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Chapter Nineteen
Christmas

A
S
I
AM SURE
I have said before, Geoff is a man of lists; he likes to have a plan. Unfortunately, we were now so far off our original plan, we had to sit down one evening and completely write a new one, and that sort of thing just upsets him. He kept veering back to the original plan and I had to ‘look' at him for a while, until he concentrated on the new one.

We were also beginning to understand why we had been told time and time again that it was a bad idea to live on a narrow boat while you are restoring it; there are just too many problems, especially when children are involved. We had discovered a whole list of things that are problematic with a child: there's the school run; there's the fact that at the end of the working day everything has to be cleared before Sam sets foot back into the boat as he can do a fair amount of damage to himself and his surroundings with power tools, especially when he's trying to ‘help'; there's the fact that living on a boat means just that –
living
– quality time with your child, nutritious meals at regular intervals, going out, friends, birthday parties, etc. All the ‘stuff' that goes on in normal life doesn't stop just because your parents have fallen out of the sanity tree and hit every branch on the way down.

We tried very hard to keep firmly in mind that Sam never asked for this, he never wanted it, and he had given us very little in the way of trouble about it, a fact for which I will be forever grateful. So these were our excuses why, with two weeks to go before Christmas, we still only had one room completed.

Geoff had built a new sofa in the saloon where we could sit by the fire. It was an ingenious thing which lifted and moved, revealing compartmentalised storage space; there are obviously times where being a pedantic, obsessive compulsive is an asset. With the new sofa, which had been installed a little to the left of the front doors, the original bathroom space had become a distant memory and we had finally reached a point where we knew the upheaval was going to become vast and poor Sam would be moved about the boat like a pawn in an extreme chess match.

The new layout of Happy would mean that the old kitchen, which was at the very rear of the boat, would become our main bedroom, one of the old bathrooms and half the next cabin had already been made into the new bathroom, the other half of that cabin and half of the next one would be merged together to make Sam's new bedroom (half of which we were currently sleeping in), the next three cabins were scheduled to become an open-plan kitchen, dining and lounge space (Sam was currently sleeping in the first of these). So, the dilemma was: how to move people around to give them some living space while each of these rooms was being destroyed and walls were being moved.

It was finally decided that we would start with Sam's room. We did this for two reasons – firstly, it was in the middle of the boat and we figured that we could work out to each side; secondly, and probably the more important, was that it would give Sam a place of his own where he could escape the noise and fuss that was consuming the rest of the boat. There was also the odd little room right at the very front of the boat, but as we hadn't come up with a decent use for that yet, we decided to just leave it as a nice warm ‘snug'-cum-television room, yet another place that Sam and his toys could escape to, without being in danger of having something fall on him.

But, as it was only two weeks to Christmas, we convinced ourselves that it would be better to wait until the New Year before starting anything major. We were away in Cumbria for the best part of the holiday and then, moving back down the country, were due to visit my parents in the Midlands. There seemed no point at all in starting anything new.

We spent the next week filling Happy with tacky fairy lights that flashed and changed colour; we also managed to find the smallest Christmas tree in the world, I think the sad-looking little thing only stood 12 inches high. We over-decorated it and balanced it on a box. From the outside, and with the curtains open, Happy looked like a floating brothel. Sam loved it and would curl up under a patchwork quilt in the front cabin listening to a Christmas carol CD and watching the lights flash.

I have never faced a Christmas with so little money. With three children to find presents for, Geoff and I set a firm budget, decided to forego presents for the two of us and just concentrate on the kids.

Amelia, although disappointed that this year wasn't going to be full of useless, expensive presents, each one forgotten and cast aside in the excitement of opening the next, seemed to understand and accepted our reasoning. I was so proud of her when she tentatively asked for a new coat, but I felt really sad as well. I
wanted
to buy them rubbish, I
wanted
them to have the piles of useless glittering presents that they had come to expect. Damn it all,
I
wanted the piles of useless glittering presents that
I
had come to expect.

