach Brum.

The Grand Union Canal

I skirt Brent River Park, 400 hectares of woodland, hedges, fields, ponds, streams and a succession of parks that stretch seven kilometres from Western Avenue at Hanger Lane all the way to the M4 at Osterley. A tube train hammers overhead one moment and the M4 the next. In between, despite being enmeshed in London’s suburbs, I could well be in leafy Hampshire.

As I watch the tailgating cars and stacked planes awaiting their turn to come in to land at Heathrow, Caroline’s regular, dependable 3 m.p.h. doesn’t seem so slow. There are no hold-ups, no queues, progress is absolutely dependable and even better, sailing the country’s first nationwide navigation network I’m rediscovering the joy of travel.

In the evolution of transportation, it seems to me, we’ve accelerated from pony and trap to the speed of sound and on to virtual travel, in what historically is the blink of an eye. Somewhere along the way, the journey got hijacked. Road arteries clog, and train commuters rage at every delay in getting them where they need to be next. Before long the only way to get everything done in 24 hours in super-accelerated lifestyles may be by living lives virtually – working, playing, having sex and relationships in cyberspace.

A butterfly cult of instant redundance helps fuel the illusion of progress, serving short concentration spans and a fundamentalist faith in the notion that all things are hot and then they’re not. Several careers are needed in a lifetime, and several husbands and wives. We travel through life like a dose of salts.

As Caroline sails through the snowstorm of blossom, I try to remember when the idea of my slow-time journey first formed. Singapore. Almost a year to the day. As I sat on the thirtieth floor of a hotel watching traffic streaming across a causeway into Singapore’s forest of concrete and glass, ineluctably my only other visit to the steaming metropolis swam into consciousness.

Forty years earlier, aged nine, I’d been bundled, along with my brother and sister, into a trishaw by my father. It was our first time abroad and together we made a hallucinogenic journey through a night perfumed by the sweet sickly smell of durian (‘tastes like heaven, smells like hell’) and ringing with the guttural cries of hawkers yelling from stalls garlanded by bare electric bulbs. The night crackled, the trishaw kept its steady, human-powered pace, and we children in the back exploded with excitement.

Forty years on, alone in that hotel room, watching cars silently stream behind the plate-glass window to and from a city that never slept, it struck me something had changed in our relationship to travel. To those shuffling the causeway, journeys were simply inconvenient interludes between departures and arrivals; dead time which could only be filled usefully by catching up on business calls on the mobile. Movement and multitasking provides the illusion one is getting on, getting through. But getting through what? The reality is, those commuters are like Sisyphus daily pushing their rock to the mountain top, only to find it waiting for them again at the bottom the next morning. It was that evening in Singapore that I started actively seeking a more humane navigation through life.

Twelve months later, that navigation is taking a breather at a second lock. I stare at the ingenious beauty and simplicity of the mitred gate, an invention that belongs in the upper echelons of history-changing advances. Europe’s first pair of horizontal swinging gates, very similar to these, was operating on a Milanese canal in 1497, invented and installed by one Leonardo da Vinci, when employed as engineer to the Duke of Milan.

The water steps by which the canal climbs the contours of the country have a noble pedigree then. If you can’t go through or round a hill (James Brindley’s preferred method), then you take giant’s steps up it. If the obstacle is a river, you simply create a metal trough, or aqueduct, and sail over it (known in the eighteenth century by an