The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Page 3

  This method brought on only the mildest of hernias and was one I had occasion to use later, so I was actually very grateful to Mr Carrot for his passive encouragement to develop a solo technique. That gratitude does not extend, however, to his next piece of churlishness.

  I started to haul Jack down the towpath, a long and mercifully grassy slope of about six hundred metres, but by a third of the way down I was reduced to a sobbing wreck. I recalled my conversation in the tea shop. Feather-light skiff ? Hah! Light-winged dryad of the waterways? Pshaw! Bobbish little jollyboat? Phooey! She felt as if she were constructed of solid plutonium, and was about as draggable on dry land as a dead dugong. The fact that it had begun to drizzle did not improve my spirits.

  Just then, when I was picturing in my mind’s eye the warmth, comfort and grace of a British Rail Inter-City second-class carriage, there came a friendly call: ‘Need a hand, mate?’

  Two burly workmen scraping some windowpanes on a refurbished lock-side cottage had watched my painful progress down the towpath and decided I needed help. I directed one to take the prow and the other to join me in carrying the stern, and with a quick heave-ho we had covered the next fifty yards in a matter of seconds. In two minutes more I would be afloat and on my merry way again, a free spirit, a lissom Ariel, a bird of … ‘OY!’

  The call floated down the towpath from the top lock where the lock-keeper was standing beckoning to the two workmen to drop what they were doing and come immediately.

  They did.

  They returned.

  ‘Sorry mate,’ they intoned together. ‘The boss says we’re not to get involved, and we have to get back to work on ’is window frames. Sorry. Good luck, though,’ and off they trudged to the cottage.

  Ah. I see. So when the lock-keeper said he couldn’t get involved, he clearly didn’t include in his policy of non-involvement the act of telling other people not to get involved. Right-o.

  One dreary hour later, I was back on the water at last, with all my gear re-stowed. The canal lay before me in a featureless three-mile stretch across the waste of Rednal Flats, and I set off, sculling into a thin drizzle borne on a stiffening headwind. There is, as I had realised the evening before, an art to rowing, and it was an art that I did not in fact possess. My progress that day across the Rednal Flats was a sorry zigzag of crashes and curses from bank to bank, the oars flailing ineffectually in the rowlocks and my back and arms beginning to ache abominably. I spent more time trying to extricate myself from bankside vegetation than in forward motion and I began seriously to doubt the wisdom of the whole foolish venture.

  Another miserable doubt was looming. The map showed three thick black chevrons across the blue line of the canal, a symbol I would come to loathe in the months to come: namely, another flight of locks a mile or so ahead. Aston Locks, three of them spread over more than a kilometre. Would I encounter another officious lockkeeper? And what really were the rules about rowing boats in locks? Would I find this impasse all the way down the Severn? If so, I may as well give up now, sink the dinghy in this hellish canal and sneak off to a train station somewhere. I could always sit in a rented bed-sit in Bournemouth for six months and make up fictitious letters to all my friends about my wonderful nautical adventures. It has been done before. Yes (heave, slosh, crunch), that’s what (heave, swing, jam) I would do (heave, thud, rustle).

  Then we were at Aston Locks, and there was a smiling, cheery-looking man in the standard British Waterways green uniform.

  ‘Now look,’ I started up defiantly. ‘Dinghies. Rowing boats. Are they allowed in canal locks or not? Because – ’

  ‘Oh, aye. No problem there, boyo.’

  Pause. Welsh. Has possibly misunderstood.

  ‘You mean, unaccompanied, just on their own?’

  ‘Oooh yes. Don’t see why not. They’re boats, after all. Got to get down somehow, isn’t it?’

  Another pause.

  ‘I’m sorry. Are you telling me that this boat, unpowered as it is – ’

  ‘Unpowered? No. You’ve got oars there, boyo. That’s powered in my book.’

  ‘And this is legal, is it? Right down the Severn as well?’

  ‘Oh yes, isn’t it. All over England and Wales, far as I know.’

  ‘And so, let me get this quite clear. I, meaning me, could take this boat, Jack de Crow, down through these three locks, unaccompanied? Yes?’

  He looked at me cheerfully, encouragingly, kindly.

