‘Ah! what a wondrous thing it is
To note how many wheels of toil
One thought, one word, can set in motion!
There’s not a ship that sails the ocean,
But every climate, every soil,
Must bring its tribute, great or small,
And help to build the wooden wall!’
It was a curious thing that the greatest of the advantages of living
in a barge disclosed itself unexpectedly. When we made up our minds to
buy a barge I was free to live where I pleased, but shortly after we
had bought her I received an offer of an appointment which would
require me to be in London every day. I could not afford to refuse
this appointment, and we reflected what a pretty mess we should have
been in if we had taken a house in the town where we had intended to
send the boys to school. We should have had to get rid of the lease of
the house, and probably have lost a good deal of money in the
transaction. As it was, we had only to withdraw the boys’ names from
the school, choose another school within striking distance of London,
and anchor our barge fairly near a railway station from which I could
travel daily to London. The change of plan cost us nothing.
My work in London was to begin in September, but when I found it
impossible to finish the barge in time, I applied for a month’s
postponement, and the partners in the firm, who were yachtsmen,
admitted the propriety of my request and granted it like sportsmen.
The barge had now to be completed at breakneck speed. The haste robbed
the entertaining labour of part of its joy; still, we experienced a
good deal of that satisfaction which is presumably enjoyed in
primitive societies where every man builds his own house and goes
hunting for his dinner.
We could bicycle from our cottage to the quay at Fleetwick in five
minutes. I engaged to help me two handy men: Tom, a sailor, and Harry,
a landsman, both, like myself, rough carpenters. Of course, everyone
in the place came to see the _Will Arding_; never before had there
been so many loiterers on the quay. People came on board so freely to
watch the floating house daily grow into shape under our hands that I
grew expert at mechanically repeating my explanations with nails in my
mouth while I kept to my work.
The most keenly interested, as well as the most regular and most
welcome of our visitors, was Sam Prawle, the ex-barge skipper already
mentioned, who lived in a smack moored in the saltings. He made his
living by looking after a few small yachts. He came most days during
the dinner-hour, studied what we were doing, and gave us his views.
‘If more people knaowed what could be done with a little ould barge,
less housen would be built,’ he would say, with a shake of his head.
He was always ready to discuss the advantages of living in a vessel.
As a matter of fact, since the death of his wife, who used to take in
lodgers, he had been unable to afford a house, but to hear him talk
one would have thought that he had been taxed off the face of the
land. And after his prolonged visit to the inn on Saturday, where he
learned all his news--for he could not read--and had discussed the
political situation and the infamy of the local rates, and had got
everything in his head well mixed up, he would be decidedly ’agin the
Government.’ ‘What I says is this,’ he remarked once, in summarizing
the appalling situation. ‘We shall ’ave to ’ave suthen different to
what we ’ave got, or else we shall ’ave to ’ave suthen else’--as
illuminating a judgment as one commonly meets with in political
discussions.
We worked up forward to begin with, because the main hold had in it
about four thousand square feet of match-lining, two thousand square
feet of three-ply wood, one thousand square feet of flooring, and half
a mile of headings of different sorts, besides the bath, kitchen
range, and a hundred other things which took up room. We gradually got
rid of stuff from the hold as we worked our way aft. Within a few
days the appearance of the _Will Arding_ wonderfully changed. While we
were still at Bridgend, the hold, the sides, coamings and bulkheads,
had shown nothing but one great expanse of tarred surface, whereas now
we had clean match-lining round the sides and on the forward bulkhead.
The total length of the barge is about seventy-four feet, and her beam
is seventeen feet at the level of the deck and fifteen on the floor.
At each end there is a bulkhead shutting off what used to be the
forecastle forward and what used to be the skipper’s cabin aft. The
length between the bulkheads is fifty feet. The headroom under the
decks varies from four feet three to five feet eight, and under the
cabin tops, which measure respectively thirty feet by ten and ten by
ten, the headroom is between seven feet three and nine feet. We made
the cabin tops out of the hatches by nailing match-lining on them
lengthwise and covering them with tarpaulin dressed with red ochre and
oil. Thus we had two fine roofs, and these were raised on strong
frames supported by stanchions bolted on to the coamings. Between the
stanchions we fitted the windows. As the windows are high up and there
are plenty of them, the interior of the vessel is very light and airy.
