Opposite the Cross Keys (27 page)

Perhaps, for PC Utting was not the only fundamentalist Christian in the neighbourhood, the story of the coming flood had taken root and conviction, and the ark was expected to be borne forth on the bosom of the waters as the windows of heaven opened and Opposite the Cross Keys gave way under the strain. Perhaps – since the work progressed very slowly, as was inevitable single-handed – people thought it would never be finished, did not even want it to be finished. It was enough that its presence enlarged their lives, broadened their horizons. Further east in the county, in Broadland, that ambiguous area of rivers and lakes and marsh, which was like the world as it might have been at the beginning of Creation, land, sky and water not yet quite separated, a boat was nothing special. In St Awdry's it was, like the rainbow it presaged, a promise of possibilities.

Back in St Giles Maud and I discussed the boat endlessly. I had never said anything about Chicken to my parents, not because I was ashamed of him – Mrs Fenner had taught me that lesson – but because I knew, disadvantaged as they were, lacking a Maud or a family of Fenners in their own childhoods, they could never be expected to understand about the name, and would only be affronted, if not terrified, by the laughing lawlessness I found so powerful an attraction.

My father, a man of honour and innocence, tended to think of all countrymen as nature's gentlemen, practising their rural crafts in landscapes of the Norwich School. He knew nothing of the dirt, the smell of poverty, the grinding labour which made up the life of the agricultural labourer of the time – or, if he knew something, it was only something he had read, deodorized on the printed page, paying as much attention to its literary merit as to the facts presented there. Nevertheless, so full was I of the boat and its building that I could not resist mentioning something about it – ‘a man in St Awdry's was making one, all by himself' – knowing he would be pleased to hear that rural crafts were flourishing in the outback exactly as he had supposed.

‘A boat, eh? I must see what
I
can do in that line.'

My father, let me say, among his other accomplishments, was a whiz at cutting out. He could take a pack of playing cards and, using only scissors and a dab of glue, turn it into enchanting three-dimensional models of merry-go-rounds, castles complete with jousting knights, troikas pulled by slavering horses – whatever you asked for would be provided, so long as the cards, which my mother, who was fond of playing whist in the afternoon with selected ladies, secreted in various nooks about the house, could be unearthed over her protests and put to better use than foolish games.

Out of a blue pack and a red pack patterned with tiny fleurs-de-lis, my father fashioned a galley twelve inches long, which looked like something out of an illuminated manuscript with its castles at either end, its pennons caught in frozen flutter, and its great sail – the only part showing the face of a card – emblazoned with the ace of hearts. A tiny figure in the crow's nest had its hand to its eyes, scanning the horizon.

I was so pleased with my father's cleverness that I took the galley next door for May Bowden to admire.

She looked it over without comment, then said, ‘I suppose you want to sail it on the lily pond.'

‘Oh no!' I cried. The pond, not much bigger than a bath tub, was covered with a green slime in the spaces between lily pads blotched with brown freckles like the hands of very old people. ‘I mean –' belatedly: May Bowden was so touchy about her possessions – ‘it's not meant to go sailing. It's just for looking at.'

‘Rubbish!' May Bowden snapped. ‘What's the good of a boat only for looking at? Tell you what –' with sudden animation – ‘if the river Yare is clean enough for your Royal Highness, we might take a little ride out to Bawburgh and try it out there.'

Bawburgh, a few miles out of Norwich, off the Earlham road, was the village where May Bowden had been born, and where her father had begun his long climb to riches as the village cobbler. I had accompanied her there once before, in a hired Daimler limousine, to be shown the ancestral cottage, the little hump-backed bridge, the river and the village green where she claimed, improbably, to have been crowned Queen of the May.

I had also been taken to an orchard which lay in a hollow close by the church, where there was what looked like a large black box lying open on the ground, filled to the brim with greenish water. It was not my idea of a well, but that was what May Bowden had called it – St Walstan's Well, after a prince and holy man of God who had died at nearby Taverham working in the fields like a common labourer, so meek he was, so compassionate. His workmates had loaded his body on to an ox-wagon to bring it back to Bawburgh, his own village, for burial. Where the oxen had halted, in the hollow below the churchyard, a spring of purest water had gushed from the ground; a spring which, since that May day a thousand years ago, had never failed, and never would, to the world's end.

