There and Back Again

In the biting spring rain of the Easter Bank Holiday I set out South again, under the M6 motorway and all the way to the junction of the Brinklow Arm where the canal undercuts the Fosse Way. Here I finally hit the BIG RED SIGN (not literally): “Canal Closed". This is as close to the finish line as it’s currently possible to reach, and the word from Waterways is that any reopening is still a way off. I span round in the mouth of the junction- a beautifully executed reverse three-point turn which was only beautifully executed because there was no-one there to see it- and with more than a little annoyance headed back the way I came.

Back North to swing through the Second City, en route to the finish line from the West instead. Without time and patience to enjoy this diversion for the journey that it is, I make the most of the Easter holiday and punch back up onto the Coventry Canal. Traversing first the city, then the towns of Bedworth, Nuneaton, Atherstone, and Fazely knocked off the itinerary in a couple of days with help from Willow, and Julian from the boatyard at Aynho. After a long and dark winter, making the most of the longer days is a relief, if not a bringer of better weather.

The Fazeley run-through on Sunday was marked by two significant events; the first being the removal of the winter boat covering. After months of being hunkered down against the constant wind and rain (another record-breaking winter for rainfall in England), the need to open the central cabin has become pressing. In order to measure up and enable the building of the workshop, all the existing centre structure must be removed, including the middle sides and roof, handrails and external handles of the fore and aft cabins. The temporary timber sides coming off is the first step, and for the first time in six months it is possible to cruise in the hold and see the world from a duck’s-eye view.

The second, and far more monentous event of the day is the addition of a new boat’s apprentice. At a little over ten weeks old Dora the terrier joined Willow for her first day on the water. Though she is yet no bigger than an outstretched hand, she took to the day with aplomb. A quick inspection of the craft for travel-worthiness, a bowl of milk for Dutch courage, and she spent the rest of the day on the roof wrapped in towel and scarf, happily watching the world drift by.

The next day saw me once again running solo onto yet another waterway; this time the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal. A new one for me, and a climb up Curdworth to Minworth, to the South of Sutton Coldfield and to the outskirts of Birmingham itself.

Here is another unexpected retracing of life, in the shadow of the M6 Toll road. In the late 1990s I took part in protests to stop what was then known as the Birmingham Northern Relief Road, as it cut another swathe through the already heavily-scarred landscape. The road and runway protests of the decade were personal landmarks for me, and much of my experience then shaped the man I am today. My first taste of direct action was given to me by my otherwise highly conservative mother, her ire bought up to boil by the building of the M40 motorway close to our home in South Warwickshire. I remember too our junior school (where I was still a pupil) put on a play about local friction arising from the road-building, the production drawing to a close to the strains of Mike and the Mechanics “The Living Years” (I didn’t sing, I put the acetate-printed lyrics on the projector). As I grew into my teens I became (and still am) highly politically and environmentally aware, and donned the politics of protest as readily as the army surplus greatcoat I used to wear. I immersed myself in the growing counterculture, and went to bat against the Criminal Justice Bill (and sadly, later it as the ‘Act’). I learned then to despise the destruction of habitat for private profit; and to my eye in those days the new Toll road was the most egregious of these acts. Sold as a solution to the congestion and pollution of the inner city M6, but made available only to those who could pay extra, it was no solution at all for those who needed it most. I hated it with a passion, and will not use it to this day. That protest became my swansong for the direct action of blockade; realising even as a teen that these acts are often more performative than effective in the way of such things. After that I changed course, and began working to heal the scars on land instead. I worked for years on conservation schemes, using the same machinery that brought destruction to reinstate what I could. I’ve dug countless miles of watercourses, made pools and habitats for mammal, bird, and aquatic life, planted hundreds of acres of trees and hedgerows. It’s a quieter protest of a sort, and it started where I now pass with the boat, alongside the tarmac white elephant that skirts the Warwickshire-Staffordshire border.

As I pick my way out of the landscape to head home today, I find myself on lanes I drove in the years after the motorway was built. We trekked across the wasteland on our old Ford diggers, joining pipes and ditches back up, turning hard standing back to field, planting, hedging, re-shaping hard edges into contours.

Curdworth, Grove End, Minworth; the hinterland of the new road but no less bashed about by it. Up a little further towards Shenstone where we made compounds fit for the potato harvests again. I could at one time take you from Bassett's Pole to Cannock without going near a main road because of it.

Here is another chapter flicked through like a photo album, the breifest of glimpses where a young man with ideals turned from shouting to shovel work. I’m reminded out of the blue of the “Digger’s Song”, a pure coincidence in an unrelated conversation; but the timing is aposite, as always. We were ‘noble diggers all' in those fields, both before and after the tarmac went down, I believe. Perhaps it’s self indulgent to think of oneself in these terms, but sometimes the best you can do isn’t what you’d hoped at the outset. Perhaps the work I did there in the later years will prove to be more worthwhile than all the shouting in the early ones, even if it did make me feel like an apologist for modernity at times.

In a few days I’ll slip the lines at Minworth and make a dash through Birmingham itself. Like Kristofferson I’m heading for the border, though over the bridge it’s Warwick not New Mexico. From there more chapters will open out in front of me, some new and others old.

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