In Praise of Locks (and lock-keepers)

JOURNAL ENTRY

 2^nd June, Friday

North easterly winds
Grey skies.
But there are five ducklings
Braving the bluster
And a swallow scissors low over
A meadow of buttercups.
This light makes the yellow Irises blaze."

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the night to you wherever you are.

A strawberry moon hangs to the west in a sky still lined with silver. Its light plays upon the ruffled water, almost alive. Twilight is reluctant to leave us. And why not? It is a lovely night and I am so glad that you could make it. Come inside out of the wind. The kettle is on, the night is ours for the taking, Welcome aboard.   

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

It’s been rather a strange week. A prolonged high-pressure system (or systems) has meant that there hasn’t been a lot of change weatherwise. It’s been dry, some mornings even dawning without dew. However, the sun has been fleeting – sometimes emerging in the afternoon, but heavy banks of racing cloud driven by a perpetual north easterly wind has meant that pullovers and even coats have been dug back out. When the wind does drop, it is hot. But the wind has generally been rather persistent. The dryness has resulted in everything being covered with a layer of dust and I was talking to one of the CRT men the other day who was saying that by this weekend a flight of locks near us will be very close to running dry. He was letting water down the canal by filling and emptying the locks – this sends water from upstream to further down where it is needed. The problem is that the only main source of water for this canal comes from the Grand Union 10 or so miles further up the canal. This means that those stretches furthest away can be prone to becoming too shallow to use unless the water is carefully managed. It is a time-consuming and labour-intensive job.

Nevertheless, we’ve managed to get a bit more painting on the Erica done. Although the wind, at one point, was trying to blow the paint off my brush. However, at least she is once more again green! Neither of us would claim to be good painters, and it is only the first coat, but the metal is protected and that was the main thing. We can take our time to get a better finish – although we are using the same colour as before, because the original has been weathered, we do have a rather blotchy appearance, but it is much better than before. We can work on prettying it all up later on at our leisure. 

Although, sometimes weather-wise it hasn’t quite seemed like it, the signs of summer are everywhere. More and more colour is washing the hedges and banks of the canal. When the wind drops a little, the air dances with the coloured lightning of dragonflies and the dart of damsel flies, the flicker of butterflies and the warm hum of bees. Loose veils of gnats hang and smoke above the water surface. More than anything, for me, the elderflower is in blossom. Their large lacy saucers, still slightly green, scenting the air with heady smell of soporific heat and sweetness. Summer is here when the elder is in bloom.

[MUSIC]

TUESDAY MORNING, 5.30AM

The sky is heavy with great piling grey boulders of clouds. Some of their bottoms are ragged, frayed, betokening rain – for somewhere on some meadow or field, village or town to the south.

From time-to-time flecks of rain, pin-thin, wind-chased and driven, wet the air, but not the ground.

Even at this hour the hedges and trees are quiet. Perhaps, the birds have read the air or maybe they are just content to ride the branches on the wind.

It’s a brisk north-easterly blowing again today. The trees are now fully in leaf. The trees’ storm song is louder now. An operatic roar. How quickly things change. Only a few weeks ago, the oaks and ash still looked sparse, more a tangle of branches than the billowing fountainous shapes they adopt when in full leaf. More winter than summer. But now, they are transformed. Yesterday, this was just patch of reeds – today, yellow flags, water irises, bloom. I had no idea they were here. But today, they look as if they have been in flower for weeks!     

As well as yellow flag, there is clover, buttercup, forget-me-not blues – veronica in the hedgerows. 

Grass stems bow and bend. King cups nod and curtsey. The reeds beside me quiver and pray. It’s a majestic wind, this wind that blows down the hill.

To the north-east banks of charcoal cloud gather.

A kestrel swoops out of the covert lining the canal, lifting into the face of the wind. It hangs on the edge of the gusts, like a child’s kite, without even to flap a wing. Poised, en-point, sky-surfing. Then, a short dive further over to the field edge.

A pheasant calls out again.

I can feel the soft stippling of rain on my brow. Cool. Soothing.  