That was the story May Bowden told me, long before Nellie Smith and the old un between them had taught me better than to meddle with the power of water. When she had finished she opened her handbag and took out an empty medicine bottle which she bent over and filled at the black box.

‘There!' recorking it, full, and returning it to her bag. ‘That's to keep by.'

I said that it looked like any other water.

May Bowden looked disgusted with me. Water from St Walstan's Well like any other water! Water to cure measles and melancholy and keep your winter woollies from going yellow. Water to make you what you wanted to be.

‘Did you drink some when you were a child here?'

‘Of course.'

‘And did it make you what you wanted to be?'

‘Of course.'

‘Then why do you need to drink some more? Does it wear off?'

‘It doesn't wear off. Only it's a long time to be the same person.'

I had not cared for that black box of water down in the orchard; but Bawburgh was a pretty place and I was always game for a ride in a limousine. About risking my dear little boat in the river I was less sure, but I didn't say anything.

My mother having given me permission to go, the limousine called for us next morning, May Bowden dressed up to the eyes, in frills and flounces that made her look like a tester bed with all the trimmings. I suppose she wanted to impress the people in Bawburgh who had known her before her father made his money, though there couldn't have been many of those left, she was so old.

When we drove into the village over the bridge and I saw the grass dotted with daisies and the shiny river flowing with no particular haste towards Yarmouth, I was glad I had come to sail my galley there. I felt that somehow its launching was a prefiguring, a rehearsal, of the day when Chicken's boat would take to its proper element, the two of us on board waving to the people waving back from the bank as we set out together on our journey round the world.

‘Take your shoes and socks off,' May Bowden commanded. ‘That's what I used to do at this very spot when I was your age. It's quite shallow, so you needn't worry.'

I took off my shoes and socks, stepped off the bank and gently lowered the playing card boat into the water. It sailed beautifully, and I shouted with joy – a short-lived rejoicing before a mute swan, one of that breed with a lump on its beak which makes it look as if it had recently been in a fight, came barging along regardless. With the flick of a scaly toe it tossed the galley into the middle of the stream before carrying on at the apex of its V-shaped wake as if nothing had happened. Through a film of tears I watched my father's masterwork bobbing into the distance.

‘If there's one thing I can't stomach,' declared May Bowden, ‘it's carrying on. You ought to be glad it's on its way, doing what it's made for.'

‘It was made for me.' I was sobbing outright now. How stupid she looked, the old woman, with her white face, her hat perched on her dyed hair. ‘I only brought it round for you to look at, and you had to go and say, come here to Bawburgh. I hate Bawburgh, and I hate you!'

For a moment we stared at one another hard-eyed. Then May Bowden clapped her hands together and said, in a completely different voice, ‘I know what we'll do! Get your shoes and socks back on and we'll drive to Yarmouth. The car can go faster than any boat. We'll drive to Southtown Bridge and we'll wait there for it to pass under. And then we'll take out our hankies and wave
bon voyage
to it as it sails out to sea and off to the Spanish Main!'

I knew it was ridiculous. I knew the playing card boat could never survive the weir at Cringleford. Or, if it did successfully shoot that mini-Niagara, then the paddle steamers which plied between Norwich and Yarmouth during the summer months would surely chew it into confetti. I knew that if, against all the odds, my boat came through these dangers in one piece, it would unfailingly meet its doom just behind Yarmouth, sucked down into the mud of the tidal flats of Breydon Water.

I knew it was ridiculous. Daft. I also knew that, certain of its coming, I would stand on Southtown Bridge, peering down past the herring drifters and the cargo ships parked alongside Hall Quay, straining for the first glimpse of that bellying sail which sported the ace of hearts, shading my eyes against the glare just as the look-out in the crow's nest would be doing, spying me. Willing it to come, willing it to go, as one day I would come, and go, with Chicken.

