Chapter Twenty-five
Roast or Drown – Your Choice
THE SUMMER OF 2006 was a scorcher. By the end of July we were enduring day after sweltering day of temperatures that were well into the nineties and began to wonder if we would ever be cool again.
Steve and Jude with their three-year-old son Charlie (another Charlie!) had moved into the marina the previous year and after a couple of months of tentative hellos that gradually lengthened to ‘chats’, it was delightful to find someone who was happy to have a good laugh at misfortunes, both ours and other people’s, and we began to have the occasional coffee.
Sam was quite happy to play with smaller children, so he and Charlie (little Charlie), got on quite well, both of them owning huge amounts of small plastic figures which would be dragged out to wage loud and raucous games while Jude and I sneaked a quiet half an hour, well, relatively quiet anyway. Their second child was now on the way and as the summer moved on and the temperature skyrocketed, poor Jude, suffering from extreme morning sickness, became more and more unwell.
We would often see her sitting in their mooring watching Charlie play. Incapacitated and unable to join in, she would be huddled under the gazebo looking rather green, with any conversation punctuated by her rushing off to be unwell. She must have lived almost entirely on ginger at that time. We all felt so sorry for her, but apart from giving good-natured and no doubt completely unwelcome advice there was absolutely nothing anybody could do to help other than offer to fetch and carry for her.
Because of the way we live, everything we do tends to be a chore. We carry water, we carry shopping bags for miles, we lug small children around and every trip becomes almost like a military campaign to get items to and from the car and boat. Doing this when hale and healthy can be a pain. Doing it when pregnant must have been almost unbearable. Adding into the equation the heat, the insects and the nausea, I found myself constantly surprised that we never found Jude sitting in the corner of the washing block, giggling and rocking gently – maybe she only did it at home. If she didn’t, I want to know why because I flaming well would have in her position. Usually I get quite broody when someone else is pregnant, but not this time. I didn’t envy her at all.
Eventually, when the temperature reached 30 degrees, they pulled out of the marina and took their boat downriver where they parked under a tree for three days until the heat wave finally broke. I personally think it was that or wait for Jude to break.
As Steve and Jude had pinched the only shaded spot for about ten miles (not that anybody begrudged them having it in the slightest) and, even with the windows completely removed and the doors open, we basically found ourselves living in a metal oven. It was a no-win situation. Although Geoff had been around fitting mosquito nets to all the windows, the little darlings still managed to get in and, like every other live-aboard occupant on the river, we were all covered in itchy, bleeding bites. There was no way to get round this and it was a relief to get to work, which offered air conditioning and massive respite from the rabid flocks of tiny little vampires all trying to suck my blood. Geoff suffered the worst of all of us; he seemed to have a particularly delicious flavour which the mozzies really couldn’t get enough of – both legs below the knee were swollen and in a horrible state. A year later, he still had the scars.
We had also been experiencing some really spectacular storms, and, even though these could be terrifying for poor Herbert, who would hide under Sam’s bed, or leap quivering into my lap at the first low rumble and stick his head under my arm, we began to look forward to the next one as each storm settled the dust and got rid of the mozzies for a brief time.
Geoff had been working on the boat each day while the kids were at school and I was at work and we were now 90 per cent through the refit. The soft furnishings had all been changed. My fantastic mum had gone well beyond the call of duty by making us eight sets of fully lined curtains and Happy Go Lucky was beginning to look absolutely stunning. We were well on our way to having her fully finished; she was really beginning to feel like home.
On this particular Friday, the local radio announcers had been giving ever-increasing weather warnings and by three o’clock the rain was coming down with such force it was filling up the car park at my office. With the wind howling we decided to close early; all the phones and computers were down, we couldn’t do any work and we just wanted to push off home.
Three trees had already fallen and it was beginning to look pretty bad on the roads. Geoff had rung earlier and, with the weather being so bad, we had decided that he and the kids would stay at Arwen and Carl’s for the night and they would see me in the morning.
I was really looking forward to it: a whole night by myself. I stopped in at the garage on the way home and treated myself to a pot of very naughty, expensive ice cream and, although nervous about the howling weather, set off toward the boat down the A10.
As I came down the drive I noticed that there was a queue of cars waiting to go into the marina – odd, we were usually lucky if we saw one or two. I could see a lot of movement ahead and then realised that a tree had come down and was blocking the drive. Oh, just great!
The one thing that is bad about this lifestyle is that there is an unwritten rule that you absolutely cannot get away with being a girly girl, so waiting in my nice, warm, dry car for the big, strong, burly men to get the tree out of the way wasn’t going to cut it. With a big sigh, I clambered out of the car and over toward the hustle and bustle. Sure enough, there were already two other women there, both dressed in office clothes, pulling branches out of the way as one man with a chain saw and another with a hacksaw were cutting a passage through the tree.