I spent a miserable Saturday afternoon Christmas shopping in Cambridge and, after spending a couple of hours battling with the rabid, unhappy shoppers and another hour battling with equally rabid but more homicidal than unhappy drivers on the A10, I squelched over the darkening flood defences with a scant few bags, a headache and a very heavy heart.

As I approached the boat, I noticed how pretty she looked with the lights twinkling in the front cabin; the fog gathering around the windows changed colour with the reflected lights, giving Happy her own front-end aurora borealis; the scent of wood smoke wafted toward me through the damp air and I could hear Sam and Geoff, singing loud, mostly off-key, carols. With me out of the way for the day, they had been packing up the books left by the previous owners to make room for our own and had taken them to a second-hand book store. They had made more in book sales than I had spent on presents, so they were righteously happy when I clambered in through the door.

Over the next couple of days, Sam and I had a fantastic time making Christmas cards on our wobbly table. By the time Charlie arrived on Saturday, we had a complete range of glittery, tasteless, blobby and unidentifiable cards. These we made envelopes for and sent them on their way to unsuspecting friends and family. With Charlie's help, we spent that weekend making fudge and hijacking a friend's cooker to bake Christmas biscuits and other poorly shaped goodies. It was a lovely weekend; we were all sticky, glitter-covered and felt slightly sick from too many ‘taste tests'.

I was surprised to find that, when pushed, the kids didn't actually want anything much for Christmas; Charlie wanted some roller skates and Sam a new computer game. They were far happier just puddling around making things, laughing, throwing things at each other and making a mess. We discovered that Sam can really cook and Charlie has a superb eye for package design. By the time Sunday evening rolled around, they both plonked themselves onto the sofa, next to a huge pile of homemade presents that we intended to give to the family. Exhausted, and even after a bath, still slightly glittery, they both proclaimed it the best weekend ever.

Christmas and New Year sped past. It was strange to spend time in a house again and I found myself staring out of the window, missing my early morning dose of fish lips in the mist. I also found myself automatically throwing the toast crusts out of the window; luckily my mother thought that I was feeding the birds.

‘We do have a bird table, dear,' she grouched, as she rushed around sweeping them away from her immaculate patio.

Within days, it seemed, Sam was back at school and we were faced, once again, with
the plan
. The weather was cold, wet and grey. Snuggled up together in front of the fire, we just couldn't bring ourselves to do anything more than make tea and sit around discussing what we ought to be doing.

As we were retiring to bed after yet another fruitless evening of watching mind-numbing rubbish on the telly, Sam woke up from a nightmare and, as he was unwilling to be consoled, I settled him in bed with Geoff and prepared to sleep in his room for the night.

I couldn't get comfortable – the whole bed felt clammy and damp. Putting this down to Sam being frightened and probably a bit sweaty, I didn't really give it much thought, but it felt so horrible that, eventually, I decided to get up and change the sheets.

Stripping Sam's bed down was always a bit of a pain as the mattress had to be standing on its side to enable the sheet to be put on, so, at two in the morning, I was buried under a heavy mattress struggling to replace a fitted sheet. I lifted it up on to its side and, leaning it on the wall, bent down to pick up the sheet. As I began to stand up the mattress toppled and landed across my back and shoulders.

It didn't hurt, but it was absolutely soaking. The whole underside of the mattress was completely sodden, and turning the main light on to get a better look I noticed that the wooden board that made up the mattress base was also covered in water; it had obviously been like this for some time as dark patches had appeared on the underside of the mattress and it had a mouldy, musty smell. I picked the whole thing up and, after dragging it through the boat, slung it as far as I could down the gangplank, leaving it in the dark to be dealt with in the morning.

