The Middle Level Navigations, Great Ouse, and Cam

The need to remove a large accumulation of weed from around the boat’s propeller and repair the ducting that forms part of her extended funnel meant that I had to stop at the service point in the town of March, a town that lay at the mid-point of my route back across the Middle Level Navigations.

The high engine revs required to keep the boat moving while the propeller was fouled had blown holes through the thin skin of the funnel ducting. Preoccupied with repairs, I didn’t initially notice the arrival of a grey pigeon on the roof of the boat. When I did see it and not wanting it to crap on my solar panels, I tried to shoo it away, but to no effect.

Under way once more, I saw that the pigeon had positioned itself on a rope-fender at the far end of the roof. It seemed content to face the buffeting wind as we chugged through the wide expanses of wheat grown on the land that was drained centuries ago.

Two and a half hours later, when moored up, the pigeon was still there. Closer inspection revealed that about a third of its brain was exposed on one side of its head. The clean removal of bone seemed to indicate that the likely cause of the wound was an air gun pellet fired by of one of March’s youthful inhabitants.

I filled a couple of compartments of an ice-cube tray with water and breadcrumbs and left it near the pigeon, while quietly thanking my father for barring me from owning an air rifle. He rightly surmised that I would have set about maiming the birds that fed on the nuts with which he filled the birdfeeder that hung from a conifer in the garden.

The urge to fire a gun must have lingered, because rather than taking the “social services” option at school, I joined the cadet corps, and so first encountered a rifle in the cold drizzle of a late Autumn-day at a military firing range in the Cotswolds. The smartly turned-out boy-soldiers and sailors who descended from the coach all believed they might emerge from the day being acclaimed as the best shot.

For the sergeants and corporals who ran the firing range, this was merely an opportunity to make the private school kids from whom the officer-class was drawn, suffer. Instead of an indoor firing range with gleaming assault rifles, telescopic sights, ear-defenders, and man-shaped targets, we were ordered to lie down outside in a row of cold, muddy puddles, and each handed an Enfield .303 rifle, the same model my maternal grandfather had used in the Battle of the Somme, and told to commence firing at a distant circular target, largely obscured by the drizzle.

Unlike my grandfather, I wasn’t a robust twenty-year-old with layers of muscle to protect my collar bone from the rifle’s recoil. I was a skinny fourteen-year-old, whose attention, rather than being focused on the target, was on the various locations to which the puddle-water had penetrated.

My first shot was accompanied by an uncomfortably loud detonation next to my ear, a stench of cordite, and a jolt of pain from my right collar bone. Each subsequent shot was executed with my eyes shut, my ear held as far away from the shell-chamber as was possible, and braced for the ever-worsening stab of pain coming from my right shoulder.

I was too immature to realise that this was an opportunity to gain the tiniest of glimpses into what my grandfather had had to endure at The Somme. He’d still have been a naïve youth when he enlisted as a private with the Liverpool Pals Regiment, and still eager enough, after eighteen months of training, to look forward to a deployment to the front line.

At some point during The Battle of the Somme, or one of the subsequent battles, he was reported as “Missing in Action”. His father didn’t tell his mother of the telegram that had been delivered until, a few days later, a second arrived reporting that his son had reappeared after been pinned down in a fox hole in no man’s land.

He’d enlisted as a private, but due to the high rate at which the officers were being killed, he was offered a commission. He turned it down, wanting to stay with his mates, but when very few of those remained alive, he accepted the commission. The result was that he subsequently found himself threatening his own men with his pistol in order to make them go “over the top”.

He survived the war, married, and his wife gave him a son and a daughter. In 1939, such was his despair that it was happening all over again, that his wife feared he might take his own life. He didn’t do so, but died in his early sixties from a lung condition relating to the inhalation of mustard gas.

There was no sign of the pigeon the next morning, just the boat at rest on the quiet waters of the drain amidst the wheat fields. Perhaps this was one of the drains dug by Napoleonic prisoners of war. More naïve young men whose dreams of adventure and glory had ended in misery and mud.

Peterborough Cathedral bathed in sunlight. The view is through the courtyard entry arch. — Peterborough Cathedral. Peterborough lies at the junction where The Middle Level Navigations split from the River Nene.

The interior of Peterborough Cathedral. Taken from high up and looking down on an arch and the main aisle below. — Peterborough Cathedral

A dramatic cloud formation at sunset is reflected in the River Nene at the Embankment Moorings in Peterborough. — Peterborough Embankment

Phil is seated on his small cruiser which is being towed through the weed filled drain by the Narrowboat Mary Joan. — Rescuing Phil and Jane whose engine had succumbed to the weed near their home at Nordelph on The Middle Level Navigations.

A dense clump of green weed can be seen on the stern plate of Narrowboat Mary Joan. — An example of the weed retrieved from around my propeller. There would be four or five clumps of this size to extract each time a descent into the weed hatch was required. The weed was usually held tightly in place with abandoned fishing line. While rescuing Phil and Jane, I removed weed from my own propeller three times within about thirty minutes.

Ely Cathedra in bright sunlight is seen through a stone arch to one side. — Ely Cathedral, which lies just above The Great Ouse. This photo was taken while passing through on the way to Cambridge.

A knitted eel catcher postbox cosey is in the foreground. He has a net and a swan sits on the water next to him. There is a steel cord and padlock around the bottom. — Whoever acquired the contract to create knitted postbox cosies in Oundle, has also found work in Ely. This is an eel catcher with his net, an occupation that may have given the city its name. The cosy was padlocked to the crown of the postbox via a steel cord. It doesn’t seem to be a foolproof security measure.

A middle aged man in white hat and shirt sits in the stern of narrowboat. — On the outskirts of Cambridge, on the River Cam, I discovered that the intellectual gravitational pull of the university was already evident. John, who moored next to me, has a maths degree from King’s College. He kindly provided an hour’s free I.T consultancy on a coding issue with which I was wrestling. He also kindly said I could use his city mooring for the week as he’d be away exploring the tributaries of the Great Ouse.

Kings College Chapel is viewed across a field that contains three brown cows. — King’s College Chapel

Caroline and James are pictured in the courtyard of Selwyn College. — Caroline (whose father was my father’s cousin) and James in the quadrangle of Selwyn College. Caroline (at the age of 70) teaches a “Maths for Engineers” course at the college, which indicates that brain function does not necessarily diminish with age. James is a fellow of the college and teaches computing and electronics. They gave me a tour, which included the new university developments in west Cambridge. The architectural quality of which was in stark and depressing contrast to the beautiful colleges.

The rather ugly bulk of Cambridge University Library can be seen behind an example of the iconic red telephone box.

The main library building of Cambridge University. It was designed by the architect Giles Gilbert Scott, as was the iconic red telephone box that stands before it. His design for Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral indicates that the library was not an “off day”, but rather, the telephone box was a very rare moment of inspiration.