While the Storm Rages, page 8
But Noah disagreed with a dismissive wave of his arm. ‘We can look at it as we go,’ he replied. ‘The Captain knows which way is west and we need to set off now while the tide is high. That’s all we need to think about at the moment.’ And with as much certainty as he could muster, he reached for the ignition, which coughed and spluttered, without ever threatening to start.
‘Give me a second,’ he said, without looking up. He tried again, and again, but there was nothing, the only life was the heat rising in his cheeks. ‘Always takes a while... come on, Maudie, come on!’
He could feel their restlessness beside him. Even Samson on the deck looked slightly agitated, slamming his hoof hard on the ancient deck.
Noah tried the choke, then let the engine rest, not wanting to flood it and risk never getting started. But whatever he did, the engine simply refused to catch.
‘Where shall I hit it?’ said Big Col.
‘Hit my boat and I’ll hit you straight back.’ Noah couldn’t help it, he was flustered and frustrated.
That was all the encouragement the bully needed, aiming a kick at Noah that would’ve impressed Samson himself. But whilst Noah was smaller than Big Col, he was way quicker, and seeing the kick coming, he swivelled out of the way, leaving his attacker’s foot to thwack against the steering column.
There was a metallic bang, then a rumble, and what sounded suspiciously like a belch, which made Noah jump back in front of the wheel, turning the ignition one, final, frantic time.
And that was it, the Queen Maudie awoke, announcing it to everyone within a one-mile radius.
‘Quick! Clem, untie her. Now!!’
The Queen Maudie roared a throaty, smoky greeting that was matched by Noah, as he cautiously opened up the throttle and felt the water part either side of the boat’s flanks.
Noah whooped, the dogs barked and Samson brayed in what they all hoped was delight.
They were moving, already feet closer to Windsor, the Duchess and hope, but within seconds they reached their first obstacle. Limehouse Lock, which separated the basin from the freedom of the Thames, and a rotund, pock-faced man who stood guard there.
23
‘Who on earth is that?’ Big Col asked as the boat pulled closer.
‘That,’ sighed Noah, ‘is Tipsy Nev.’
‘What sort of name is that? And what’s he doing there?’
‘He’s the lock keeper, isn’t he? And as for his name? Well, you’ll see, soon enough.’
Noah closed the throttle as Queen Maudie pulled up to the lock. Big Nev leaned forward, squinting. ‘Who’s that then?’ he barked, voice thick with tobacco. He leaned still further, unsteady on his feet, the wooden pillar in front of him the only thing stopping him from tumbling headfirst into the water.
‘Is he drunk?’ Clem asked, although Nev clearly was.
‘Drunk?’ replied Noah, ‘at this time of day. No, Nev’s just tipsy. Like he always is.’
‘Who’s that then?’ Nev repeated, his eyes two bleary bloodshot slits.
‘It’s me, Nev, Noah Price. You know, Tom’s boy.’
‘Tom? Tom’s not here. Marched off to sock Adolf a couple of weeks back.’ He threw a clumsy punch that saw him lurch against the pillar for a second time.
‘Yes, I know, Nev, and I’m his son. You remember me, don’t you?’
‘Course I do!’ the man chuckled. ‘Whass your name again? Nick, is it?’
‘Noah. Like the man on the ark.’
‘Ah yes, yes, course.’ Nev’s face remained blank, clueless. ‘Where you off to then?’ He tried to look the length of the boat, his eyes widening when they happened on Samson. ‘That an ’orse?!’ he gasped, rubbing at his eyes.
‘Oh no,’ Noah replied. ‘I’d never take a horse on a boat. This is a donkey. It’s a completely different thing.’
Nev burped, like Noah’s statement had caused a tiny explosion in his brain. He knew he should say something back, he was a responsible lock keeper after all, but he couldn’t think what it should be. So came up with something else.
‘Your dad know you’re taking his boat?’
‘Course he does.’
‘S’just... well... you’re a kid, aren’t you. Not sure I should be letting you loose on the river with a beast onboard. Ain’t safe, is it?’
‘We’re not going far, Nev. Just to Woolwich and back. Need to get this donkey to a field down there, you know, before the bombs start.’
Nev snorted and staggered. ‘S’hardly the safety of the countryside, is it?’