Grimacing and trying not to give in to the need to wash my hands in Lye, I wandered into our bedroom and poked Geoff awake. I dragged him into Sam's room and showed him the still soaking but mattress-less bed base. He decided that, as the base was solid, the moisture had nowhere to go and no way to evaporate and this had probably been building up for ages. He was far more sanguine than I about the whole thing and, yawning, gave me a kiss, assured me that we would deal with it in the morning, and staggered back to bed; I slept on the sofa.

The mouldy bed pushed us into action again. The next morning we examined all the mattresses and found each one to be in the same condition as Sam's. I was amazed that we hadn't noticed this before, then had minor hysterics and refused to sleep on any of them.

Geoff, stoic as usual, went straight to the room and a half that were to be made into Sam's new space and began to dismantle them. Eventually, after spending another ten minutes moaning about the diseases we could have caught from the beds, I joined him.

Unsurprisingly, we encountered all the same problems that we had when dismantling the bathrooms. Firstly, there were screws with no grip or with heads that broke off the second you touched them with a screwdriver that had to be drilled out. There was no pump-out tank to remove – thank God – but being a hotel boat, every room boasted a little corner sink, and we knew they were going to be trouble.

The wall holding the sink was the very last to be removed and Geoff had been building up to another long struggle. Having nothing to do at that point, I made tea and, wandering in, I leant against the wall sipping it, intent on enjoying the show.

As before, Geoff removed all the screws, dismantled the taps and pipe work and just as before, the wretched thing just hung on the wall and mocked him.

‘What are you going to do this time?' I asked, leaning over and giving it a little wiggle. It felt completely solid.

Geoff grinned at me. ‘I have a cunning plan, Lord Blackadder,' and with that, he picked up a lump hammer and hit it – hard.

Watching the hammer's descent, I winced and backpedalled away from the expected explosion of porcelain shards. He obviously hadn't hit it hard enough because, apart from making a sound like a broken bell, nothing happened. Geoff frowned and, taking a deep breath, he braced his feet apart and raised the hammer for another blow.

It never fell. Without any sound at all, the sink just dropped to the floor where it hit with a dull thud and lay there, leaving Geoff with a confused look on his face and the hammer held above his head. To this day I have no idea why it was so funny, but I laughed so hard my face hurt and I had to go and sit down for a bit; even now when I think of him standing there with his hammer I still laugh. Over the course of destroying the cabins to make way for a more open-plan living area, we removed seven sinks in all, and not one of them gave up without a fight.

Within two weeks, Sam had a bright new bedroom and we were all looking forward to him moving out of our makeshift room and back into his own. He was enchanted with the new room: a bed just his size, new mattress, massive amounts of ventilation, desk at the end with a light, wardrobe and drawers. His new bed was high enough that all his toys fitted beneath it in big storage boxes. The whole room was decorated in cool blue and white, and a new dark blue, deep pile carpet, which nicely matched the curtains, covered the floor.

The weekend before it was finished, we had let him loose in B&Q and he was allowed to choose whatever additional decoration he liked. He chose a frieze of Scooby Doo and Mystery Incorporated; it was huge and had the added attraction of little sticky figures that could be placed on it to complete certain scenes of ghosts, monsters and general mayhem.

I had winced slightly; it was so ridiculously far away from the traditional rose and castle narrow boat decorations that it felt like putting fake black oak beams in a spaceship, but it was his choice and he loved it.

When the room was complete, he moved in amidst much celebration and furore and refused to emerge for two days, even to the point of demanding all his meals be served on a tray – this he would place reverently on his desk, turn on the overhead spotlight and settle down to some serious eating. He got away with this for 24 hours, but as part of our new family lifestyle, we had decreed that at least one meal a day should be eaten together around a table, and, lovely though his room was, it was way too small to hold two adults, a small boy and a pot of spaghetti Bolognese.

Chapter Twenty
She's a Narrow Boat, Not an Ice Breaker!

W
ITH ONE ACTUAL BEDROOM
completed, a bathroom and the space where a room used to be now holding a rather comfy sofa, we felt we had actually made some progress.

