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On open water, however, I really couldn't get my head around bank effect at all. I will quote from Wikipedia:

‘Bank Effect' refers to the tendency of the
stern
of a
ship
to swing toward the near bank when operating in a river or constricted
waterway
. The asymmetric flow around a ship induced by the vicinity of banks causes pressure differences (
Bernoulli's principle
) between port and starboard sides. As a result, a
lateral force
will act on the ship, mostly directed towards the closest bank, as well as a
yawing moment
pushing her bow towards the centre of the waterway. The
squat
increases due to the decreased blockage. This phenomenon depends on many parameters, such as bank shape, water depth, ship-bank distance, ship properties, ship speed and
propeller action
. A reliable estimation of bank effects is important for determining the limiting conditions in which a ship can safely navigate a waterway. This phenomenon has several different names, including bank suction, stern suction, and ship-bank interaction.

Hmm, very technical. What this actually means in real terms is that if, like me, you have a tendency to bring the back end a little too close to the bank when attempting to get around a tight corner, bank effect takes hold, pulls your rear end aground and pushes your nose out into the middle of the waterway, so slapping you diagonally across the canal, where you then stick until your wonderful husband wanders up with a pole and pushes you straight again. This isn't much of a problem until there is someone coming the other way who doesn't expect a 70-foot barricade stuck across their path of progression. There then follows a panicked race: can we get our boat out of the foliage before the oncoming boat hits us? And can he slow down to avoid hitting us until we can get our boat out of the foliage?

By the time I had hit the bank for the third time in as many hours, we gave up and compromised. Geoff would drive through the really curvy bits as he didn't seem to be affected by bank effect and I would bring it into every lock as I wasn't affected by Geoff's lock ‘pinballism'. We were both happy, but not as happy as the other river users that I was no longer at the tiller.

Early the next morning we had a phone call from Amelia, who, having taken a job as a lettings agent about three months earlier in Didcot, had moved to Oxfordshire. With our rapidly dwindling amount of clean clothes in mind and our lack of anything resembling wheeled transport, I asked her if she would mind meeting us in Cropredy and giving me a lift to the nearest launderette – not exactly a fun-filled day out, but it was getting to be an emergency.

She agreed with a laugh, mentioning that it was parents who were supposed to be saddled with their migrant offspring's washing, not the other way round, and couldn't I just be normal for once. Seeing the irony, I laughed, and offered her and Huw a bed for the night and a cooked dinner in return for their help.

Thinking that we would really have to buy some food if I was to make good on my offer to feed them, we stopped at the Fenny Compton wharf and enjoyed a rather long walk into the village for a visit to their little shop. We had nearly arrived at our destination when Charlie gave a short shriek of outrage and shot off into the road. Confused and relieved that there were no cars, we watched her wander over to a small, fluffy lump in the road and pick it up.

‘Oh God,' I nudged Geoff. ‘What the hell has she got this time?'

‘I have no idea,' he replied, ‘but you can guarantee that if Charlie has found it, it will be broken, need feeding and will probably cost us a great deal of money in vets' bills – and then it will spitefully die and leave her bereft, something else we are going to have to deal with.'

Curious silence fell as we watched her walking back across the road, with something fluffy held between her cupped hands.

‘Look, it's a dove.' She held up a bemused-looking bird to show us and grinned – oh dear.

‘That is not a dove,' Geoff poked it with a forefinger. ‘It's a bloody stinky pigeon – is it hurt? What are you going to do with it?'

Charlie thought for a moment. ‘I dunno. Keep it warm, feed it, I'll call him Grubs.'

Great, just what we needed –
another
occupant – and with her hands full Charlie couldn't help carry the shopping back to the boat.

Stopping for the night just past Fenny Compton Tunnel (a poorly named, thin, little brick-walled cutting which was now open to the sky and very overgrown), we studied Grubs closely and found that there wasn't anything physically wrong with him, but mentally he was, without a doubt, the most ridiculous animal in the world. He stuck to Charlie closely, and seemed to suffer terminal apathy. He ate well, he slept, but, above all, he
stank
. He was the smelliest thing I had ever encountered and would have even given Herbert a run for his money.

The next day we travelled toward Cropredy and the promise of clean underwear. Amelia and Huw turned up as we moored. Grubs took one look at Huw's huge mop of tight, curly, blond hair, flew up, settled himself into it and stayed there. Even when Huw went outside and jumped up and down in an effort to dislodge him, he held on tight and stayed there against all efforts to remove him, rubbing his beak through the curls and cooing in deep satisfaction.

