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Chapter Twenty-five
Roast or Drown – Your Choice

T
HE SUMMER OF
2006 was a scorcher. By the end of July we were enduring day after sweltering day of temperatures that were well into the nineties and began to wonder if we would ever be cool again.

Steve and Jude with their three-year-old son Charlie (another Charlie!) had moved into the marina the previous year and after a couple of months of tentative hellos that gradually lengthened to ‘chats', it was delightful to find someone who was happy to have a good laugh at misfortunes, both ours and other people's, and we began to have the occasional coffee.

Sam was quite happy to play with smaller children, so he and Charlie (little Charlie), got on quite well, both of them owning huge amounts of small plastic figures which would be dragged out to wage loud and raucous games while Jude and I sneaked a quiet half an hour, well, relatively quiet anyway. Their second child was now on the way and as the summer moved on and the temperature skyrocketed, poor Jude, suffering from extreme morning sickness, became more and more unwell.

We would often see her sitting in their mooring watching Charlie play. Incapacitated and unable to join in, she would be huddled under the gazebo looking rather green, with any conversation punctuated by her rushing off to be unwell. She must have lived almost entirely on ginger at that time. We all felt so sorry for her, but apart from giving good-natured and no doubt completely unwelcome advice there was absolutely nothing anybody could do to help other than offer to fetch and carry for her.

Because of the way we live, everything we do tends to be a chore. We carry water, we carry shopping bags for miles, we lug small children around and every trip becomes almost like a military campaign to get items to and from the car and boat. Doing this when hale and healthy can be a pain. Doing it when pregnant must have been almost unbearable. Adding into the equation the heat, the insects and the nausea, I found myself constantly surprised that we never found Jude sitting in the corner of the washing block, giggling and rocking gently – maybe she only did it at home. If she didn't, I want to know why because I flaming well would have in her position. Usually I get quite broody when someone else is pregnant, but not this time. I didn't envy her at all.

Eventually, when the temperature reached 30 degrees, they pulled out of the marina and took their boat downriver where they parked under a tree for three days until the heat wave finally broke. I personally think it was that or wait for Jude to break.

As Steve and Jude had pinched the only shaded spot for about ten miles (not that anybody begrudged them having it in the slightest) and, even with the windows completely removed and the doors open, we basically found ourselves living in a metal oven. It was a no-win situation. Although Geoff had been around fitting mosquito nets to all the windows, the little darlings still managed to get in and, like every other live-aboard occupant on the river, we were all covered in itchy, bleeding bites. There was no way to get round this and it was a relief to get to work, which offered air conditioning and massive respite from the rabid flocks of tiny little vampires all trying to suck my blood. Geoff suffered the worst of all of us; he seemed to have a particularly delicious flavour which the mozzies really couldn't get enough of – both legs below the knee were swollen and in a horrible state. A year later, he still had the scars.

We had also been experiencing some really spectacular storms, and, even though these could be terrifying for poor Herbert, who would hide under Sam's bed, or leap quivering into my lap at the first low rumble and stick his head under my arm, we began to look forward to the next one as each storm settled the dust and got rid of the mozzies for a brief time.

Geoff had been working on the boat each day while the kids were at school and I was at work and we were now 90 per cent through the refit. The soft furnishings had all been changed. My fantastic mum had gone well beyond the call of duty by making us eight sets of fully lined curtains and
Happy Go Lucky
was beginning to look absolutely stunning. We were well on our way to having her fully finished; she was really beginning to feel like home.

On this particular Friday, the local radio announcers had been giving ever-increasing weather warnings and by three o'clock the rain was coming down with such force it was filling up the car park at my office. With the wind howling we decided to close early; all the phones and computers were down, we couldn't do any work and we just wanted to push off home.

Three trees had already fallen and it was beginning to look pretty bad on the roads. Geoff had rung earlier and, with the weather being so bad, we had decided that he and the kids would stay at Arwen and Carl's for the night and they would see me in the morning.

I was really looking forward to it: a whole night by myself. I stopped in at the garage on the way home and treated myself to a pot of very naughty, expensive ice cream and, although nervous about the howling weather, set off toward the boat down the A10.

As I came down the drive I noticed that there was a queue of cars waiting to go into the marina – odd, we were usually lucky if we saw one or two. I could see a lot of movement ahead and then realised that a tree had come down and was blocking the drive. Oh, just great!

The one thing that is bad about this lifestyle is that there is an unwritten rule that you absolutely cannot get away with being a girly girl, so waiting in my nice, warm, dry car for the big, strong, burly men to get the tree out of the way wasn't going to cut it. With a big sigh, I clambered out of the car and over toward the hustle and bustle. Sure enough, there were already two other women there, both dressed in office clothes, pulling branches out of the way as one man with a chain saw and another with a hacksaw were cutting a passage through the tree.