One morning, after dropping Sam at school, I staggered back into the boat and threw myself down on to the sofa, causing Geoff to look up in surprise. He had a large hammer in one hand and was obviously preparing to hit something, hard.

‘Are you all right?' He put the hammer down and, taking a closer look at me, walked into the bathroom and grabbed a bottle of Night Nurse. ‘You look absolutely foul,' he informed me, holding out a shot of glowing green yuck.

‘Gee, thanks,' I sniffled at him and, turning, prepared to throw myself face down on the sofa. ‘Believe me, I probably feel worse than I look.'

‘Oh no, you don't.' Geoff grabbed me before I could settle myself in comfort. ‘Why don't you go and have a long sleep in Sam's room, you can shut the door to the end of the corridor and I can carry on working.'

‘OK.' I downed the disgusting medicine and shuddered. ‘Don't let me sleep for too long.'

Geoff looked around what was going to become our saloon. ‘Two hours at most,' he promised.

True to his word, Geoff woke me with a nice cup of tea two hours later. Sam's bed had been surprisingly comfortable and I really could have stayed there for the rest of the day.

‘Come and have a look at this.'

Ho hum. I got up.

Sam's bedroom had been created from one of the old bedrooms in the corridor, and the saloon had been partially created in the space where the old toilet and one bedroom used to be. There were another two unused bedrooms, which were due to be all knocked down to make a through kitchen, dining room, saloon and, while I had been asleep, Geoff had done it all.

In my strange, fluey state I couldn't quite grasp what he had done, only that there was suddenly a huge area of just, well, ‘space' really. He had taken out two sets of side walls, two fixed beds and some other little bits like bedside tables, and all that was left was our little sofa fixed on one wall, which looked a good 30 feet away.

It was an amazing and huge change. Happy went from being one long, dark little corridor to all airy, light space. It was rather empty, it echoed and the whole place looked a little odd as there was just a void with a sofa and the wood burner stuck at the end.

‘Wow,' I mused, ‘this really makes a difference. Now that you've got it all cleared, what's going where?'

Geoff spent the next 20 minutes showing me drawings and pointing out exactly which part of the new space those drawings pertained to. By the second drawing, I found myself beginning to drift and couldn't remember what was on the previous one. Luckily Geoff finally noticed that my eyes were glazed and I was beginning to slide down the wall. He put the drawings to one side and helped me back to bed. By the time I awoke for the second time, he had cleared all his tools away, vacuumed the mess up, been out to pick up Sam and had made dinner.

About eight o'clock that evening, I was curled up on the sofa with a hot water bottle, which he occasionally re-filled for me.

‘How are you feeling now?' he asked. ‘Is there anything you need?'

I sniffed and smiled up at him from beneath my blanket, ‘No, I'm fine. I feel a lot better actually.'

‘Good.' Geoff reached behind him and brought out a sheaf of papers. ‘Shall we go through these drawings now then?'

I suddenly felt really ill again.

Throughout February, the vagaries of the central heating system became more and more irritating until Geoff finally took the whole thing apart for a second time and swore at it for another couple of days. When he put it back together, it certainly was more efficient but still not perfect; every three or four days it would just stop working, and we would have to bleed it and go round the boat bleeding all the radiators which took about an hour and a half, fill the header tank back up with water and restart it.

The wood-burner was a godsend and, as temperatures plunged below freezing, it was often too cold to do any work at night, so we spent a lot of time just huddled up in quilts by the fire. Being very new to all this, it took us some time to work out that in temperatures like these you NEVER let the fire go out, because if you did, it could take up to ten hours to get the boat warm again.

We had learnt that particular lesson very early in our ownership, when, having been out at a birthday do at Arwen and Carl's, we had let the fire go out before we left, at around ten o'clock that morning. By the time we had returned, 11 hours later, the boat was bone-achingly cold.