Despite Huw's new hat (which would insist on pooing down his neck), we had a pleasant evening and all finally retired at about midnight having finally removed Grubs from Huw's head after the wretched thing had fallen asleep.

The next morning, Amelia brought in a cup of tea for Geoff and me to enjoy in bed. ‘What's that smell?' she enquired, wrinkling up her nose.

I yawned. ‘It's probably your stepfather.' I nudged Geoff and a muffled ‘Oh, thanks!' came from under the covers.

‘No,' she sniffed again. ‘It smells like cat. Phew, it's horrible.'

I took a sniff; hmm it was a bit horrible. ‘Either it's the pump-out tank which needs seriously emptying or it's that wretched bird of Charlie's.'

Amelia laughed. ‘Charlie warned Huw that she was letting Grubs out of her bedroom, and he went outside for a smoke – funnily enough, he's wearing one of Geoff's hats.'

We laughed together. Funny, now that Amelia had mentioned the smell, I found it really pungent. Sighing, I got out of bed and, picking up a torch en route, I opened the toilet and looked down the hole.

‘Erm, Geoff, I think we have a problem.'

It had been a little while since we had last pumped out, and there was absolutely nowhere with a pump-out machine until we reached Banbury. Geoff looked down the hole and worked out that we had about a day and a half's gap left and that the smell was due to the seals around the toilet base beginning to give way again.

These seals gave way on a regular basis and we always carried spares, but it was a horribly smelly job to replace them. Which was why, knowing full well that Amelia and I were going to be out of the boat for the best part of the day, I suggested that they be changed sooner rather than later. And with that instruction imparted, Milly and I gathered up every dirty piece of clothing we could find and fled.

It was the first time I had been in a car with Amelia since she had passed her driving test and I was understandably nervous. It was only after the fourth or fifth gasp at a corner that Amelia turned to me and, slapping at my white knuckles with a pen, made me let go of the handle on the dashboard.

‘I do this for a living, you know,' she said and, pinning me to the seat with a hard look every time I flinched, we carried on into Daventry.

Strangely enough we had a lovely day. With there being nothing we could do other than sit and talk while watching the washing go round and round, that's exactly what we did, and by the time we got back to the boat with the clean and lovely smelling washing, we were both relaxed and quite cheerful. It made me even happier to note on entering Happy that, not only had Geoff fixed the seal on the toilet tank, he had also set Huw and the kids to cleaning the boat up. Happy shined like a new pin.

Amelia and Huw left that evening, both having to go to work on the Monday morning. They informed us that they had filled in an application for a flat, rather than living in a shared house as they were currently doing, and so by the time we reached our final destination, they would probably have a place of their own.

I was a little unsure how I felt about this news. What right did she have to grow up like this, I thought, as I watched them walk away, hand in hand, down the tow path toward their car. I smiled; at least Huw was the type of guy who would actually laugh and put up with a stinky pigeon on his head for an entire evening and if that isn't a good way to judge a future son-in-law's character, I really don't know what is.

The next morning, we left Cropredy and headed on toward Daventry, and after a pleasant but totally uneventful day we moored up next to some big fields, where we figured the children could go and run riot with a boomerang that Charlie had purchased a couple of weeks previously but hadn't had the opportunity to test.

Home schooling was not going well. I had a nasty suspicion that schools don't actually instil a wish to learn into children; they just feed them the information they need to pass the exams. Any time we told Charlie to think for herself, she would throw herself into her bedroom and sulk, or just shout that she couldn't do it. I was beginning to have long and wistful reminiscences about them going to school. Sam, on the other hand, would be quite happy with maths or IT, and would spend hours messing about with these two subjects. But if I suggested geography or history or comprehension, he would often join Charlie in a shared and noisy tantrum; ah well, at least they were doing something together.

I don't blame the children, but I do blame Geoff and myself – obviously, we were not cut out to be teachers, as more often than not we would just let them get away with it for an evening's peace and tranquillity, and when we did insist that the work was actually completed, all too often it would end in tears, either the children's or mine.

So on this rather gorgeous September evening, instead of getting on with the vagaries of the digestive system or writing stories, Geoff took the kids off to play boomerang in a local field. I entertained the vague hope that he would find interesting flora and fauna that maybe they could incorporate into a fascinating ‘biology lesson'. ‘Don't be ridiculous,' I chided myself; if Geoff found some interesting fauna, he'd eat it or just give it to Charlie to domesticate.

As I stood leaning on the tiller with my eyes closed, revelling in the late afternoon sunshine, I heard a little thump and looked down. Twelve pairs of black, shiny eyes looked back at me and, as one, their owners opened their tiny beaks and went ‘peep'. It was very late in the year for such tiny ducklings to be about, but here they all were. I looked about for their mum and spotted her skulking behind another boat.