  ‘Oooh yes. No problem. After April, next year. Out of use since 1956, see. But come April and they’ll be like new pins. Cheerio!’

  The newly developed Mackinnon ‘Swing and Hernia’ method of removing a dinghy single-handedly from a canal came into its own that afternoon. Three times I unloaded the boat, three times dragged her an inch per heave across gravel, boulders, marsh and broken concrete to send her scraping once more into the black and stagnant waters of the Aston Lock flight. I started to calculate that considering the distance she’d done overland since leaving Ellesmere, I’d have done better to equip her with a set of sturdy wheels rather than oars. Perhaps I could convert the wretched thing into a sort of caravan and save an awful lot of trouble all round.

  And even when we finally reached the open canal again beyond the third lock, it was difficult to tell where land stopped and water began. The passage narrowed to a humid green lane, only a boat’s width, between towering bulrushes and creeper-clad alders, making every stroke of the oars a frantic struggle akin to beating anacondas to death every five feet. The lurid green of duckweed grew so thickly that it looked as though I were ploughing across a velvety bowling lawn, leaving an inky black trail behind me. But all this was like the Spanish Main when compared with what was to come.

  The Morda Brook, despite my breezy assertion in the White Lion Tea Rooms, is by no stretch of the imagination a navigable waterway, but it was my only route out. So it was that at the reedy dead-end of the canal I hauled Jack de Crow out of the water for the fifth time that day and dragged her a hundred yards down a narrow lane to slide her over the ford and into the dank, black waters of the least navigable stretch of water in Britain.

  The Morda Brook, oh the Morda, the moist and morbid Morda, the Morda of my nightmares. Actually, no, at first, it was quite fun. Once away from the ford, the brook turned into a sparkling stream, cutting between high clay banks lined with alder and overhanging willow, little more than five feet wide in most places. I soon found that the easiest way to proceed was to stand in the boat and pole or paddle my way along with a single oar in the manner of a Venetian gondolier – albeit a rather muddy, leaf-plastered one – and be carried onward by the steady chattering current beneath the keel. Every five minutes or so I would have to leap out into the shin-deep waters to drag Jack bodily over a bar of shingle or round a particularly tight bend, but the change from the monotonous slog of rowing was a welcome relief.

  There was a lightening of the air as well. The afternoon had turned golden and blue; high white clouds were tinged by the westering sun and for the first time that day I felt touched by a sense of adventure and high spirits. This was exploring if you like! Occasionally there was a greater obstacle to overcome: a black, many-clawed alder tree that swept its low branches down over the stream’s surface and had to be worked around, or a half-submerged log that needed heaving aside. But these were merely grist to the mill and added to my growing elation.

  All the time as I progressed, the banks of the Morda reared higher about me until I was alone in a narrow world of dark water and steep clay sides clothed in wild mint and Himalayan balsam. This last is a wonderfully triffid-like plant with a complicated pink flower rather like a snapdragon smelling of peaches. The seed pod – a tightly sprung contraption – explodes at the lightest touch into a tangle of curlicues sending hard black seeds like buckshot shooting in every direction. With every stroke of my paddle, half a dozen of these pods would instantly recoil with a soft splitting pop and the decks of my little galleon would rattle with tiny
cannon-shot, and the air would grow yet heavier with the drowsy scent of peach balm.

  Colemere Woods to the Severn

  Night was falling, the gold faded from the landscape and white stars began to glimmer out in the clear evening blue, and what with the meandering wriggles of the brook I had no idea what distance I had covered. I knew that there was an old road bridge only half a mile up from the confluence of the Morda and the wider Vyrnwy. I knew also that Keith’s cottage where I was bound that night (and where even now a sparkling, clinking, lemon-sliced gin and tonic would be waiting) was only a mile or so across the fields from the Vyrnwy in the hamlet of Rhos Common. So when I poled around a sharp bend and saw the last gleam of twilight making a perfect disc beneath the arch of a bridge ahead, I breathed a heartfelt sigh and calculated that I would be sitting down to supper within the half-hour.

