Narrow Minds (10 page)

‘Hey guys,' I called as I approached the laughing pair.

On hearing us approach, Sam tried to sit up, but his concern for the frogs kept him prone on the ground. Charlie, completely unencumbered jumped up immediately. She still looked slightly wide-eyed but obviously her sense of vague disorientation had been replaced by her normal need to gently harass her brother.

‘Mum!' She stepped carefully over Sam's friends that were crawling happily around the two. ‘Where have you been?' She looked down at Sam then deliberately walked away from him. ‘I'm starving, really, really hungry, is it lunchtime yet?' Sam stayed where he was but nodded carefully and enunciated without opening his mouth. ‘And me.'

I laughed, great, two kids with the munchies and not a cafe or shop in sight, this was going to be a fun walk back. ‘Yeah, come on, let's go and find an early lunch.' I watched as she picked her way through the seething mass of small hoppers, waiting for her to register her brother's howls of protest at being left covered in frogs. I waited until she had reached me then physically turned her round and sent her on her way with a small push back toward the pond. ‘Go and dig out your brother please.'

Charlie pouted, then grinned as she listened to Sam's ever-rising hysteria. ‘Oh I think we can just leave him there.' She held up a hand as Sam howled again and went to get up. ‘No, Sam, don't move, you'll hurt the frogs.'

Sam stiffened and held himself very still, his whole body rictus with indecision.

‘Don't be foul,' I said and gave her another gentle shove, ‘no brother, no burgers.'

Charlie huffed but in a couple of minutes both children were picking their way back toward me and the frogs were left hopping about completely unconcerned by their strange morning. Well we'd all had one of those.

The kids shot ahead of me through the gap in the hedge toward Geoff who was now lying on his back in the warm grass staring up at the clouds, he sat up slowly and grinned indistinctly as we all pushed past him. Checking, I noted that his eyes were almost back to normal. ‘Food?' I enquired.

‘Oh yes.' He jumped to his feet (he only wobbled slightly) and set off down the path after the chattering kids.

As we came to the end of the path I put on a turn of speed and caught up with Chaos and Disorder. ‘If,' I stated as I came alongside them, ‘when I search both of you in about two minutes, I find even one baby frog, it will be limp cheese sandwiches and water from a local garage and not rubbishy fast food.' I paused to let Geoff catch up and smiled as they stared expressionlessly at me. ‘Are we clear?'

I turned and walked on with Geoff and pretended that I hadn't even noticed the hurried turning out of pockets and the kerfuffle at the waterside as the kids did a very bad job of surreptitiously putting their ‘pets' back onto the ground.

Geoff looked at me with a grin. ‘You're not nice, you know.' He gave me a hug. ‘But I love you.'

Luckily just over the road from where we had parked the car was the ubiquitous set of ‘golden arches' and within ten minutes there was nothing but silence in which the only break was the munching and slurping of one husband and two children trying to sort out a drug-related hunger. (I'm such a proud mother.) I finally managed to get Geoff to focus. It wasn't that difficult actually, he had spent most of his university years in the same state, so the fairly vast amount of second-hand smoke he had imbibed on the boat was rapidly wearing off.

‘So what did you think?' I amused myself by making horrible noises with my chocolate milkshake, allowing him to ponder for a moment.

He pursed his lips, then a look of embarrassment stole across his face and he reached into one of the many pockets on his jacket. ‘Whoops,' he said pulling out the boat survey, ‘I don't think I was supposed to take this.'

‘Gak!' I coughed, ‘You stole his survey?'

‘No, NO!' he hesitated. ‘Well … yes, technically, but I don't think I meant to actually steal it, I just put it in my pocket.' He reached over and pulled the straw out of my mouth, obviously irritated by the noises I was still making. ‘Let's face it, Mr Disorientated isn't going to notice it's missing, I'll run it back to him in a couple of minutes and apologise profusely.'

After wiping the spots of milkshake off my face that had been flicked from the straw, I leant over and tried to take the survey from him, but he was obviously fully restored to quick and decisive movement and whipped it out of my reach.

