Messing About In Boats

Not long ago, at the bottom of some box or other, Aelred found a set of photo disks from nine years ago (give or take a few months), our last full summer in Cambridge. That was the summer when we took what remains for us the gold standard of family holidays:  a week's cruise down the River Ouse, from Ely to a place called Hemingford Grey, in a self-catered rented boat.

Helier had been born in mid-July of that year. In those days the older children still went to school, and we wanted to go away somewhere before it started up again, out of the hot, crowded flat and the traffic noise and the drunks of the night singing at the taxi stand five minutes after the pubs let out -- but where to go to escape it all? And how? The very thought of straggling on and off trains with children and baggage and a baby in arms, which meant more things to leave behind on the train,  exhausted me;  better to stay home, I thought, with the traffic and the drunks, than to live, in recurring nightmares, the not-unlikely scenario of leaving the baby himself on the train.

I forget now how and when I hit on the idea of a boat trip. I was, however, always thinking about boats. Cambridge rests in the elbow of the River Cam;  it flows down from the flat black fenland out Ely way to loop around Midsummer Common and Jesus Green before meandering away behind the gardens of Trinity and Kings and the playground at Lammas Land, and eventually down to Grantchester, where the church clock stands at ten to three and there's always honey for tea.

I could, and did, spend hours in those days walking by the river, looking at the boats. Along Midsummer Common, where the college boathouses stand, every available inch of river bank is lined with narrowboats like floating gypsy caravans:  my favorite of these, for its name alone, was called the Unthinkable. Some were playthings;  others were lived in, with bicycles tethered to their top decks, or whole container gardens set out to catch the temperamental sun.

Idealistically -- because of course a boat would be more crowded even than our flat -- I was in love with the idea of this peripatetic life, puttering up and down from one mooring to the next, falling asleep and waking to the mutter of water just outside. Walking, I would see a lady on a houseboat raise her window to throw the remains of her morning toast to the swans, and something about this mundane gesture, on the water, sent me into private raptures.

Whenever I read The Wind in the Willows, my heart belongs to the Water Rat.  He speaks my inmost language. It must have been in a moment of utter Rattiness that I thought of a boat as the answer to our holiday dilemma. What could be better? No trains, except the very short one from Cambridge to Ely, where the boatyard was. No hotels, no leaving either the baby or his necessary accessories behind in some inconvenient place;  we would take it all with us, wherever we went. We could stop and get off the boat to explore, but mostly the trip would be the boat itself, with the water beneath it and the enormous sky above it and the land drifting past at a maximum speed of seven miles per hour.

Too often, family holidays suffer from the disease of anticipation. By looking forward to them, we ruin them:  the weather's never so fine, the food so good, the company of our household so pure and sweet and devoid of maddening attributes, as our imaginations render things beforehand. On this trip, we experienced a day of rain, some bickering and temper tantrums, a general fear of going through locks, a grocery shortage on Sunday when all the shops in the  hinterlands are shut, and an incident with a quayside which cost us a good foot of flashing along the stern. But mostly it was -- we remember it clearly as -- idyllic, as we had anticipated that it would be.

No doubt you are wanting me to shut up now and show you some pictures.

Leaving Ely:  you can see the towers of the Cathedral in the distance, rising on their hill above the fenland. 

Breakfast company

"We love boating, and our trust in Dad's ability not to land us in a watery grave is unwavering and absolute."

How the baby spent the entire week, except when we were going through locks and I had to stand on shore and hold ropes. Then he went berserk.

Entering the Old West River below Ely;  here the Ouse does some kind of funny dog-leg. If you bear left at the fork, you're on the Cam and headed for Cambridge. Bear right and you're on the Old West River for a stretch, at the end of which you meet the Ouse again.

Steam Engine at Stretham

An Encouraging Sight

One minute the morning looked like this. 

And then it looked like this. 

(moored near a place called Over)

More to come. Stay tuned.