Speaker 1: Hello there, tonight, I'd like to take you drifting along
the Oxford Canal aboard a dark green narrow boat at dusk.
The Oxford is one of the oldest canals in England,
cut by hand more than two hundred years ago, winding
its slow way through the Warwickshire countryside. It was built
for coal barges, but these days it carries little more
than a few painted boats, moving at walking pace past
reed lined banks and low stone bridges. We'll travel only
a short way this evening, just as the willows darken
against a pale blue sky, the cottage windows begin to glow.
And by the way, if you'd like more stories like
this one, you might want to check out our app.
It's called Night and it is fresh stories for you
every day, so there's always something new to fall asleep to.
Plus you can hear them in your favorite voice. It's
a free download the links just below this video. Take
a moment now to settle, close your eyes if you'd
like to place a hand on your stomach if it
feels good, and take a slow, deep breath all the
way down. Feel the belly rise and the long, slow
breath out a slow, low thud somewhere under your feet,
the diesel engine of the narrow boat ticking over no
more than a heart beat. Beneath that, the soft, near
constant slap of water against the wooden hull. The boat
is called Wren. Her name is painted in pale yellow
letters on her dark green stern, with a small loop
of red rope coiled below it. She is sixty feet
long and seven feet across the standard narrow boat measure,
built to fit the old narrow locks of the English
canal system. To night, she is more than a small
wooden landing on the Oxford Canal, somewhere in the soft
green Warwickshire countryside, and you are setting out for the evening.
The light is dusk, not yet dot ar, A long
blue evening, the kind that comes in late spring never
quite seems to finish. The sky above the willows is
still pale. The water below is the color of old slate,
and on it the willows lie upside down, every leaf doubled.
You step down from the towpath onto the rear deck.
The boat shifts a little under your weight and then settles.
Someone has left the small cabin door propped open. A
faint warmth comes from inside, the warmth of a small
coal stove kept low, and the smell of strong tea.
The tin of biscuits opens somewhere on the countering lines
are slipped first the bow, then the stern. The boat
begins very slowly to drift away from the bank. The
Oxford Canal was finished in seventeen ninety. It was one
of the early canals designed to follow the contours of
the land rather than cut straight across it, which is
why it wanders the way it does, in long, shallow
curves through the fields. James Brindley had a hand in
the early stretches. The line you are on tonight is
the older, more meandering part, the part the engineers later
thought too slow and tried to shorten, and never quite did.
Ren moves at about three miles an hour walking pace,
slower sometimes when the wind is on her bow. The
tiller is long and worn, smooth, painted black, with a
brass cap at the end. The hand at the tiller
is your own. You only have to hold it. The
boat knows the channel more or less. The deep water
lies a little to the left of center, and that
is where Wren wants to be, and that is where
she goes. The first bend comes up softly. A line
of alders on the towpath side a field of cows
just visible through the hedge, three of them lying down already,
the others still cropping at the grass. None of them
lift their heads as the boat goes past. They have
seen a great many boats. One of them flicks an
ear at a fly. The engine note does not change,
a low, soft sud. The water at the bow opens
in the long pale v and closes again behind the stern.
A little farther on the canal narrows into a long
cutting where the reeds grow tall on both sides. You
hear the reeds before you really see them, a dry
papery rustle along the hull as the boat passes, and
somewhere among them a moor hen calling two short notes,
and then silence. The reeds are deep green at the
base and pale gold at the tip. A few of
them have last year's brown seedheads still standing. A dragonfly
lifts off one of them, hangs for a moment in
the air beside the boat, and is gone before you
can really look at it. The banks are close here,
you could almost touch them. The water has narrowed to
barely the width of the boat, and the boat seems
to settle lower in it, as if she has found
the place she fits best. The slap of water against
the hull becomes a softer slap, almost a stroke. A
pair of mallards is asleep on a flat piece of
bank in the reeds, A male and a female heads
tucked under their wings. They do not wake. The boat
goes past at walking pace, four feet from them, and
they do not wake. Ren has been polite, Wren has
been quiet. The diesel ticks on low and steady. Your shoulders,
without your noticing, have begun to drop. The tiller is
light under your hand. There is nothing to steer around.
