When I was 14, I had a little blue rowing boat that I’d row up and down the River Waveney in Bungay. It was all very idyllic - overhanging willow trees; water-meadows at sunset, that kind of thing. Once I even saw a Kingfisher. These are the kinds of things that childhoods in retrospect seem to be made of, despite the fact that at the time they seemed to feature a good deal more hanging from coat-hooks by your underwear.
Generally speaking, the first thing I’d do when I got into the boat was row the 10 metres or so upstream to the bridge and tie up underneath it. The water was clearer under there out of the sun and you could see fish, boulders and discarded traffic cones in its shade. It was nice. No one knew you were there and no one bothered you.
I took some people out on the boat too. I didn’t really have any friends at that time because I was the weirdo who liked computers - but ask a kid if he wants to have a go in a boat and, weirdo-captain or not, he’s going to say yes.
Taking people out in the boat didn’t really work. Its a solitary business, rowing. Even when you do it in teams you’re starting at the back of your teammate’s head. I can only imagine that sitting opposite someone you don’t know or even like, while they rock back and forth with the exertion of the oars was an unsettling experience for most of my passengers. Conversation, such as it was, rarely sparkled.
“Have you ever fallen in?”
“No, it’s a flat bottomed boat. It would actually be comparatively hard to capsize.”
“Oh.”
“‘Capsize’ means ‘tip over’.”
“Oh.”
So I ended up not really being bothered that no one wanted to come on the boat with me and devoted my days to exploring the two or three miles of river between the sluice gate at the Staithe near our house and the other sluice gate up beyond the swimming hole that all the kids called “The Sandy”.
In all the months I spent going up and down the river, the best things I found where as follows:
- A huge dead pike.
- Lots of dead eels
- Fishing floats and lead weights knotted in the branches of trees by over-casting fishermen.
(In fact I think I indulged a fantasy that one day I’d be bobbing along the river and a fisherman would cry out in distress that his best float had become entangled in the tree opposite. “Don’t worry!” I’d cry and he’d thank me and probably give me a trout to take home for tea. No such emergency ever took place - at least while I was in rowing distance - but I used to love finding them; fluorescent, alien, expensive-looking. Sometimes they’d still have the hooks and weights attached and I’d have to spend 10 - 15 minutes delicately untangling them.)
Soon after that summer, I discovered girls, beer and smoking fags in the order named. I made some actual friends, we started going to the pub and I got far too aware of my (ridiculous, shambling) image to want to be seen dead in a fucking rowing boat. So the boat went away in the shed where it stayed until it was sold, unremarked by me, a few years later.
I guess the reason that I’m writing this - other than to indulge in yet more whimsical melancholy - is to chide my teenaged self for not having the foresight to bring together four of the great loves of my life - rowing boats, girls, drinking and smoking fags - into one Awesome Super-Hobby.
I think its because I don’t drink, smoke or chase girls anymore that the lack of the fourth becomes so sorely missed - and I find myself in this vaseline-lensed reverie about taking my wife out on a misty Autumn evening, mooring up under my bridge with a half ounce of ready-rubbed and a bottle of whisky and, as the cars and tractors rattle along Bridge Street above us, having freaky-deaky boat sex as the sun goes slowly down.
