Chapter Nineteen
Christmas

AS I AM SURE I have said before, Geoff is a man of lists; he likes to have a plan. Unfortunately, we were now so far off our original plan, we had to sit down one evening and completely write a new one, and that sort of thing just upsets him. He kept veering back to the original plan and I had to ‘look’ at him for a while, until he concentrated on the new one.

We were also beginning to understand why we had been told time and time again that it was a bad idea to live on a narrow boat while you are restoring it; there are just too many problems, especially when children are involved. We had discovered a whole list of things that are problematic with a child: there’s the school run; there’s the fact that at the end of the working day everything has to be cleared before Sam sets foot back into the boat as he can do a fair amount of damage to himself and his surroundings with power tools, especially when he’s trying to ‘help’; there’s the fact that living on a boat means just that – living – quality time with your child, nutritious meals at regular intervals, going out, friends, birthday parties, etc. All the ‘stuff’ that goes on in normal life doesn’t stop just because your parents have fallen out of the sanity tree and hit every branch on the way down.

We tried very hard to keep firmly in mind that Sam never asked for this, he never wanted it, and he had given us very little in the way of trouble about it, a fact for which I will be forever grateful. So these were our excuses why, with two weeks to go before Christmas, we still only had one room completed.

Geoff had built a new sofa in the saloon where we could sit by the fire. It was an ingenious thing which lifted and moved, revealing compartmentalised storage space; there are obviously times where being a pedantic, obsessive compulsive is an asset. With the new sofa, which had been installed a little to the left of the front doors, the original bathroom space had become a distant memory and we had finally reached a point where we knew the upheaval was going to become vast and poor Sam would be moved about the boat like a pawn in an extreme chess match.

The new layout of Happy would mean that the old kitchen, which was at the very rear of the boat, would become our main bedroom, one of the old bathrooms and half the next cabin had already been made into the new bathroom, the other half of that cabin and half of the next one would be merged together to make Sam’s new bedroom (half of which we were currently sleeping in), the next three cabins were scheduled to become an open-plan kitchen, dining and lounge space (Sam was currently sleeping in the first of these). So, the dilemma was: how to move people around to give them some living space while each of these rooms was being destroyed and walls were being moved.

It was finally decided that we would start with Sam’s room. We did this for two reasons – firstly, it was in the middle of the boat and we figured that we could work out to each side; secondly, and probably the more important, was that it would give Sam a place of his own where he could escape the noise and fuss that was consuming the rest of the boat. There was also the odd little room right at the very front of the boat, but as we hadn’t come up with a decent use for that yet, we decided to just leave it as a nice warm ‘snug’-cum-television room, yet another place that Sam and his toys could escape to, without being in danger of having something fall on him.

But, as it was only two weeks to Christmas, we convinced ourselves that it would be better to wait until the New Year before starting anything major. We were away in Cumbria for the best part of the holiday and then, moving back down the country, were due to visit my parents in the Midlands. There seemed no point at all in starting anything new.

We spent the next week filling Happy with tacky fairy lights that flashed and changed colour; we also managed to find the smallest Christmas tree in the world, I think the sad-looking little thing only stood 12 inches high. We over-decorated it and balanced it on a box. From the outside, and with the curtains open, Happy looked like a floating brothel. Sam loved it and would curl up under a patchwork quilt in the front cabin listening to a Christmas carol CD and watching the lights flash.

I have never faced a Christmas with so little money. With three children to find presents for, Geoff and I set a firm budget, decided to forego presents for the two of us and just concentrate on the kids.

Amelia, although disappointed that this year wasn’t going to be full of useless, expensive presents, each one forgotten and cast aside in the excitement of opening the next, seemed to understand and accepted our reasoning. I was so proud of her when she tentatively asked for a new coat, but I felt really sad as well. I wanted to buy them rubbish, I wanted them to have the piles of useless glittering presents that they had come to expect. Damn it all, I wanted the piles of useless glittering presents that I had come to expect.

I spent a miserable Saturday afternoon Christmas shopping in Cambridge and, after spending a couple of hours battling with the rabid, unhappy shoppers and another hour battling with equally rabid but more homicidal than unhappy drivers on the A10, I squelched over the darkening flood defences with a scant few bags, a headache and a very heavy heart.

As I approached the boat, I noticed how pretty she looked with the lights twinkling in the front cabin; the fog gathering around the windows changed colour with the reflected lights, giving Happy her own front-end aurora borealis; the scent of wood smoke wafted toward me through the damp air and I could hear Sam and Geoff, singing loud, mostly off-key, carols. With me out of the way for the day, they had been packing up the books left by the previous owners to make room for our own and had taken them to a second-hand book store. They had made more in book sales than I had spent on presents, so they were righteously happy when I clambered in through the door.

Over the next couple of days, Sam and I had a fantastic time making Christmas cards on our wobbly table. By the time Charlie arrived on Saturday, we had a complete range of glittery, tasteless, blobby and unidentifiable cards. These we made envelopes for and sent them on their way to unsuspecting friends and family. With Charlie’s help, we spent that weekend making fudge and hijacking a friend’s cooker to bake Christmas biscuits and other poorly shaped goodies. It was a lovely weekend; we were all sticky, glitter-covered and felt slightly sick from too many ‘taste tests’.

I was surprised to find that, when pushed, the kids didn’t actually want anything much for Christmas; Charlie wanted some roller skates and Sam a new computer game. They were far happier just puddling around making things, laughing, throwing things at each other and making a mess. We discovered that Sam can really cook and Charlie has a superb eye for package design. By the time Sunday evening rolled around, they both plonked themselves onto the sofa, next to a huge pile of homemade presents that we intended to give to the family. Exhausted, and even after a bath, still slightly glittery, they both proclaimed it the best weekend ever.

