Water Gypsies (4 page)

‘Oh,
hello,
moy dear! Oh, my goodness me, look what we have here?’ She gazed, astonished at the sight of Maryann’s face smiling out between those of the two babies. ‘Come in, come in! Hello, Joley, Sally, Ezzy –how’re you, moy dears? Darius – look who’s here! You’ll be wanting to see! – Come on through – he’s having a snooze by the fire,’ she added.

Though Mrs Simons had not lived on the cut for many years now, her backroom looked like a home from home, a larger version of a narrowboat cabin, with its gleaming range and colourful peg rug, and plates, their filigreed edges threaded with ribbons, and photographs and brasses displayed all over the walls. Maryann’s father-in-law was getting out of his chair by the fire. Darius was in his shirt sleeves and adjusted his braces as he smiled shyly. Maryann was always delighted to see him. He looked just the same, she thought, lined face suntanned even in winter, the white beard and long white hair round his bald crown, the same sinewy, if slightly stooped stance. His deep blue eyes lit up with pleasure at the sight of them all.

‘Well now, lass – what’ve we got here?’ Though he knew Maryann had been expecting, this was the first time they had been to Oxford since the girls arrived.

‘Look at these two!’ Alice Simons exclaimed. ‘Here, your arms must be pulled out of their sockets. Put them down on my chair!’ Maryann laid the girls down and they kicked and gazed round, stimulated by the faces looking down at them. Esther smiled and blew bubbles. Ada kicked and moved her head, trying to see everything.

‘This one is Esther,’ Maryann said softly. The old man’s wife, Joel’s mother, his ‘best mate’ for years on the cut, had been called Esther Jane. When she died, he had renamed the boat in her honour. ‘And this is Ada.’

A wistful smile appeared on the old man’s face. He watched the babies, fascinated.

‘Two of them,’ he said eventually. He shook his head in wonder. ‘With the best names.’

Tears came into Maryann’s eyes. She could tell how moved this reserved old man was at the sight of his granddaughters and she loved him for it. He stood for a long time, eyes fixed on them.

‘Bonny,’ he said eventually. ‘Very bonny, the pair of ‘em.’ As he passed Maryann, for a second she felt his hand pressed warmly on her shoulder. He went to the front and they heard him putting on his jacket and old trilby. The front door opened and closed. Darius didn’t want to be away from the
Esther Jane
a moment longer.

‘Well now,’ Mrs Simons said, ‘we’ll have a nice cup of tea. Let those men do the stroving – you stay here and have yourself a rest, moy dear.’ She filled the kettle and set it on the range, where it whispered as it heated up. ‘Now – I want a nice long hold of these lovely babies.’

They passed a happy hour together. Joley and Sally always enjoyed the novelty of being in a house, which seemed like a palace to them in comparison with the
Theodore.
Mrs Simons found them some bits and pieces to play with and they went out the back to see the chickens. Maryann settled contentedly with the old lady, who had always been kindness itself to her. Whenever they came to Oxford, Maryann felt she was truly coming to see family. Alice had been heartbroken for them when they’d lost Harry.

Alice Simons cuddled Ada and Esther in turn, talking to them, making them smile. When they started squalling she handed them back to be fed.

‘Our Nancy’s expecting again,’ Maryann told her. ‘Pleased as punch about it she is.’ Nancy and Darius had been working the Grand Union a lot recently and hadn’t been down to Oxford.

She had Alice Simons’s immediate attention. ‘Oh well, isn’t that nice! Marvellous. You girls’ve been such a blessing to Esther’s boys. She keeping all right, is she? And how’re you managing, Maryann dear?’

‘Oh – I’m all right,’ Maryann said. There was a silence. The clocked ticked. She so longed to pour out her worries to someone. She’d met boatwomen who’d brought up fifteen children, more even, on the boats. Was that what Joel wanted? Children and more children in a never-ending line? She had some better days now, but come the hard winter, the times of heavy rain, of ice, she knew she’d start to feel herself sliding under it all again.

Hesitantly she said, ‘I don’t know how I’ll manage if we have any more, though.’

‘Oh no, dear.’ Alice Simons snapped to attention, sitting forward to perch on the edge of her chair. ‘Dear me, no. Thin as a railing you are already. No – childbearing’s all very well in its place, but you have to call a halt somewhere. My mother died after she’d had her eleventh. I saw her slip away – worn out she was, with it all. Now you know I was the eldest daughter, so of course I was landed with it all.’ She shook her head.