The boat goes where the channel goes the run. The
cutting opens and the bank on the towpath side falls
away into a small wet meadow. There are king cups
in the grass, yellow flowers on long stems, half closed
for the evening. A heron is standing in the meadow
on one leg, perfectly still. It is not fishing, it
is just standing. As the boat goes past, it turns
its head. The quarter turn slowly and watches round pass,
and then turns it back beyond the meadow the first bridge.
It is a small hump backed stone bridge, the kind
you find every half mile or so along this canal.
The number twenty eight is painted on the brickwork at
the side in black on a white square, the way
the British waterways men used to mark them, and still do.
The arch is low as wren goes under you duck
your head a little without thinking, and the sound of
the engine for a moment comes echoing back off the
curved stone, a fuller sound, a rounder thud, and then
opens out again. On the other side. Underneath the arch,
it is briefly cool and faintly damp, and smells of
moss and old brick. Then you are through. On the
far side, a lane comes down to the bridge and
crosses it. There is no one on the lane. The
hedges have just leafed out. A single hawthorn in flower
stands at the corner, its blossom heavy and white in
the half light, and the smell of it reaches you
a beat after you see it, a soft, sweet, almost
almond smell, the smell of an English may. You take
a slow breath of that smell, And then it is
behind you, and the boat moves on a little farther on.
You hear the lock before you see it. It is
not a loud sound. It is the soft, hollow rush
of water through a half open paddle in the lock
gate somewhere ahead, around the next bend, a pouring sound,
steady and patient, like a tap left running in another room.
Wren slows. You ease the throttle down with the small
lever beside the tiller, and the engine drops to a tick,
and the boat coasts in toward the lock landing. It
is a single lock, and narrow lock, only seven feet wide,
the standard size on this canal. Two pairs of black
wooden gate, one at each end, with long balance beams
sticking out over the towpath. The lock chamber between them
is empty tonight, or nearly so. The water inside is
lower than the water you are floating on by perhaps
six feet. You will have to fill it before Ren
can go in. There is no one else here. The
lock is yours. You tie the boat to a bollard
on the landing loosely with a single loop. The towpath
under your boots is fine, pale gravel. There is a
small wooden bench beside the lock, painted dark green, and
the noticeboard with the rolls of the canal in faded
white letters. Someone has left a folded paper bag on
the bench, and the half empty bottle of water, left
perhaps by an earlier boater and forgotten. The lock takes
its time. You take years. First, the paddles on the
far gate. The gates at the upper end must be lowered,
if they are not already, so that no more water
is coming through. You walk along the lock side to
check they are down good. Then the paddles on this
end the lower gates must also be down to hold
the water in. Once it begins to rise. You check
those two down. Then the gates at this end must
be closed. If they are not already. They are good.
Now the upper paddles can be raised slowly to let
water in from the higher pound above. You take the windless,
the short cranked iron handle that every boater carries, and
walk along the towpath to the upper end of the lock.
You fit the windless onto the square spindle at the
top of the paddle gear, and you begin to turn
it slowly, one quarter turn at a time. There is
a soft clicking inside the mechanism, a pall falling into
a ratchet, and with each click, the paddle deep down
in the lock wall under the water rises a fraction
a half inch, another half inch, the water on the
far side of the gate begins to find its way through.
You do not raise the paddle all the way. You
raise it about a third and you stop, and you
walk back along the towpath to watch. The lock is filling.
Water is rushing in through the underwater channels at the
upper end, and you can see on the dark surface
inside the chamber to slow circular swirls where the water
is coming up around them, smaller eddies, a piece of
leaf turning a feather of foam. The water is rising
at the speed of a slow tide, not quickly, not
all at once, but in a steady, patient lift. The
lock walls show their wet line, dark with old water
paler above. As the water climbs, the dark line climbs
with it, fraction by fraction, inch by inch. The damp
green moss at the corners of the sea stones is
being submerged again. You lean on the balance beam and watch.
It will take perhaps eight minutes to fill. There is
nowhere else to be. The engine of the boat behind
you ticks on at its low idol. The water rushes
softly through the paddle. A little farther up the cut,
the blackbird is singing in a hedge, slow phrases, a pause,
another phrase. It is the last song of the evening
for that bird, the long late song that blackbirds sing.
