Brigitte
offered another scene. “The Lock.” He remembered the Canal and
the Lock, the Barge and Lannigan.
They followed the
street and left the rows of town cottages to a place of solitary
farmhouses. From behind they heard the clip clop of a horse
approaching. A low flat hay cart drew alongside. The driver beckoned
and they joined three children who sat, legs dangling over the back
of the cart between the road and the seesawing bogie. Through a gate
they looked into a farmyard where a woman dressed in a long black
dress washed clothes in a small bath, scrubbing the soaped clothes
along the sideways leaning washboard.
Near the bridge,
they climbed up the steep and narrow lawn, and jumped off, onto the
grassy canal side below, and looked up waved thanks to the centre
stone and looked beneath into the lock and the tall black
water-keeper gates with sluices that leaked bright, splashing streams
to the water level below, and above in the higher stairs, to the
harbour beside the grain stores, the swans, the water hens and the
beds of green lilly pads with white lilly flowers.
A long, black,
narrow barge puttered from the narrow upstream channel into the
harbour, and waited for the lock side keeper. Lannigan appeared in
the splendour of his uniform: a black-grey suit, preceded by his fob
and chain secured waistcoat and puffing pipe, grasped beneath a thick
grey moustache and a battered narrow brimmed hat. He went quickly to
winch the splashing, noisy, water into the lower trough, raise the
level then open the gates to capture the barge; then lowering the
water to the lower level and releasing the barge into the lower
stairwell of the canal, so that it could continue its journey.
Job completed the
keeper returned to his green gated, rose-arched, cottage pathway, and
stopped to remove his hat and mop his brow, checked his timepiece
before entering the twilight interior to await another puttering
summons.
They ran up the
hill to the higher level and walked canal-side, past the hazel groves
the hawthorns, greengage trees and the damsons, towards the castle
and their secret place above the straight keep wall: conquered just
like the high orchard barrier with pointed stanchions fashioned from
the rusty hay turner.
High above the
ruins, the dungeons and the lower staircases, moat-circled from
invasion by the sedentary blue-green Grand Canal waters, and the
diamond glitter on the tumbling darting, skirting Barrow river flow,
on their regal seat in the window, beside the battlement walk, they
kissed, hugged, sighed, talked and dreamed.