Replacing the straw with a humph, I concentrated on sucking quietly while he perused the document. I really don't know what they put in those milkshakes but by the time you've actually managed to get a mouthful, you have had to suck so hard your cheeks hurt.

Impatience finally won out. ‘Does it say anything about no gas, no water, no toilet?' I paused to suck hard again.

Geoff nodded. ‘But more to the point, this survey is over ten years old and it only had three millimetres of hull then.' He shook his head. ‘If we buy this, not only are we going to have to put all the living services on, but we're going to have to have her re-bottomed.' He sighed and pushed the papers toward me. ‘Really it's just a thin steel shell, most of which is going to have to be either replaced or re-plated.' He sat back in his chair and took a sip of the greyish tea in front of him. ‘I wouldn't give him half of what he's asking for it.'

‘Well, is it a difficult job to get a boat re-bottomed?' I asked.

‘Hmm, there are two ways of doing it.' Geoff slipped into lecture voice. ‘You can either get the bottom re-plated or you can just over-plate.'

I raised an eyebrow at him.

‘Well, with re-plating they remove the entire bottom plate and put a new one on and with over-plating they just weld a new bottom over the old one.'

‘Sounds difficult,' I said.

‘Not really, obviously it has to be done by a company that knows what it's doing but there are enough of those around. It's just time-consuming and fairly expensive.'

‘Not something we want to do, I suppose,' I said.

‘Not if we have time constraints, no.' Geoff stared at the survey. ‘And we can't really put it off if the steel was already this thin ten years ago, God only knows what thickness it is now. Run her aground once and if it's thin enough we could find ourselves with a hole or a tear.'

I shuddered and took another long suck of milkshake as I watched Sam blithely take a frog out of his bag and place it carefully on the table in front of him.

Charlie groaned and put her head on the table. ‘Oh Sam,' she moaned.

I got up from the table and wandered over to the counter. ‘Excuse me do you have a small plastic tub I could borrow?'

The young man behind the counter eyed me in confusion for a moment then nodded and passed me a white tub.

‘Thank you.' I wandered back and placed it on the table. ‘Come on, turn out your pockets and put all four-legged friends in the tub please.' I gave them both the ‘I'm losing patience' look. Charlie and Sam looked at each other, sighed and began to turn out pockets, bags and of all things, coat hoods.

Sitting in the car and waiting for Geoff to return from his delivery of paperwork and seven small frogs back to their natural environment, I asked the kids what they had thought of the boat in the brief time they had been aboard. There was a brief pause in the argument over whose fault it was that I had found out about the frogs for just long enough for Sam to say one word ‘smelly' then they went back to hitting each other.

Leaving them to it, I climbed out of the car and sat on the bonnet staring out over the canal. This raised some serious questions: had we got such a good price for
Happy Go Lucky
because the prices had gone up? If that was the case, was Geoff wrong? Was that the going price for a useless lump of half-sunk steel? I sighed as I contemplated our delicate bank balance, we were in serious trouble.

We were due to see the Humber Keel the next day. Geoff was quite excited about this, I had looked into the history of the Keel and had found that the original ships came in a variety of sizes, usually between fifty-seven and sixty-eight feet long. Their sturdily built hulls had a blunt bow and a flat bottom which could navigate easily in the shallow waters that connected the inland waterways to the Humber.

It seemed a fairly daft design to me, great square sails had towered above these ships which, in even a moderate wind, looked as though they would have tipped over if it hadn't been for the huge Leeboards that sat like fish wings either side of the hull.

By the twentieth century the hulls had changed from oak to steel and most of the old ships were powered by steam or diesel engines. A lot of these engines were installed with the help of conversion grants at the end of the Second World War. By 1949 all but one of the original sailing keels had disappeared, the only one left has been preserved by the Humber Keel and Sloop Preservation Society who also have a Humber Sloop.

