Kiss My Name (5 page)

GEOFF-August 1986

             
My panic attacks began after our narrow boat holiday in the summer of ’86. They are very difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced them, but mine manifest themselves in a way that I can only describe as a momentary physical and mental breakdown. I feel dizzy, shivery, I struggle to breath and the first time especially, I thought I was dying. In subsequent panic attacks, I haven’t felt that I am going to die, there is just an overwhelming feeling of dread. Generally, I have between one and a dozen a year. These days normally one or two a year, after the narrow boat trip, in the late eighties, it was a dozen a year, sometimes more.

I wish we’d have gone to Westward Ho! Deidre, my wife, wanted to go to Devon, but we’d taken the girls down to the Cotswolds, Devon or Cornwall every year since they were four and two and I just fancied doing something different, something a little more adventurous. By 1986, our Sarah was twelve and our Joanne was ten, so I thought that if we did something special, they would look back on it fondly. As it turns out, I was wrong.

              Deidre and I had it down to a choice of two. Westward Ho! and Ibiza. The two of us had only ever been abroad together when we were courting. We went to Hersonissos in Crete, in 1971, which felt very exotic back then, subsequently though, money had become much tighter, with the kids arriving soon after, so we hadn’t ventured abroad again. Deidre thought it would be lovely to take the girls on an aeroplane to a sunny spot, but when we weighed up all the pros and cons, we decided against it. One of the negative factors, was that we are all pale skinned, so if we’d have gone in the kids summer holidays, we’d have all either fried like egg whites or hidden in the shade for most of the day. Westward Ho! was then the front runner, until I saw an advertisement in the Sunday Express for a narrow boat trip along the Leeds-Liverpool canal. I had no experience of boat trips, but it seemed like something we would always talk about. We have always talked about it too, but not for the reasons that I would have hoped.

             
I sent off for a narrow boat brochure without telling Deidre of my intentions, just in case it didn’t appeal to her, but the brochure was always going to be intercepted by Deidre, as she’s the one that opens the post every day, as I am out and about. I can still clearly picture the day it arrived, I’d done three endowment mortgages and arrived home absolutely shattered. I didn’t mind being shattered though, it was a real buzz working for the Pearl and I always say to Deidre that the ten years I spent there, were the happiest I ever had and were also the best ten years work that I ever did. People like to slag off endowments these days, but don’t believe everything you read in the papers. A lot of my customers paid off their mortgages when their endowment policy matured and then had a nice chunky sum left over afterwards. Anyone ever made a chunky sum from a repayment mortgage? No, they bloody haven’t and they never bloody will! Anyway, my point is, Deidre had leafed through the narrow boat brochure long before I got home.

“When are you thinking we go on this?” she asked, pointing to the brochure on the kitchen table, after she passed me my tea from the oven.

“As soon as the kids break up for their summer holidays.”

“No chance!”

              I thought Deidre was pooh-poohing the idea. I love Deidre, she is my world, but she is also a creature of habit and the previous summer she’d said if she could go to Devon for two weeks every summer for the rest of her life, she’d be more than happy. I agreed, but deep down, I fancied a change. Now I had spotted that potential change, Devon, for me, would have been disappointing. I love the place, but for just one year I wanted adventure not familiarity. I knew I would have to put forward a sound argument.

“It looks great, Dee! Do you not think? The kids would love it. Have a proper look at the photos again in the brochure. The scenery is fantastic and the kids will have a ball going through all those locks! They can skipper the boat too if we keep an eye on them.”

Deidre smiled at me as I reached across for the vinegar and ketchup to put on my burger and chips.

“I know, you don’t have to persuade me, Geoff, it looks great, but I am not going during the first week of the summer hols.”

“Why not?”

“Fergie and Andrew are getting married that first weekend and I want to watch it. Julie and Anne are organising a street party too, if we were on a narrow boat we’d miss all that.”

To me, it seemed like the perfect reason to book it. Our neighbours were a pain in the arse. I wasn’t fond of the Royal Family either.

“I couldn’t give a bloody monkeys about some ginger, toffee nosed Royal!”

“I know you couldn’t, Geoff, but the girls will want to see it and so do I.”

“Seems a stupid reason to delay a holiday to me!”

“Geoff, if I’d have suggested going on a narrow boat when the World Cup was on, you’d have moaned like hell about that!”

“Deidre, I didn’t even watch the bloody final! I hate the Argies and the Germans anyway and Maradona only won that World Cup because he cheated his way through. I always say to the girls when we play Monopoly, better to lose than to win by
cheating. That law doesn’t just apply to Monopoly, you know, it applies to life... and to World Cups too!”