Within 20 seconds of being out of the car I was absolutely and completely soaked to the skin; the rain was so heavy it was actually difficult to take a breath without being in imminent danger of drowning. If the afternoon had been dark and bat-filled, it would have been reminiscent of the night at Dracula's Lock. With us all working together, we managed to get the tree cleared in about a quarter of an hour. Spluttering water and unable to talk, we smiled and waved to each other and carried on down the drive. Those of us with log burners took a couple of extra minutes to gather up as many burnable logs as we could; another rule, never turn down free burning material. (I have been known to drag trees out of the river and wrestle them on to the bank with a huge grin – something for nothing – always useful.)

I wasn't looking forward to the battle of walking the flood defences, but I was fortified by the knowledge that after only ten more minutes of battling I could get dry, fix myself a huge mug of hot chocolate, settle down in front of a DVD and maybe have a little nap or, wow, an uninterrupted bath ... Yes! That was the plan: bath, hot chocolate, snuggly dressing gown and a film. Oh, and there were about two shots of Scotch in that bottle left over from Christmas which would go very nicely in the hot chocolate. Oh bliss.

By the time I reached the mooring, I may as well have thrown myself fully clothed into the river; I just couldn't have been any wetter. Steve and Jude had arrived back and Steve had waved and laughed at me as I staggered past their boat. Head down into the wind, I managed to lift an arm in response but I wasn't going to hang around and chat, and anyway, Jude was probably enjoying the respite from the constant, draining heat.

My shoes squelched and my black skirt and top were misshapen dish rags. Appearing, wind-ravaged, out of the pre-storm gloom, I would have terrified small children and could easily have been mistaken for Jenny Greenteeth, a mythical hag that appears out of running water to drag people to a watery grave. Hoping that my teeth were still white, I picked my way carefully down the slick steps, humming some well-loved lyrics by Cloudstreet:

Her emerald smile in the sunlight had captured his fearful eye,

She slid like a seal in the wash of the stream and he felt the bank slipping by,

No time to cry that he could not swim, no time to draw in and breathe,

With her hair round his ears and filling his mouth and her long fingers twined in his sleeve.

I headed down the steps, toward the dry warmth and that hot chocolate with a splash of Scotch, the thought of which had kept me going for the last ten minutes.

Even though I wouldn't have thought it possible, the sky became even darker, and black and purple cumulonimbus clouds, eerily backlit, gathered in a grumbling crowd on the horizon with the first flicker of lightning. I decided that enough was enough. Leaping over the final steps and fumbling with the keys, I entered the boat with a speed that belied my oft-voiced statement that storms didn't worry me in the slightest.

As I stepped into the boat, I turned hurriedly to close the top hatch, intending to shut out the terrible weather. It was only after the doors and hatch were safely closed that I sagged, soaking, against the wall and my thoughts, trying to turn once again to that bath, became arrested by a further cold, wet sensation seeping into my shoes. Looking down, I was horrified.

At least two inches of water covered Happy's floor. Her movement in the storm created very small waves that sloshed around the Morso and the television cabinet and broke happily against the side of the sofa. I noticed with a strange detachment that a couple of Sam's plastic Pokémon figures actually appeared to be surfing.

The windows! Oh no! It had been such a hot day that Geoff had taken the windows out and forgotten to put them back again when he had left to pick the kids up from school. It wasn't only the floor that was covered in water (thank God the laminate flooring hadn't been put down yet), but every curtain, the beds and the sofa were also soaked, and the water was still coming through the window openings, increasing in volume as the storm built up force.

I sloshed around and replaced all the windows – at least that would arrest the deluge – then, waving goodbye to my evening of luxury, I started on the cleaning-up operation. It took me four hours to mop all the water into buckets and throw it out into the river. By the time I had managed to actually dry the floor, the sun had reappeared and all our furnishings were on top of the boat, gently steaming: we were creating our own fog.

Geoff and the kids turned up, worried by the half-garbled message I had managed to get through to them before the mobile network had given up. It had gone something like:

‘Argh the boat's full of water, and there's a huge storm and everything is soaking and argh ...'

And of course, at that worst possible moment, the phones had died. I assumed that Geoff had just turned me off mid-rant; he thought I had drowned or had been struck by lightning.

We had actually been quite lucky. We had spare bedding and I had got to the mattresses before they became soaked, but even with this small reprieve it took the whole of that weekend to dry everything out and another week before the windows stopped steaming up. So much for a quiet night in.