The ducklings were the cutest thing I had ever seen, all black and fluffy, with tiny little serious faces. I went into the kitchen and fetched some wholemeal loaf, then stood at the back of the boat, leaning on the tiller and smiling at the ducklings' antics as they bobbed and weaved, mobbing each other to get to a particularly good bit of bread floating on the water.

They went through all the bread in a matter of minutes. Mum and three of the more enterprising ducklings had climbed out of the water and were shouting at the boat from the tow path. Laughing at the ducklings energetically jumping up and down and peeping loudly, I cordially wandered over and emptied the last of the crumbs into a pile on the tow path. Mum and the three babies fell on the offerings and their squabbles made me laugh again.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a huge, overfed tabby cat lurking in the bushes that bordered the canal and before I could find something to swat it with, or draw breath to shout, it had made a huge leap, grabbed one of the ducklings and hightailed it up the tow path. As I saw it move, I made a leap of my own toward the ducks, in the mad hope of frightening it off. It didn't work, and as I'd jumped, I managed to catch one foot on the T stud at the back and landed face first on the tow path, just late enough to frighten mum and the other two ducklings into complete hysterics and watch the cat scarper.

As I got slowly to my feet, I noticed that my hand was bleeding, as was my nose from where I had mashed it into the ground. I had twisted my ankle, and was covered from head to toe in dust and feathers. I stood up and began to dust myself off and, naturally, it was at this point that Geoff and the kids wandered back into view.

Charlie stopped, took in my completely beaten-up appearance and asked, ‘What on earth have you been doing?'

I glared at her, and, climbing back on board, I slammed open the doors to the engine room.

‘Feeding the bloody ducks.' 

Chapter Thirty-two
This is Not the Time for Things to Go Wrong!

T
HAT EVENING, COVERED IN
Germolene and with a swollen nose, I settled down to watch a DVD. It was only nine o'clock and I really fancied watching something pointless. We had been staring gormlessly at the telly for about an hour, when, getting up to make a cup of tea, I noticed that the lights were very dim.

‘What's up with the lights?' I asked Geoff.

He looked up from the book he was reading. ‘Oh, I thought it was getting hard to see.' He wandered down to the engine room and came back to report that our batteries had run out of charge. I shrugged. Ah well, it happened sometimes; without a full day's run to charge the batteries, we often got only half an evening out of them. There was really no point sitting around in the dark, so we had an early night. The next day was again only a short run, which brought us to the outskirts of Banbury. We moored in time to go down to the big shopping centre which is just off the canal and treated ourselves to dinner in a restaurant, then staggered back to the boat about eight o'clock. The main thing on our minds was a new car; our little Daewoo Matiz wasn't big enough to swing a cat (although I could think of one that I would really, really like to have tested that cliché with), let alone big enough to pack all our worldly goods into when we finally handed over Happy to Gerald in a couple of days' time.

As we headed back to Happy, we were all in a slightly pensive mood. Nearing the end of our ‘road' trip, we were actually going to have to move off her and find something else to do. We hadn't found another boat, we hadn't made any firm plans, the future was a blank and at some point we were actually going to have to sit down and make a plan to fill it with something.

Ah well, push those worries aside, tomorrow is another day as they say. We opened the hatch and, reaching into the boat, I flicked the light switch; nothing except a vague glow. Damn, no electricity again. Ah well, another early night.

The next morning brought two major problems. We still had no electricity so couldn't have a cup of tea, and the smell from the bathroom had become pungent again. We really needed to get to a pump-out today. Avoiding looking down the toilet, I left Geoff in charge of the sleeping kids and, with his head in the electrics, I walked back down the tow path, intent on using Starbucks' loo and collecting the takeaway beverages so necessary to get us functioning in the early morning.

On my return, I opened the front door, carefully juggling a tea and a double mocha with peppermint shot and whipped cream (a girl could get used to that first thing in the morning) and was confronted by Geoff, waving a bit of wire at me.

‘Look at that,' he grinned. ‘I found it.'

‘It's a bit of wire,' I tried to edge round him. Come on, matey, my coffee's getting cold.

‘Yes, but it's an important bit of wire, this is the wire from the alternator – no wonder we haven't been getting any electricity.'

I finally managed to sit down and grab a sip of my lukewarm calorie fest. ‘That's lovely, can you fix it?'

Geoff pondered for a moment, and, grabbing a greasy bag, unearthed a chocolate croissant. ‘Oh yeth,' he spluttered around a mouthful, ‘it might take a couple of hours though.'

