Chapter Twenty
She’s a Narrow Boat, Not an Ice Breaker!

WITH ONE ACTUAL BEDROOM completed, a bathroom and the space where a room used to be now holding a rather comfy sofa, we felt we had actually made some progress.

One morning, after dropping Sam at school, I staggered back into the boat and threw myself down on to the sofa, causing Geoff to look up in surprise. He had a large hammer in one hand and was obviously preparing to hit something, hard.

‘Are you all right?’ He put the hammer down and, taking a closer look at me, walked into the bathroom and grabbed a bottle of Night Nurse. ‘You look absolutely foul,’ he informed me, holding out a shot of glowing green yuck.

‘Gee, thanks,’ I sniffled at him and, turning, prepared to throw myself face down on the sofa. ‘Believe me, I probably feel worse than I look.’

‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Geoff grabbed me before I could settle myself in comfort. ‘Why don’t you go and have a long sleep in Sam’s room, you can shut the door to the end of the corridor and I can carry on working.’

‘OK.’ I downed the disgusting medicine and shuddered. ‘Don’t let me sleep for too long.’

Geoff looked around what was going to become our saloon. ‘Two hours at most,’ he promised.

True to his word, Geoff woke me with a nice cup of tea two hours later. Sam’s bed had been surprisingly comfortable and I really could have stayed there for the rest of the day.

‘Come and have a look at this.’

Ho hum. I got up.

Sam’s bedroom had been created from one of the old bedrooms in the corridor, and the saloon had been partially created in the space where the old toilet and one bedroom used to be. There were another two unused bedrooms, which were due to be all knocked down to make a through kitchen, dining room, saloon and, while I had been asleep, Geoff had done it all.

In my strange, fluey state I couldn’t quite grasp what he had done, only that there was suddenly a huge area of just, well, ‘space’ really. He had taken out two sets of side walls, two fixed beds and some other little bits like bedside tables, and all that was left was our little sofa fixed on one wall, which looked a good 30 feet away.

It was an amazing and huge change. Happy went from being one long, dark little corridor to all airy, light space. It was rather empty, it echoed and the whole place looked a little odd as there was just a void with a sofa and the wood burner stuck at the end.

‘Wow,’ I mused, ‘this really makes a difference. Now that you’ve got it all cleared, what’s going where?’

Geoff spent the next 20 minutes showing me drawings and pointing out exactly which part of the new space those drawings pertained to. By the second drawing, I found myself beginning to drift and couldn’t remember what was on the previous one. Luckily Geoff finally noticed that my eyes were glazed and I was beginning to slide down the wall. He put the drawings to one side and helped me back to bed. By the time I awoke for the second time, he had cleared all his tools away, vacuumed the mess up, been out to pick up Sam and had made dinner.

About eight o’clock that evening, I was curled up on the sofa with a hot water bottle, which he occasionally re-filled for me.

‘How are you feeling now?’ he asked. ‘Is there anything you need?’

I sniffed and smiled up at him from beneath my blanket, ‘No, I’m fine. I feel a lot better actually.’

‘Good.’ Geoff reached behind him and brought out a sheaf of papers. ‘Shall we go through these drawings now then?’

I suddenly felt really ill again.

Throughout February, the vagaries of the central heating system became more and more irritating until Geoff finally took the whole thing apart for a second time and swore at it for another couple of days. When he put it back together, it certainly was more efficient but still not perfect; every three or four days it would just stop working, and we would have to bleed it and go round the boat bleeding all the radiators which took about an hour and a half, fill the header tank back up with water and restart it.

The wood-burner was a godsend and, as temperatures plunged below freezing, it was often too cold to do any work at night, so we spent a lot of time just huddled up in quilts by the fire. Being very new to all this, it took us some time to work out that in temperatures like these you NEVER let the fire go out, because if you did, it could take up to ten hours to get the boat warm again.

We had learnt that particular lesson very early in our ownership, when, having been out at a birthday do at Arwen and Carl’s, we had let the fire go out before we left, at around ten o’clock that morning. By the time we had returned, 11 hours later, the boat was bone-achingly cold.