Chapter Twenty-six
Christmas Again

O
UR SECOND
C
HRISTMAS ON
the boat was planned to be a little different from the first. Arwen and Carl had decided to go to New Zealand for a month and we had asked if we could borrow their house while they were away. They had recently become the proud owners of a small flock of fussy, fluffy hens and the most spiteful and aggressive cockerel you could wish to meet, so they were happy to have someone to look after the scary group.

We were all approaching Christmas with wildly differing views. One minute I would be looking forward to it, the next I didn't want to leave the boat, and the kids argued and bickered more than usual. Sam, of course, was ecstatic; Sky TV, computer games, Internet and all the lovely things that he felt he was being denied and were his right. Charlie swung her views from one day to the next. She hadn't long left a house, and this was to be her first full Christmas with us so she was understandably a little tense.

Geoff and I had decided that with us all off the boat this was going to be a perfect opportunity to do all those jobs that were smelly and definitely not child-friendly; there is nothing more irritating than finding a seven-year-old stuck in your gloss paint. These jobs also included laying the new floor and completing (well, starting actually) the huge amount of painting that had to be done to finish Happy off completely.

With the car full of clothes and Christmas presents, we headed over to Arwen and Carl's at the beginning of December. As we were heading down one of the little country lanes, trying to find a way to avoid the A14, a deer crossing the single-track road in front of us was lit briefly in the headlights. Geoff slammed on the brakes, accompanied by the children (and me) screaming. Going so slowly down the tiny lane it had been no problem to stop and we watched the deer disappear into the ditch and across the field.

As Geoff put our ageing Audi into gear and began to pull away, another deer crashed out of the bushes, saw the obstacle that we presented and just took off in an attempt to clear the car. All I can remember thinking is ‘Wow, deer really can fly'. But it didn't quite make it. The back legs crashed down onto the bonnet and the animal, while twisting in an attempt to regain its footing, crashed sideways through the windscreen. For a couple of seconds there was only the sound of screaming children, cracking glass, heavy breathing and hooves screeching across metal as the poor thing struggled desperately to get itself out of the windscreen and back on to the road.

Luckily it had fallen with its back and rump through the window so at least we weren't in danger of being decapitated by flailing legs. Finally, it made it off the bonnet of our now horribly battered car. It staggered about in the road for a moment in full view of the only headlight we still had in working condition, then, shaking its head, took off at full speed after its friend, leaving us to examine the state of our totalled car and attempt to calm two wide-eyed and terrified children (and me).

We limped to Arwen and Carl's and made a call to the insurance company. They were less than helpful, and over the next week sent an assessor to study our car. He arrived with a condescending expression.

‘A deer jumped onto your bonnet while you were almost stationary,' he sneered. ‘What type of deer?'

‘A red deer.'

‘We don't have red deer around here,' (funny, that was the third one I had seen since we had been here) ‘are you sure it wasn't a reindeer, little bells, fat bloke in red attached behind it, ha ha ha.'

‘Let's hope not because if that was Rudolph there are going to be a lot of disappointed kids in a couple of weeks' time.'

He sneered again and said, ‘Well, lead on, lead on. Let's see if we can find any
evidence
of your so-called
deer
.' He gave a derisive sniff and indicated out the door.

Keeping my evil tongue well under control, I preceded him outside and pointed out the Audi, parked two or three cars down the lane. He wandered over to it, still sniffing, and I could have laughed aloud as I saw him walk round to the front and watched his jaw drop.

‘You could have been killed,' he muttered, taking in the perfect hoof print embedded in the bonnet, the smashed lights and the decimated windscreen which sported ginger hair and clotted blood all down one side.

I nodded. ‘Yes, we were just lucky he didn't come through feet first.'

He ran his fingers over the dent, ‘How big would you say this thing was?'

I shrugged. ‘It was nearly fully dark, but I would have said four and a half, maybe five foot at the shoulder, it made a hell of a thump when it landed; it was trying to jump the car.' Then I just couldn't help myself. ‘Mind you, the thump could have been that fat guy that it was dragging, I'm fairly sure I heard him screaming, “Blitzen, stop, ya bugger!”'

He whipped round and narrowed his eyes at me. I just smiled back at him, keeping my own eyes wide open and innocent looking. Then he laughed.

‘Yes, OK, I agree it was almost definitely a deer, or at least a big animal of some sort – you have to admit that, as a story, it sounded fairly unlikely.'

I nodded. ‘I think if I was going to make something up, I would have come up with something more believable.'

He smiled again. ‘You wouldn't believe the stories we get told.'

Over a cup of tea he gave me the bad news that the Audi was probably going to be a write-off; she was so old and there was so much damage that it really just wasn't going to be worth fixing her.

