NARROW DOG

Lunatic Scheme

I suppose we could die, I said.  I mean we have nearly had our allotted span.  There’s not much else to do – I don’t want to spend my declining years on holiday – we would be bored stiff.

Join some committees, said Monica, work with the local community.  You must be joking, I said.  What we want is a lunatic scheme, a mission from which few return – one that people are scornful about, like when we started running.  Something outside the envelope.  We want some action.  We are not too old for some action.

I know, said Monica, we’ll take our narrowboat Phyllis May to France and go down to the Mediterranean with Jim our whippet.  We can get the boat shipped over on a lorry.  And you could write a book about it all – you used to want to be a writer.  Goodness, I said, that’s a thought – we could call the book Narrow Dog to Carcassonne.  There you are – the title already – all we need now is the book.  I’ll pay to have it printed and we’ll give it to our friends and ask them questions about it to make sure they have read it.  We’ll need a new engine on the boat, said Monica.  That’s OK, I said, we need a new engine anyway.

At last we had what we needed – a lunatic scheme, a stupid mission.  The planning went fine until Monica heard of a famous adventurer who had sailed his narrowboat across the Channel.  We’ll sail across, she said.  But you can’t do that, I said.  The dog goes into convulsions if we go more than three feet from the bank.  And narrowboats don’t have a keel.  They fill up from the bow and turn over and go straight down.  The famous adventurer is a master mariner, and we can’t even get our boat through a bridge-hole without crashing it.  And he’s an engineer and his boat was built to go to sea.  And I am no good at mending things or anything practical – I operate at the conceptual level.  You’re scared, said Monica.  Yes, I said, I’m very, very scared.  I’m a coward, so I can’t do it – it is not in my nature.

But with an adventure in it, said Monica, someone might publish the book for us and that could pay for the adventure.  We don’t need the money, I said, and it’s no good to us anyway if we are on the bottom of the Channel with our boat and our whippet.  I’m not doing it, I tell you, and that’s final.  For us it’s the lorry, and the crane into Calais. 

I don’t think I knew what fear was until the day we left South Dock, opposite Canary Wharf in London, to go round Kent to Ramsgate, a fifteen hour voyage.  I felt faint and thought that death had come to spare me the horror of the journey.  But for me there was no release.  The pilot stood beside me on the back of our narrowboat and the current swept us down the Thames, past the Dome, past the great flood barrage, under the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, and out to sea into the evening and into the night. 

Funnily enough I did not feel frightened once we had got going, and loved driving the boat on into the darkness, riding the waves, trailed by scarves of kingfisher light.  I was able to think about the book.  I thought to be a success in writing you had to be twenty-four with ten more books in you and the face of a film star, not an ugly old pensioner who would be lucky to finish one book before he snuffed it.  But publishers wanted the book and the Carlton Television people said they are going to feature our adventure on nine out of ten Waterworld programmes.  Maybe after all these years I have come into fashion.   Jim had been given half a tranquilliser and I could hear him howling drunkenly below, and the booze trying to break its way out of the cool cupboard.

Clear off, said the Keeper of Ramsgate Marina over the VHF – you can’t come in here at this time of night.  It’s gone three o’clock.  People are so thoughtless.  Look, I’ve had a terrible day, and we definitely, I mean definitely, don’t do dogs.  And for a sixty-foot boat we charge forty pounds a night.  Give me the handset, said the pilot, I taught that geezer to sail.  We turned in to the black mouth of the marina. 

Will we have a go at the Channel tomorrow? I asked.  Weather looks good, said the pilot – are you tired?  Yes, I said, Monica and I are very tired, but we can sleep when we get to Calais.  You’ll need to be awake, said the pilot, it’s the busiest shipping lane in the world, and the wakes from the Sea-Cats come in at eight feet high.  The television people will be on my escort boat, so if you go down your kids will have the footage as a souvenir.  That’s alright then, I said.