Sam had been sent to bed with hot wheat bags and, with a fine disregard for the electricity bill, he also had a heated blanket; he was soon warm, cosy and fast asleep. Geoff and I fared less well, the heating went off at about 11 o’clock and refused to come back on again, no matter what we did to it. Even with the fire roaring away, the temperature at the front of the boat was still finger-, toe- and mind-numbing.

With all the old beds still out of bounds due to the damp, Geoff and I had taken to sleeping on the saloon floor and at two o’clock in the morning, with the fire still on full, we huddled together, fully dressed, under two quilts and gibbered gently at each other. I got up once to check on Sam but even with his blanket now turned off, he was still completely toasty (I think that small boys have some sort of inner nuclear reactor). Pausing only to put on yet another pair of socks, a woolly hat and some gloves, I went back to join Geoff, and we finally fell asleep.

At four o’clock in the morning, we woke up, sweating and soaked. The ambient temperature had finally risen and everything was back to normal – in fact, it was so hot that Herbert had taken himself off to sleep in the bathroom.

We turned the fire down and, after divesting ourselves of all layers of clothing and dumping one of the quilts, we managed to sleep well for the rest of the night, but it was a major lesson learned; the Morso did not go out again until May.

Two days later, we woke up to dead silence, broken only by odd crunching sounds. Thinking that maybe it had snowed; I peered out of the window. No, no snow, just a very heavy frost.

I woke Geoff up as I went to put the kettle on by the simple act of tripping over him as he lay happily asleep on the floor (you would think most men would be happy to have a beautiful woman fall into their laps; maybe he would have liked me to fall from a lesser height).

Anyway, with Geoff up and about, if still wincing and limping slightly, I mentioned the odd noise. He looked in all the usual places that produce odd noises: central heating, water pump, engine room, but couldn’t find anything. I was a bit concerned as I am not a great fan of odd noises, they never lead to anything good, and, by the time Geoff gave up, I was getting quite tetchy about the whole thing.

‘Good grief! Come and have a look at this.’ Geoff had pulled the curtain aside and was staring out over the river. I joined him at the window and was amazed. The whole river was frozen from bank to bank.

‘Now there’s something you don’t see every day.’ Geoff slid the window open and gave the ice a poke with our broom.

‘That’s fairly solid,’ I said, watching the broom handle bounce off the white river.

‘It’s thin close to the boat, look.’ Geoff bashed the ice close to Happy’s side and it gave way with a crack, the same cracking sound we had been trying to track down.

‘Oh it’s the ice. As the boat moves, she’s breaking the ice,’ I shivered. ‘Eugh. Close the window, it’s flaming cold out there.’

Over breakfast we discussed our day’s plans.

‘We were going to Ely today. Are we still going to go?’ I devoutly hoped he was going to say no but didn’t really think there was much chance of that – it would take more than an inch of ice for Geoff to change a ‘plan’. Sure enough...

‘Yeah, it’ll be fine, the sun’s out and, more to the point, there’s no wind. We might not be so lucky tomorrow.’

Irk! I just knew he was going to say that. Oh well, better go and find the thermals.

An hour later found us both bundled up in whatever warm clothing we could find, standing at the stern, ready to go. Herbert had been forced out for his last wee; I finally had had to chuck him down the gangplank and then stand guard on it to stop him sneaking, still un-emptied, back on to the boat. He had finally given in and with an odd hobbling and tiptoeing movement had made his way over the frozen grass to relieve himself. When I finally let him back on to the boat the ungrateful little gargoyle dived into his bed and lay there staring at me in mournful accusation.

Standing freezing at the tiller, I waited for Geoff to go through his cast off checklist and stared mournfully at the cup of tea he had placed for me on the roof. I had so many pairs of gloves on I couldn’t actually pick it up and was just wondering whether we had any straws, when Geoff, finally finished, jumped aboard with a big grin and a puff of breath. I put Happy into forward and with a huge plume of water from the prop we stayed exactly where we were.