As the light goes, water in the lock rises at
about half way. You walk back and ease the paddle
up another quarter, and the rushing sound grows a little fuller,
a deeper note. The swirls in the chamber widen. The
water comes faster, but never too fast. The stone of
the lock walls, pale local limestone, cut and laid two
hundred years ago by men with picks and barrows, is
warm to the touch where the last sun caught it,
and cool where it did not. You let your hand
writ on the top course. The stone is smooth where
ropes have worn it over the long decades. There is
one place where the rope grooves are deep enough to
fit your finger. The water rises at three quarters full.
The surface inside the lock has come almost up to
the level of the upper pound. You ease the paddle
down slowly, so as not to slam the mechanism. The
clicks reverse, pall out, ratchet free, and the paddle drops
back into place. The rushing sound dwindles, the chamber goes quiet.
The water has settled. Now the upper gates. You walk
across the small footbridge at the upper end of the lock,
lean your weight onto the balance beam and push. The
great wooden gate swings slowly on its iron pintle with
a soft creak. You walk it open. On the other side.
The matching gate swings open too, pushed by an unseen hand,
or rather by the same trick of the water, which
is now level on both sides, and lets the gate
move freely. The lock is open. You step back down
to ren You loose the loop from the ballard. You
ease the throttle gently forward, and the boat noses into
the lock chamber between the wet stone walls. And you
bring her to a stop in the middle, and you
cut the throttle to idle, and you climb up the
iron ladder set into the wall, and you walk back
to close the upper gates behind her. This too is slow.
You lean on the beam, the gate swings closed. You
cross the foot bridge. You lean on the other beam,
that gate swings closed. To They meet in the middle
with a soft wooden knock. Now the lower paddles. You
fit the windlass onto the spindle, and you raise the
paddle slowly, and the lock begins to empty. But here
you are doing the opposite of what you did before.
The water inside the chamber falls, Wren falls with it.
You watch her sink quietly between the walls, six feet
down into the lower pound. Her painted roof, which was
at the level of the towpath, is now far below it.
The water in the lock pours out through the lower
paddle with that hollow rushing sound, and the surface drops
inch by inch. When it has come level with the
lower pound, you lower the paddle, You open the lower gates.
You climb back aboard. Wren in her lower country, moves
out through the open gates onto the lower water. You
ease the throttle forward. She begins very slowly to move
on behind you. The lock sits empty again, the gates
left open, as the roll of the canal asks, some
other boat in the night or the morning will find
it ready. The engine note settles, the slap of water
against the hull resumes. The blackbird in the hedge is
still singing. You have lost perhaps fifteen minutes to that lock,
perhaps twenty, and you cannot remember being in any hurry
about any of it. A little farther on the canal
begins to bend toward a village. You see the church spire,
first dark against the soft sky, rising above a stand
of trees. Then a row of low red brick cottages
along the towpath side, their gardens running down to the water.
Then the warm yellow of a window, then another, then
a third. It is the time of evening when the
lamps inside English cottages have been let, but the curtains
have not yet been drawn. You can see through one
window the corner of a kitchen, a wooden dresser, a
row of blue and white plates standing on a shelf,
a brass kettle on a stove, Through another, the hall
with a coat on a peg, and the stair going up.
Through a third, only the warm shape of the lamp itself,
an ordinary lamp on an ordinary table, with no one
in the room. You are not looking in. You are
passing the gardens, come down to a low brick wall
at the water's edge. Roses are climbing on, some of
them not yet in flower. There are wooden mooring rings
set into the wall, painted in white and red, and
that one of them, a small painted dinghy is tied
up black with a yellow line round the gunne, and
the rose and castle painting on its bow. That is
the old canal tradition. A castle on a green hill,
a great pink rose in the foreground, three blue blooms
beside it. The rose and castle painting goes back at
least to the eighteen fifties. On the working boats, no
one is sure exactly where it began, Birmingham perhaps, or
the boat yards of the Midlands. It was the way
the working boatmen and their families decorated the cabins they
lived in, Castles on the doors, roses on the water cans,
lockets of bright color against the long gray life of
the working canals. The dinghy at the wall is a
small inheritance of that. Wren goes past that walking pace.
Inside one of the cottages, a radio is on. You
can hear briefly a piece of slow music a piano,
and then it is gone, and the cottage is behind you.
A little farther on a low arched bridge takes a
lane across the cut. A man is leaning on the parapet.
