Recommended Narrowboat Books

When I’m not writing, business blogging, parenting or narrowboating I like to get my nose stuck into a narrowboat book.

Terry Darlington, author of Narrow Dog To Carcassonne will be signing copies of his book Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier at this year’s Crick Boat Show. The new book sees him travelling the north of England with his wife Monica and their two dogs. Narrow Dog to Carcassonne was the bestselling travel book of 2006, and this latest will be his third book.

Terry’s first book is the only modern boating travelogue that I’ve read, so Steve Haywood’s books are quite high on my reading list. He’s written One Man and a Narrowboat: Slowing Down Time on England's Waterways and Narrowboat Dreams about his own travels and the history of the canals. I have however read the original boating travelogue: Tom Rolt’s Narrow Boat . This is a lovely lyrical log about Tom and Angela’s travels in 1939 through an idyllic rural England.

I tried to find books about narrowboat women and so discovered The Amateur Boatwomen (Working Waterways) by Eily Gayford. This is a fascinating account of the author’s experience training women to work narrowboats during the Second World War. I like the bit where they sit in a cabin laughing at the seemingly impossible thought that boats might one day have “a bathroom with hot and cold taps, fitted carpets, a Hoover, (and) a telephone!”

I then read Ramlin Rose, by Sheila Stewart: This is probably one of my favourite books ever! I met some travelling boat girls up the River Stort a couple of years ago and asked them if they’d read anything about narrowboat families: They recommended Ramlin Rose. Sheila Stewart had wanted to interview a Banbury boatwoman and write her biography, but ended up compiling a number of true stories into a fictional life story.

This month I have read my first historical boat novel; Water Gypsies by Annie Murray. This is a sequel to The Narrowboat Girl, but I was told the cut does not actually feature that much in the first book, so I went straight for the sequel. Water Gypsies begins in 1942 and describes a series of tragedies that befall the heroine, who is tormented by a miserable past!

Marie Browne’s Narrow Margins is a modern tale of a family aboard, trying to make a new start after losing their IT company and large house when Rover went bust. They move their children and dog onto a dilapidated narrowboat called Happy Go Lucky and teach themselves about narrowboat life and boat refurbishment as they go along.The sequel, Narrow Minds describes their return to the water on another run down boat. There's an interview with Marie Browne on the Sunday Mercury website.

Next on my list of books to read about families on boats is For Better For Worse, For Richer For Poorer by Damian and Siobhan Horner. This husband and wife team have written a memoir about leaving their careers and lives ashore, to travel the French canals with their two young children.

Of course, if I didn’t spend so much time reading narrowboat books I might finish writing my own: The Real Life of a Narrowboat Wife. Then it could be me signing copies at next year’s Crick Boat Show…

Come and say hello to me at the Boatshed Grand Union standat Crick this year.

For more information about this year’s Crick Boat Show visit www.crickboatshow.com or call 01283 742972.

Disclosure: I wrote this post for Boatshed Grand Union, and it contains affiliate links to Amazon.

The Grand Junction Arms

I've promised myself to blog twice a week and sometimes it's hard to find the time when I'm starting a business, being a mum and being a narrowboater. A little voice inside me (and Fanciful Alice) says that I should hurry up and finish my book. It's kind of nearly finished; this is an extract that I'm working on at the moment.




In late August 2011 I finally moored my own seventy foot boat at The Grand Junction Arms in Bulbourne. This is the Tring Summit level of what was The Grand Junction Canal and it marks the beginning of a long leafy cutting that leads down towards Cowroast marina. The way that I remembered it, The Junction Arms was a good old fashioned boaters' pub, built in the mid nineteenth century and still home to old roll-up smoking boaters in waistcoats having impromptu music jams with an accordion in the corner. Bulbourne is a hamlet, consisting of two rows of cottages: one row of cottages along the road, and a row of canal-side cottages at the top of the Marsworth flight. This second row of cottages can only be reached via the towpath, which has been tarmacked in order to allow for the unusual site of the occasional car trundling carefully down the towpath outside the window of our moored boat. The first time I ever came to the Grand Junction Arms it was bustling with boaters after the Wendover 2000 canal festival. Myself and my new-found boating friends sat in the beer garden admiring the BW canal workshops opposite, which in those days were still working and had been making lock gates since 1810.

“I'd like to make a lock gate one day,” said Rufty Tufty Biker Boater, with a cheeky grin. He was a carpenter by trade.
“It would be good to work there for a bit and say you'd made a lock gate wouldn't it?”
I nodded in admiration. I thought it would. But he never did, because in 2004 the yard closed down forever.

At least the pub is still open, I thought to myself. I left the girls on board with The Doctor and popped in for old times sake and to see if they had a copy of Towpath Talk.

As I walked down the towpath I noticed that there was a lovely old painted boat moored in front of us, called 'Cressy' which reminded me fondly of days gone by. Once, this place would have been a welcome stop for the horse-drawn boatman, providing stabling and refreshments when the horse and crew grew tired. When the invention of motor boats allowed for longer working days many traditional canal-side inn's went out of business; without the need to rest a tired horse the boats carried on cruising far into the night. They needed to work hard just to make ends meet.



To be continued.



The story continues when I actually go into the pub and meet a mysterious olde worlde gentleman at the bar.