The Narrowboat Summer by Anne Youngson

Author:Anne Youngson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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They moored for the night at Napton Junction. When they had calculated that morning, as they did every morning, where they thought they should aim to be at the end of the day, Eve and Sally had assumed they would go farther, but when they set off after lunch, Anastasia asked them what the rush was, though Sally was keeping below the 4mph maximum. So she slowed even further, which meant other boats came up behind them, and Sally pulled in to the bank a few times to let the faster boat go first through one of the many narrow bridges. It was a long, featureless stretch, but lovely in a way that Sally had come to recognize any stretch of countryside with a canal running through it was transformed into a frame of tranquility.

Anastasia sat in the front, with the logbook in her hands. It was a thick, black journal with narrow-ruled pages. Each day, a line was drawn across the page to mark the end of the previous day and the new day’s entry started with the time at which the boat moved (if it did). Anything involving maintenance on the boat—fuel and water taken on board, toilet and bilge pumped out—was recorded as it happened. Then, once the day was over, a note of the place and time of the final mooring and any observations were added: damage seen on the banks, sightings of unusual or rare wildlife or plants, incidents involving other boats, other people. The book Sally and Eve were using, that Anastasia held in her hands, had been started over two years before and was still not quite half full. Anastasia’s observations were curt and crisp: “Tree fallen across canal. Maintenance crew making a mess, slowly. Moored for night at 2:30 p.m.” And the next day: “Did not move. Crew finished clearing tree at 4:30, slowed down by cups of tea, passersby and incompetence.” Her writing was small and neat. Sally’s was small but messy, Eve’s large but clear, so they had been taking it in turns to fill in the log on the basis that neither of them came close to meeting Anastasia’s standard. To begin with, they had tried to be as brisk as she was, but as time went on they had begun to include what she would undoubtedly regard as irrelevant detail, turning the book from a straightforward record into a fuller diary of the trip. They both enjoyed doing this and they enjoyed reading what the other had written. They had even begun to squeeze in additional observations in the margin of each other’s daily accounts: “Octogenarian on bank called Sally my lovely and she did look lovely, in pink.” “Eve and Noah covered the floor in mud. Eve helped clean it up; Noah hindered.”

Now they both stayed at the rear waiting for Anastasia’s criticism of what Sally remembered as prolix whimsy in comparison to her economy. Eve went down to make tea and when she brought

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