Looking down. He raises his hand as Wren goes under,
you raise yours. Neither of you says anything. Under the bridge,
the brick is mossed and damp. The arch echoes the
engine for a beat, then the open water again. The
village falls behind. The lamps in its windows shrink to
small warm points among the trees, and then the trees close,
and the villa is gone. You're breathing by now has
slowed without your having asked it to. There is a
long pound of open water ahead. The towpath runs straight
along the left bank. The hedge on the right is
full of cow parsley in white flower, and the sky
above is a deeper blue, now going toward indigo at
the top, and still pale where it meets the fields
in the west. The slap of water against the hull,
the low thud of the engine, the slow pale v
at the bow. You could ride them stretch a long time.
A pair of swans is on the water ahead, a
male and a female, with no signets, too early in
the year. Yet they see the boat, and they begin
to swim unhurriedly in the same direction as Ren, keeping
their distance. They will swim ahead of her for half
a mile perhaps, and then take to the bank or
turn and let her pass. There is no reason to
rush them. The water in their wake is dark and smooth.
The canal narrows briefly where an old bridge has crumbled
to a single stone arch, and then opens out again
onto a long embankment. Here the cut is carried above
the level of the fields on a raised bank of
earth built up two hundred years ago by men with
shovels and barrows. To either side, the ground falls away
gently into a wide, shallow valley. Beyond the valley, the
soft blue shapes of low hills, a wood dark against
the sky, A single white farmhouse very far off, with
one window lit closer in a field of young barley.
The green shoots only six inches tall, moving very slightly
in a breath of wind that does not reach the water.
On the embankment. A few rooks are coming home to
the wood. You hear them before you see them, that
dry cracked call distant, and then a long slow line
of black birds flying low across the valley, one after
another into the trees. The rooks have been coming home
to that wood for longer than the canal has run
beside it. The canal is two hundred years old. The
rookery is older. The wind dies, the barley settles, the
roofs are in a little farther on, you see the
white smoke of a chimney rising straight up out of
a copse, perhaps a quarter mile off, someone's wood fire,
just laid for the evening. You smell it a moment later,
faintly wood smoke drifting across the fields. It is a
smell that does not change very much from one century
to the next, applewood perhaps, or oak, something slow and clean.
The smoke rises, the smell passes, wren goes on, The
embankment ends, the land closes in around the cut again,
and the canal goes back into woodland. Old beaches with
their long, pale trunks and patches of bluebells still showing
in the undergrowth, only just past their best, the bluebells
or the color of the deeper sky in the wood.
It is darker. The dusk has come on faster here
than it did on the open embankment. You reach down
to a small switch beside the tiller and turn on
the boat's head lamp, A single small lamp at the bow,
throwing a pale yellow cone onto the water ahead. It
picks out the line of the bank, the dark fringe
of the reeds, the gleam of an oar blade left
leaning against a tree by some long ago boater. The
engine takes on a little farther on the canal goes
into a short tunnel. You have time to see the
dark mouth of it ahead, a low brick arch in
a hillside with a stone date plaque above it. The
numbers worn, and then Wren is at the entrance, and
you ease the throttle down and she slides in. The
tunnel is not long, perhaps a hundred yards, but inside
it the world becomes very small. The brick walls are
rynches from the boat on either side, and the roof
is just above the cabin top, and the head lamp
throws a long, pale halo on the water ahead. The
engine note doubles, then trebles. Every sound bounces off the
curved walls and comes back fuller, deeper, almost a cord.
Water drips from the roof in places, old drips, fed
by springs in the hillside above that have been falling
since the tunnel was cut. They patter on the cabin roof.
One falls cold on the back of your hand. The
walls are slick with moss and lime, pale green where
the head lamp catches them black Between you see at
the far end the small bright circle of the world again,
a coin of pale dusk, growing slowly as the boat
moves through. The bricks pass, the drips pass, the cold
smell of the tunnel, wet stone, iron, fairy, old water
fills the deck for a long moment, and then thins,
and then the boat is out and the engine note
opens in The evening is back around you, fuller and
bluer than before you switched the headlamp off again. The
dusk is still bright enough to steer by. The canal
opens into a long, straight, quiet pound the longest of
the evening. The towpath here is empty as far as
you can see. The hedges have gone wild, hawthorn and
elder and bramble knotted together, a soft dark wall on
either side. Above the hedges the sky. The sky is
the color of a deep blue cloth held up to
a lamp. There is one bright planet low in the
west Venus. Perhaps it has not been there long as
you watch two or three smaller stars come into the
cloth above it, very small and very pale. Your shoulders
have softened. Your hand on the tiller is light. The
boat goes where the channel goes. You only have to
hold it. It is time you find to think about
mooring up. A little farther on, the canal widens into
a small pool where a stand of willows leans out
over the water on the off side bank and the
towpath side has a soft green verge with three or
four iron mooring rings set into it. Someone has chosen
this spot before. It is a good spot. You ease
ran in toward the bank very slowly, and the boat
coasts the last few feet on her own momentum with
the engine a tdle, and she touches the grass softly,
hardly a touch at all. You step off with the
bowline and lip it through a ring and tie it
with a slow, deliberate knot the kind canal boaters use
that comes loose with a single pull in the morning.
