Fading From View

There’s been a bit of a hiatus of late, part health-related, part busy-ness, perhaps part nerves too. As I said recently, the return journey is now finished; a lovely chapter closed and another one about to begin. In the weeks to come, these pages will be filled with tales of welding, grinding, and painting; but it would be remiss of me not to mark this last travel passage with a few words.

I had pause to, well, pause, after reaching Warwick; there’s a stepchange required now- from hopping onto the deck each week to shove some more miles through the prop, to the organised and concerted effort needed to bring this project to fruition. It is daunting in a way, the enormity of the task at hand is now visible in all it’s complexity, and until the first spanner or grinder is applied to the work it all melds into one huge JOB, and seems all too Sisyphean for it. I had to take a step back for a couple of weeks, let the dust settle on the prospect of the next few months. Set my feet, if you will; adjust my balance, get a feel for my range.

More than this however, the mere idea of travelling through Warwick and Leamington seemed to unsettle me. For some reason I shied away from the trip, perhaps not wanting to shatter some sort of illusion. I know all-too-well that the place has changed dramatically, and it was as if my memories were suddenly fragile, not strong enough to withstand a new reality. The new landscape that might somehow burst the bubble of my identity, as if my own life could be taken away with the old bricks.

I let the boat rest at the bottom of Hatton Locks for a month, literally inching it along the moorings in a half-arsed attempt to stave off the displeasure of the waterways authorities. Then, finally, I got it done.

Finishing work at 4, I slip into Warwick ahead of rush hour and park on the side street I once walked up every morning with a hundred other Benford factory workers, en route to a place that endures only in memory.

I untie and pass the Cape of Good Hope pub, once surrounded by the sprawl of the factory where I served my apprentice years, and I am struck by the comprehensiveness of its erasure. There is no sign that this was once a tangle of iron and brick industrial buildings; afloat in a sea of bright yellow construction equipment, stacked and shoved into every available space. Today the area is- as many canalside locations are- a collection of bland quasi high-end residences. The trees now lining the banks tell the story of how long it has been gone. No young saplings here, but Oak and Ash with bows which hang over the water and speak of their own permanence, where once a broken chain-link fence hung limp by stacks of dumper truck chassis frames, all queued for their visit to Mark Elswood's paint shop.

As the boat descends Cape locks I look across to where my paint shop once stood, adjacent to both the top lock and the pub.

This is where my canal journey began in earnest, as I stood watching the morning mist rise from the water as heaters slowly warmed the workshop inside. As an apprentice I used to get my share of early shifts, and was often the first person in the place. I’d start the burners to begin the shift and stand in the small gap between the building and fenceline, chainsmoking rollups made from the dog-ends of cigarettes left in the ashtray by the previous shift. I’d steal these first few minutes of the day for myself- smoking, drinking the vending machine coffee, and listening to some tunes. I can still hear the music through my walkman headphones, feel their foam pads tight against my earlobes as Mark Chadwick sang “but you haven’t made it yet, no you still haven’t made it yet". Thirty years on the sentiment remains aposite, though at least now I have an idea of where it is.

As I stare, mute, at the scene, tangible momentos to the past begin to resolve, the forgotten corners that can tell a story if asked. An incongruous dog-leg line to the fencing, the unnatural dropping away of the ground level. It clearly wasn’t always like this, here. Mostly though, the experience is solastalgic- that resonating response deep within which shouts of your own mortality and the utter indifference of the world to it.

The lock is empty so it’s time to move on, park it back in the past. Away to Leamington, see what else has changed.

Warwick continues to baffle me as I pass, and at times I am completely without bearings. If you had blindfolded and dropped me in some places I would never have guessed my location, until passing Tesco the scene opens out to the more familiar- the transition between the two towns, revealing the beautiful meadows of the Avon crossing below the short aqueduct; too low-lying to have been gobbled up by years of urban development. There are odd pockets of bucolic landscape here, a small farm, pasture, grazing animals. You could be forgiven for not knowing that here you were squeezed between two sizeable towns that from the road have no separation.

Into Leamington the old-new contrast is equally stark; this once heavily industrial town now leafy and clean. Long gone is the Ford Foundry, where the castings they made were of such high quality they were exported to assembly lines the world over. Gone too the huge AP plant up the Tachbrook Road, at one time the biggest employer in the area, and maker of car brakes for everyone and everything. Potterton’s, also a distant memory; though I am heartened to see that Flavel are still here, overlooking the canal from Clemens Street, even if the site looks dilapidated compared to it’s neighbours.

Another change I note is that almost everyone who passes me is a jogger; sculpted calves and bottoms shuffle past- prisoners in a Lycra embrace, obligatory white earpods in place under Nike caps. It’s genuinely good to see, as not all that many years ago this town (love it with all my heart as I do) was bandit country- especially for boaters. Though as I drift through Old Town I again feel a pang for the place I knew. I pass under the bridge that separates Clemens and Brunswick Streets, where I lived for some of the best and worst years I’ve known. Court Street where I worked in the finest pub I ever knew, and then Althorpe Street where I was a prototype fabricator and where a colleague ‘gifted me' all his overtime- whilst trying to steal my girlfriend in the evenings I was kept late at work. Not all memories are rose-tinted after all, even if his attempts ultimately failed.

Passing on I glimpse through low trees onto a row of little houses and a park, the white-painted end-of-terrace no longer the pub known locally as Hector's House, site of many drunken New Year's Day sessions (it was the only pub that opened on January 1st), and source of the strongest Rum Punch known to man.

I swallow down a lump in my throat along this stretch; I lived so long, often without anywhere to live, at this end of town. That it totalled only 6 of my nearly 46 years is irrelevant, they loom so large in my own landscape as to carry their own gravity. Some of us didn’t make it out of those years alive, and the steel railings at the butt-end of Leam Terrace remind me of Herb, who passed away one cold night on that very stretch of pavement, and now reaches out from 26 years ago to shake me from any sort of comfort in this reverie. Thoughts pass inevitably to others now gone, and most of all to Woody, my first real friend in the town, who we lost to heroin and the cold night in 1998. His face is still clear to me, olive skinned and with a mop of jet black hair framing his John Lennon-style round glasses. We sold the Big Issue together for a while at the crossroads of the Parade and Warwick Street, and he taught me how to keep warm sleeping rough, where it was safe to be at night, and where to go for cheap food. For a time I am ashamed of myself- I can’t recall his name; but it comes in the end, what little of it I ever had; having never been given his full name for the keeping. The echoes of these lives grow ever more faint after all this time; and it pains me to realise that one day I will think of them all for the last time. I must try harder to bring them to mind more often, these men and women who once populated my world with such vigour.

But I know it will all settle like silt in the water behind me, regardless of intent. In truth it’s gone; the town doesn’t exist like that any more, and neither do I. There will always be a part of me that thinks of Leamington as home, even though I know it's unlikely to ever be so again.

The rattle and staccato pop of the engine below me bring me back to today, and this little journey back through time concludes as I pass out of Radford and back into the countryside. I tie up at one of my favourite old mooring spots near the Fosse Way and leave for a different home, as the long-threatened storm finally breaks overhead. Next time I’m aboard I’ll have an angle grinder in my hand and the build will begin at last.

Away from the past once more, it’s time for some future.

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