‘Are you kidding me?’ joked Noah. ‘The Nazis won’t bother dropping a bomb on Woolwich. It’s a wreck already.’
That brought a drunken hoot from Nev. It was working, Noah thought. He’d open the lock in no time. But then Nev seemed to sober up a touch.
‘Very funny. But I can’t let you out, can I? Maritime rules.’
‘Come on, Nev. We’ll only be an hour. Two at the most!’ And by then, Noah thought, by then you’ll be too drunk to remember we even exist.
‘Rules... is rules.’ Nev smiled, like he’d said something incredibly profound.
‘I understand, Nev,’ Noah sighed, feeling Clem and Big Col’s eyes burning into him. ‘It’s just, well, Dad left you a gift, to say thank you, because he knows how... well... professional you are. I’ll just go fetch it.’
Noah dashed from the cab and into the cabin. Nev weaved and lurched on the jetty. Clem and Big Col just looked confused, until Noah returned, holding a half-empty, dusty bottle.
‘This is for you,’ he said, thrusting it into Nev’s fist. ‘Courtesy of my dad. Half a bottle of his finest, famous Moonshine.’
Nev’s eyes widened, his pupils a murky green and the rest pure bloodshot red. He gasped, and pulled the bottle to his chest, cradling it like it was his first, precious grandchild.
‘My dad was always very grateful to you,’ Noah said, laying it on thick. ‘And, well, this was his last wish, before he went off to fight. Get Samson to safety, he said. That’s all that matters to me.’
Noah had no idea if Nev had heard him. He still seemed lost in thought, enthralled by his new booty. But just as Noah thought he’d come up short, the man turned, set the bottle down with utmost care, before turning his hands with surprising dexterity, to the lock’s mechanisms.
‘It’s working!’ Clem whispered. ‘What is in that bottle?’
‘Water,’ Noah whispered back. ‘But he’s legless, isn’t he? And before he realises, we’ll be long gone.’
As soon as they chugged slowly away from the basin and on to the Thames, Clem went for the map, concertinaing it out until it filled the cab. Her pupils dilated, swimming in the vast sea of knowledge that the map held, her brain drawing an instant line from where they were, to where she thought they needed to be.
Noah though, had challenges of his own to consider, namely the busyness of the river itself.
He had lived by the river his entire life, and so knew this stretch pretty well, but he’d never seen it from this vantage point: never been steering a boat down it. And if he was honest, it was all a little bit much. Everywhere he looked there were boats, some large, some small, but all seemed to be belching the most furious acrid smoke into the sky, which lingered over them, nipping at his eyes and scratching his chest.
If that wasn’t bad enough, everything seemed to be moving much faster than them, and more aggressively, taking advantage of the high tide. It was like the world was about to end in mere minutes and everyone needed to get home before it did.
Tugs surged to his left and right, some of them hauling vessels that were ten times the size of theirs: their wake alone threatening to capsize them. There seemed to be no order to it, who went where and who waited for whom. Noah knew how it worked on the road: you drove on the left and gave way to the right, but here? Well, it was a free for all.
Panicking he decided to veer back to portside, to hog the bank, thus avoiding the bigger vessels, but as he did so he merely earned a savage blare of a horn from a boat behind, which made him veer right once more.
‘Flippin’ Nora,’ he moaned, heart pounding. Whichever way he steered he saw obstacles or trouble: a bobbing buoy to his right, a sandbank to his left. He had no idea whether it would be best to open up the throttle and push on, or creep along, hoping that if he crashed slowly, it would do less damage.
What didn’t help, was Clem wafting the map too close to his eyeline.
‘Leave off with that, will you?’ Noah huffed.
‘What, and not know where we’re going?’
‘I can’t flipping see where we’re going because you’re waving that thing in front of my face!’
He grabbed at the map, pulling it roughly from her hands and throwing it over his shoulder, before realising he had steered too close to the bank again. A swift, stern turn of the wheel saw Maudie veer quickly right, too quickly, drawing a stiff rebuke from Big Col, and an even stiffer one from Samson, who turned and brayed his disapproval. If Noah didn’t know better, he could’ve sworn the donkey tutted at him, before turning its head away in search of luscious grass to pine after.