Then the stern line, then the center line. Wren is moored.
You go back to the rear deck. You reach down
to the small brass key and you turn the engine off.
The silence that comes in. Is not really silence. It
is everything that was under the engine suddenly free to
be heard. The slow click of the cooling iron, the
soft slap of water against the hull, still there, smaller now,
almost private. A late blackbird somewhere very far off, still
finishing his song. The drip of dew of a willow
leaf into the canal. You stand on the deck for
a long moment in that not silence. The sky is
darker now, the blue has deepened almost to black at
the top, and only a soft band of pale gold
remains in the west. Low along the line of the fields.
The boat sits perfectly still on the water. A small
ripple from somewhere, a moor hen, perhaps settling on the
far bank, moves slowly across the pool and folds itself
into the reeds and is gone. You step down into
the cabin. Inside, the small coal stove is still glowing low.
Someone has set it earlier and banked it, and it
will burn quietly all night. The cabin is warm. It
smells of coal, smoke and tea, and a little of
beeswax from the old wood of the cabin walls. The
walls are tongue and groove, pine varnished to a soft amber.
A brass oil lamp hangs from the ceiling, already lit
turn and very low. There is a small table folded
out from the wall, with a blue and white striped
cloth on it. There is a kettle on the stovetop,
just off the boil. You can hear it ticking down.
There is a brown teapot beside it, and a single
cup and a small jug of milk under a beaded cover.
You pour the tea slowly. You watch the steam rise
from the cup in the lamp, light, slow and pale.
The windows of the cabin are small, with little curtains
pushed back to either side. Through them, you can see
the willows, dark now against the last gold of the sky.
A moth somewhere outside brushes against the glass once and
gives up and is gone. There is a low cushioned
bench along one side of the cabin, long enough to
lie on, with a folded wool blanket at one end.
There are books on a shelf above it, a guide
to the Oxford Canal in pale green cloth, a small
book of birds, a novel with its spine cracked along
the top from many readings a leather case for windlasses
hanging on a hook by the door. A bus timetable
for the local village tucked behind the lamp. Quite practical,
quite unromantic, kept there in case anyone needs to walk
to the shop in the morning. The tea is hot.
You hold the cup in both hands, the stove ticks,
the lamp glows outside. The canal lies perfectly flat, and
run on it and the willows above her. The Oxford
Canal was built to carry coal coal from the Warwickshire
field to Oxford and on to London by way of
the Thames. For a hundred years it carried that coal
at this speed, three miles an hour walking pace by
horse on the towpath. Whole families lived on the working boats.
They painted their cabins with castles and roses. They cooked
on small black stoves like this one. They moored in
the evening in places much like this place, on the
long quiet ponds between the locks, and let the night
come on. The coal trade is long gone. The canal
is still here, Wren is still here. You are still here.
You set the cup down on the table, You sit
on the cushioned bench. The wool blanket is heavy across
your knees. The lamp above the table is the only
light in the cabin. The light is yellow and small.
It reaches the corners of the room and stops outside.
And owl calls once from the wood beyond the willows,
a long, soft note, a pause, another, then nothing. The
stove ticks, The kettle is quiet now. The slap of
water against the hull is so small that you have
to listen for it, And when you listen, it is there.
The slap of water, the tick of the stove, the
hush of the canal, just the canal, just the boat,
just the long, blue, quiet evening on the water. The
lamp is turned a little lower. The willows lean over
Wren in the dark, and Wren rests against the soft
grass bank, and the slow water moves under her the
way it has moved for two hundred years. Just the
water against the hull, slow and quiet and steady, and
the long dark canal going on into the night.