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When we finally moored up, we were so tired that we just threw her into the side and Geoff used the gangplank to get ashore to set the mooring pins. He returned, sodden and exhausted, to find me, also still dripping, staring down at Sam who had fallen asleep in his ‘nest', all by himself, still unfed. The guilt at being a bad, irresponsible and uncaring parent was almost crippling.

I left Sam asleep in his ‘nest' while I dried off and put on my warm, fluffy dressing gown, then, picking him up, I carried him to his bedroom while Geoff made the long-awaited cup of tea. Sam, feeling himself being moved, opened his eyes and smiled, snuggling down into my shoulder. While I was putting him into bed, he held his arms out for a big cuddle. Lying down beside him to acquiesce to his unspoken request is the last thing I remember that night.

Next morning I was awoken by a fully refreshed and very hungry six-year-old climbing over me. He was trying very hard not to wake me up (this involved his foot in my face and smothered giggles,
very
loud smothered giggles). Nursing my face, I lay, confused, in Sam's bed waiting for feeling to return in the shoulder that he had been using as a pillow.

As you get older, confusion on waking becomes commonplace and an accepted part of the morning routine, but, this particular morning, I was completely adrift from reality. Waking up in pain in a strange room should have been enough to confound me, but when I sat up and looked blearily out of the window, I couldn't work out why the sky wasn't where it should be and the world had turned green.

As a result of our mad rush to moor up somewhere,
anywhere
, the previous night, we had managed to get Happy in amongst a huge reed bed – the plants were higher than the boat. Sam summed it up, saying he felt like he had been made very small.

There was a definite loitering going on that morning. We created the world's biggest breakfast of cereal, cold meats, fruit, cheese and naughty cake, very continental. Sam was very enthusiastic about having cake for breakfast, even if we did have to eat from the plastic lids of large storage boxes due to the lack of crockery. We then sat about, drinking vast amounts of tea out of a couple of old mugs that were discovered shoved into the cupboard beneath the sink, and listening to Sam chattering on about nothing in particular.

Studying the map, we decided that as the locks were now nicely spaced apart, one of us could stay with Sam, to make up for the previous day. We were also due to stop at a big supermarket in Northampton, where at last we could buy a wretched can opener, get some more water and other bits and pieces; I ruefully added crockery to the bottom of the shopping list.

So with the sun shining and the horrors of the previous night now a mere memory, we backed Happy out of the reed bed and sauntered on towards the promise of gore-free baked beans.

Chapter Ten
I Think I'm Having a Heart Attack!

S
ADLY, THE CLOSER WE
drew to Northampton, the less salubrious our surroundings became. The dirty, overgrown canal hid, embarrassed, under huge broken lumps of floating polystyrene, so reminiscent of dirty, pitted chunks of ice that Geoff started to hum the theme from
Titanic.
The banks were overgrown, covered in litter, and we moved between grubby, off-white buildings that faced away from the canal in a huddle of barbed wire and security guards.

Cautiously feeling our way through the congested water, I held the tiller lightly, waiting for the tell-tale jerk that would signal something was wrapped around the prop, but amazingly enough it never came. Maybe the fates had decided that we had paid for our passage through this litter-choked potential minefield by suffering the trauma from the night before. So, making slow but surprisingly unimpeded progress, we transferred from the Grand Union Canal to the River Nene and moored at lunch time without incident at the Northampton City Quay.

After lunch and a huge shopping trip to the local supermarket, we were on our way again. I had spent a happy hour packing away all the new plates and cups and unpacking our exciting new acquisitions; a slow cooker, a three-tier steamer and a baby George grilling thingy. I had deliberately placed them on top of the hob.

‘I won't have to listen to you for a while.' Then, realising that I had finally started talking aloud to inanimate objects, I went and checked on Sam.

Sam had recently discovered the delights of the ‘Beano'. He was so engrossed, I had to poke him before he finally answered my questions (talking to the hob had given me just as much response), his eyes sliding back to the colourful characters on the page mid-conversation. I gave up and went back to the kitchen.

After I had prepared a casserole for dinner, smiling at the simple delight of being able to use real vegetables, I took Geoff a cup of tea.

‘How can it be,' I sat on the deliciously warm roof with my cup of tea and pondered to my slightly nauseated husband – he had slipped a surreptitious pack of five jam doughnuts into the shopping and had eaten them all over the last hour – ‘that a supermarket that size has no bloody can openers?'

I was still enjoying the sunshine on the roof when Geoff pointed out that the fourth lock of the day was approaching. We had become proficient at locks: pull the boat in, close the gates, make sure all is secure and that you are far enough away from the sill at the rear and then start letting the water out or in depending on whether you are going up or downhill. But this was the first time we had come across a ‘guillotine' lock.