‘Noah, what are you doing?’ Clem snapped.
‘Trying not to crash because of you and your obsession with maps!’
‘It’s not obsessive to want to know where we’re going. It’s not obsessive to have a PLAN!’
‘Why do we have to have a plan?’ Noah sighed, ‘Why can’t it be, I don’t know, an... adventure!’
‘Because I want to know how far we’re going and when we’re likely to be back.’
‘Why? What does it matter?’
‘It matters to me, Noah.’
‘Will we see the Houses of Parliament again?’ interrupted a voice from behind them both. It was the first time in his life that Noah had ever been pleased to hear Big Col’s voice.
‘Course we will. Once we reach Waterloo. But we’ve only just left home.’
‘Oh. Right.’ It didn’t seem to make much sense to Big Col, even though they’d practically passed it on the way to Battersea earlier. ‘And Tower Bridge? What about that?’
The excitement looked odd on his usually aggressive face, and for the tiniest split-second Noah saw a slightly different side to him.
‘Tower Bridge is ahead. We’ll sail right under it soon.’
Clem saw his enthusiasm as an opportunity, grabbing the map and smoothing it on the floor in front of Big Col.
‘Look, here’s Tower Bridge, and here’s the Houses of Parliament and we, well, we’re somewhere around here.’ She jabbed her finger slap bang on top of Wapping.
Big Col looked like this was all news to him. ‘And Buckingham Palace. That’s over here, isn’t it?’ His finger went too far north, so Clem patiently put him straight.
‘Haven’t you ever, you know, walked round London with your mum and dad? Seen the sights?’ She wasn’t judging. It just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do. Why live in the capital if you weren’t going to go out and explore it?
‘Dad works. Mum too.’
‘But Sundays, maybe?’
Big Col shrugged but seemed to retreat inside himself, like he was remembering his Sundays and wasn’t too keen on what he saw.
‘There’ll be other landmarks on the way too,’ added Clem. ‘Hampton Court Palace maybe. And the maze.’
‘Thought you didn’t like getting lost,’ Noah interrupted, trying to make a joke. But there wasn’t time to answer.
‘Is there somewhere warm I can put Delilah?’ Big Col said, stroking her gently.
‘Warm? It’s bloomin’ boiling today already!’
‘Not for her it’s not. She’s from India. She needs it like a furnace. Sleeps in a box near the stove at home.’
Clem looked concerned. ‘And what happens to her... if she gets too cold?’
‘Dunno really. I only usually take her out for a bit, until she seems to go a bit still. Then I pop her back in the warm again.’
Noah didn’t like the sound of this. He was hardly a vet, but he didn’t know if they could keep Delilah as warm as she needed to be. And if she got sick? Then he didn’t want to see how Big Col would react. He clearly loved the snake enormously.
‘Stoke the stove in the cabin. That’s your best bet. With the door shut it’ll soon heat up. You can tidy up while you’re down there.’
‘It better had warm up,’ Big Col replied, his voice suddenly like it had just been sharpened. ‘I’m trusting you.’ And with that, he thudded from the cab, leaving Clem and Noah alone.
‘Never mind him,’ said Clem. ‘But we do need to look at the map and work out exactly where Windsor is and where we can moor the boat.’
Noah gave in. ‘Fine, just do it on the floor and not in front of me. I need to concentrate on all this traffic!’
So she did and he listened occasionally, when he wasn’t too stressed, tuning into the bits about distance and tides and times, tuning out when it veered away from the essential into a geography lesson.
‘So I think if we’re going about ten to fifteen miles an hour, we should be there about seven o’clock tonight. Hopefully the Duchess will let us in at that time and then we could come back tonight or sleep on the boat and make an early start in the morning...’
Noah interrupted her, hollering ‘TOWER BRIDGE!!’ at the top of his voice as it loomed imperiously into view, though Big Col didn’t seem to hear. Or if he did, he suddenly wasn’t interested.
‘Lord,’ Noah thought to himself, ‘Please don’t let Big Col be below deck, resuscitating a snake with hypothermia.’
Noah had his own things to worry about. The bridge brought a new wave of boats, weaving left and right, jostling for the quietest passage. The smoke intensified too. Made Noah think about what it would be like if bombs did start to drop on their city. Is this what it would be like? Foggy and miserable and scary?
