Water Gypsies (22 page)

‘And this is my darling Roy.’

The second picture showed a thickset man with cropped, fair hair who looked out of the picture with the sort of half smile which shows no teeth. He was wearing a suit and tie.

‘Oh – I see what you mean,’ Maryann said. ‘Your son
does
look just like his father.’

‘Yes.’ Sylvia put the pictures back in her bag. ‘Though they’re not alike in temperament. Oh, I forgot!’ She reached over to the cupboard. ‘I brought a cake from home. Would you like a piece? It’s cherry madeira.’

Maryann wasn’t hungry, but she thought she’d better accept a piece out of politeness. And she was beginning to warm to Sylvia, even if she couldn’t take to Dot.

‘But where are your … Kay and Dickie then? You left them with your mom?’

‘Oh no,’ Sylvia said. ‘My mother’s been dead for a number of years. No, they’re at boarding school. I sent them some time ago, to avoid the bombing, of course. They’re not far from each other, fortunately – outside Worcester. I’ve dropped them a line to tell them to send their letters here. Is that the best thing? I so miss hearing from them. I’ve been told I’ll be able to have leave to go home for the Easter holidays.’

Maryann was still struggling with the idea of Sylvia being a mother and of sending your children away to the other side of the country.

‘How old are you, then?’ she blurted out.

Sylvia chuckled at her frankness. ‘I’m just thirty-two as a matter of fact.’ Maryann was even more astonished. The woman was older than her! ‘Dot here’s a mere pup – only twenty-one.’

‘I think you’ll find I’m old for my years.’ Dot looked up for a second, somehow challenging them. Maryann wondered why she had to be so aggressive, as if she felt permanently under attack. ‘What happened today won’t happen again. I can promise you that.’

‘And you?’ Sylvia asked.

‘Me? Oh – I’ll turn thirty in the autumn.’ Surely she looked older, didn’t she? she wondered. Some days she felt as old as Methuselah.

‘Were you born and bred on the cut?’ Sylvia asked, in rather awed tones.

‘No,’ Maryann admitted. ‘I married into it.’

‘Told you, didn’t I?’ Dot said triumphantly. ‘I knew she had a Birmingham accent!’

Maryann stiffened in annoyance. She didn’t like Dot’s tone, or the fact that they’d been making guesses about her life. She felt prickly about any of her life being exposed beyond her control.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m from Brum. That’s where I met Joel – my husband.’ She said it in a way that did not invite more questions and looked down into her lap.

Gently, Sylvia asked about Joel’s accident. She said her own husband, Roy, was an RAF officer in Coastal Command.

‘Will he get leave at Easter as well?’ Maryann asked, trying to get off the subject of herself.

‘Oh, perhaps,’ Sylvia said lightly. ‘I imagine he might. But the poor darling never seems quite sure when he’ll be home.’

By the time she went back to the
Esther Jane
that night, Maryann had a picture of Sylvia’s life in a nice family home in Wimbledon. She saw a pretty garden edged with roses (this was far more than Sylvia had told her, but she enjoyed embroidering this charmed picture), the two children playing out on the greenest of lawns and her husband coming home, broad-shouldered and handsome in his air-force blue. Of Dot’s background she had learned almost nothing, except that she came from Buckinghamshire.

I just don’t take to that one,
she thought, squeezing into bed beside Joley and Sally. Dot seldom met her gaze, except with a challenging stare. Maryann just couldn’t imagine what her real life was like.
I’ll just have to try and rub along with her somehow,
she thought.
It’ll only be for a trip or two.

But Sylvia … course, she was from another life altogether, but there was a nervous sweetness, a sympathy, about her which Maryann had warmed to. And at least Sylvia was a mother: that was something they had in common. It felt new and strange, the company of these women not from the boating life. As if a door had opened, giving her a glimpse into something new.

As she slipped into sleep, she realized her headache had gone.

Twenty-Two

It was true, as Maryann found out on the trip to Oxford, that Sylvia and Dot were not bad boaters, especially for beginners. But they were still early on in their learning and some things took a frustratingly long time.

The first day they travelled back to the coalfields. This time, though, after loading they stopped to cloth up before departing for the long journey south, as the weather looked uncertain. In the past Maryann had usually left most of this to Joel and Bobby, who were quick at it after a lifetime of practice. Now, with Joley’s help, it was she who had to cloth up the
Esther Jane,
leaving the others to deal with the
Theodore
.