Great, ah well, nothing for it. I waited until the children were awake and then dragged them out for a cooked breakfast. On the way back, we spent an hour on an extremely entertaining kids' playground. It had some horrific adult torture implements disguised as educational play equipment and by the time they had finished whizzing me about and bumping me up and down, I vowed never to have mocha for breakfast ever again. Luckily Geoff rang me to say that everything was fixed and the kettle was on, and, with that good news, we headed back to the boat.

The smell from the bathroom and, strangely enough, also from our bedroom, was now utterly disgusting, and the first job of the morning was to pump out. Being used to pumping out being free in Cambridgeshire, I was horrified at the £15 we were required to pay – well, we would have been required to pay, if the guy's pump-out machine hadn't broken only five minutes into the exercise. It was a pain, but at least we figured it would have reduced the mass in the tank, which would give us another couple of days in which to find another one.

On the other side of Banbury we discovered the delights of lift bridges, all of them down. There is a knack to lift bridges: you have to pull the boat over to the side of the canal, let the bridge opener off the boat, wait until the bridge is up, and go carefully underneath between very narrow walls. Glancing upwards at the inland waterways equivalent of the sword of Damocles hanging over your head, you hold your breath and, when it doesn't fall, you breathe a huge sigh of relief and then pull in again to let your partner get back on; how people do it single-handed I'll never know.

After seven of these wretched things, we had had enough and decided to moor up for the night. It was quite early and, as we were fairly close to one of the garages listed in the local paper, we decided to go and see if we could find a new car.

The address of the garage was a little vague to say the least. It was listed as Adderbury, but after taking the hour and a half walk to that village, we couldn't find it anywhere. The walk from the canal to Adderbury is horrendous; there is absolutely no provision made for walkers along that stretch, the cars come past at 60 or 70 miles an hour as you stagger, tripping over lumps and ditches, the three miles into the village. By the time we got there, we were tired, hot and fed up, and knowing that we would have to face the same walk back just made it worse. When we worked out that the garage that we were looking for wasn't in the village, well, I can't remember being that irritated for a long time.

Finally making it back to the canal, the kids and I made a grateful break for the boat. Geoff hesitated.

‘What's up,' I called back to him.

‘You carry on,' he said, ‘I'm just going to walk a bit in the other direction and see if the garage is that way instead.'

‘OK,' I called, thinking ‘weirdo'. ‘I'll have the kettle on for when you get back.'

Geoff was back within 20 minutes. ‘We went the wrong way,' he laughed. ‘It's just over the bridge.'

The kids did not find him funny.

I was quite happy to be out of the boat the next morning – the smell from the bathroom had become almost intolerable. You had two choices: either sleep with the windows closed and suffocate due to the smell, or sleep with the windows open and freeze to death. The smell drove all of us out of the boat by nine and we straggled down the road to the garage.

After much discussion, we had decided that we were looking for a big car with four doors and a large boot. There was still a huge amount of stuff that we would have to unload from the boat. This garage was advertising a Toyota people carrier which would be ideal.

What we ended up with that day was a two-door, sporty Ford 4x4, with a less than ideally sized boot but very pretty. I blame Geoff for giving in too easily. The Toyota was horrible, faded to an almost pink colour and sported chintz curtains. Charlie and I, even bleating together, shouldn't really have been able to break one of his plans
that
easily. But the Ford was nice and the garage was very helpful. When we explained our circumstances (and gave them a cheque for the full amount) they were more than happy to come and pick us up from wherever we had made it to and bring us back to pick up Mab, as she was christened by the kids, after her MOT.

We were on our way again and, at Aynho Wharf, we paid for a full pump out and bought some supplies. As we pulled away, it started to rain – the first rain for two weeks – and I went to drag out the waterproofs to find that, once again, against all reason and experience, we had put them into storage.

We had arranged to meet Gerald at Lower Heyford the next day. I have to admit I wasn't exactly pleased to see him, not that there was anything wrong with him, he was a nice guy, but he was buying our boat and, quite frankly, I was entirely unsure as to whether I wanted to sell her. Not that we had a lot of choice – it was his money that had just bought our new car, and we were planning to get a new one, so I kept telling myself it would be OK, but that didn't stop me feeling a little sad.

I was surprised at the intensity of my feelings. I have lived in many houses during my working career, usually moving every two years, and have never worried about leaving a house, never having found one that really felt like home.

After all the work and the various traumas over the past two years, Happy felt like ‘home'. We had been through a lot with her, had completely changed her and modernised her and I loved everything about her. Not only about her, per se, but also about the lifestyle that she embodied and the changes that living aboard had wrought. Geoff, knowing how I felt, kept up a continual chatter about the prospective new boat, what we were hoping to get, what we were hoping to do and, little by little, it became another adventure to look forward to.