‘It’s the ice,’ Geoff inched his way along the gunwales to the front of the boat and, sure enough, the bow had moved enough to make a beautiful ‘V’ shape in the ice which then held us fast.

The next half hour was spent bashing the ice with anything we could find. The best implements, we found, were a barge pole and a spade. As we smashed the ice away from the river side of the boat, Happy moved away from the bank and toward the middle where the ice was thinnest and actually started to make a little headway of her own. Of course, once we had started moving, the ice began to break away from her bow in big chunks that went skittering off across the frozen surface of the river, which was great fun to watch.

It wasn’t quite so enjoyable to sit inside and listen to the amplified cracks as the ice broke and the horrible scratching noises as she brushed gently against any ice that refused to break. It struck me at the time that similar noises, obviously many times amplified, may have been the last sounds that some of the passengers on the Titanic ever heard. I shuddered and went back outside to stand with Geoff.

After about an hour of fairly slow but steady headway, I looked back at our progress: it was quite impressive. Beyond our wake, a huge crack in the ice stretched straight down the centre of the river. I laughed, watching the flock of rather relieved-looking swans that floated, in rather more restricted width than they were used to, behind us.

It took a little longer than usual but we finally made it to our normal turning point at the Lazy Otter. Forgetting the ice (I was driving at this point, Geoff had gone in to warm his hands) I took the usual route of swinging her nose over to the right and then around in a wide circle to the left, which usually meant we only had to perform one backing manoeuvre to get her turned completely around.

In all fairness, I did manage to get about halfway through the turn before she came to a complete halt, stuck in the ice again. It was much harder to get her underway this time. Getting her to go in a straight line with a fair amount of power at the back had worked well, but we were trying to turn her within her own length and the ice was having none of it.

Eventually, Geoff broke the ice to the left of her nose and I broke the ice to the right of her stern. Sweating and occasionally swearing as the ice failed to break, causing the implement in our freezing hands to vibrate painfully, we slowly pirouetted on the spot; it took us nearly an hour of smashing away at the ice to get her under way again.

Getting back to the mooring was much easier, as all we had to do was follow the break we had made on the way down. Our only issue was the seemingly millions of waterfowl that had taken refuge in the crack that we had created on our outward trip – we had to take it very slowly or risk crushing the birds up against the side of the ice in their panic to get away from us.

We managed to get back to our mooring three hours after we left. Pulling Happy back in, we gave up. We were cold, tired and were still suffering from painful, blood-returning tingles in our bashed hands. There was no way that we could make it to pump out and then back in time to pick up Sam. I sighed, another day wasted. But as I sat by the fire with yet more tea, I thought of the swans and ducks all happily swimming in exposed water that wouldn’t have existed if we hadn’t passed by, and decided that maybe the day hadn’t been wasted after all.

What with bad weather and other such traumas, we didn’t manage to get to pump out until the weekend, so early on a nearly windless Saturday, with a weak and watery sun doing its best to cheer us all up, we headed out toward Ely.

The journey was pretty much incident-free and, as we pulled in to pump out, we were all in good moods and had decided that we would turn around after pump out, find somewhere to moor and go into town and do some food shopping.

About 200 yards downriver there was a fantastic 100-foot mooring free, with just one lone angler sitting right in the middle. As boats have the right of way on moorings in Ely, we did as we were supposed to, slowed right down and shouted to him.

‘Coming in to moor!’ We began to pull into the space; the angler didn’t move. We slowed down a little more and shouted again, but he neither moved nor looked up or gave any sign that he was alive at all. I began to think he was a mannequin that someone had put there for a joke. By the time we actually hit his keep net we were running about, panicking and screaming, Happy was in full reverse and desperately trying to slow down, Geoff had his back against the boat and was ‘walking’ her front end along the wall in a desperate attempt to stop us from squashing this guy’s equipment.

