There was a work party from the Waterway Recovery Group on site all week, and I knew a hired JCB had begun to haul the soil and assorted debris from the canal basin. Thousands of tons would have to be shifted before the structural condition of the abandoned wharf could be assessed. It seemed a good chance to capture the first sections of brickwork being exposed.
The WRG were all volunteers. They were many things in their ordinary lives — teachers, solicitors, bus drivers or factory workers. All they had in common was a willingness to give up their spare time to labour in the mud for no reward other than knowing they’d made a small contribution towards a bigger scheme.
Canals seem to hold a fascination for many people. As more of the Ogley and Huddlesford Canal emerged from its premature grave, dozens of volunteers were coming forward to help, organisations were finding funds to support the project and businesses were showing an interest. Not long ago, the whole subject of inland waterways had been a mystery to me, but I was beginning to grasp the appeal.
I’d already recorded the progress on the restoration of the lock. The early stages had been the most fascinating, as digging parties moved onto a completely filled-in site. Trenches had been dug to locate the wing walls of the lock, and one trench had hit a soft spot which turned out to be the paddle frame and drop shaft a couple of feet below ground. A trial hole on the land boundary exposed the distinctive orange brickwork of the arch above the approach ramp to the old bridge.
Restoration had suffered a setback when plans in the British Waterways archives revealed a three-foot-wide land drain had been cut through the head walls and inverts of all three locks in the Fosseway flight. The drain had caused damage to the head walls, and the floors of the lock had been partially cut away. A survey showed that just over three feet of masonry had been taken off the walls of the lock, creating yet more work for the volunteers.
By now, things were different. The lock had been fully excavated and repaired, including the weir and by-wash. Thanks to the land drain, it even contained water. A stile and picnic table were being erected, and work was under way to re-establish the towpath.
If you’re trying to be a freelance journalist, it helps if you can take your own pictures. Part of my inheritance had gone on a good Nikon 35-millimetre SLR camera. Since my photographic skills were self-taught, I’d adopted a technique explained to me once by an old newspaper staff photographer. If you shoot off enough exposures, one or two of them are bound to come out all right, he said. So I keep shooting whenever the conditions are right and the opportunity arises. And occasionally they do come out okay.
I set up my tripod and took pictures of the lock site for a few minutes without taking much notice of the activity. There were twenty or thirty people around, most of them anonymous in overalls or thick sweaters and jeans, and all wearing white hard hats. There were a few vehicles coming and going, and a dumper truck reversing on the lockside. It was only when I’d finished off a film and was packing my camera away that I became aware of Andrew Hadfield. He was a recent recruit to the restoration team. An architect by profession, he’d proved a valuable addition. Today, he was taking an interest in the visiting volunteer work party.
Andrew waved to me from the head of the lock, where he stood with an old man at his side. If only I’d taken that gesture as a warning instead of an invitation, things might have been different.
‘This is Chris,’ Andrew was telling the old man as we squelched towards each other. ‘He’s our resident reporter and chronicler. He gets us in the news now and then, when he can spare the time from his other work. Theatre and book reviews he does as well. He’s a cultured chap, you see.’
There was something in the tone of Andrew’s voice that told me I ought to have gone back to my book reviews right then and let my brain wallow in the familiar words and sentences. Books and plays are a series of worlds in which to escape, where reality is kept at bay, at least for a while.
The old man was stepping forward, his shoulders stiff inside his overcoat. He picked his way carefully over the mud, tapping his stick on the broken bricks. The sound was like the ticking of a watch, slow and relentless, like the old carriage clock back at Stowe Pool Lane.
‘You don’t know me — do you, Christopher?’ he said.
‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t.’
I hadn’t been called Christopher for a long time, not since my father had died three months before. It wasn’t a name used by friends or workmates, and certainly not by strangers who’d just been introduced. It was a name used only by family, and a family was something I no longer had.
Andrew laughed in delight at my expression, and took my arm to pull me closer to the old man.
‘I’ve got a surprise for you, Chris. This gentleman is Mr Longden. He’s an old friend of the family.’
‘Really? A friend of my family?’
I looked at the old man again. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about him, nothing that should have given me that strange, uncomfortable feeling when I first saw him. Despite a slight stoop, he was as tall as Andrew, over six feet. He wore an old coat, buttoned up tight against the chill, and leaned on a strong stick with a well-worn ivory handle in the shape of a ram’s head. His white hair was thinning on top but he’d allowed it to grow thick round his ears and on the back of his neck. A woollen scarf worn inside his overcoat didn’t hide the fact that his shirt collar was too loose on the sagging skin.
‘Yes, my name is Samuel Longden,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of me?’
The question seemed important to him. But it didn’t take much thought before I answered.
‘Not at all.’
A mixture of reactions passed across his face. Pain, disappointment, resignation — and some other powerful emotion I couldn’t name, but which made him thrust his body forward, so that he could grasp my hand in his cold, dry fingers. I stared at him in amazement as the old man leaned in and spoke with a sudden intensity.
‘Christopher,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what it means to me to meet you at last. Because there’s only you left now, you see. Only you.’
2
We sat in my Escort, parked in the lay-by on Fosseway Lane, close to the level crossing for the branch line to Brownhills. Andrew had been too pleased with himself, too intent on being part of our conversation, for me to want to linger at the lock site where he could listen to what Samuel Longden had to say. So I’d invited the old man into my car on the pretext of the cold, and he’d readily agreed.
The Escort had taken quite a hammering over the years. The inside trim was showing signs of wear, and the bodywork was full of chips and scratches that were revealed whenever I took it through a car wash, which wasn’t often. Most worrying at the moment was a strange rattle in the engine at low revs. I didn’t dare take it to the garage, for fear of what they might find wrong, and how much it would cost.
The heater worked, though, and gradually we began to warm up. The old man sat hunched in his overcoat, staring out at traffic passing over the level crossing. Once we were in an enclosed space, I became aware of a smell about him — not the stale, unwashed odour I might associate with old people, but a sort of mustiness, a suggestion of mildew, like a stack of old books in the cellar of a second-hand bookshop.