The four of us were on a week-long cruise of the canals of Midland England on a converted industrial barge. The beginning of the trip had gone off without a hitch. We picked up our narrowboat, as it’s called, from the Barton Turns marina and got a lesson on how to operate the canal locks from Oliver, the old marina hand who had actually captained a barge back when the canals were still used to transport goods along England’s industrial waterways. Now the canals are almost exclusively the playground of holidaymakers who either rent (as we did) or own their barge-converted-houseboats.
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We headed south on the Trent Mersey Canal with Roger at tiller as captain, me (Monique) in the small but sufficient galley as chief cook and bottle washer, and Caroline and Gregory as navigators/deck hands, which meant reading from the guidebook about the places we were traveling through, looking ahead for oncoming traffic when going under one of the hundreds of beautiful, but narrow, historic canal bridges, and tying us up when we moored. Contrary to my prior fears, there isn’t much to operating a canal boat that even New York City rats like us couldn’t handle.
The July sun shone uncharacteristically bright as we cruised through villages, towns, and cities whose livelihoods were established and, in some cases undone, by the creation and ultimate disuse of the canals as part of England’s transportation grid.
These days, canals are more like extended social water-networks, with people – some of whom spend their retired lives just cruising the countrywide system – trading canal warnings (“The paddles aren’t closing properly at Fradley Junction”) or friendly touring tips (“Oh, you must stop at Sandon Hall”) as they chat at the various mooring points that give access to gas pumps, water tanks, shops, and farm stands.
This camaraderie is no more evident than at the locks, the gated sections of the canals that either fill up with or empty out of water, enabling boats to go up and down country along with the elevation of the land. The Midlands canal locks still operate with their original 19th-century technology, requiring one to push open and closed heavy wooden or iron doors (called gates), and then crank ancient gears to lift paddles (valve-like panels) to let the water in or out. Experienced canal boaters were invaluable and generous with their advice to novices like us (“Use yer bum, dear, not yer arms to push open the gate”), never making us feel like the bumbling greenhorns we judged ourselves to be.
The physical challenge of lifting the paddles at first daunted Caroline and me, who appointed ourselves “the Lockettes.” I don’t do much (OK, how about no?) upper-body work in my normal life and I was throwing all my weight into the L-shaped crank (called a windlass) to lift what felt like two-ton paddles. My biceps at first responded to the task with indignant groans but, ultimately, with increasingly rock-hard assurance. Those bulging muscles are my favorite souvenir of our trip.
But not my most enduring memory. No, that honor goes to the moment when Roger was arrested. But I get ahead of myself – first we had to find the body in the canal.
Read on.
LINKS
Map of Trent Mersey Canal route
narrowboat
canal locks
lock gates
paddles
windlass
TRAVEL INFORMATION
Barton Turns Marina
Trent-Mersey Canal
Fradley Junction
Sandon Hall
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