The saloon is sixteen feet long by fourteen feet nine inches wide, and
is, of course, the most important room.
As has been said, we began our work forward, and the first job was to
divide the forecastle into a triangular sleeping cabin and a scullery
of the same shape. Then we divided the space under the fore-cabin top
and put up a partition, forming on one side a large cabin (the owner’s
cabin), and on the other a kitchen, a narrow passage, and a bathroom.
The bath had to be put in position first, and the bathroom built round
it, as there would have been no room to turn a bath in the narrow
passage.
We have often wondered since what we should do if anything happened to
the bath, for a considerable part of the ship would have to be pulled
to pieces to get it out. Perhaps we could have a rubber lining made
for it; but still it is a good solid porcelain enamel bath, and ought
to last as long as the ship.
The one space without light and with little headroom was abreast of
the mast, and this naturally offered itself as the best place for the
water-tanks. We could not afford to buy new water-tanks, so we went to
a shipbreaker’s, and were lucky enough to find two four-hundred gallon
tanks measuring four feet by four feet each, which just fitted in
under the decks. At the same place we bought six mahogany ship’s doors
for £4, and these we scraped and varnished, so that they looked very
handsome. The tanks had to be put in their places at a very early
stage, as they were to be built in like the bath. Empty they
weighed about five hundredweight each, and were bulky things to
handle. However, with tackles and guys and Sam Prawle’s help, we got
them through our furniture hatch and safely down into the hold, where
we levered them into position, and wedged them in safely. The great
size of our water-tanks was the only fault Sam ever found with the
barge’s internal arrangements, and his eye brightened sympathetically
when I pointed out that if we found that they held more water than we
wanted, one of them could always be filled with beer.
[Illustration: THE DINING CABIN]
At the after end of the narrow passage already mentioned we made the
dining-room, which opened aft into the saloon. Forward of the saloon
on the starboard side came the spare cabin. Aft of the saloon on the
same side was our daughter’s cabin. On the port after side was a lobby
with steps descending from the deck; and aft of the lobby was the
boys’ cabin, which had been the skipper’s cabin in the barge’s trading
days.
The rapid progress we seemed to make during the first few days at
Fleetwick was in a way deceptive. It does not take long to put up
partitions and hang doors. The result looks like cabins. Yet only the
fringe of the work has then been touched. The finishing is the true
labour. The underneath part of the rough tarred decks, for instance,
had to be covered with three-ply wood, well sand-papered, before it
could be painted and enamelled. The deck beams, worn and knocked
about, had to be cased in; nail holes had to be stopped with putty,
and the joins all covered with headings. Then there was the making of
the cupboards and shelves and bunks. There was never a right angle; we
were always working to odd shapes. Indeed, there was so much to do
that at times I was bewildered where to begin, and only by tackling
the first job I saw, whether it strictly should have been the next or
not, and putting Tom and Harry on to it too, could I regain a sense of
performing effectual labour.
The wood bought in London was not much more than half what we
ultimately used. Before we had finished we used over a mile of
beading. Oppressed with the continual sense of working against time,
my brain became so active that I slept badly. My life seemed to
consist of sawing up miles of wood, and driving in millions of nails.
I was pursued by dreams, after the manner of illustrated statistics in
magazines, in which I saw black columns denoting the various amounts
of material used, or tables showing how the material would reach from
London to Birmingham, or pictures demonstrating that the nails in one
scale would balance a motor omnibus in the other.
When the dining-cabin was nearly finished we gave a tea-party to
celebrate the occasion, and while we were sitting round the table we
saw through the windows the legs of a party of strangers. The fame of
the WILL ARDING had spread so far that people came on board who had
not the most indirect of excuses for taking up my time. Being proud of
the ship, however, and sympathetic towards all inquiring minds,
particularly in nautical matters, I was glad to explain things to
everybody. At least, I did so to all whose manners were passable. I
developed a high power of curtness to the quite considerable class of
people who seemed to think that it was my duty to provide a sort of
free exhibition for which it was not even necessary to say ‘Thank
you.’ Tom, for some not very good reason, regarded the arrival of
strangers during our tea-party as a particular offence, and we heard
him begin to parley with them on deck with: ‘The guvnor says this is a
’alf-guinea day, and yaou can get the tickets at the Ship Inn.’