If anyone ever says to me “I hate pigeons, they’re flying vermin”, I tend to not say anything. It’s true, they carry all sorts of diseases and there are a lot of them. But if there was only one left in the whole wide world, they would be treasured, revered, apologised to and their last few years would be pandered to by an kindly molly coddler. It’s not their fault. They don’t know what they are or how to control their bowels when flying over you. This is how I tend to view every single living thing. With one exception. There is one species of animal that I will never be able to bring myself to feel sorry for, under any circumstances. I’m talking about the Mustela Vison. If anything ever deserved to be made into a pair of gloves or a coat, it is the mink. If Kenneth Graham had made the mistake of including a mink in ‘Wind in the Willows’, he would very soon have found that most of the cast would have been eaten by the second chapter, and the rest of the book would have ended up in chewed up tatters. And on my river, I’ve got loads of the little….blighters. They eat everything. Should anyone be interested, they should get themselves a book on wildlife on Britain’s canal and rivers, make a list of everything in it, and they would end up with a mink menu. Come to think of it, one could probably use the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.
I had to start trapping them and managed to get rid of them in my local area for a while. Over a period of about three months I got rid of two families. I hated doing this more than I hate the mink themselves to the point where I always had to get somebody else to do the final dispatching. Having a pot shot at a distance I considered fair game, but a trapped animal? I couldn’t do it.
I have the pleasure of being the guardian of Nebulae, an ex working canal boat. Every year for the past ten years at the end of winter, I open her up and ‘air’ her ready for a good spring clean. I forgot about the wretched mink. They duly moved in. I didn’t discover this until I was getting on board with my father who had kindly come down to do some electrical work on her. I was greeted with loud unafraid squeaks and an absolute mess, not to mention a very nasty smell. My father and I retired to the pub. This was going to require some thought.
My only option was to do what any full bloodied and fearless Lockeeper would do.
I waited for Mrs Lockeeper to come home.
I came up with a plan and explained it to her. I then had to come up with another plan. Plan B was similar to plan A, the difference being my involvement didn’t require me to be visiting a sick relative in Bournemouth.
Remember Malcom? The man who will shoot at anything that moves, and if it doesn’t move, he’ll shoot at it until it does? He’d previously lent me an air rifle, and being Malcom’s, it had a sniper sight and had been re bored specifically for taking out police helicopters. As sinking the boat had been one of my earlier strategies anyway, I was relatively happy to aim the gun downwards from a position where I could pot any escaping mink. Mrs Lockeeper role was to enter the boat from the stern and bang two saucepans together, hopefully driving the mink down towards the business end of my trembling gun. I don’t really understand why the mink weren’t frightened of her because she sure scares the hell out of me, with or without saucepans.
In the door that leads from the boatman’s cabin to the rest of the accommodation, there is a little viewing hatch with a sliding door. Mrs Lockeeper opened the door, and the head of a mink poked its head around the side and gave her a bit of a look. It was described as a look which was somewhere between ‘no milk today, thank you’ and ‘Don’t try and tell me those saucepans are loaded?’. The next thing I knew I was minus a gun, plus some saucepans, and dreaming of Bournemouth.
Customers could be funny things. After a few years of ‘jobbing’ on the water in London, I finally took the Queens shilling and joined British Waterways as a ‘lengths man’. Within days of joining I was put in charge of a marvellous tug called Olton. Towing on the inland waterways had largely been put out to contract but I happened to have hit a purple patch. My mate Ed and I shifted serious tonnage to and from any wet bit of London we could get to. Hard work but great fun. I was also put on a rota for weekend and holiday cover Lockeeping duties at Limehouse.
The ship lock itself, originally the size of a small national park but now reduced to a mere Sainsbury’s car park, had electrically operated gates, and the entrance itself was traversed by a swing bridge that even Captain Smith would have slowed down for. It led off the River Thames into a basin that was once a busy coaster dock, now largely only used for pleasure craft. A two man team would operate these big toys and on weekends in the summer and Bank Holidays it could be extremely busy.
As a Number one, you carried a company cellular mobile phone, an office remote mobile phone, a two-way radio for talking to the Number two, and a hand held VHF for talking to incoming and outgoing traffic, and if you really had nerves of steel or accidentally got the valium muddled up with the aspirin, your own personal cellular phone as well. If an amorous porcupine had approached me bearing roses and chocolates I would have been polite but firm.
On one of these extremely busy days I was co-ordinating a visiting yacht squadron outward bound, whilst trying to wrestle another two yacht squadrons coming inward bound. (Put your hands in shark infested reinforced quick setting concrete, try interlocking your fingers one by one and you might have some idea of the problem). All my quills, except my own personal mobile, were firing off at the same time. I think at one stage I was telling my Number two the history of the Limehouse Accumulator Tower, telling an inquisitive foreign engineering student to hove to and keep his squadron in a ‘stationery against flow’ single order holding pattern, whilst negotiating split second timing of the opening of the swing bridge to a commodore who must of thought he was earwigging a conversation between a drug crazed bunch of timeshare saleswomen and a representative from the Office of Fair Trade. I had to laugh, telling myself that all I needed now was for my friend Isobel to phone me up and see if I was available to baby-sit that night. Well then things took a turn for the worse. My friend Isobel phoned me up and asked if I could baby-sit that evening. Character building stuff. I think I said yes.