‘Are you sure you know what to do?’ she asked them.

‘Of course,’ Dot said, already climbing along the hold to the cratch at the fore end where they stowed the cloths and tarpaulin. Dot’s tone was prickly with resentment at having her competence questioned again.

‘I’ve done it a few times,’ Sylvia said. Maryann could tell she was trying to soften the effect of Dot’s brusqueness.

‘I’ll let you get on with it then. Come on, Joley.’

Joley had helped do the job many times. Balanced on the top planks, Maryann shuffled along on her knees, knotting the tough, hairy strings of the side-cloths over the planks, while Joley stood in the hold threading them through in the right places and passing them to her.

‘This one needs splicing,’ she told him, holding out one that was frayed and in danger of snapping. They had to take constant care of all the ropes on the boat, and these strings had to be pulled very tight and knotted taut; their rough fibre blistered her hands.

She had tied the final string and she and Joley were opening out the top cloth to lay it over when they heard a shriek from behind on the
Theodore.
Maryann swivelled round in time to see Dot hurtling down from the top planks. Her hands reached out, trying to clutch anything to save herself, but she failed and rolled at a very undignified angle over the gunwale and into the cut, her large backside the last thing to disappear under the water. The splash was impressive. A moment later she surfaced like a flustered hippo, spluttering and enraged. Maryann caught Sylvia’s gaze as she stood in the hold, a hand clasped horrified over her mouth. As well as consternation, Maryann was sure she saw a flicker of laughter in Sylvia’s expression. The Bartholomew children were in fits of giggles, and the man who was clothing up his own boat behind them called out, Taking a good look in there, were you?’

Not entirely succeeding in straightening her own twitching lips, Maryann climbed down to help Dot out. Her bun had come loose, her heavy plait uncoiling down her back.

‘ What happened? D’you have a string snap?’

‘Yes, I damn well did.’ She took Maryann’s hand resentfully and was hauled, gushing water, onto the bank. ‘And I don’t think it’s very nice of you all to laugh!’

‘I’m not.’ She managed to look sober. ‘Sorry, Dot. You awright?’

‘Yes, of
course
I’m all right!’ She shook herself, almost like a dog, looking ready to explode with anger. ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous.’

‘There’s no need to get upset.’

‘I’m
not
damn well upset!’

For the second time in twenty-four hours, one of the trainees went dripping into the
Theodore
’s cabin to change an entire set of clothing. Maryann frowned, watching Dot’s furiously hunched shoulders disappear through the hatches. There was no need to get that mithered about it, was there? Everyone fell in sometimes. Again, she and Sylvia exchanged glances and Sylvia shrugged, rolling her eyes. For the first time Maryann wondered just how well Sylvia and Dot got on when they were on their own. Just because they were different from her didn’t mean they had anything in common themselves.

Maryann had hoped to get past the first set of locks at Rugby that day, but the clothing up took at least twice as long as usual – she helped Sylvia finish on the
Theodore
– and they still had to get past the junction at Hawkesbury again. Dot was silent and morose all day, but with brooding determination completed the manoeuvres round the bends almost perfectly this time. She was still barely speaking to any of them until the evening, though, which added an extra strain, but then she just seemed to snap out her mood.

In a quiet moment that evening Sylvia said to Maryann, ‘Kit did mention to me that Dot can be rather touchy, so don’t take it personally, will you?’

The next morning, when they reached the double locks at Hillmorton, Maryann gave Dot the mildest of reminders to go back and close a paddle that she’d left open. She got a furious reaction,

‘I’m going to!’ Dot’s fleshy cheeks flushed angrily. She stomped off with the windlass, calling over her shoulder, ‘I do know what I’m doing, you know.’

‘Well, if you know what you’re doing, why don’t you do it then?’ Maryann retorted to her back, fed up with her. She’d asked politely enough, hadn’t she? Who did she flaming well think she was? She had to admit, though, that Dot was strong. She bow-hauled the butty into the locks at Hillmorton with the force of a man.

