Thursday 12 July 2018

High roads and high seas


I don't think anyone has captured childhood Summer memories so accurately as Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie, but they were his memories, so who am I to call them 'accurate'?

It helps to have been brought up in a village. His village - Slad, near Painswick, Gloucestershire - is quite close to here, so I have visited it often. Bath claims to be at the foot of the Cotswold Hills, and I suppose if you stretch it a bit, it is.

The road between Bath and Stratford upon Avon (A46 as it is now known) is a wonderful old route, much improved by the Romans a couple of thousand years ago. There are many high stretches of it which must have been haunts of Highwaymen in the not so distant past.

If ever I go to Oxford, I ignore the ghastly M4 and branch right off the A46 past Cirencester. Much nicer. There are so many places of interest to the right and the left of it, and it is surprisingly easy to reach the birthplace of Shakespeare, right up there in Warwickshire - the very heart of England, and the spiritual home of The Archers.

Down here in the South, everyone thinks of The Midlands as a post industrial, cultural wasteland. I blame Birmingham for that. Black Country coal merchants. After the canals ceased to be the transportation for all that coal, Birmingham's city elders tried to improve their image by dubbing the place 'The Venice of the North'. That's like calling Venice 'The Birmingham of the South'.

I once almost bought a 72 foot Birmingham coal boat. 72 feet is the longest narrowboat you can use on any canal. It was in very good condition after much work on the hull, but it was configured exactly for use as a coal boat. It had a cramped little engine room at one end, and the rest of the space was the open hold for many tons of coal. It would have cost me £1200, and after I had converted it, it would sell today for around £80,000.

The owner was an alcoholic, and rather than bring it down (at great expense) from Birmingham on a low-loader, he sailed it down on the canals, crossing the Severn Estuary to connect with the Bristol waterways on the other side.

His wife called the coastguard, because he should have capsized and drowned in the 6 foot wide, 72 foot long thing. Somehow he made it over safely - well, almost safely. Halfway across he stepped over the running engine for some reason and the crotch of his trousers got caught in the large, spinning flywheel. When the edge of the flywheel started drawing him down and burning his testicles, he found super-human strength and tore himself away, leaving his trousers spinning around on the flywheel.

He arrived in his underpants, to the great relief of his wife. The coastguard never located him.

24 comments:

  1. He was lucky! My uncle lost an arm in a factory machine and if it wasn't for his colleagues he could've been drawn in. There was not much work security back then.
    Greetings Maria x

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    1. No. People were always having accidents, then not being paid when off work.

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  2. You could say that there were no flies left on him

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  3. My niece lives on a Dutch barge with her husband and two small children ..... it’s lovely and pretty spacious. They grow fruit and veg on a bit of ground outside and they have a ‘shed’ where guests can sleep or, they turn it into a dining room when we go for dinner !
    Poor bloke ...... were his ‘bits’ OK ? ... and, had he had s few drinks on his journey ? XXXX

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    1. We are watching Lucy Worsley ... The First Georgians ! XXXX

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    2. Lucy Worsley. Every old man's fantasy.

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  4. Pat recommended that book which I ordered and read. It was beautifully written. I so enjoy reading about other cultures; their history. I was beautiful.

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    1. It's a wonderful book. Very English - pre-war English.

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  5. Lovely story about the narrow boat captain, thank you.

    I too try to eschew the dreadful motorways and try to get there in a more leisurely and interesting manner - a bit like the "old days", pre motorway. But the increased traffic density these says does not help.

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    1. And the increased speed of the traffic on previously peaceful country lanes turns what used to be a nice trip into a series of potential hazards.

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  6. My brother got pulled into a sugar beet harvester when his hand got caught. He lost some fingers and a bit of hand. Peter got caught in pulley on a tractor and started to get dragged in by the arm and then engine cut out. Saved him.

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  7. I burnt my testicles on a bleached bath....just as painful but hardly as colourful

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    1. You are always burning your nether regions with bleach. I think it is a more sophisticated cry for help.

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  8. Cider with Rosie was on O level English text back in the day. I visited Slad and was disappointed when the village had a fast road running through it and it didn’t seem as intimate as the book suggested. As for the boat story. I have always believed freshly laundered underpants are essential for peace of mind and an anchor in the storms of life.

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    1. I went to the pub in Slad once and asked the landlord if Laurie Lee (who was then still alive) frequented it. He said "You just missed him". My mother believed that clean underpants prevented car accidents.

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  9. I love Cider with Rosie. I think he also wrote a book called As I walked out one May morning.
    As to your story - not sure whether it had a happy ending or an unhappy one. (You could be cruising the canals now if you had bought it ((and hopefully with your trousers intact.))

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    1. Spanish Civil War. As it is, I cruise the streets with my trousers almost intact...

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  10. There is nothing so frightening as machinery running out of control, I speak as an engineer who spent 6 years mining in Africa. It can really bring you up short.

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    1. Indeed. Captain McClean and his infamous machine.

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  11. Fabulous visual story. Thank goodness he broke away from the flywheel or he wouldn't have been "72 long" anymore.

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