When training, Dave had mentioned them as being something to look out for, because instead of nice, gentle winding handles, you have to insert a key in a lock, turn it, then wait while a huge metal door rises automatically and lets the water out from beneath you.

We pulled in at the mooring, as Geoff wanted to study the lock mechanism before we brought our monster into the pound. When he was satisfied that he knew how it worked, he signalled me to bring Happy round the corner and into the enclosure on my own. OK, not a problem. It should have been a simple manoeuvre – and would have been – if I had actually elected to turn left into the lock, but instead, and to this day I don't know why, I sailed merrily past and turned right.

As soon as I was past the lock I figured out what I had done and put Happy into reverse to slow her down. As usual, she completely ignored me and carried on, preferring, instead, to take up a central position on what appeared to be a huge lake.

There was open water all around me and a wind had sprung up from nowhere, pushing me further away from the bank. I promptly went into complete panic and did every stupid thing I could think of; first, I put the engine into neutral; now, without propulsion of any kind, the wind had free rein to do what it liked; I dithered, felt sick, put the engine into forward, then changed my mind and put her into reverse, let go of the tiller and stared horrified back toward the rapidly disappearing lock.

Totally convinced that we were going to capsize at any moment I finally pulled myself together enough to put Happy into forward and begin the necessary 180-degree turn. It is awe inspiring to find out, first hand, just how much space is needed for a 70-foot boat to turn half circle.

Eventually, after what seemed an hour but was probably about three minutes, she was pointing the right way again, and I managed to relax. I was quite proud of not killing either myself or Sam and finally pulled into the lock. Geoff, still admiring the architecture of the lock, hadn't even noticed we were missing and was quite surprised when I appeared from an unexpected direction.

Still nervous and waiting for my heartbeat to settle, I positioned Happy carefully within the lock, threw a rope around a bollard and awaited the now expected, gentle pull forward as the water escaped from under the hull and lowered you into a dark wet hole giving you a good amount of time to study the slimy, weed-covered stonework while you waited for the forward gates to open. It's quite nice really, five minutes' peace and quiet to mull over the happenings in your day.

Not this time. Geoff stuck the key in the mechanism and, checking to make sure I was ready, turned it. The great metal door started to lift, pulling a huge amount of water from under the boat, Happy leapt forward as though she had been kicked in the butt and smacked her nose against the far door, her back end swinging around as a bubbling tide cascaded out from beneath us. Geoff took one look at what was going on and hit the emergency stop button. The lock door stopped and although water continued to pour down to the next level it soon settled and Happy stopped trying to climb the lock walls.

‘Everything OK?' Geoff shouted down.

‘Yes, sort of,' I answered through gritted teeth as I struggled to keep Happy's rear end under control. ‘Bit fast that, isn't it?'

‘Will you be all right if I open it again?' He put his hand on the key and made ready to turn it.

‘Yes, I think so, I just wasn't expecting it to be so fast.' I looked at the huge door, held in stasis.

This time I was ready for it, Geoff turned the key and the water picked up pace. I found the easiest way to deal with the pull was to let Happy's nose rest against the door as it rose; with her big rope fender around the bow it wasn't going to do any damage to either the boat or the lock and it was obvious from long vertical smears on the lock door that others had done the same thing. Just as the lower edge of the lock gate cleared the water, I pulled her back and allowed her to float free. When the lock is empty and the door is at its highest point, the dripping lock door covers you in water and occasional small wriggly things as you pass beneath it ... Lovely.

We had six of these locks to face before the end of the day, three of them were key-operated and the others were manual. The manual locks consisted of a huge metal wheel that has to be turned by hand, which, by a series of counterweights, then lifts the huge door at the end. These locks, being slower to rise, weren't quite as ferocious as the electronic ones but I still got very wet as we exited. They also had the added advantage of giving Geoff an unscheduled upper torso workout. Taking pity on him after the first puffing, panting lock raise, we changed places with the intention of giving Geoff a rest but, as it took me three times as long to raise the door, Geoff decided that it was better to suffer but be quick.

That evening we were scheduled to stop at Billing Aquadome, but it was so crowded with screaming kids and holidaymakers we braved another lock, mooring up a little further on, beside a field full of curious horses. Compared with the previous night's fiasco, this evening was almost holiday-guide perfect. Dinner had been silently cooking all day thanks to the new slow cooker and was eaten and cleared away by six o'clock. We spent a pleasant evening on the bank playing silly ball games with Sam, and just generally relaxing. I called Amelia and Charlie and although I missed them I was too tired to really get upset about it. By ten o'clock we had all peacefully and soundly passed out.

Due to our pleasant and early night we were all up and about early the next morning, ready to face the ten locks that we were scheduled to tackle that day. Geoff, still a little sore from the three he had completed the previous day, was less than ecstatic about the coming day's exercise but a cup of tea or four and he was as ready to face them as he was likely to get.