There were lots of ‘firsts’ for me while working at Limehouse. One of them being the first and the last time I’ve ever sworn at a customer. One lunchtime the VHF crackled and a wife came on the blower. She informed me that she and her husband were both experienced narrow boaters but had just taken delivery of a large Dutch barge and it was bigger than anything they had handled before. How were they to bring it into Limehouse? From the window of the Harbour Masters office I was looking out on a strong ripping spring ebb (place garden pea in fire hose, turn up to volume ten, observe and discuss). I explained that I couldn’t really tell them how to do it, but would suggest how I would do it. In short this involved turning for the dock entrance upstream and flying across the river while keeping the bow of the boat towards the upstream pier head, turn at the last minute and being mindful of a slight whirlpool effect. Voluble bridge chatter carried on for a bit. Shouldn’t they go downstream to the Thames barrier and beat back up? Yes, they could, if they trusted their newly acquired engine to a) maintain and preferably make way against the flow in which case I would leave a note for the morning shift to have coffee, sandwiches and two divorce lawyers standing by or b) not get depressed if they couldn’t find anybody the middle of the North Sea who could machine brand new con rods for a very knackered engine.
Within the hour I was wibbling about with bits of paper and occasionally checking the camera pointing upstream towards Tower Bridge. A nice antique Dutch barge came trundling down the river at a great rate of knots. This in itself wasn’t a problem although boats can have expressions, and this was definitely a ‘If you think your going to inherit my estate now you’ve pushed me down this ski slope in my bath chair then you’ve got another think coming’ type expression. To my horror I saw the barge manoeuvred across the fairway to the wrong side of the river. My suggestions for coming into the dock pre supposed the starting point to be the right side of the river. If they carried on and executed what I’d said then there would be a almighty great……. followed by several smaller but still major ricochet type…… Oh my goodness.
Eventually the boat was in the lock and the husband was climbing up the ladder telling the world about my impending anatomical rearrangement. I waited on the lock side, praying he hadn’t ever practised law in America and thus had a basic sense of right from wrong. At one point halfway up the ladder, knife between teeth, he said that he should have listened to his own gut feeling and gone further down for a safer turn. I called down to him quite loudly, employing an anglo saxon phrase, requesting that he enlighten me as to at what point his gut told him to break the normal rules of the river and come down the wrong side of the navigation.
On hearing this, his wife informed us all of his name. ‘John!!’. I think she was the brighter of the two. Who knows, if we’d met at a party we could have been friends. As it was he climbed back down the ladder and I locked them through.
Customers can be funny things, but there again to be fair, so can Lockeepers.
My patch runs from Hanham Lock, up eleven miles of the action packed flora and fauna’d River Avon, to the beginning of the Kennet & Avon Canal in Bath. The first thing a boater encounters is a picturesque flight of six locks that wind their way up a hill allowing ever increasing views of the beautiful City of Bath. The second thing they encounter is Nigel. Nigel is the Bath flight. Off duty he’s also a pub called the Midland but that’s another whole series of stories. The flight was built in the early 1800’s and for a couple of hundred years the paths, stone lock sides, steps and quaint bridges were being chipped battered and bruised until such time came when somebody arrived with a Van Gogh paint brush, poodle clippers, Jo 90 glasses, a dry wit that could drop a camel driving comedian at fifty yards, and said ‘enough is enough’.
Nigel, with great expression, folds his arms a lot. Given the right type of situation he could semaphore the first three chapters of ‘War and Peace’ before elevenses. It would be terribly wrong for me to frighten anybody who wanted to use the flight because at no stage does Nigel ever contravene the strict code of customer relations guidelines laid down by our employers. There is also no charge for using the Bath flight. Having said that, it would also be wrong of me to suggest that happy go lucky boaters can use the flight without either losing several nights sleep afterwards or gaining a psychotherapist. For instance, boaters arrives at the top lock wishing to lock down to the delights of central Bath and the River Avon. They might find Nigel cutting the grass. They politely submit flight plans. Nigel, without making eye contact, stops cutting the grass, puts down the poodle clippers, raises himself up to his full height, folds his arms and looks up at them. He turns sideways to face the direction where the sun might set over the Mecca of boating fools. They wonder where he’s gone. He turns back. They see him again and go and get their parents. (Ok so a grown up writer would have said ‘there ain’t much of him’, but hey, it’s my day off).
One of Nigels talents is controlling the temperature on the flight. Not only that, he can do it at a distance. Many a time I’ve called in to pick up or drop off something I’ve needed (the canal works a bit like the pony express and anything I’ve ordered from the Devizes office usually has seventeen sets of footprints on it and sometimes, in it). I’ve been with Nigel when he’s spotted something away down the flight. “They don’t want to be doing it like that”, say the folded elbows.As the stare sets solid the perpetrators of the crime visibly start to shiver in the hot summer sun, disappear into the boat only to emerge later wearing thermals and thick woolly jumpers without ever knowing why. Contrarily, if one has boated down the entire flight and is still wearing only shorts, they should moor their boat outside the next pub and buy themselves several rounds on congratulatory beer.
