The Canal Barge – Part 1: Lock Keeper

"Slowly," said Raymond. "The lock does not like to be hurried."

"I'm turning the handle as slowly as I can."

"Then you are doing it wonderfully."

Helen laughed and leaned on the iron windlass. The sluice gate groaned, and water poured from the lock in a long creamy rush. The barge sank gently between the stone walls, with ferns and moss growing from every crack. Above them, a willow leaned across the sky, and the whole canal hummed with dragonflies and summer.

Helen, fifty-eight, a retired headteacher from Bristol, had booked the week alone after a thirty-year career and a quietly painful divorce. Raymond, sixty-two, the skipper, was tall and silver-haired, with a tanned face, a battered straw hat and an old-fashioned courtesy. He had run barge holidays on the canal for twenty years, since his wife's illness, and told the stories of every lock.

"This is lock twenty-three," he said. "The keeper's wife kept ducks. They live here still, I think, as ghosts."

"That's extraordinarily specific."

"I am extraordinarily bored. It is the nature of the canal."

By the third day Helen was working the locks without prompting. By the fourth she had learned to steer. They tied up each evening under the plane trees, and Raymond cooked on a tiny stove, omelettes with herbs, tomatoes warm from the sun, local goat's cheese and a bottle of burgundy. They ate on the deck while the light faded to gold.

"I have not enjoyed anything so much in years," she said, on Thursday.

"The week is nearly over."

"I know." Helen turned her glass. "I've been wondering if it has to be."

Raymond set down his fork. "Helen. I am sixty-two and I have not said this in a long time. I would like to ask if you would stay for another week. And I would like, very much, to kiss you."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Slow Water.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Slow Water.