The locks were about an hour apart, which is just enough time for the non-driving part of a couple to start a project and get really involved before they are dragged away by the pilot screaming ‘lock!' down through the engine room.

At the fifth lock of the day, our progress was impeded by workmen from the Environment Agency completing some repairs, but, as it was around midday, we made them a cup of tea and settled down to a picnic lunch on the mooring.

About half an hour later, another narrow boat pulled in behind us and the owner, an older gent who strongly resembled Kris Kristofferson in his
Blade
persona, wandered over to us, wondering what the delay was. He checked out the repairs in the lock and, agreeing that none of us were going anywhere for the next half hour or so, we fell to discussing our separate journeys, taking time to moan about the locks and the ‘tourists'. On hearing that we had moored at the bottom of the Rothersthorpe flight he perked up a little.

‘Did you hear anything “funny” while you were moored up there?' he asked, raising his eyebrows and leaning forward slightly.

‘No, didn't hear a thing,' Geoff shook his head. ‘Mind you, we were so tired, there could have been a brass band playing on the roof and we wouldn't have noticed. What was there to hear?'

‘Well,' he leaned forward and looked around conspiratorially, ‘they say that there are feral children in the woods there, and they'll throw rocks until you give them food.'

‘Sounds like normal teenagers to me,' I laughed around a pasty.

‘Ah, but they belong to a troop of travelling dwarves who escaped from a circus just after World War II, and it's said they can be heard singing old war songs at dusk just around that area.' He sat back smiling and nodded in the self-satisfied way of one who has imparted great knowledge.

‘You're having us on,' I laughed. ‘I know we're new to this, but I'm not falling for that.'

He looked hurt, ‘No, no, it's true, if you read some of the travel pamphlets, you'll see it listed as a local myth.'

There wasn't much we could say to that, so Geoff just muttered, ‘No, didn't hear a thing.' Luckily, at that point the workmen opened the lock again and we all began finishing cups of tea and clearing up. The older man gave us a cheery wave and went back to his boat, whistling ‘We'll Meet Again' as he walked.

Geoff and I just looked at each other.

‘Do you think ...?' I paused and looked back toward the other boat.

‘No!' Geoff said emphatically. ‘I don't.'

Through the repaired lock, we headed on toward Wellingborough. The next lock ‘Wollaston' was against us, forcing us to moor up while it was filled. As the water rose, I could see something white bobbing around in amongst the clutter of plant life and twigs that always seem to gather within the pound. Eventually I could make out a very young swan, still mostly grey. It had obviously been stuck there for a while and the poor thing was completely exhausted.

As we opened the gates, it swam out of the lock and, staggering up the bank, keeled over amongst the reeds. Forgetting for a moment how big and scary these things are, I rushed over to it and put a hand out to help it (to this day I have no idea what I expected to do if I had caught it). It leapt to its feet, flapping and hissing, then bit me. This sudden burst of energy convinced me it was fine and probably just needed to rest, so nursing my serrated hand, I backed away from the still hissing monstrosity and returned to the boat. As we pulled into the lock I looked back and was comforted to note that it had settled back down in the reeds and appeared to be already asleep; in my mind, its contented snores kept time with my throbbing hand.

Wellingborough Embankment was the next mooring with shopping opportunities. Geoff needed various bits and bobs: more screws, a hose attachment and some electronic bits that would enable us to connect our stereo into the speakers that were already embedded into the ceiling, and although we were all due a visit to the local supermarket upon his return, he had strict instructions that if he saw a can opener he was to buy it immediately.

While he was gone, Sam and I spent a happy hour in the park. I was very glad that most children were back at school; I don't think 40-year-old women are supposed to enjoy themselves quite so much on a children's slide.

The visit to the supermarket was more than a little fraught. Sam had decided that he hadn't finished playing in the park and strenuously objected to being dragged away to go shopping; we finally had to bribe him with the promise of new comics.

As we were heading out through the checkout, I remembered the can opener and was about to dash off in search of one when Geoff nudged me and pointed surreptitiously to the lady who was working on our till.

‘That's why we didn't hear any singing,' he snickered. ‘They are all now integrated back into society.'

I was confused for a moment and then looked at the smiling lady on the till. She was rather vertically challenged, and, laughing, I gently slapped him for being rude. As we got out of the supermarket, the jokes about singing World War II escapees became more and more unlikely and it was only when we had made our way, giggling, back to the boat and were underway again, that I settled down to unpack the shopping. Oh bloody hell, with all his messing about I had completely forgotten to go back for the wretched can opener.

As we headed towards our last two locks of the day, Sam came and helped me to put the food away. This involved him opening a lot of packets and eating a little of whatever he fancied; he ended up scurrying off with a handful of goodies and leaving me to not only put the food away but to clean up his crumbs as well.