Maryann thought bitterly for a second of her mother. Even if Flo had been prepared to see her, she’d never’ve been able to talk about anything like this. There’d be no sympathy there. Flo’s attitude was always, ‘I’ve had to suffer, so why shouldn’t you?’ Since she’d met Alice Simons, though, the old woman had always been on her side.

‘I wasn’t having that – not for me,’ Alice went on. ‘When I met moy William down here and we was wed I told him straight: “William, I said, “I’m not marrying you to be a brood mare like my mother.” Well – as you know, we had the three, and they was enough for me. Quite enough.You want to look after yourself, dear.’

Maryann looked down at the colourful peg rug by the range, longing to ask the unspoken question which now hung between them.
But how did you keep from having any more?

‘Joel’s a good boy – I’ve always said so,’ Alice Simons was saying. ‘I know the men in my family and we’ve never had a bad ’un. Not really. But they’re men – you know what I’m saying, dear.’ Maryann could feel a blush rising up her neck to her ears. What was Mrs Simons going to say next?

Just then Sally ran in from the back, her coat flying open, and clearly full of excitement.

‘Them hens want some food!’ she said. ‘Can Joley and me give them some corn?’

Maryann clenched her hands, desperation rising in her. The moment was lost. She couldn’t ask now.

‘You go out to the privy,’ Alice Simons said. ‘And you and Joley take a couple of handfuls from the bag out there. Let Ezzy have a go too, there’s a good girl. Shut the back door now!’

Sally’s boots clattered out again in a great hurry.

Alice Simons leaned forward. ‘I wouldn’t normally say such a thing –’ she touched Maryann’s arm – ‘because I know people don’t go for talking about it. P’raps they
should,’
she added fiercely. ‘Only I don’t want to see you waning away in front of my eyes.’ She lowered her voice. ‘You’ll have to have a word with Joel and get him to change his habits. You have to get them to pull back before they goes the whole way. That way you don’t catch, see?’

The blush had taken over what felt like Maryann’s entire body by now, but she looked back at Alice Simons with gratitude.

‘Are you sure? Oh – I don’t know if Joel…’

‘Well, tell him it’s that or nothing,’ Alice said with a sniff. ‘That’ll make him think.’

Maryann looked down again, trying to imagine.
Is that really how you do it?
she wondered.
Joel gets so carried away. How am I going to ask him to stop?

But she heard the urgency in Alice Simons’s voice as she spoke again. ‘Sometimes what it comes down to is it’s them or you. And you don’t want these children growing up without their mother, do you?’

Four

Old Darius Bartholomew was up to watch them pull away from Juxon Street Wharf early the next morning. Maryann saw him fade into the mist of an Oxford dawn, his face lined by time, just standing still in his coat and hat, eyes fixed on the boat as it moved away, putt-putting gently past the other moored craft. The sight of him wrung Maryann’s heart, as she knew it did Joel’s.

‘He goes down to the wharf every day,’ Mrs Simons told Maryann each time they visited. ‘Every day without fail. Stands there watching. Poor Darius – he’d give anything to be young again.’

Maryann feared that the same fate – being left behind on the bank – would befall her husband and perhaps at a much earlier age. Joel’s chest was weak from a dose of gas in the last war so his health was fragile. She had come to dread winter and the first cough. The crackling wheeze in his chest, which was always there, even in summer, was made far worse by the wet and cold which crept up on them through the autumn. She always hoped for Indian summers and mild winters, dreading his racking coughing fits, the risk of him falling so sick he could no longer work his boats. It was too painful to imagine Joel stranded on the bank with that deep, longing look she saw in his father’s eyes. Darius, at least, was old. He had known it would come to him one day and he still had the comfort of knowing that his two sons and their families were working the cut.

They loaded a cargo of stone for Birmingham. The following days were wet, and in parts where the locks were widely spaced Maryann sat in the
Theodore
with the children, while Bobby took the helm. In between her chores she tried to teach Joley his letters.

‘Oh, Mom, do I have to?’ he’d complain as she tried to get him to stay at the table with a scrap of paper and a pencil.