Nigel has a shed halfway up the flight. It is definitely a Tardis, i.e Doctor Who, Time and Relative Dimension in Space etc. One winter I was part of a ten man gang working on the flight replacing all the lock gates. Break times would find us all in the Tardis playing cards, drinking tea and discussing deeply intellectual and spiritual matters. Nigel had left an adjustable spanner outside the hut. He was very proud of it and it was very special to him because after a whole morning, despite all efforts, it still worked. The team were debating Rousseau’s Social Contract versus Descartes Discourse on Method, the precedent being a rather attractive girl who had walked by earlier wearing not a lot more than a skimpy tee shirt and a big belt, when we heard someone shouting outside. Nigel went out to find one of our leaderettes shouting from the other side of the canal at a man who had picked up the adjustable spanner and was about to hot foot it away. The team came out of the hut one by one, the jaw dropping further and further as the man thought he was witnessing an impromptu David Copperfield performance. He handed the spanner back to Nigel and ran off to find some warmer clothes. The Bath flight is in good hands.
Nigel is also accomplished at drowning maggots and hassling fish, i.e he’s a keen fisherman. On the day of a fishing match, where the stipulated swims fell either side of where Nigel was fishing one morning, a rather big chap, laden with all his fishing gear approached his allotted place and saw that it had been taken up by a foreigner. He menacingly put down his gear and rolled up his sleeves ready to do battle. After only a few paces he had been rugby tackled by an angling club official.
“That’s Nigel!”, he said, and his intonation must have said it all, because apparently no other explanation was needed. Nigel pretended not to notice, but couldn’t resist relating the story to me when I next saw him.
As it happened I wondered why I was gaining lots of fisherman friends. On several occasions I was pressed with gifts that ranged from sides of venison to a pocket knife. They all came from fisherman. Then the penny dropped (it being pay day and me with a hole in my pocket). Hanham Lock is the most perfect spot for fishing. There is an island, a weir, several bits of nice deep slack water, and most significantly, lots of ‘No Fishing’ signs. A sign bearing these words leads a fisherman to think that somebody knows something they don’t. In a few short months I had been left in no doubt that if only I were to lean out of bed, throw a creatively adjusted coat hanger on the end of knotted bed sheets out of the window, I could daily haul in legally what a Spanish trawler does illegally in a week. Which is apparently serious tonnage.
I did know there were big fish in the river. On a previous occasion I’d weakened and let a boaty grandpa fish off the lower pier head with his three grandsons (memories of days spent doing such things with my grandpa are still as fresh as they are precious, how could I refuse). One of the boys caught a decent size fish and was reeling it in to the delighted barks of grandpa’s instructions, when suddenly a sixteen foot great white shark reared up and ate the fish. The rod valiantly touched its toes and the fishing line when for a high G sharp before finally giving in.
When telling the story to my assembled fishing friends in the Old Lock & Weir pub, two things were pointed out. Firstly, it was probably only (only!!) a twenty four pound pike, and secondly, my ability to describe the one that got away showed a certain innate ability that was a basic instinct to every fisherman.
Well in the face of such a compliment I had no option but to do what any other fearless and full bloodied Lockeeper would do. I invited them over to fish for the legendary pike at Hanham Lock.
The date was agreed and I even managed to move the hour forward a bit but it was still going to be the middle of the night.
And so the great day came.
The sun was shining, sending its early warming rays through the delicately wafting leaves of the trees being used by tuneful dawn songbirds twittering there welcoming tunes to the early riser. These were the conditions greeting every inhabitant in a leafy little village about fifty miles outside Buenos Aires. Which was unfortunate, because in Hanham it was positively blizzarding it down. It was so cold I had icicles on my alarm clock which already had enough problems of its own never having been tried out at that time of the night before.
I had stupidly agreed to pick up the experts from the other side of the river. We were six in the dinghy as well as enough boxes of equipment that could of satisfied the travelling arrangements of Joan Collins. We disembarked like Michelin men that had been coloured in by a particularly angry child and after about two hours of fiddling, twiddling, twisting, snipping one-upmanship, it started to get light. And then we all cast our lines into the river. Then we reeled it all in again. Great, I thought. Now I can go back to bed. But the mad fools wanted to do it all again. Cast out, reel in, cast out, reel in. Then there was a break in the rhythm. Cast out, reel in, sip from hip flask, cast out……
Megan, the Border Collie pup, sat shivering on the grass wondering if the great and fearless leader of her pack had finally and spectacularly lost the last of his marbles.After about six hours of standing around freezing our gene pools off everybody decided that they had all had their fill. Everybody caught something that day. I caught a really big willow tree, Richard caught Megan the pup, Robin was caught sipping from an undeclared bottle of something terribly strong and terribly Italian, Malcom was caught emptying a big frozen fish he’d bought in Tescos into his keep net, Martin caught pneumonia and Craig caught the X39 bus back to some obscure suburb of Bristol. We’ve now decided to make it an annual event.
