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Alarmed, appalled - at any rate galvanised - by the coming
of his fiftieth birthday, Steve Haywood explained to his partner, Em, that he
wanted to spend a lot of time cruising on their narrow-boat Justice, searching
for the English soul. Or perhaps his true need was to escape the toils of
London. Despite his pangs of conscience about leaving Em on mortgage duty in
London on weekdays, she agreed, perhaps attracted by the idea of weekend
boating without the time-consuming Friday and Sunday night chores, perhaps
believing that the idea would evaporate with the Cabernet Sauvignon.
It didn't, but life intervened in the form of a collapsing
ceiling and a consequent return to work; the care and feeding of a Victorian
end-of-terrace in sickness and in health also caused many interruptions to the
cruise almost until its completion. Furthermore, the initial delay led to the
unplanned acquisition of a 30-year-old Triumph Herald convertible, which had
its own influence and its part to play on the journey in a very changeable and
often phenomenally wet summer early this century.
The journey itself makes a gripping story, which I won't
spoil for you. Interwoven with it are the story of the birth of the Triumph
Herald and the engineer who made it possible, and the story of Tom and Angela
Rolt, Cressy, Robert and Ray Aickman, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Peter Scott,
all with musings, memories, opinions and questions about British manufacturing
industry, waterways restoration, the modern world, fruit flies - you name it,
except, perhaps, sealing-wax and cabbages. If all this doesn’t give clues
to the English soul, the clues are often contradictory: witness our romantic
approval or Romany painted caravans and our mean-minded hostility to Roma
asylum seekers, our boasted celebrations of eccentricity and the tendency of
people on bridges to spit or throw stones at boaters, or Steve Haywood’s
earlier desire for planners to view canals positively and act accordingly, and
his present disapproval of what he calls the “chocolate box
twee”.
Yet this is far from being a gloomy book, and it's
fascinating, informative and frequently very funny. The writer has a pleasantly
idiosyncratic take on things, and an engaging was of expressing it. For
example: “In the past the waterways were the preserve of hippies who
couldn't quite accept that the 1960s had finished, and enthusiasts who were
certain that the 1760s hadn't", and “Decisions are things that just
happen to you while you're working out what to do next".
A few niggles - must he write “different ... than”
and “single criteria”? Why didn't his editor correct an obviously
absent-minded confusion of Queen Victoria’s birth with her accession? To a
pedantic old biddy like me, such things cause serious pain and distress.
Nevertheless, I have read the book with enjoyment four
times, and shall again, so if you are not a pedantic old biddy, think of the
flawless pleasure in store for you when you buy a copy, and if you are, it's
still a thoroughly worthwhile experience. I would recommend it even if Mr
Haywood didn't appreciate Elizabeth Jane Howard as an underestimated and truly
great writer.
He also gives recipes. May contain nuts.
Review by Wendy
Stevens, first published in SarfLund'ner, the newsletter of IWA South
London Branch, February 2005 |