Just as I am about to leave, a buzzard rises up over the hedge three or four feet in front of me. Strong wings cutting black into the putty-grey skies. For a split second she hovers over me, looking down on me, as I look back up to her. I can feel the fire of her eyes.

For a split second, I appear on her consciousness. For a split second, I was prey to her.

For a split second she was much more than a bird to me. 

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

IN PRAISE OF LOCKS AND LOCK-KEEPERS

Whichever way you look at them, canal or river locks are an event; an occasion. Oh, I know they can be a pain. Just when you are wanting to settle back, take things easy, ‘Oh no!’ There it is, a cluster of bollards just in front of a rise in the towpath and yes, you’ve not imagined it, there they are – the black and white wooden balance beams looming either side of the canal. Yes, yet another lock!

But, despite that, locks break up the journey. Inject a bit of action, energy, into the day. A way of punctuating a journey. Marking off the sections, charting your progress, or just, being a bit different. And all locks are different. They all have their quirks and characteristics. Like the one just down from where we are at the moment. The ghost lock. When going down, no matter how many times you close the bottom gate, lo, it will slowly swing back open. So you get wise to it. You know the games of Bearley’s ghost. So you hang around a bit. Perhaps even, hang off the iron handle on the balance beam (which is as large as a thick railway sleeper) for a little while – daring it to budge open. Of course, it won’t. It’s seen all these tricks before. And so, after a while, and a cursory swipe at a dandelion head with the windlass, you saunter down the grassy slope to the canal below and climb aboard your waiting boat, dallying in the bywash foam. Once aboard, you grab your mug of tea – or if this was the olden days, puff contentedly on your pipe (men and women) – and gaze back, to watch in horror and frustration, the gate swinging ominously and silently open again.

Now, you can take up the gauntlet. Disembark – or whatever the correct term is for hot-footing it off a narrowboat – and stride purposefully back. Knuckles white around your windlass. But, hear me out from a man who has trod that bitter road, don’t do it! That way madness lies. Sisyphus had it easy pushing his boulder up that eternal hill. You will be there until doomsday. So, against all your better instincts, you leave it. The canal there is arrow straight for a good half mile or so. It leers at you, open mouthed, like a cackling gorgon.   

Canal users will know – that unless there is a nearby boat waiting to enter a lock, it is one of the big no-nos to leave a lock gate open – especially a bottom lock gate. This is because if there is a leaky top gate – and the majority of top gates do have some sort of leak – you are effectively draining the waters above the lock dry – and possibly flooding the bottom pound (or stretch of water). All this goes through your head as you guilty leave the mischievous lock. So, you then spend the next half hour announcing loudly to any boats coming upstream ‘gosh, what a nuisance that lock is and how many times you had to close the gate and it still swung open!’ Of course, most will look at you with a mixture of bewilderment and pity, but there are a few who will know. You can see it in their eyes. For they too have played and lost with the ghost at Bearley lock.

Yes, there’s something about a lock. On a sunny day, when the towpath is full of walkers, and sauntersers, hikers, and bikers, dog walkers and twitchers, families and the solitary. Follow them a few miles until you get to a lock. See how many are irresistibly drawn to the edges and gaze down into the depths of the chasm below, running their fingers over the weather worn wood and metal work. Up until then, they might have given the oily sluggish canal water scant attention, but at a lock, they realise here is the canal. Locks are stopping points for the towpath as much as for boats. And canal lore, states if you throw a boat into the mix, a veritable crowd will form.

A few years ago, my sister, Wendy, had come to join us on the boat. We were, as it happens, coming up to the ghost lock. Wendy hadn’t done a lock in years and years. “Nothing to it, sis.” I said, manoeuvring her off the stern and onto the towpath clasping a windlass like a wilted magician’s wand. “It’s early, mid-week, and no one is around. We’ll take it slowly. You’ll enjoy it.”

As soon as Wendy’s hand made contact with the gate beam, that it was then, out of nowhere, crowds appeared. Men, women, dogs, children, frightful youths with startling haircuts, Cyclists, stopped to stand, heron legged. A group of hikers, beladen with backpacks, sporting large boots and knees, marched up and joined the throng. Fathers explained to wide-eyed children exactly what the lady was doing in a detail only Wikipedia could trump. I nimbly drove into the wall. 