I had to agree. I'd been expecting this, and she certainly had been playing up for some time now, overheating and making strange noises, even when she didn't have Rudolph embedded in her radiator. So obviously it was time to get a new car.

Watching the tow truck load our poor, bloody, hairy Audi onto the back of a car trailer, I was not that sad to see it go. It was a really expensive car to run, although it did have a huge boot and I was going to miss that. Now all we had was our tiny little Daewoo Matiz; the children had named it ‘pod' because it was bright green and looked like a mobile pea. Arwen and Carl had left their car behind and said that we were perfectly at liberty to use that while we were staying, so at least we each had transport.

While the entire trauma with the car had been going on, Geoff had taken full advantage of us all being off the boat and had been working steadily through his list of jobs. It wasn't only laying the new floor and the glossing that needed to be done; there was also some tiling to do, some emulsioning, lino to be laid in the bathroom which also now needed re-decoration (good grief, had we really been on here so long that the first room was now due for re-decoration – the mind boggles) and, finally, the finishing off and decoration of our bedroom.

Christmas Eve and the new floor was down. It hadn't taken as long as I expected as I was under the impression that the old floor would have to come up before the new laminate went down. When I suggested this, Geoff stared at me in amazement.

‘You can't put laminate flooring over a void.' He flapped a bit of it at me. ‘Look, it's all floppy; it would just bend and break.'

‘A void?' I frowned at him. ‘What's actually under this floor then?'

He shook his head at me. ‘How long have we lived on this boat?' he asked. ‘Are you seriously telling me that you have never looked under the floor?'

I couldn't understand what the problem was; why on earth would I want to look under the floor, so I just shrugged at him.

‘Look.' He put his finger through a drilled hole and lifted up a wooden panel. The gap he revealed appeared to be full of concrete paving slabs.

‘What are those?' I poked one; they actually were concrete paving slabs.

‘It's the ballast,' he put the floor panel back down and frowned at me. ‘You know, those things I have to lug from one side of the boat to the other every time you put a new piece of flaming furniture in and we end up leaning over?'

Realising that I had obviously missed something important, I tried to make amends for my complete lack of observational skills by showing some interest. ‘So what's under the concrete blocks?'

‘Nothing.' Geoff frowned. ‘Well, obviously there's the bottom of the boat, but that's just the steelwork and the struts to lay a floor on. Without those blocks we'd be floating a good foot higher and her prop would be out of the water.

‘Good grief!' The extent of the weight and the amount of these things suddenly dawned on me. ‘How many of these blocks are there?'

‘I don't know, I've never counted them.' Geoff gave me a pointed look. ‘But I feel like I've moved hundreds because you keep changing your mind about where you want things to go and every time, I have to drag up the floors and push them from one side to the other.'

‘Yes, you already said that.' I thought back over the last few months and reddened slightly, remembering all the changes I had made and how many mornings Geoff had woken up with muscle pains ‘Oh ... sorry, you should have said.'

Geoff gave me a kiss on the forehead. ‘Never mind, you're happy with it now, aren't you?'

‘Well, I did think that maybe the sofa would look better on the other side.'

Geoff's eyes widened and I grabbed a paintbrush to fend him off.

‘Don't you dare, I have a brush here and I'm not afraid to use it.' I brandished it at him with a grin.

‘Just remember,' he snarled. ‘I'm sure I can find a wife-sized space under this floor if I have to.' He gave me an innocent smile. ‘Cup of tea ... darling?'

Although the new flooring took less time than I had feared, there were so many cuts to be made, avoiding furniture and other built-in obstacles, then creating lift-up panels so that the dreaded ballast could be accessed, that it had taken far longer than Geoff had hoped.

But while he was completing the floor, I had been working on the tiling that needed to be finished in both the kitchen and the bathroom. So with two of the scheduled ‘big' jobs finally crossed off our list, we settled down to a good, old-fashioned Christmas with Amelia and Huw. Being away from the boat we were forced to relax; we had a wonderful time.

Geoff was taking Sam up to see Grandma for New Year and with Charlie heading back to the other family for the same period, I had decided that I would use that time to complete the glossing. Then we had a week left at Arwen's after New Year, which would give the paint a good time to dry, and we could move back into a totally finished boat.

I spent so many hours trapped in the boat with the paint fumes that by the time I had finished each day, I would happily weave my way back to the car and have to spend a good ten minutes breathing deeply on top of the flood defences until I felt that I was safe to drive. On New Year's Eve, I did actually make it to a friend's party that was being held just down the road from Arwen's house, but I was so tired and so high on paint fumes that I left well before midnight and I probably wasn't very coherent company while I was there – sorry about that, guys.