Sam had been sent to bed with hot wheat bags and, with a fine disregard for the electricity bill, he also had a heated blanket; he was soon warm, cosy and fast asleep. Geoff and I fared less well, the heating went off at about 11 o'clock and refused to come back on again, no matter what we did to it. Even with the fire roaring away, the temperature at the front of the boat was still finger-, toe- and mind-numbing.

With all the old beds still out of bounds due to the damp, Geoff and I had taken to sleeping on the saloon floor and at two o'clock in the morning, with the fire still on full, we huddled together, fully dressed, under two quilts and gibbered gently at each other. I got up once to check on Sam but even with his blanket now turned off, he was still completely toasty (I think that small boys have some sort of inner nuclear reactor). Pausing only to put on yet another pair of socks, a woolly hat and some gloves, I went back to join Geoff, and we finally fell asleep.

At four o'clock in the morning, we woke up, sweating and soaked. The ambient temperature had finally risen and everything was back to normal – in fact, it was so hot that Herbert had taken himself off to sleep in the bathroom.

We turned the fire down and, after divesting ourselves of all layers of clothing and dumping one of the quilts, we managed to sleep well for the rest of the night, but it was a major lesson learned; the Morso did not go out again until May.

Two days later, we woke up to dead silence, broken only by odd crunching sounds. Thinking that maybe it had snowed; I peered out of the window. No, no snow, just a very heavy frost.

I woke Geoff up as I went to put the kettle on by the simple act of tripping over him as he lay happily asleep on the floor (you would think most men would be happy to have a beautiful woman fall into their laps; maybe he would have liked me to fall from a lesser height).

Anyway, with Geoff up and about, if still wincing and limping slightly, I mentioned the odd noise. He looked in all the usual places that produce odd noises: central heating, water pump, engine room, but couldn't find anything. I was a bit concerned as I am not a great fan of odd noises, they never lead to anything good, and, by the time Geoff gave up, I was getting quite tetchy about the whole thing.

‘Good grief! Come and have a look at this.' Geoff had pulled the curtain aside and was staring out over the river. I joined him at the window and was amazed. The whole river was frozen from bank to bank.

‘Now there's something you don't see every day.' Geoff slid the window open and gave the ice a poke with our broom.

‘That's fairly solid,' I said, watching the broom handle bounce off the white river.

‘It's thin close to the boat, look.' Geoff bashed the ice close to Happy's side and it gave way with a crack, the same cracking sound we had been trying to track down.

‘Oh it's the ice. As the boat moves, she's breaking the ice,' I shivered. ‘Eugh. Close the window, it's flaming cold out there.'

Over breakfast we discussed our day's plans.

‘We were going to Ely today. Are we still going to go?' I devoutly hoped he was going to say no but didn't really think there was much chance of that – it would take more than an inch of ice for Geoff to change a ‘plan'. Sure enough...

‘Yeah, it'll be fine, the sun's out and, more to the point, there's no wind. We might not be so lucky tomorrow.'

Irk! I just knew he was going to say that. Oh well, better go and find the thermals.

An hour later found us both bundled up in whatever warm clothing we could find, standing at the stern, ready to go. Herbert had been forced out for his last wee; I finally had had to chuck him down the gangplank and then stand guard on it to stop him sneaking, still un-emptied, back on to the boat. He had finally given in and with an odd hobbling and tiptoeing movement had made his way over the frozen grass to relieve himself. When I finally let him back on to the boat the ungrateful little gargoyle dived into his bed and lay there staring at me in mournful accusation.

Standing freezing at the tiller, I waited for Geoff to go through his cast off checklist and stared mournfully at the cup of tea he had placed for me on the roof. I had so many pairs of gloves on I couldn't actually pick it up and was just wondering whether we had any straws, when Geoff, finally finished, jumped aboard with a big grin and a puff of breath. I put Happy into forward and with a huge plume of water from the prop we stayed exactly where we were.

‘It's the ice,' Geoff inched his way along the gunwales to the front of the boat and, sure enough, the bow had moved enough to make a beautiful ‘V' shape in the ice which then held us fast.