Deidre’s neck flushes red when she gets annoyed. I noticed it had gone pink.

“Geoff, if I’d have said we were going on a boat with no tele when England were playing, you’d have done your nut in!”

To be fair, she was right. I calmed down a bit. We’ve always had a fiery relationship and this could have been a springboard to a massive row, but Deidre seemed keen on going on the narrow boat so I was not going to upset her that night. She’s a fiery redhead, is Deidre, but that’s not a bad thing, I wouldn’t want to be married to a pushover. The fact that she was a strong, determined lady was what attracted me to her in the first place, that and the fact her arse looked good in jeans!

“Fair enough, love. We could go a few weeks into the summer holidays this year, if that’s what you want. You like the idea of going away in a boat though? It’s going to be brilliant, love. A holiday the girls will always remember.”

“There’s only one little thing that puts me off.”

“What’s that, love?”

“Is that not how Natalie Wood died?”

              Deidre was into Hart to Hart and when she was younger her favourite film had been West Side Story. I can still remember watching the news with her on BBC when they said Natalie Wood had died and it freaked her out a little. Natalie Wood was only a couple of years older than Deidre and me, so incidents like that hit you hard. They make you feel more aware of your own mortality.

“Dee, she was in a dinghy in California, love, not on a narrow boat in Yorkshire.”

“I know that Geoff, but I just mean, will it be safe for the kids?”

             
I put my burger into the brown roll that Deidre had put on my plate. She always gave me brown rolls, I preferred white, but Deidre said brown ones were better for me. Burgers and chips from the deep fat fryer were no doubt doing my arteries the power of good too!

“Dee, both the girls are good swimmers, we’ll keep an eye on them and we’ll make sure they wear life jackets whilst they are up on deck.”

I don’t drink a lot these days, now I’m a pensioner. Just the odd shandy and the occasional glass of brandy, but back then I used to drink a fair bit. It was not unusual for me to get through six or seven cans on a week night. Up until this point this had obviously been an unspoken concern. Deidre face formed a frown.

“I don’t want you drinking much, Geoff. I wouldn’t be comfortable on a boat if you’re knocking back the Carling Black Labels and the Oranjebooms, every five minutes.”

              I haven’t a clue where Deidre got the idea that I drank Oranjeboom from! Maybe it was just that advert that was on, (‘Oranjeboom, Oranjeboom, it’s a lager not a tune!) or maybe one of the fellas brought Oranjeboom around when they came to watch the Quarter Final when that four feet tall Argie was out jumping Shilts. Not drinking was a sacrifice that I was willing to make to go narrow boating though, I promised I would only drink a couple of cans a day.

             
On Saturday 16
th
August, 1986, a bright, sunny, summer’s day, Deidre, Sarah, Joanne and I climbed aboard our narrow boat, “Monty’s Miracle”, in Silsden, West Yorkshire and began cruising west. We had been given over an hour’s induction regarding the facilities on board and how to operate the locks. I’m a pretty practical sort of guy and Deidre is more than capable with practical stuff too, so we were reasonably confident that we would cope and we did. The girls thought it was the greatest adventure known to man, which I felt particularly pleased about. They stood on deck for near enough the whole first day, waving and chatting to walkers on the canal’s edge. They were both desperate to take the wheel too, which Deidre and I allowed, supervised of course. The speed limit permitted was four miles an hour, so unless we were approaching a lock, it was a relaxed form of travel and even the locks are a breeze when you’ve been through a couple.

             
All told, our trip was an eight day, seven night adventure. We planned to head as far as Wigan and then turn back. By the end of the first day we had reached Skipton. The second day was great fun as we went as far as Burnley, but had to pass through the Foulridge tunnel, which was a dark, semi-circular tunnel almost a mile long. Joanne was really scared we would break down in there, but once you get a little way in, because it is straight, you can see the bright light of your exit point, which comforted her enough to avoid tears. The bloke who gave us our induction on operating the boat in Silsden told the girls a story that just before the First World War, a cow called Buttercup fell into the canal just by the Foulridge tunnel and rather than just clambering back out, she swam the whole way through it.

Sarah kept saying, “Dad, do you not think it’s amazing that Buttercup swam through here? I didn’t even know cows could swim!”

I’m not sure whether this was just a tale for the kids, but if the story was true, Sarah was right, Buttercup must have been a bloody good swimmer!

             
Our third day was another pleasant run, through East Lancashire, from Burnley to Blackburn. That evening, Deidre and I were enjoying a glass of Hock on deck after the girls had gone to sleep. It was a wonderful, warm, cloudless evening and I must admit we started to become a little self-congratulatory about what a great idea this had been. Little did we know what fate would deliver the next day.

