Kiss My Name by Calvin Wade Read Free Book Online Page A

more than capable with practical stuff too, so we were reasonably confident that we would cope and we did. The girls thought it was the greatest adventure known to man, which I felt particularly pleased about. They stood on deck for near enough the whole first day, waving and chatting to walkers on the canal’s edge. They were both desperate to take the wheel too, which Deidre and I allowed, supervised of course. The speed limit permitted was four miles an hour, so unless we were approaching a lock, it was a relaxed form of travel and even the locks are a breeze when you’ve been through a couple.
                  All told, our trip was an eight day, seven night adventure. We planned to head as far as Wigan and then turn back. By the end of the first day we had reached Skipton. The second day was great fun as we went as far as Burnley, but had to pass through the Foulridge tunnel, which was a dark, semi-circular tunnel almost a mile long. Joanne was really scared we would break down in there, but once you get a little way in, because it is straight, you can see the bright light of your exit point, which comforted her enough to avoid tears. The bloke who gave us our induction on operating the boat in Silsden told the girls a story that just before the First World War, a cow called Buttercup fell into the canal just by the Foulridge tunnel and rather than just clambering back out, she swam the whole way through it.
    Sarah kept saying, “Dad, do you not think it’s amazing that Buttercup swam through here? I didn’t even know cows could swim!”
    I’m not sure whether this was just a tale for the kids, but if the story was true, Sarah was right, Buttercup must have been a bloody good swimmer!
                  Our third day was another pleasant run, through East Lancashire, from Burnley to Blackburn. That evening, Deidre and I were enjoying a glass of Hock on deck after the girls had gone to sleep. It was a wonderful, warm, cloudless evening and I must admit we started to become a little self-congratulatory about what a great idea this had been. Little did we know what fate would deliver the next day.
    We are both pensioners now and the girls are both married with their own children, but that holiday was all set to be the holiday of a lifetime. If only we had left a little later on that fourth morning. If only the girls had slept in and hadn’t been so eager to set off. It would still have been a tragedy, there’s no doubting that, but it wouldn’t have been our tragedy. Maybe it’s selfish to wish a tragedy on some other unsuspecting soul and I know I can’t turn back time, but if I could, we’d have set off from Blackburn to Wigan at lunchtime that day and just read about the tragedy in the local papers.

GEOFF – August 1986
                  Tuesday was the fourth day of our narrow boat trip. The intention was to go from Blackburn to Wigan, stay there overnight and then head back towards Silsden. The previous afternoon we had encountered our first wet weather on the trip, as it bucketed down for a while and then drizzled through until mid-evening, but on the Tuesday, it wasn’t just showery or briefly heavy, it was relentless rain all day, from the moment we woke up. Every time I hear Boomtown Rats ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, I think to myself that I don’t like Tuesdays. This was the Tuesday that started that.
                  It was probably the rainfall that woke the girls up. By quarter past six, they were out of bed and standing next to ours, looking down on us and begging for breakfast. I am not a morning person and the Hock we’d had the previous evening was not helping me spring out of bed, so Deidre clambered up and made them some cereal. We knew from experience that it was a wasted effort telling our children to go back to bed, like the Grand Old Duke of York’s men, once they were up, they were up. I nodded back off. I remember having a pleasant little