When we were about two foot away from him (and still going forward), the angler jumped to his feet and stuck out his hand in a policeman type ‘stop’ gesture. Erm, nice to see you are actually alive, mate, but no ... I can’t stop. In the immortal words of Mr Scott, ‘I canna change the laws of physics, Captain’; we’re coming in whether you like it or not.

Well, quite frankly, the guy went loopy.

‘What the f**k do you think you are doing?’ he screamed, leaping up from his little stool-type box thing and beginning to literally dance with rage. Now I had read about this in books but always thought it was a literary plot device, but obviously not – this guy was really ‘dancing’. OK, he wasn’t about to be drafted into the hallowed lines of Hot Gossip but he could have definitely been put to music. It certainly didn’t help that he was wearing an all-in-one purple waterproof suit thingy so the whole scene looked very similar to a disco dancing, angry, purple Teletubby on ‘E’. I was having serious problems keeping a straight face.

‘We’re mooring,’ I shouted to him. ‘We did tell you we were coming in, but either you didn’t hear us or ...’ I let the sentence trail off, as the only other choice was to tell him that he was an ignorant bastard and even though I felt that would add fuel to his Teletubby dancing, I didn’t feel I had the moral fibre to be responsible for someone having an aneurism first thing on a Saturday morning.

‘You can’t just pull a boat in here, you stupid bitch,’ he screamed, stamping his way down the mooring toward me. ‘You’ve just squashed my net.’ He stamped past Geoff, who was still holding the boat off the wall with his body, and came toward me with one fist raised.

I watched him come down the boat, pure aggression in motion – even if it was purple and ridiculous motion – and had a momentary indecision. If I backed off and apologised, would he feel he had the upper hand and carry on with the aggression or would he calm down?

‘Look, I’m sorry about this,’ I shouted down to him. ‘We did tell you we were coming in and your nets are fine, the boat hasn’t touched them.’ I pointed to Geoff who was in danger of disappearing into the river, and waited to see if he would calm down a little.

No. He just got redder in the face (ick, blood-red really clashes with purple – he now resembled an overweight teenage blueberry with an acne problem).

‘You stupid, fat bitch’ (hey, I’m NOT fat), ‘nobody has the right of way here.’ (Wrong, actually, this is a mooring and if he had bothered to read his fishing licence – if he had one – he would have noticed that boats have right of way for moorings.)

OK, the guy was spoiling for a fight and he obviously felt that I was an easy target; time to bring out feisty grrrl again.

‘Listen, I’m sorry if we have squashed your nets, which we haven’t. I’m sorry if you decided to ignore us when we said we were coming in. I’m sorry you decided to sit in the middle of 100 foot of mooring like king shit. I’m sorry we won’t acknowledge you, Lord of the River. But we’re here, we’re moored where we should be, and it’s you who’s in the wrong – now get lost. We will move her back in the spirit of cooperation but we’re not leaving.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed, with a huge sense of relief, that Geoff had moved the guy’s nets, had fastened Happy’s front ropes to one of the rings and was now walking towards us. Mr Purple Teletubby also noticed this and began to back away, shouting as he went, ‘Spirit of cooperation? I think we are well past that. I was having a lovely day until you turned up, you stupid bitch. I don’t want to fish any more.’ And with that last ringing, adult rejoinder he turned and stamped past Geoff back toward his equipment – his undamaged equipment. Geoff and I looked at each other and got on with tying the boat up.

All was quiet for about five minutes until Geoff went inside to look for his coat. Mr Tubby looked up and, noticing that I was on my own again, stamped back up the length of the boat to have another go. Seeing him coming, I nonchalantly stepped back on to the back plate and opened the back doors.

‘Nobody has right of way here, you stupid cow. Anglers or boats – we are all equal you can’t just pull in and push people out of the way.’

His voice was rising and so was my temper. It was so obvious that he had deliberately waited until he could have a go at me without Geoff there and I was absolutely damned if I was going to let some puffed-up (literally), middle-aged banker think I was an easy target just because I was female.

