Narrow Margins by Marie Browne

Author:Marie Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908917508
Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Twenty-three Tonnes of Steel,

One Man and a Rope

WHILE ALL THIS HAD been going on, Charlie’s first and second visit to the boat had arrived and passed. It would be fair to say that on her first visit she had expected the boat to be bad. I think that by her second visit she half expected it to be completely finished. She loved the new bathroom but felt that, really, if that was as far as we had got, we ought to be putting a lot more effort in. She was willing to be slightly mollified with promises of graceful elegance in the future but we had sorely disappointed her with our present level of activity.

It’s amazing really: you can completely ignore your living conditions until somebody points them out to you. I think her exact words were, ‘Oh yuck.’ I have to admit she was right. With one bathroom dismantled, tools everywhere, boxes heaped haphazardly in odd cabins, Happy was looking a slightly sorry sight. However, even with all the disappointment, we had a fun weekend and at least Charlie agreed to come back. But she did expect it to be a lot better by then. (We had our orders.)

Hardly anything on Happy changed over the next couple of weeks (hoo boy, were we going to be in trouble) and one morning, with Sam safe at school, we decided to head into Ely for a pump out and a full refill with fresh water. It had been irritating to discover that the river had no turning spaces for a boat of Happy’s length. To travel into Ely, we had to spend three quarters of an hour heading in the opposite direction and turn her at the ‘Lazy Otter’, so every time we made the journey Geoff desperately searched for likely spots that might have just enough space for us to squeeze our way around and allow us to knock some time off the journey.

He had spotted one such place where the bank had been eroded over time, forming a nice semi-circle shaped ‘bite’ out of the bank, where, he hoped, we might be able to jam her nose into the apex and use it like a winding hole. So bundled up in jumpers, woolly socks, hats and gloves, we decided to give it a try.

I have always found it difficult to envisage 70 foot. You look at ‘normal’ narrow boats – most of which are around 55 foot – and then you take a look at our monstrosity. Well, that day we found out exactly how long 70 foot is ... About three foot longer than the width of the bloody river.

Under normal circumstances being across the river wouldn’t have caused us any real problems. There would have been grumping and sighing, but we should have been able to kick off from the bank or use a pole to push her backwards, swing her straight and off we’d go. That day the circumstances were anything other than ‘normal’. We

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