Personally I think the keel looks a little odd with sails, like an up-scaled child's toy, a brick of a ship with a big square hanky tied to the front. But they have a bulky beauty all their own, Geoff loves them and I suppose I can see why. Like Geoff, the Humber Keel has a definite air of solid practicality about it.

Built in the 1940s, this particular keel was bigger than the originals at seventy-four foot long and eighteen foot wide. She was a bit of a beast and sounded the perfect vessel to convert to an excellent houseboat. There were, however, certain drawbacks. She wouldn't be able to get through any locks and quite frankly finding a river mooring for her down south was going to be a complete nightmare but Geoff loved the idea of owning a piece of floating history.

The advert sounded promising but I had a sinking sense of déjà vu. We had looked at a barge before buying
Happy Go Lucky
and to say the viewing had been a disappointing disaster was the understatement of the year. Listing, full of water, the woodwork cobbled together by a man with a chainsaw and St Vitus' Dance and sunk up to her gunnels in mud she certainly hadn't lived up to her sales blurb.

I wasn't really holding out much hope for this viewing either. The advert showed that the Keel had no roof and someone had perched what looked very much like a Portakabin on top. Presumably to have somewhere dry and warm to live while the rest of the boat was being converted and restored, a great idea for maybe one or two of you, but for a family of four? No way. I love my children but the idea of living in a 10 x 10 space with them for at least two years just made me shudder, especially as Charlie was getting to that age where it was imperative for her to have doors to slam, no doors, then all that hormonal frustration was going to have to be taken out somewhere else: probably on me.

Personally, I was just looking forward to visiting her mooring town of Beverly .This medieval market town sounded lovely, extolled by one of the Yorkshire tourist websites as being,‘perhaps one of the most beautiful towns in Britain'. There was a large Saturday market (shame we were going on a Sunday) excellent architecture, great shopping and the obvious draw for tourists, the beautiful gothic Minster.

However, it wasn't really the Minster that I wanted to visit but St Mary's church which has a carving of the ‘jolly rabbit' inside, this is said to be the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
. I also wanted to take a look at the west front which is rumoured to have possibly been the influence for the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge, which was built much later.

Once again we stayed at a motorway inn which pleased Sam no end. It wasn't until the next day that we found out he had merely been looking forward to another cooked breakfast and was almost suicidal when he found out that their restaurant was closed for refurbishment and we had to go to a Little Chef. He grouched all the way through breakfast. Charlie, miserable because my snoring had kept her awake all night was snappy and short-tempered, especially with her brother who was currently pushing his breakfast around his plate with a sneer and rating each bite out of ten.

The weather wasn't helping matters. Unlike the previous day, Sunday was almost twilight in its gloom and the deep grey clouds became almost purple as we headed north-east toward almost certain nautical disappointment.

As we reached the outskirts of Beverly, the heavy grey clouds could obviously hold their contents no longer and proceeded to produce a rainstorm the like of which I had only ever seen on holidays in America. With lights on and windscreen wipers at full speed, we picked our way through tiny streets, almost invisible behind the veil of heavy rain that continued to pour from the black sky. Charlie and Sam became even more morose.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of backtracking, we found ourselves in the out of the way car park of an unnamed transport company. Geoff stopped the car and scratched his head. Peering out into the deluge, he shook his head and tapped the Sat Nav. ‘Well, it says that we're here.'

We all peered into the running water. True, the car park did run alongside the river and we could just make out the rain-washed ghosts of various boats and barges. The visibility was down to about five foot.

A tapping on the window made us jump. Geoff, heedless of Sam's screams, rolled down the window, allowing the wind to inundate the back seat with water. He stuck his head out and shouted to a shadowy figure, that sported an interesting collection of waterproof clothing, ‘Hi, are you Matt?'

The figure nodded and spoke. I couldn't hear a single word as the howling wind whipped his words away. Geoff nodded and taking a moment to roll the window back up, he manfully climbed out of the car and pausing only long enough to drag his hood over his head, set off into the cloudburst.

The kids and I sat in the car and looked at each other.

‘I'm not going.' Charlie crossed her arms and glowered at me.