‘Just sit still for a minute and have a go,’ Maryann urged. ‘You don’t want to grow up and not be able to read, do you?’

Joley shrugged, resting his chin wearily on his hand as if to say, ‘Oh well, if I
have
to.’ Maryann was unusual in being a woman on the cut who was a ‘scholar’. Having been brought up on the bank, she had been to school until she was fourteen. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like not to understand any of the signs in the shops or to read a newspaper, and she wanted her children to be able to do the same as her. But, to Joley, what counted in his everyday life was being able to catch a rope, jump on and off a boat or have the strength to shaft the fore end off the mud. Why did he need to know letters? With a long-suffering air he wrote his name, JOEL BARTHOLOMEW, laboriously with the stub of pencil, tongue curled back over his top lip. She taught him to write THEODORE and ESTHER JANE and the names of other boats they passed, which he did under sufferance, wriggling wrestlessly all the time he was made to sit on the bench. Sally was quite different. Her clear blue eyes took in everything and even at three she had been keen to copy everything, struggling to mark erratic lines on the paper. At five, now, she had overtaken her brother.

‘Look – I’m
writing!’
she’d proclaim proudly. Joley would scowl at her eagerness, and Maryann often found it tempting not to bother with him and to concentrate on Sally. But Maryann was determined that all her children would at least be able to read and write. What if they didn’t spend all their life on the cut?

Those first days of the trip the rain fell and fell. Joel was delighted. The cut was low, the ‘bottom too near the top’ as some of the boaters put it. At least they weren’t pumping out water to put out fires as they had in Birmingham and Coventry during the bombing, but it was never good news when the water level fell and Joel was glad to see some water coming in. They pushed on through the wet. Once they were well into the Midlands, though, the rain stopped and the sky cleared. By the time they reached the bottom of the great flight of Hatton locks up to Warwick, the afternoon was bathed in mellow autumn sunshine, weeds and grass shining with water droplets and the air heavy with moisture.

Maryann was at the helm, with Bobby on the bank ahead, lock-wheeling. Another pair of boats had gone up ahead, which meant that the locks would all be set against them. Maryann sighed. For a few seconds she dashed down into the cabin, brewed tea and fetched Joel’s soaked corduroy trousers to lay on the cabin roof in the sun. When she came out, she could see Joel signalling to her that he was going to tie up and wait for another pair to come down. Even when the locks were set for them it was a good two to three hours’ work getting to the top of Hatton. The great flight of locks, the ‘Stairway to Heaven’, towered above them, the black and white beams of the gates and the paddle ratchets rising up the hill towards the sky, looking as if they were stacked on top of one another. The combined rise of the twenty-one locks would lift them almost a hundred and fifty feet to the fringes of Warwick.

They waited at a distance from the bottom lock, drinking tea and eating bread and lard in the sunshine. Joley and Sally got off and scampered about on the bank and Maryann sat holding Ada. Bobby stood ahead by the lock, watching for boats. Something would be along soon.

‘Once we get up here, we’ll tie up before Warwick,’ Joel said. ‘That’ll do us for the day.’

Quite soon Bobby called to them, ‘Pair coming down!’

The two boats from the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company appeared eventually out of the bottom lock, side by side, loaded and sheeted up. As they emerged from the last lock, the butty was released skilfully so that the snubber extended gradually to its full length and the motor boat went on ahead. As they passed, the man at the helm of the motor started waving and shouting about jossers coming up, and turning to look, Joel and Maryann suddenly realized that there was another pair of boats from the Fellows, Moreton and Clayton company steaming up behind them. They hadn’t heard the engine over the sound of the Grand Union carrier.

Eyes fixed on the approaching green-and-orange painted boats, Joel slammed his tea mug down furiously on the
Theodore
’s cabin roof. There was no sign of the pair slowing down.

‘I don’t believe it. Them buggers ent going to stop!’ It went against the etiquette of the cut not to wait if another boat was lined up for a lock. ‘Right.’ Joel’s voice was grimly determined. ‘Bobby!’ he roared. ‘We’re coming in.’ He ran along the bank to the
Esther Jane,
whose motor was still gently turning. Maryann looked round for the children.

‘Joley – Sally! Come back on – we’re going. Quick!’

They children hopped aboard in seconds. Maryann speedily deposited Ada in the cabin and pushed the butty off as Joel pulled away.