We are both pensioners now and the girls are both married with their own children, but that holiday was all set to be the holiday of a lifetime. If only we had left a little later on that fourth morning. If only the girls had slept in and hadn’t been so eager to set off. It would still have been a tragedy, there’s no doubting that, but it wouldn’t have been our tragedy. Maybe it’s selfish to wish a tragedy on some other unsuspecting soul and I know I can’t turn back time, but if I could, we’d have set off from Blackburn to Wigan at lunchtime that day and just read about the tragedy in the local papers.

GEOFF – August 1986

             
Tuesday was the fourth day of our narrow boat trip. The intention was to go from Blackburn to Wigan, stay there overnight and then head back towards Silsden. The previous afternoon we had encountered our first wet weather on the trip, as it bucketed down for a while and then drizzled through until mid-evening, but on the Tuesday, it wasn’t just showery or briefly heavy, it was relentless rain all day, from the moment we woke up. Every time I hear Boomtown Rats ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, I think to myself that I don’t like Tuesdays. This was the Tuesday that started that.

             
It was probably the rainfall that woke the girls up. By quarter past six, they were out of bed and standing next to ours, looking down on us and begging for breakfast. I am not a morning person and the Hock we’d had the previous evening was not helping me spring out of bed, so Deidre clambered up and made them some cereal. We knew from experience that it was a wasted effort telling our children to go back to bed, like the Grand Old Duke of York’s men, once they were up, they were up. I nodded back off. I remember having a pleasant little dream about Linda Lusardi until I felt a gentle rocking. It was Joanne trying to wake me up.

“When are we going, Dad? Sarah and I want to get moving.”

“Joanne, it’s pouring down out there, love.”

“That doesn’t m
atter, Dad, Monty’s wet already. He lives in the water.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the boat, love, I was thinking about us.”

“Mum said she’ll get our Kagools.”

“Did she now?”

“Please, Dad.”

“OK, Joanne, just give me a few more minutes and I’ll come and start him up.”

“Thanks Dad!”

             
Joanne scuttled off excitedly to tell her big sister the news. Despite my mild protests, I was delighted that regardless of the bad weather, they were still looking forward to a day on the canal. If it had been raining in Devon, I was sure they wouldn’t have begging us to go down to the beach in the pouring rain at seven in the morning. This was further evidence that I had chosen the perfect holiday.

             
Just after the seven locks of Johnson’s Hillock, we were heading towards Chorley in a place we later discovered was called Whittle-le-Woods when it happened. I was at steering the tiller at the rear when Sarah shouted back.

“Dad, you need to slow down, there’s someone swimming in the water.”

“Where?”

“Up there on the starboard side.”

              I am not sure if there is a port and starboard side for narrow boats, there aren’t many ports on the Leeds-Liverpool canal, but it added to the sense of adventure calling the sides the port and starboard side. I looked forward and could see something, bobbing up and down in the water. I couldn’t see if it was an animal or a child, but you could tell whatever it was, was too small to be an adult. It was ten o’clock in the morning in the pouring rain, why would anyone be swimming in a canal in this weather? I pulled on the engine leaver so we could slow down and shifted the tiller to the right so we could veer left of whatever it was.

Deidre was with the girls trying to communicate with whatever it was, trying to tell it to get out the way. All of a sudden, there was real panic in her voice.

“Geoff! Geoff! I think it’s a child, Geoff! His head’s down. Quickly!”

Nothing happens quickly in a narrow
boat. It doesn’t travel quickly. If you pull the tiller, it doesn’t react instantaneously. When we thought split seconds may be important, we were in a vehicle that did things at its own, very slow pace.

“Geoff, hurry!” Deidre shouted.

“I can’t bloody hurry, woman. It won’t go much faster than this. I don’t want to hit him, either.”

             
We were all panicking. Sarah and Joanne were anxiously looking at Deidre and me, hoping we could rescue this floating creature, whatever it may be. I could see the hair on the back of its head, as it was face down, it had a white t-shirt on, Deidre was right. It was a child, definitely a child. I manoeuvred ‘Monty’ so we were alongside him. He was now on our ‘starboard side’.

“Oh my God, Geoff!
Get him out from the back. I won’t be able to lift him.”

At the front of ‘Monty’, there was plenty of room on deck for the whole family, but at the back, there was very little room for anyone other than the person steering the boat. My initial reaction was to think it would be far wiser for me to stop all power, move through the cabin and lift whatever it was out at the front end. My wife is an intelligent human being though and I think her decision was made, not just taking into consideration the floating object, but also her two young daughters looking nervously on beside her. With adrenalin pumping through my veins, I was purely focused on retrieving what we thought was a boy out of the water and saving him. I think, at this point, Deidre had realised he was beyond saving. She is a protective mother and Deidre did not want me lifting a body out of the water right next to her children.