I didn't mention it, but I still harboured secret regrets about the loss of Happy and day-dreamed about winning the lottery and having our own fleet. But sitting on the roof, feeling the rain running down the back of my neck, it did occur to me that maybe it would be nice if the next boat had a wheelhouse.

The next day, Gerald turned up on his push-bike, which we loaded on to the roof. Trying to absent myself from all the technical explanations that were sure to be going on, the kids and I settled into a pile of DVDs and swore to keep as far away from the back of the boat as possible. I did stick my head out once or twice while delivering mugs of tea, but didn't get involved. Seeing someone that wasn't Geoff handling my boat was just too much and I felt sick and sad every time I saw it.

I had to admit Gerald handled her length very well and, by the end of the afternoon, he was sure that he could complete the final leg of her journey to her new moorings by himself, or at least with the aid of his family.

As we pulled into our mooring for the evening at Gibraltar, we watched him cycle away into the gloom and the headache that had been lurking at the edges of my consciousness finally evolved into a full-blown migraine, complete with disco lights and sound effects. I don't have them very often but when I do, oh boy do I know it. The kids rushed around putting out lights and helping me toward the bedroom. Charlie, knowing which drugs to look for, rushed into the bathroom and then emerged white-faced, saying that all she could find was an empty packet.

This was very bad. Without some serious painkillers, I was liable to be laid up for three full days and that was three full days that we really couldn't afford to lose. Geoff gave strict instructions to Charlie to watch her brother – and her mother – and then shot out of the door.

He was gone for about half an hour, but when he returned he had a supermarket bag holding lots of much-needed drugs.

Later, when the drugs had kicked in and the lights in my head had switched off, I asked him where he had got them from. He shrugged.

‘I went a couple of boats down and spoke to one of the owners, told them what the problem was and he immediately grabbed his keys and drove me to the local supermarket, waited around for me to get what you needed and then drove me back here.'

‘Oh, what a sweetie.' I stood up and, ferreting around under the sink, found the rather good bottle of wine that I knew was under there. I wandered down the line of boats until I found the one Geoff had described, gave him the wine and thanked him profusely.

He blushed and muttered, ‘We look after each other.' I nodded and thanked him again. I was going to miss this so much it brought my headache back.

Waking up the next morning, I was completely confused; we had completed a full pump out the previous day – how on earth could the boat still smell so bad? Maybe it wasn't the pump-out tank at all, maybe that duck-eating cat had actually snuck in and sprayed all over the bedroom. I sighed, hmm, not really likely.

Hunting for a lost slipper, I got down on hands and knees to look under the bed, aha, there it was. I reached under and grabbed it, overbalanced and put my hand down on the carpet. It was completely soaked.

What the hell? I got up and, grabbing a torch, peered beneath the bed. It was horribly apparent what had happened. The pump-out tank had actually overflowed, but because Happy was lower at the back than the front, all the liquid had slid under the wall and along the top of the tank, running down the sides to soak the carpet in urine and other ‘stuff'. Oh yuck.

After washing my hands for a full five minutes, I finally got my OCD tendencies under control and went to tell Geoff.

‘What are we going to do?' I addressed his bottom, which was all that was sticking out from under the bed. ‘We can't sell her smelling like this.'

Geoff climbed back to his feet. ‘Let's clean the carpet and see how she smells after that,' he instructed.

For three hours, I squashed myself, a bucket and a scrubbing brush under that stupid bed; the carpet was still wet when we went to sleep that night, but at least it smelt more of lemons than pee.

Leaving the carpet to dry, we carried on toward Thrupp, our ultimate destination. We took far longer than normal at our final lock, Shipston Weir, spending time studying the walls and watching the water that was leaking through the badly fitted lock gates hitting the sill and exploding back upwards in a beautiful, diamond-effect light show, courtesy of the low sun. We finally left the lock and I spent some time staring back at it as it very slowly disappeared into the distance. I wondered if I would ever go through a lock again or whether I was destined to become a ‘Gongoozler'. I shook my head; if I couldn't see the lock from a boat, I vowed never to go near a lock again.

Just past Thrupp, we moored up outside ‘The Jolly Boatman'. We had four days in which to move out, and it wasn't really enough time. One day to pick up the car, one day to move as much stuff as possible into storage, one day to do the final packing, one day to clean and do the final, final packing, and there was a horrible possibility that, in amongst all the moving and cleaning, we would have to lay a new carpet in the bedroom, which now smelt like a cat had died in a vat of lemons.