Most of the journey went better. There was a hint of spring in the air and the biting cold had softened to mildness. They woke in the mornings to the first, tentative sounds of birdsong. Maryann found that, despite her own burden of being in charge of loaded boats, children and everything, Dot and Sylvia were very efficient at getting shopping in whenever there was a chance to. Sylvia also insisted that she and Dot cook for everyone most of the time.

‘How can you possibly do everything – all your washing and looking after the family and cooking? No – you let us do that,’ Sylvia said. Maryann had more of a sense that the work was being shared by them all than when she worked with the men.

As the days passed along the winding Oxford cut, Maryann gradually became more used to the women and they to her. She found Sylvia immediately easier – they were closer in age, and Sylvia was always nervously anxious to please. Dot, in spite of her prickliness and determination always to be right, was extremely hardworking. It seemed that her way would have been to push on and on, never stopping for a rest.

‘You’ll have to go and work the beer boats,’ Maryann told her. ‘Then you’d never have to stop at all!’

Sylvia was kind and motherly to the children, especially to Rose when once Maryann confided, though without going into too much detail, how the child came to be in her care. She always chose very carefully what she did and did not tell.

‘Oh, the poor little lamb!’ Sylvia exclaimed. She made a special pet of Rose, always cuddling and spending time with her when she had the chance, and Rose loved the extra attention. Maryann realized that Sylvia needed this. Once she came into the cabin and found Sylvia cuddling Rose, tears running down her face.

‘I do miss my own children,’ she said wretchedly. I love this life here, but some days I just wish it didn’t have to be like this.’

To Maryann’s great surprise, it was Dot who formed a special bond with the boys. As the children gradually relaxed with ‘them ladies’, Joley and Ezra shyly showed Dot their fishing rods and she seized on them with great enthusiasm.

‘Marvellous. I say, look at those!’ She squatted down to talk to them. ‘Well – we must give these an airing.’

In spare moments when they were tied up, she encouraged the boys to take up their fishing again, and went to fetch bait for them when they were at Napton, queuing for the locks.

‘Nothing like a tinful of squirming beasties to delight a couple of lads,’ she said gruffly.

‘That’s nice of you,’ Maryann said, astonished and touched by the trouble she’d taken and the smiles it had brought to the boys’ faces. She handed Dot a mug of tea as they stood waiting. The small gesture felt like a friendship offering. The children were clustered round the fishing rods in great excitement, Ezra scolding the twins for nearly tipping the tin of maggots over. ‘Joel – their dad – usually gets them doing it. You done much fishing then?’

‘Oh,
hours
of it.’

Maryann was still trying to get used to Dot’s way of talking. ‘Hours’ came out as ‘ars’.

‘We grew up on the Thames, you see. My brother Steven and I practically lived on the river. Steven’s a couple of years younger than me. He’s in the Navy now – somewhere in the Med. But we were always out and about, he and I. There’re just the two of us, you see.’

Maryann saw the softest expression she’d yet seen come over Dot’s face as she spoke.

‘My two’ve never been fishing, or anything like that,’ Sylvia said, staring out over the water. ‘I s’pose I always hoped Roy would take them out and do these sorts of things. But he’s always so frightfully busy, of course, poor darling.’

‘Well – you’ll be able to take them yourself now, won’t you?’ Dot said.

‘Yes.’ Sylvia looked pleased. ‘I shall, shan’t I?’

Sylvia’s Roy had been high up in an insurance firm in the City of London in peacetime. Dot, who had been working in London as a secretary in a legal firm, told them her father was a Judge. In other circumstances Maryann would have felt intimidated by this, but now she was getting to know the women a bit better and they were on her territory, making all their beginners’ mistakes, she felt better and even risked joking about it when she heard about their backgrounds.

‘Aren’t I mixing with the nobs these days?’

Sylvia laughed at this. ‘Hardly, dear!’

It dawned on Maryann then that, though Sylvia’s voice sounded like a tinkling chandelier, she didn’t see herself as anything special, and this came as a surprise. And she knew now that they really
had
been nervous of her when they arrived.

‘Completely terrified, actually,’ Sylvia admitted. ‘You’ve no idea how we all look up to you real boatwomen.’

As the trip progressed, they worked more and more as a team, taking turns lock-wheeling, sharing the cooking and other chores, and Sylvia, especially, helped Maryann with the children.