Christmas and New Year sped past. It was strange to spend time in a house again and I found myself staring out of the window, missing my early morning dose of fish lips in the mist. I also found myself automatically throwing the toast crusts out of the window; luckily my mother thought that I was feeding the birds.

‘We do have a bird table, dear,’ she grouched, as she rushed around sweeping them away from her immaculate patio.

Within days, it seemed, Sam was back at school and we were faced, once again, with the plan. The weather was cold, wet and grey. Snuggled up together in front of the fire, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do anything more than make tea and sit around discussing what we ought to be doing.

As we were retiring to bed after yet another fruitless evening of watching mind-numbing rubbish on the telly, Sam woke up from a nightmare and, as he was unwilling to be consoled, I settled him in bed with Geoff and prepared to sleep in his room for the night.

I couldn’t get comfortable – the whole bed felt clammy and damp. Putting this down to Sam being frightened and probably a bit sweaty, I didn’t really give it much thought, but it felt so horrible that, eventually, I decided to get up and change the sheets.

Stripping Sam’s bed down was always a bit of a pain as the mattress had to be standing on its side to enable the sheet to be put on, so, at two in the morning, I was buried under a heavy mattress struggling to replace a fitted sheet. I lifted it up on to its side and, leaning it on the wall, bent down to pick up the sheet. As I began to stand up the mattress toppled and landed across my back and shoulders.

It didn’t hurt, but it was absolutely soaking. The whole underside of the mattress was completely sodden, and turning the main light on to get a better look I noticed that the wooden board that made up the mattress base was also covered in water; it had obviously been like this for some time as dark patches had appeared on the underside of the mattress and it had a mouldy, musty smell. I picked the whole thing up and, after dragging it through the boat, slung it as far as I could down the gangplank, leaving it in the dark to be dealt with in the morning.

Grimacing and trying not to give in to the need to wash my hands in Lye, I wandered into our bedroom and poked Geoff awake. I dragged him into Sam’s room and showed him the still soaking but mattress-less bed base. He decided that, as the base was solid, the moisture had nowhere to go and no way to evaporate and this had probably been building up for ages. He was far more sanguine than I about the whole thing and, yawning, gave me a kiss, assured me that we would deal with it in the morning, and staggered back to bed; I slept on the sofa.

The mouldy bed pushed us into action again. The next morning we examined all the mattresses and found each one to be in the same condition as Sam’s. I was amazed that we hadn’t noticed this before, then had minor hysterics and refused to sleep on any of them.

Geoff, stoic as usual, went straight to the room and a half that were to be made into Sam’s new space and began to dismantle them. Eventually, after spending another ten minutes moaning about the diseases we could have caught from the beds, I joined him.

Unsurprisingly, we encountered all the same problems that we had when dismantling the bathrooms. Firstly, there were screws with no grip or with heads that broke off the second you touched them with a screwdriver that had to be drilled out. There was no pump-out tank to remove – thank God – but being a hotel boat, every room boasted a little corner sink, and we knew they were going to be trouble.

The wall holding the sink was the very last to be removed and Geoff had been building up to another long struggle. Having nothing to do at that point, I made tea and, wandering in, I leant against the wall sipping it, intent on enjoying the show.

As before, Geoff removed all the screws, dismantled the taps and pipe work and just as before, the wretched thing just hung on the wall and mocked him.

‘What are you going to do this time?’ I asked, leaning over and giving it a little wiggle. It felt completely solid.

Geoff grinned at me. ‘I have a cunning plan, Lord Blackadder,’ and with that, he picked up a lump hammer and hit it – hard.

Watching the hammer’s descent, I winced and backpedalled away from the expected explosion of porcelain shards. He obviously hadn’t hit it hard enough because, apart from making a sound like a broken bell, nothing happened. Geoff frowned and, taking a deep breath, he braced his feet apart and raised the hammer for another blow.

It never fell. Without any sound at all, the sink just dropped to the floor where it hit with a dull thud and lay there, leaving Geoff with a confused look on his face and the hammer held above his head. To this day I have no idea why it was so funny, but I laughed so hard my face hurt and I had to go and sit down for a bit; even now when I think of him standing there with his hammer I still laugh. Over the course of destroying the cabins to make way for a more open-plan living area, we removed seven sinks in all, and not one of them gave up without a fight.

Within two weeks, Sam had a bright new bedroom and we were all looking forward to him moving out of our makeshift room and back into his own. He was enchanted with the new room: a bed just his size, new mattress, massive amounts of ventilation, desk at the end with a light, wardrobe and drawers. His new bed was high enough that all his toys fitted beneath it in big storage boxes. The whole room was decorated in cool blue and white, and a new dark blue, deep pile carpet, which nicely matched the curtains, covered the floor.

The weekend before it was finished, we had let him loose in B&Q and he was allowed to choose whatever additional decoration he liked. He chose a frieze of Scooby Doo and Mystery Incorporated; it was huge and had the added attraction of little sticky figures that could be placed on it to complete certain scenes of ghosts, monsters and general mayhem.

I had winced slightly; it was so ridiculously far away from the traditional rose and castle narrow boat decorations that it felt like putting fake black oak beams in a spaceship, but it was his choice and he loved it.

When the room was complete, he moved in amidst much celebration and furore and refused to emerge for two days, even to the point of demanding all his meals be served on a tray – this he would place reverently on his desk, turn on the overhead spotlight and settle down to some serious eating. He got away with this for 24 hours, but as part of our new family lifestyle, we had decreed that at least one meal a day should be eaten together around a table, and, lovely though his room was, it was way too small to hold two adults, a small boy and a pot of spaghetti Bolognese.