For each one of my children I have always had the same advice: violence proves nothing, shouting, screaming and swearing does no good, there is nothing that cannot be solved by quiet conversation and a little give and take on both sides.

Right, good advice. Well it would have been if I had taken it, but all that went out of the window completely. We stood there and screamed at each other like a couple of fishwives, with much swearing on both sides I am sad to admit, about the rights and the bylaws, and the fact that he was in the middle of a huge mooring and wouldn’t move and that I was a stupid bitch. Eventually I gave up. He just kept repeating the same boring insults, I was called a stupid, f**king bitch so many times that I even considered suggesting some more interesting insults for him to use.

This carried on, to the vast amusement of a growing audience, until Geoff stuck his head out of the back of the boat and, as expected, Mr Tubby put his head down and scurried off with his parting shot: ‘Oh I’m not discussing this, you’ve ruined my day.’

Geoff made sure he hung around me and kept a firm eye on Mr Tubby as he stamped about packing his kit up and complaining loudly about horrid, nasty boat people, to anyone that would give him half an ear. I did notice that none of the other anglers had come to his defence, but were all sitting, very quietly, as far away as possible.

By now it was past midday and, unable to put it off any longer, I grabbed Sam and steeled myself to walk past the still ranting angler on my way to the supermarket, which had been the original reason for the stop here.

Geoff and I agreed that he would stay with the boat – not that we really expected Mr Tubby to do anything to it in such a public place, but better safe than sorry. Sam and I put on our coats and, taking another deep breath and Sam’s hand, I prepared to walk past the angler, as he, very slowly, packed up his equipment.

He looked up as I approached and opened his mouth, but I got in first. Very quietly and with as much dignity as possible, I explained, ‘I’m not going to discuss this any more, and certainly not in front of my son.’

The deep colour crept up his face again.

‘Your son should know what type of person you are; you are a stupid, inconsiderate bitch ...’

I grabbed Sam’s hand and firmly walked away from the now almost apoplectic angler, knowing that he would stop screaming as soon as he noticed Geoff walking toward him, and, sure enough, as he spotted him stepping off the boat, he grabbed the last of his kit and scuttled away.

Unfortunately the car he was loading it into was parked just past us. I slowed in indecision for a moment. I really didn’t want to break into a run in an attempt to get around the corner and away from another confrontation; it would look stupid and would frighten a small boy. Sam, as helpful as ever, decided at this point that he didn’t want to go shopping and grabbed the step rails of the local pub, which he held onto with a death grip, bringing us to a complete halt, and allowing Mr Tubby to catch up.

Deciding that I really couldn’t deal with another stupid screaming match, I ignored him completely and bent down to explain things to Sam, as Mr Tubby stamped past. He deliberately allowed his fishing box to swing round and hit me on the back of the head. There were a couple of men sitting in the small beer garden, boaters, from the look of them (they are the only type of people who would sit in a beer garden in minus-degree temperatures) and while one shouted ‘Hey’ at the retreating Mr Tubby, the other stood up, raising his eyebrows at me, but I just shook my head, asking him to let it go and mouthing, ‘Thanks, but no.’ The last thing I wanted was a Western-style punch-up between boaters and anglers, ranging across the packed Saturday morning riverfront of Ely; that sort of escapade didn’t even bear thinking about.

Finally disengaging Sam from the steps, we stood together, watching, while Mr Tubby backed his car angrily on to the road and powered away. I wondered if he knew how close he came to being thrown into the river.

I would like to think that he had a blow-out on the way home and ended up in a ditch, or his engine exploded, or that he was a miserable little misogynist that still lived with an overbearing and man-hating mother who blamed him for her husband leaving, but I know that life isn’t that kind. He was probably the accountant for a large company and suffered from stress. Whatever he was, I hoped he wasn’t married – I would have to feel really sorry for his wife.

For the next couple of weeks I was worried that we would run into him again, but he obviously felt that fishing elsewhere would be a good idea. Personally, I agreed with him totally.