Troglodytis

It's blowing a bleeding gale out there. As I sit in front of the fire, which is happily burning wood we found on the towpath last week, I am beginning to worry that the tree nearby will blow over and fall on us in an act of woody retribution. I am cocking an ear for any ominous creaking. It's very cosy being inside a little boat while outside the sky tries to turn itself inside out. We are somewhere just inside Northamptonshire but I am not sure where; it is a beautiful but beguilingly same-y part of the world. (Didn't manage to get a photo of that lovely hill? Never mind, here comes another one. The pub is straight over two fields and behind the church, is it? Well that narrows my search down to just the twenty square miles, then.) Earlier today we were in a village butcher's shop being served by the proprietor, a very entertaining bloke; squat, sullen and dry humoured in his straw boater. Casting an eye about his shop, it struck me that, with fifty farms within cheese-rolling distance, there was no reason why he should be offering up squashy, wrinkled fruit and veg for sale other than as a social experiment. He was utterly preoccupied by some special reinforced paper bags he had acquired for wrapping up his spit roast chickens. They keep the chicken either cold or hot, you see. “French. Engineering.” he told us repeatedly and with great solemnity when we had bought a chicken from him two days before. He had the dogged, disappointed countenance of Tony Hancock and his face was a map of broken veins. He also had the habit – which I remember blokes in our local pub when I was a kid having too – of addressing all elderly gents as “Dad”. One came in for beef and some pork chops. “Another transaction in which I lose money”, he said as he clapped four chops onto the counter. “Dad” smiled ruefully at Al and myself. Our hearts did not bleed.

Having bought a tiny brown loaf from the Bemoaning Butcher for 94p (a transaction in which we lost money and gained not much bread) and eaten it for lunch, Al washed up and I revved up Little More and steered her womanfully into Braunston Tunnel. Now, we've been through a few tunnels on our travels since July, but this was the longest – almost twice as long as Dutton Tunnel where we dropped the bike overboard.* It took us almost forty minutes to pass through, during which time, steering alone in the pitch dark, I thoroughly spooked myself imagining what it would be like if the engine broke down in there. I mean, what would you do? There is no towpath. It is too long to be seen or heard by anyone outside if you were even halfway to the middle. You'd join in with the engine and have a breakdown of your own I suppose. I looked ahead. The light at the end of the tunnel; that's supposed to be an optimistic, uplifting thought, isn't it? But what if the light is so bloody small you need a torch and a telephoto lens to see it? The light far ahead at the end of this tunnel was the size of the head of a carpet tack, and I had already been in the tunnel almost ten minutes. By the dim glow cast by the headlamp 38 feet ahead of my place on the stern, I concentrated very hard on not crashing into the side. Looking up at the seeping, stalactite encrusted ceiling I began to wonder how on earth workmen like miners, sewer men and tunnel builders can stick it, toiling away, hemmed in in the dark. No light, no warmth, the damp, stale air, the primal feeling of deprivation and isolation. Just steering a boat through it was enough to feel very far away from the world as the minutes ticked by and the monotony of blackness continued.

I looked ahead to the end-light. It had grown to the size of a walnut now, which cheered me up no end until I looked behind me and saw the arch of light where I had come into the tunnel, absurdly large in comparison. I wondered if there were bats roosting somewhere in the dark. The water looked black and shiny as oil, rippling and reflecting the light of the headlamp back at me. It would be horrible to be stuck on your own in there. When he was seventeen, my Dad was electrocuted while working alone in a sewer. He was apprenticed to a bricklayer who had sent him down into the murky depths, up to his shins in – let's just call it “liquid” - to re-point the brickwork. He was holding, as illumination, a bare bulb attached to a cable. The cable had a fault in it, and as the faulty section became momentarily immersed, two hundred and forty volts of electricity went through my young Dad's body and his screams could be heard sixty feet away at the surface by his boss. While my Dad was busy seeing silent flicker-book retrospective of his life unfold before his unconscious eyes in the darkness, his boss shut off the electricity, called an ambulance and hauled him out. The tunnel was barely big enough to fit into in the first place, yet somehow my Dad's body had been flipped entirely around so that they pulled him out head, not feet first – something no-one has ever been able to explain. The paramedics got his heart started again, thank God (because he is ace, my Dad and besides, I wouldn't be here if they hadn't). The only traces of his near death experience my Dad still bears are two completely hairless calves (“Electrolysis. I don't recommend it”), a middle finger with no feeling in it ( as kids he would let us bite it and we would watch fascinated, me and my sister, as he held it unflinchingly above candle flames until it was black with soot), and a vehement dislike for enclosed spaces, especially tunnels. Yet two months after the accident he was back working in the same tunnel, and has been in and out of them for much of his working life.

He would think I was a total wuss getting myself spooked in this one.

I checked the light behind me. It was much smaller now, a bit like a Terry's Chocolate Orange. Brilliant, I thought, I must be near the end. Peering down the side of the boat to get a look at the greeny yellow light of the exit, though, my fire was well and truly pissed on. Another Terry's Chocolate Orange stared unblinkingly back at me. I was only in the sodding middle.

Just before I could start freaking myself out with thoughts of being trapped eternally in a never ending tunnel, Al emerged from inside the boat, wiping his hands on a tea towel. With a bit of company I felt a lot less morbid as the Chocolate Orange behind us shrank to the size of a walnut, then a big toe, then a garden pea. I felt like a mole with a hangover as I emerged from the darkness into what was, in reality, a gloomy Autumn afternoon but felt like a Zanussi advert. After so long travelling slowly underground in the dark, Al and I half expected the world to have changed dramatically somehow– for it to be suddenly spring or something. But, of course, things passing slowly and changing even slower is one of the best things about travelling the country on a narrowboat.

Blimey. Only three-and-a-bit weeks to go...

* For more exciting details – and tales of Alan the hero, see the blog entry Hairy Shower

Comments

[A L Katcher]

Don't know how this works, but was googling for "faffing and fiddling" and ran across a tale of going through three tunnels (in England I presume) in a boat, with two bikes on top; lost one, and with much "faffing and fiddling" hooked it up out of the water and recovered it. May i assume this little phrase refers to what as a resident of United States I'd speak of as "fiddling around?"

[Little More]

Yes, A L Katcher, fiddling around is very much akin to faffing. The whole palaver with the bikes in the tunnel would be an excellent example of world class faffery, brought on by an unfortunate incident (crashing like a dullard into the side). And it is worth remembering that none of this would have happened had I not decided to spend five months of my life faffing around on a narrowboat. The very joys of life are, as I have discovered, to be found in faffing about y'know.

Thank you for reading, and, just out of interest, why on the Great Green Planet Earth were you Googling for "faffing and fidling"?