  I paddled onwards beneath the bridge’s black arch and round the next bend where surely the waters would suddenly widen into …

  Well, alright. Around the next bend then, surely, to find the infant Morda meet her bigger sister, the graceful Vyrnwy, just about …

  Hmm. Perhaps a little further than I thought, until yes – clearly the current was slowing up as one would expect of a tributary mere yards before curving round one final bank to find …

  Damn.

  Better consult the map.

  Too dark. Better find the torch.

  Too dark to do that either.

  Make mental note: leave torch handy in future.

  Ah, here’s the torch. Where is map? Ah, here.

  Make mental note: keep map in waterproof cover in future.

  Unfold soggy map. Tears soggily into five pieces.

  Make mental note: buy sticky-tape.

  Find relevant section. Yes, as I thought. There is a bridge just five hundred yards up from Vyrnwy. So where has blasted Vyrnwy disappeared to? Stupid map.

  Make mental note: write stiff letter of complaint to Royal Ordinance Survey Office.

  Sudden horrid idea. Check map again … Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn! There are two bridges – the one I have just passed which is only an inch on the map away from Maesbury, and then the second bridge more than four inches on the map – six miles – to go from here. Only then comes the Vyrnwy, the cottage at Rhos Common and the gin.

  There was nothing for it but to keep battling on downstream. So on I went. Unseen willow branches raked across my face and clutched at the dinghy’s gunwale. Grounding on to a shallow bed would have me stepping out, not onto an ankle-deep shoal of sand, but into a thigh-deep sludge of black mud. Log jams and barbed-wire tangles occurred round every bend and the mosquitoes rose in whining clouds about my head undeterred even by the lingering vitriolic fumes of the hawthorn brandy. At last after four black hours of this thrashing, hacking, blind progress, I bumped my way under the second bridge and knew that this time, truly, honestly, the Vyrnwy was only five hundred yards downstream – and beyond that, the lighted windows and warm welcome of Keith’s cottage.

  ‘Sing ho! for the life of a bear,’ I sang, ‘Sing ho! for the life of a bear,’ and all of a sudden the stars above seemed extra sparkly and silver in the black night sky. But the Morda Brook, that spiteful, black-hearted witch of a stream, knowing she was about to lose me forever, had one or two last tricks to play.

  Sweeping under a low alder tree the boat caught for the hundredth time that day in an overhanging bough, as black and scratchy and crooked as only an alder branch can be. More impatient than ever now that the end was so near, I levered the dinghy forward with all my might using the oar and heard a most satisfying splintering crack of wood as the boat groaned, strained and then shot clear into a broad starry pool, trailing broken branches and twigs on all sides.

  ‘Hah! hah! hah! Hee! hee! hee!

  Alder witch, you can’t catch me!’ I sang in happy delirium.

  ‘Alder witch, I’m Jack de Crow,

  I break your bones, and off I go!’ I burbled to myself as I leant over to clear the debris that draped around the gunwales and the rowlocks.

  Rowlocks?

  Rowlock. Singular.

  Gunwale. Singular.

  In the pitch dark my groping hands felt the awful truth. The splintering crunch I had heard as I tore free of the alder had not been the tree’s branches breaking; it had been the entire starboard rowlock ripping away and taking a two-foot section of the gunwale along with it. My blind fingers felt the smooth, sturdy woodwork end in a splintered mass and groped hopelessly for the cold metal horseshoe of the rowlock. Gone. Torn away. Lying, presumably, in the black depths of the pool beneath that malicious alder’s waterlogged roots, while its niggly twigs and arid leaves hissed out in the sudden night breeze a mocking lullaby:

  Jack de Crow! Jack de Crow!

  You won’t get far if you cannot row.

  Crippled Crow, don’t mock me,

  The Witch of Morda, the Alder Tree!

  Too weary and numb to consider the consequences of having lost the power to row properly (except round and round in very small circles), I drifted on around the final bend … and into the final trap.

  Here, only a hundred yards upstream from where the Morda lost itself in the greater Vyrnwy, the brook narrowed into a sheer-sided gully between cliffs of slippery clay and thick nettles rearing twenty feet either side in a near-vertical slope. Across the stream at this point stretched a taut, black, double-twisted strand of barbed wire, as rigid and unyielding as an iron bar. This lay one foot above the water from bank to bank, attached either end to solid ancient willow stumps, so old and immovable that the wire had grown deep into the bark and become part of the stump itself. It was a dinghy trap, and utterly impassable.

