Watery Memories by Jennie Hart

 

In nineteen seventy nine, Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker prize with her novel ‘Offshore’. It portrays a cameo of barge life on the Thames at Battersea Reach. The barge dwellers live at their moorings in a close community choosing an unconventional alternative lifestyle. There are colourful characters and even the cat is neurotic and mentally unstable. Sometimes, if rats on the wharf are a certain manageable size, she chases them, but often, if they are of the larger variety, they chase her. She never quite knows whether she is coming or going. Her stalking ground is grubby and she has spent years trying to lick herself clean and is as thickly coated with mud inside as out!

Inspired by this story I visited Battersea Reach having read there were barges still there. They were lined up in their moorings, mostly shiny with fresh paint, in red and cream and shades of blue. None looked neglected or make-do and some had an air of affluence with decking and planters and fancy doors.

In the novel set in the sixties, they were quirky and characterful and often struggled to be watertight. They were moored randomly and some owners had to cross their neighbour’s barge to reach a gang plank to board their own. This arrangement was precarious and a priest stops visiting, unsurprisingly, because twice he falls in. When one of the barges develops a hole and is sinking, the dweller is less concerned about saving himself than rescuing his pan of mussels stewing in the galley.

I was especially attracted to this book because my paternal great grandfather was a bargee or lighter man. I didn’t know him but have a sepia photo where he stands in fisherman’s Guernsey and flat cap staring grimly at the camera. He was very small but broad chested and looks strong and weary as if adapted to a strenuous life.

My home in River Head was near the head of the canal where my great grand- father once had his barge. The canal was a fascination for me and local children and our games were mostly connected with the canal and its surroundings. I was given a lot of freedom and we often played after dark.

I explored the beck, a narrow stream that fed in to the canal by passing through a culvert. To see the beck, a few feet below street level, we leaned over an old brick wall which we dared each other to climb over and then drop down on to a slippery rock in the stream below. Sometimes the rock was submerged when the laundry upstream expelled its soapy suds. We waded in our wellingtons and on non- laundry days the water was crystal clear but often littered with discarded possessions, I remember a wicker shopping basket, a doll’s pram, a pair of trousers and odd wet shoes. This was a furtive adventure my mother had forbidden me to have.

There were still a few houseboats on our canal at that time and one of them belonged to the family of a girl in my class. I once remember going in to the houseboat with her and I was almost asphyxiated by the smell of accumulated grime, fried food and other unidentifiable odours. I made an excuse to go and have my tea in my own house with the smell of Brasso, lavender polish and Daz.

At the head of the canal was a rusted crane, lifeless and useless except to us River-Head children who spent hours jumping off it, hanging from it and shinning up it. We used it as a base for our game of Block One Two Three which involved touching the crane and shouting’ Block’ before we could be caught by the seeker.

We often caught tiddlers in jazzy nets bought from my mother’s shop; they were nine pence or a shilling in an array of colours with cane handles. We would squat by the side of the canal and fill our jam jars with water to welcome the wriggling sticklebacks and minnows.

On Sundays, families would go for a walk ‘down river’. This meant walking by the canal, past the lock , through two sets of old wooden gates  to the fields. I only went there with an adult because I was told unknown dangers abounded. I never ever saw anything dangerous just the sad sight of a fretful horse submerged in mud except for its head. A tractor eventually levered it out. Once in the fields we came to the trout stream a destination for the families. We treated it like the seaside because there was a gravelly beach and inviting flowing water, so much fresher than the canal.. None of us had water wings, just huge old inner tubes to keep us afloat. It’s no doubt the reason I am not a good swimmer.

I look back at this life and can see there are many alternative lifestyles and mine was one of them as important a memory perhaps as those of the barge dwellers of Battersea Reach.