Within 20 seconds of being out of the car I was absolutely and completely soaked to the skin; the rain was so heavy it was actually difficult to take a breath without being in imminent danger of drowning. If the afternoon had been dark and bat-filled, it would have been reminiscent of the night at Dracula’s Lock. With us all working together, we managed to get the tree cleared in about a quarter of an hour. Spluttering water and unable to talk, we smiled and waved to each other and carried on down the drive. Those of us with log burners took a couple of extra minutes to gather up as many burnable logs as we could; another rule, never turn down free burning material. (I have been known to drag trees out of the river and wrestle them on to the bank with a huge grin – something for nothing – always useful.)
I wasn’t looking forward to the battle of walking the flood defences, but I was fortified by the knowledge that after only ten more minutes of battling I could get dry, fix myself a huge mug of hot chocolate, settle down in front of a DVD and maybe have a little nap or, wow, an uninterrupted bath ... Yes! That was the plan: bath, hot chocolate, snuggly dressing gown and a film. Oh, and there were about two shots of Scotch in that bottle left over from Christmas which would go very nicely in the hot chocolate. Oh bliss.
By the time I reached the mooring, I may as well have thrown myself fully clothed into the river; I just couldn’t have been any wetter. Steve and Jude had arrived back and Steve had waved and laughed at me as I staggered past their boat. Head down into the wind, I managed to lift an arm in response but I wasn’t going to hang around and chat, and anyway, Jude was probably enjoying the respite from the constant, draining heat.
My shoes squelched and my black skirt and top were misshapen dish rags. Appearing, wind-ravaged, out of the pre-storm gloom, I would have terrified small children and could easily have been mistaken for Jenny Greenteeth, a mythical hag that appears out of running water to drag people to a watery grave. Hoping that my teeth were still white, I picked my way carefully down the slick steps, humming some well-loved lyrics by Cloudstreet:
Her emerald smile in the sunlight had captured his fearful eye,
She slid like a seal in the wash of the stream and he felt the bank slipping by,
No time to cry that he could not swim, no time to draw in and breathe,
With her hair round his ears and filling his mouth and her long fingers twined in his sleeve.
I headed down the steps, toward the dry warmth and that hot chocolate with a splash of Scotch, the thought of which had kept me going for the last ten minutes.
Even though I wouldn’t have thought it possible, the sky became even darker, and black and purple cumulonimbus clouds, eerily backlit, gathered in a grumbling crowd on the horizon with the first flicker of lightning. I decided that enough was enough. Leaping over the final steps and fumbling with the keys, I entered the boat with a speed that belied my oft-voiced statement that storms didn’t worry me in the slightest.
As I stepped into the boat, I turned hurriedly to close the top hatch, intending to shut out the terrible weather. It was only after the doors and hatch were safely closed that I sagged, soaking, against the wall and my thoughts, trying to turn once again to that bath, became arrested by a further cold, wet sensation seeping into my shoes. Looking down, I was horrified.
At least two inches of water covered Happy’s floor. Her movement in the storm created very small waves that sloshed around the Morso and the television cabinet and broke happily against the side of the sofa. I noticed with a strange detachment that a couple of Sam’s plastic Pokémon figures actually appeared to be surfing.
The windows! Oh no! It had been such a hot day that Geoff had taken the windows out and forgotten to put them back again when he had left to pick the kids up from school. It wasn’t only the floor that was covered in water (thank God the laminate flooring hadn’t been put down yet), but every curtain, the beds and the sofa were also soaked, and the water was still coming through the window openings, increasing in volume as the storm built up force.
I sloshed around and replaced all the windows – at least that would arrest the deluge – then, waving goodbye to my evening of luxury, I started on the cleaning-up operation. It took me four hours to mop all the water into buckets and throw it out into the river. By the time I had managed to actually dry the floor, the sun had reappeared and all our furnishings were on top of the boat, gently steaming: we were creating our own fog.
Geoff and the kids turned up, worried by the half-garbled message I had managed to get through to them before the mobile network had given up. It had gone something like:
‘Argh the boat’s full of water, and there’s a huge storm and everything is soaking and argh ...’
And of course, at that worst possible moment, the phones had died. I assumed that Geoff had just turned me off mid-rant; he thought I had drowned or had been struck by lightning.
We had actually been quite lucky. We had spare bedding and I had got to the mattresses before they became soaked, but even with this small reprieve it took the whole of that weekend to dry everything out and another week before the windows stopped steaming up. So much for a quiet night in.