The next half hour was spent bashing the ice with anything we could find. The best implements, we found, were a barge pole and a spade. As we smashed the ice away from the river side of the boat, Happy moved away from the bank and toward the middle where the ice was thinnest and actually started to make a little headway of her own. Of course, once we had started moving, the ice began to break away from her bow in big chunks that went skittering off across the frozen surface of the river, which was great fun to watch.

It wasn't quite so enjoyable to sit inside and listen to the amplified cracks as the ice broke and the horrible scratching noises as she brushed gently against any ice that refused to break. It struck me at the time that similar noises, obviously many times amplified, may have been the last sounds that some of the passengers on the Titanic ever heard. I shuddered and went back outside to stand with Geoff.

After about an hour of fairly slow but steady headway, I looked back at our progress: it was quite impressive. Beyond our wake, a huge crack in the ice stretched straight down the centre of the river. I laughed, watching the flock of rather relieved-looking swans that floated, in rather more restricted width than they were used to, behind us.

It took a little longer than usual but we finally made it to our normal turning point at the Lazy Otter. Forgetting the ice (I was driving at this point, Geoff had gone in to warm his hands) I took the usual route of swinging her nose over to the right and then around in a wide circle to the left, which usually meant we only had to perform one backing manoeuvre to get her turned completely around.

In all fairness, I did manage to get about halfway through the turn before she came to a complete halt, stuck in the ice again. It was much harder to get her underway this time. Getting her to go in a straight line with a fair amount of power at the back had worked well, but we were trying to turn her within her own length and the ice was having none of it.

Eventually, Geoff broke the ice to the left of her nose and I broke the ice to the right of her stern. Sweating and occasionally swearing as the ice failed to break, causing the implement in our freezing hands to vibrate painfully, we slowly pirouetted on the spot; it took us nearly an hour of smashing away at the ice to get her under way again.

Getting back to the mooring was much easier, as all we had to do was follow the break we had made on the way down. Our only issue was the seemingly millions of waterfowl that had taken refuge in the crack that we had created on our outward trip – we had to take it very slowly or risk crushing the birds up against the side of the ice in their panic to get away from us.

We managed to get back to our mooring three hours after we left. Pulling Happy back in, we gave up. We were cold, tired and were still suffering from painful, blood-returning tingles in our bashed hands. There was no way that we could make it to pump out and then back in time to pick up Sam. I sighed, another day wasted. But as I sat by the fire with yet more tea, I thought of the swans and ducks all happily swimming in exposed water that wouldn't have existed if we hadn't passed by, and decided that maybe the day hadn't been wasted after all.

What with bad weather and other such traumas, we didn't manage to get to pump out until the weekend, so early on a nearly windless Saturday, with a weak and watery sun doing its best to cheer us all up, we headed out toward Ely.

The journey was pretty much incident-free and, as we pulled in to pump out, we were all in good moods and had decided that we would turn around after pump out, find somewhere to moor and go into town and do some food shopping.

About 200 yards downriver there was a fantastic 100-foot mooring free, with just one lone angler sitting right in the middle. As boats have the right of way on moorings in Ely, we did as we were supposed to, slowed right down and shouted to him.

‘Coming in to moor!' We began to pull into the space; the angler didn't move. We slowed down a little more and shouted again, but he neither moved nor looked up or gave any sign that he was alive at all. I began to think he was a mannequin that someone had put there for a joke. By the time we actually hit his keep net we were running about, panicking and screaming, Happy was in full reverse and desperately trying to slow down, Geoff had his back against the boat and was ‘walking' her front end along the wall in a desperate attempt to stop us from squashing this guy's equipment.

When we were about two foot away from him (and still going forward), the angler jumped to his feet and stuck out his hand in a policeman type ‘stop' gesture. Erm, nice to see you are actually alive, mate, but no ... I can't stop. In the immortal words of Mr Scott, ‘I canna change the laws of physics, Captain'; we're coming in whether you like it or not.