Locks are like that. Places of fascination. Places to pause. An event. A bit of an occasion. On busy flights of locks, the passage is aided by the often unsung heroes of the waterways, the volunteer lockies. People who do nothing else than give up their precious hours of leisure to open and shut gates for other people. I can personally state that there is little than can lift the heart quicker and higher than spotting the red bouncy aid of a lockie as you are about to enter a flight.

However, lockies are really just the newest iteration of a much older guardian of the locks – the lock-keeper. Now, almost extinct, these men and women lived in the wonderful little cottages that you often still see alongside locks – the lock-keeper’s cottage. Often, they were attended by well-stocked and well worked vegetable gardens ornamented with flower beds. Their existence was rather romantically liminal – on the margins, straddling different worlds, not quite one nor the other. They worked the canals, but they weren’t boaters. They lived near the village, but they weren’t villagers – in that sense. Their lives could often be a little remote, solitary even. They put me in mind of the traditional signal box keepers on the railways of old. Mysterious masters (and mistresses) of their craft. They knew their stretch of the canal like no other.

I know I have read this passage from E Temple-Thurston’s The Flower of Gloster before, but it’s lovely and bears repeating as it gives such a warm and evocative glimpse of the life and character of a lock-keeper. The account is from the summer of 1910, Temple-Thurston is descending the Stratford-upon-Avon canal towards Stratford and has just got to Lowsonford – where the characteristic barrel-style cottage of the lock-keeper’s cottage is still there and can be hired for holidays.

[READING]

It was not always like this.

In his panoramic history of life on Britain’s rivers and canals, Water Gypsies, Julian Dutton notes that in medieval times lock-keepers were hated. These locks were ‘flash locks’ and were a very early predecessor to the locks we might be familiar with today,

Dutton describes them as:

[READING]

Slow, cumbersome, sometimes dangerous, to add to their misery, they also often functioned as toll gates, forcing those using the waterways to pay a tariff to the lock-keeper.

Nevertheless, most accounts describe friendly, if slightly maverick, characters who go out of their way to help the boaters on their way. Having said that, it is important to note that helping boaters to work the gates was not actually part of their paid duties. They were employed to ensure the smooth operation of the stretches of water under their purview (often including a number of locks) and to ensure that the locks and water were being used properly.

Ivan Broadhead’s anthology of the inland waterways, Up the Cut, includes an account by a lock-keeper, Ron Whatley, that seems to have been a transcript or notes for a talk, in which he lists the range of duties required of lock-keeper.

Ron writes:

[READING]     

What is clear to see from a lot of the accounts that there was a strong and warm relationship between boater and lock-keeper, perhaps heightened by the feeling of comradeship one gets when an industry is in decline and one’s backs are against the wall. This meant that, like the inn-keepers of canal-side inns (so beautifully captured in Geoffrey Lewis’ The Longest Trench episode 95), lock-keepers became a valuable and trusted source of support for the boater. Julian Dutton cites from A.P. Herbert’s 1930s book, also called Water Gipsies (though spelt with an i rather than a y) that for illiterate working boaters, lock-keepers often filled an important role by taking dictations from them or reading out letters to them as they passed through the lock. This is attested in Sue Wilkes’ fascinating book, Tracing your Canal Ancestors – please don’t let the title put you off into thinking that it is only useful to those who have ancestors connected to the canals. Sue writes about;

Gladys Horne (daughter of Edward Price) [who] was born on a Fellows Morton and Clayton boat at Birmingham in the 1930s. She did not get a chance to learn to read and write. And she recounts how,

“She courted her future husband Sam Horne with the help of friendly lock-keepers, who read Gladys’s letters from Sam, and wrote back on her behalf.”

As one would expect, Tom Rolt has a lot to say (and praise) about his encounters with lockies. In his classic Narrow Boat, we meet a number of them. They are a colourful and idiosyncratic group of characters painted with fondness.

For example, coming down the steep flight at Foxton.

[READING]

A little later, he describes a scene so very reminiscent of Temple-Thurston’s at Lowsonford.

[READING]

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful, peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG