Chris Nelms

I reproduce below an excerpt from Steve Haywood’s book Narrowboat Dreams (Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2008). The book is a lighthearted description of a journey by inland waterway from Banbury, Oxfordshire to Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. The start of chapter four nicely encapsulates what, for me, is the attraction of owning a narrowboat:

Arthur Ransome, who wrote Swallows and Amazons and knew a bit about this sort of thing, got it absolutely right. He said of houses that they were just badly built boats, so firmly aground you couldn’t think of moving them.

I know what he means. Anyone who has a boat knows what he means. There’s something about the mobility of a boat - especially a boat you can live on - that appeals to something deep and fundamental inside us. It’s the idea that you can just pack up your home and take it with you wherever you want, something that must be connected with our primeval past when we were hunter-gatherers, travelling every day as we followed food, our homes on our backs.

But it’s a childhood thing too. It’s to do with camping trips with mum and dad, the Cubs or the Brownies; it’s to do with the excitement of summer holidays when even putting up a tent in the garden was an adventure. It’s to do with the films we saw then, and the stories we absorbed, about gypsies in their brightly-painted vardos, and cowboys and covered wagons opening up the West, everyone on the move, no one rooted anywhere, every hill on the horizon and every bend in the road a new world waiting to be explored. It’s that thing we had about ‘gentlemen of the road’ - as we used to call tramps then. People who spent their lives meandering in carefree abandon, sleeping in barns or under hedges, their errant lives untrammelled and unregulated by the petty restrictions which limited the rest of us.

There’s a heady freedom about not having a home, because then, paradoxically, everywhere becomes your home-wherever you lay your hat, as they say. Yet you don’t lose that sense of liberation if you have a home that moves. You get the best of both worlds: the chance to wander about, but to sleep in your own bed too. Caravans, I’m told, can give you the same feeling - though their drawback is that they are linked inexorably to roads. And in the twenty-first century roads are busy, noisy hellholes where everyone’s going somewhere only to come back again immediately afterwards. On the canals, the water road is tranquil and calming, and nobody’s actually travelling anywhere properly - just, like me, pretending to go on journeys to give some purpose to their wanderings.

This text is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and the publisher.