  In the blanketing darkness I tried blindly dunking the dinghy low enough in the water to scrape beneath the wire, but to no avail. Even at her lowest the boat had a foot and a half of freeboard. I considered hauling her over the rigid wire, but between the sheer banks there was not the slightest foothold for me to stand on to perform this operation, and a prodding oar confirmed my suspicion that the stream at this point was over six feet deep. Another approach was needed: technology.

  In the midnight blackness I rummaged around in the half-ton of leaf mould, mud and debris that filled the bottom of the dinghy and located my Leatherman tool, a wonderfully useful parting gift from the Common Room, and equipped with, among other things, a sturdy pair of wire-cutters. However, twenty minutes of straining with sweat-slippery and blistered hands to snip through the wire resulted only in a sudden twang, a plop and suddenly empty hands. The torch revealed the wire still uncut but the Leatherman nowhere to be seen – another trophy claimed by the Morda Brook.

  It was at this point that I made my first sensible decision of the day. I was cold, hungry and exhausted, I was only one mile – two at the most – from Keith’s cottage, and he had been expecting me since five o’clock. It was now nearly eleven, I guessed, and if I hurried I might catch him before he gave up waiting and retired to bed. The boat would go nowhere in the night – in fact, would probably still be there for the next few millennia – and I could leave the problems for the morning and broad daylight. A saunter by starlight across open fields while I was still relatively dry and cheerful, and all would be well.

  Leaving most of my things in the boat, I scrambled up the nettle-grown bank (what were a few stings when salvation was so near at hand?) and identified, with some relief, the lights of Rhos Common across the flat plain, no more than six fields away.

  ‘Ah! First the gin, I think, Keith, thank you,’ I murmured as I tripped my way across the first starlit pasture.

  ‘And if you could perhaps be running a hot bath while I drink this? Good chap,’ as I negotiated a stile into the next field.

  ‘Now, supper. We’ll start with soup, ox-tail if possible, Keith,’ (avoid cow-pats) ‘and move swiftly on to … let’s see now … smoked salmon? Excellent!’ (Head for gap in hedge.) ‘But meanwhile, a warm, fluff y towel and a Noel Coward dressi
ng gown embroidered with Chinese dragons, if you would be so kind.’ (Those lights were distinctly closer.) ‘Ah. Thank you.’

  I strode across the open flat meadow towards the distant lights. One of them, I reckoned, I could even identify as Keith’s kitchen window …

  I stopped dead.

  I had to.

  At my feet the meadow ended abruptly in a cliff that dropped twenty feet into the broad, starlit waters of a gleaming river. A wide river. A swift, deep river. A totally unfordable river. The long sought-after Vyrnwy River, lying between me and the bright, hazy dream of Keith’s cottage.

  I do not remember much after that. Possibly I fainted. Possibly I was overcome by a black, Berserker rage blotting out all conscious action for the next hour.

  Only snatches come back to me. I remember a furious stamping stride back across the fields – a hasty, but painful, plunge back down the nettled bank into the oil-black waters of the Morda. I remember sinking immediately over my head down, down, till I found the oozy bottom – then, on hastily resurfacing, cracking my head so hard on the keel of the dinghy underwater that everything went swimmy. I remember that somehow, incredibly, and possibly helped by a blind, bitter, bloodyminded rage, I managed to heave that dinghy up onto the barbed-wire strand from underneath, surfacing from below and scraping her over the rusty strand in three great hoicks while the barbs gouged out deep grooves in the hull. I remember the sudden rush of elation as I realised Jack was over at last, and the floundering, clay-splattering manoeuvre that got me out of the water and into the dinghy like an epileptic seal, hardly heeding the long sound of ripping cloth as the barbed wire shredded my trouser-leg from knee to cuff. Then the short paddle around the final bend and out onto the broad bosom of the Vyrnwy, the delirious attempt to row to the opposite bank with only one oar and wondering vaguely why the stars were spinning so crazily in circles above me.