Southtown bridge was a noisy place, busy with the traffic of the port. There was nowhere a limousine could park, so May Bowden had the chauffeur stay only so long as it took her to cross the quay to the Star Inn and order our luncheon. While she was gone the man went to the trunk which was bolted to the running board and took out a couple of camp stools and the small table which the hiring company provided for picnickers.

Following May Bowden's instructions he unfolded stools and table and set them up on the narrow pavement, confiding to me as he did so that the old gal was nutty as a fruit cake. ‘They don't come no nuttier.' I explained that we were waiting for my boat to come along and couldn't leave the bridge, even to eat, in case we missed it.

The chauffeur stared.

‘You mean that bit o' pasteboard you were fooling about with, over in Bawburgh?'

I nodded coldly, not caring for his description.

‘Crikey! That makes the pair of you! Hope it ain't catching!'

May Bowden came back and told the chauffeur to take the limousine and park it on the forecourt of the Star, where, she informed him, she had arranged for him to be provided, at her expense, with two rounds of beef sandwiches and half a pint of beer. The man took this intelligence with small thanks, being better pleased, probably, with those clients who gave him cash, enabling him to decide for himself the proportion of solid to liquid refreshment. Soon after he departed, a waiter from the Star wearing a black frock coat and a bulging white shirt front crossed the road from the inn carrying a loaded silver tray balanced on one arm and using his free hand to wave a white damask napkin at the surge of lorries and carts as a sign they were to let him through.

He came on to the bridge with measured tread, lowered the tray on to our little table, and arranged our meal – fresh salmon mayonnaise with a glass of milk for me and a pint of stout for May Bowden – with as much aplomb as if we were seated in state in the Star dining-room. There was even a little silver vase with a single rose, in bud. The sun glinted on his pince-nez. May Bowden explained that we were obliged to stay in sight of the river as we were expecting our boat to come through.

‘I quite understand, modom,' the waiter answered, pocketing the shilling she took out of her beaded handbag.

We sat on Southtown Bridge eating our luncheon, keeping an eye on the water below. It being Norfolk, whose official motto is ‘Do Different', our alfresco meal attracted only the most delicate attention. If a couple of nutters had a mind to sit down to their food in public where was the harm of it? One apple-cheeked woman, innocently glad to see people enjoying good fare, peered over my shoulder at the salmon mayonnaise and commented admiringly, ‘Tha's nice!'

‘Would you like some?' I asked, and before May Bowden could object – the dish was too rich for my taste, tinned salmon with vinegar and sliced cucumber being nearer my mark – scooped most of it into the starched white napkin spread open on my lap and handed it over. ‘Please take the napkin back to the Star, though, when you've finished, if you don't mind.'

‘I'll give it a good wash out first, you don't have to worry 'bout that,' the woman said, taking the gift in the spirit in which it was offered. She glanced at May Bowden, though. ‘You sure your ma don't mind?'

May Bowden put down her glass of stout, wiped the froth off her lips with a corner of her lace-trimmed handkerchief, and announced angrily, ‘I'm not her ma! I am a maiden lady!'

‘Oh ah?' the woman said kindly. ‘Never mind, m' dear. You know what they say – where there's life, there's hope.' She settled the napkin-wrapped mayonnaise into her shopping basket and went on her way with a pleasant ‘Cheerio, then!'

It was boiling on the bridge. No shade: the changing patterns of light on the ever-moving surface of the river made me feel disorientated. Also, I needed to go to the lavatory.

I held out as long as I could before I told May Bowden.

‘Always something!' she returned sourly. And then, as I awaited her permission, ‘Off you go, then! I can't go and do it for you!'

She instructed me to go into the Star and inquire at the reception desk for the ladies' cloakroom; but when it came to the point and I stood on Hall Quay peering through the open door into the sumptuous gloom of the Turkey-carpeted entrance hall, my courage failed me. Instead, I went up the shopping street at the side of the Town Hall until I came to the turn-off for the Market Place where I remembered from previous visits to Yarmouth that there was a public convenience. Fortunately, I had a penny in my pocket, Maud never allowing me to leave the house without that essential standby.