              Once the figure was alongside the back of the boat, I knew it was a child. I put my hands into the water under its torso and lifted. It was not heavy at all. I angled it around so it faced me. It was a boy, a young boy. There were no signs of breathing but my immediate thought was that he did not look dead, his body was obviously cold and wet, but not decomposed in any way, I thought there was hope. I thought I was going to save him.

“Girls, stay at the front! Deidre, come through. It’s a boy, Deidre. I need you to help me.”

              I had done first aid courses when I had been a Cub Scout and done a further course at Pearl, when I had volunteered to be a first aider. I knew how to give mouth to mouth. The videos we had watched always resulted in a happy ending. When I lay him down on the cabin floor though, there was a light white froth that was coming from his mouth and nostrils. I checked there were no ‘foreign objects’ in his mouth, as they told us to at work, tilted his head back, then started breathing into his mouth every few seconds, whilst holding his nose. I could hear Deidre’s footsteps coming through.

“What are you doing, Geoff?”

I didn’t answer, there wasn’t time to. If there had been time, I’d have asked ‘what the bloody hell it looked like I was doing?’

I put my hand on his neck to fee
l for a pulse, there wasn’t one. This scared me as I had always been the best at finding a pulse on the course. I checked again, definitely no pulse, I began to administer CPR.

“Geoff, the poor kids dead, love. You aren’t going to save him. There’s no-one around. H
e won’t have just fallen in now. He’ll have been there all night. One of us needs to go and call the police.”

“Deidre, I am not leaving this poor lad until we
know we have tried everything,” I explained, as I started the chest compressions. I remembered the guidelines about putting your fingers between the nipples and start chest compressions quickly with about thirty compressions to two breaths.

“I’ll rub the souls of his feet and you shout him, Geoff!”

Deidre had remembered me teaching her CPR one evening after doing the course and had remembered bits I had forgotten. She had given up hope, but if I hadn’t, she was still going to support me. She removed his trainers, white and green Dunlop ones and his socks and rubbed his feet. I spoke to him.

“Come on, lad, you’ve got so much to live for, son. You’ve got to pull through this. Come on! Wakey wakey! Don’t give up on us! If you can hear this, don’t give up on us! Please, come on! Come on!”

Deidre spoke softly.

“Geoff, you’ve tried, love. We got here too late. He’s dead.”

              I looked at his helpless little wet body on the floor of our narrow little cabin. I put my head in my hands and cried. All I could think about was his family. They were probably out searching for him now or sitting at home, praying for his safe return. They would still be living in hope. Hoping this little fellow would walk in and get a telling off and a grateful, relieved hug. Their worst fears were about to become their reality, they did not know this, but we did.

             
For those moments, I had forgotten about our children.

“Is everything OK, Dad?”

Sarah had wandered through into the cabin.

“No, Sarah, it’s not. Just keep away.”

“Is he dead?”

“I’m afraid he is. Stay with your sister for now, Sarah. Your Mum will come through in a minute.”

Sarah did as she was told. She did not want to be looking at a dead body, she knew it was the stuff of nightmares. We had no idea what to do with the body, so I just lifted off the floor and put it on one of the settees and then laid a cover over the poor boy’s face. I then left Deidre with the girls and went looking for a local house where I could ring the police from.

An elderly couple in a small end terraced property allowed me to phone the police from theirs. The police were back at the narrow boat within twenty minutes and that afternoon, the poor mother and father of the boy identified his body. His name was Colin Strong, a ten year old local boy, who had been missing since the previous afternoon. How he came to be in the water is a mystery that twenty five years on, has never been solved.

I never knew Colin. I never kicked a football with him, I never had a chat with him about school or ice cream or sweets, but I still think of him nearly every day. After our statements to the police, we headed straight back towards Silsden. Children are pretty resilient to a tragedy like that, so Sarah and Joanne still found time to laugh and smile, but it did affect them, not just on the rest of the holiday, but it made an imprint on the rest of their lives.

Deidre a
nd I did not attend the funeral. We did not feel it was our place to. I could dramatise it and say that it changed our lives but although you do keep a slightly closer eye on your children, kiss them and hug them a little more, thank God for small mercies more often, the emotional wound heals just to leave a tiny scar. He was not our child. For the Strong family, I am sure it was very different. They had two children until that day, now they only had one. Their grief must have been unbearable, must still be unbearable and I am sure the mystery surrounding his death makes it even harder to accept.