第8章 Father of the Boat

My father died in the January of 2011, in the workshop, at the bench, with a chisel in his hand, at sixty-one, and I was thirty, and I was in the yard, and I heard it happen and I never got there in time. I want to say something about that and then get on with the rest, because it is the kind of thing that a man like me does not say out loud and it is the single most important thing about how I ended up like this. I did not go in. Dev did, and Dev said he was sat on the stool with his back to the door and his hands on the bench, and that he looked like a man who had stopped for a cup of tea, and that there was nothing anybody could have done. Everybody was very kind about it. Everybody in that yard for the next four years was extraordinarily kind about it, and I have never once been able to let any of them, and I think that is the whole engine of what I became. So I went to the workshop and cleared it out myself, over eleven days, and I found everything in it that a man leaves. Here is what was in Bram Pike's workshop, in the order I found it. Forty-one years of boat bills, in shoeboxes, alphabetically, in his own hand, because he could not abide a filing system he had not made himself. A vice that was better than anything I have ever used and that had no handle, because he'd had the handle made from a length of bronze rod and ground it down himself and then lost the key. Nine hundred hand tools, of which four hundred were his and five hundred were his father's, and there was a point about the tin handles where you could see the line where a generation ended. And under the bench, in a flat board drawer that I had to lever out with a claw hammer because it was jammed, there was a drawing. It was on a sheet of good paper, which I knew immediately was not right, because Bram Pike did not waste paper. It was half-imperial, it was folded twice, and it was a narrowboat. It was not a photograph of a boat. It was a boat that did not exist. It was a hull with a very long rear deck and the wheelhouse set right forward, and I did not understand the hull at all when I first looked at it — she had a chine on her, a hard one, running the whole length, and a deck that came down on either side like a roof, and there was a section at the bow drawn in section I got wrong twice. There were dimensions on it. Actual dimensions, in millimetres, all the way down the side, and a table of displacements, and a table of weights that had been worked out and then reworked out, and beside one of the figures somebody had written *check this, the garboard looks thin* in pencil, in Bram's hand, at some point in about 2006. I took it down to the office in a plastic wallet and a man in Derby who builds steel boats looked at it for four minutes and said, "That's a serious design. That's not a man sketching. That's a man who'd already built four and got the fifth one right." He turned it over. He looked at the note in pencil. He said, "How old's he dead?" "Seven years." "Right," said the man in Derby. "Then somebody's built her." I said no, my father never built a boat after 1994, he was too busy doing other people's work, and the man in Derby said, "He never built it. He sold it. There's a difference and it's the whole difference, and most men can't tell which one they've done." And I sat in a car park in Derby for twenty minutes with a plastic wallet on my knee working that out. He sold it. I went through the shoeboxes twice after that, properly, and the bill from 1994 was there — one sheet, itemised, the whole boat, hull number, and down the side in Bram's hand: *SOUTHERN TRADER. Design no. 5. Fee to customer: £4,200. Retained: lines 3, 7 and the garboard. Not to be built or sold without reference to B.P.* I did not know what that meant. I still do not, except in the way that you know things at three in the morning that you could not have known at noon. There is no boat called Southern Trader Design no. 5. I have looked. I have a man in the country who takes pictures of the entire British canal system for the authorities and he has looked for me, twice, and there is no such boat, and there never has been, because Bram Pike did not sell a boat to a customer, he sold a boat to nobody, and he took four thousand two hundred pounds off a man in Staffordshire for it, and the man in Staffordshire's yard went bust in 1997, and there was a five-year wait for a boat, so the money went back, and Bram kept the drawing and kept the three lines and kept the note about the garboard, and never built her, and never told anybody, and left it in a drawer under a bench for fifteen years for a son who was never going to know what to do with it. I did know what to do with it. That is what I want to say. I took it home. I took it out of the plastic wallet. I put it flat on the table in the flat in Anderry and I looked at it for a long time and I understood, entirely, and without any difficulty at all, that I was not going to build it. I was going to build something else. There was a boat at Marrow Wharf called Olive with a compression set in the aft bilge and it was worth eleven thousand pounds and I could not legally be on it in three weeks' time because I had put my address on a registration in 2016 and then taken it off in 2020 and never once, in four years, looked at what that meant. Bram's drawing had a very long rear deck. Roz has wanted a stern deck for six years. Roz said it in 2016, in the yard, in front of a broker, and the broker said it would be a longboat conversion and cost forty thousand, and Roz said, "I don't want a conversion, I want a bigger back deck," and the broker said everybody wants a bigger back deck, and Roz said, "Then everybody's paying forty thousand pounds for a bigger back deck," and the broker said "No," in the way of a man who has finished the conversation. I sat at that table and I understood that I had been in a fight for four years over a piece of ground that I had agreed to hand back before I knew it was ground. And then, because I am not a brave man, I did what I have always done. I got the drawing off the table. I put it in the flat file. I shut the drawer. And I went to the yard, and I filed a cradle bracket for four inches of flat bar, and it did not fit. Bram's other thing was the light. There was a bulb holder on that drawing, at the front deck, on the left, with a note: *proper earth, not a screw in the deckhead. She will tell you.* I never worked out who she was. I have looked. There is no she in any of the shoeboxes, or in the flat file, or in the forty-one years of it, and I have stopped looking, and I keep the note. On the night after my mother's funeral I went down to the lay-by with a torch and did the one job on that boat that nobody had ever done, which was to take the front deckhead light out, and clean the earth strap, and re-earth it properly to a bonding strap on the hull, and put the earth strap on a leg, which is where it belongs. It took forty minutes. It is a small job. It is the sort of job a man does at half past eleven at night because he cannot do anything else.