BABY ON BOARD...

摘要

Late last August, five days after giving birth, I was discharged from hospital and arrived back at the boat with a brand-new child. He didn't come with a manual. My husband was working that day. "You will look after him, won't you?" he waved from the maternity unit door as I struggled valiantly through my final ward breakfast. I smiled wanly. A year earlier I'd seen the same plea in a WW history feature about an Aire & Calder boatman. Reassuring his wife that their five-year-old would be perfectly fine on a train of Tom Puddings, the words of Godfrey 'Goff' Sherburn were dredged verbatim from the sleep-deprived sludge of my brain: "I sit him in front of the wheelhouse and rope him down and say, 'Right, play - play your box, son,' and if the music stops I know he's tumbled in."