He tried to stay calm, but it felt like there was menace and threat everywhere. Not just from other boats, but from the cranes that seemed to suddenly loom over them out of the smoke. It looked like they had sharpened their claws, ready to pick them out of the water and abandon them, broken on the shore.
It felt strange. All of it, and a more sensible child might have realised they were suddenly out of their depth.
But that wasn’t Noah’s way. There was a dog nuzzled up against his leg and a donkey in a sunhat obscuring his view, not to mention the others. He had a mission to fulfil, and he told himself repeatedly that he couldn’t give up.
24
So, they veered tortuously slowly towards central London, belching dirty clouds of their own and drawing strange looks as they went.
The looks had less to do with Queen Maudie’s mechanical limitations though, and more to do with the donkey chained to the bow of the boat. It wasn’t rare for vessels to have elaborate figureheads carved into them, but Samson and his straw hat had passing sailors rubbing their eyes in wonder.
It didn’t go unnoticed by Clem.
‘Do you think there will be bobbies patrolling the river? You know, in boats?’
‘Policemen in boats,’ laughed Noah. ‘Why?’
‘Well, because they’ll stop us if they see us. I mean, three children and a donkey steering a clapped-out tub down a heaving river on the first day of war?’
Noah was affronted. ‘Oi! Maudie is not a tub or clapped out. And she’s named after my mother. So, if you insult one, you insult them both!’
‘Noah, I’m serious. We’ll be in real trouble if the police stop us, and that’s before they discover the man-eating python in the cabin.’
Noah looked around him. And she did have a point. The river was teeming: a jumble of boats of different size and lengths, though none of the vessels seemed to be out for pleasure. Everyone was carrying something. Fruit boxes piled high, burlap sacks packed so tight it was a wonder their decks weren’t sagging beneath the drink. One larger boat looked like it was carrying some sort of gigantic gun, which unsurprisingly, piqued Big Col’s interest, as he came out of the cabin.
The one thing they all had in common was that every other vessel was manned by an adult, not by a twelve-year-old child.
‘At some point, someone is going to see it’s you, a boy, driving this boat, and when they add in Samson, well, they’re going to be suspicious.’
‘It’ll be fine, I’ll just pull Dad’s cap down a bit.’ He did so, before realising that he couldn’t see a thing.
‘Noah, your dad is six foot tall at least. And well, you’re not. Clearly.’
‘Good things come in small packages,’ he replied, quickly. His dad had said it to him enough times.
‘Children come in small packages. Which is why they get arrested for driving boats that don’t belong to them.’
That shut Noah up.
‘Of course. We could let Big Col drive. He is much taller,’ continued Clem.
Big Col loved that idea. Course he did, making noises like a racing driver, which spurred Noah into action. He told Clem to grab a wooden crate and a long oilskin mac that had been thrown in the corner of the cab.
Then, while keeping half an eye on the traffic around him, he rummaged in an old tin box, palming something long and wooden, before jamming the box under the steering wheel and the heavy coat over his shoulders. Standing tall on the crate, he shoved an old pipe into his mouth and beamed the smuggest of grins.
‘There!’ he said, ‘Now I’m six foot two. And thirty-five years old.’
‘Smoking will stunt your growth,’ Clem said, deadpan.
‘And you don’t look old. Just ugly,’ guffawed Big Col, ‘but then again, you always did.’ He yanked Dad’s hat further over Noah’s skull. ‘There, that’s perfect. Don’t ever take it off.’
Even Clem laughed which riled Noah. He asked them in the most colourful language possible to leave him well alone. He needed some space if he wasn’t going to crash, or try to throw them both overboard.
It continued that way for the next hour, with the river busy and the three children giving each other a wide berth. As wide as the Queen Maudie would allow anyway. Each of them seemed content enough with their own company. Noah gave his focus to the steering of the boat and the avoiding of bigger, faster, angrier vessels. He had taken the decision to stick close to the bank again but worried they might run aground, whilst the wake from the other boats made steering difficult, as the water not so much lapped against the sides of the Maudie as slapped them. It gave the impression of being at sea, rather than on the river.
