Saturday 21st – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941

Ivan sees that there’s something hard in the bargee’s look, a narrowing of the eyes coupled with a change in the rhythm of his breathing. Ivan half turns and looks at Michael, who’s standing at the top of the slope, set against the sky, and feels something like complicity with the bargee, although he doesn’t know why. This complicity makes him feel guilty.
The lock’s full. “Ready, boys!” the bargee says, and Ivan and Michael do the necessary thing with the second set of gates, straining against the weight of water to lever the wood and metal into the ‘open’ position. Weed, scum and oil are displaced on the surface of the water.
The bargee guns the engine, and the usual unaccountably large and acrid clouds of grey-blue smoke guff out of the narrowboat’s exhaust pipe. Above the noise of the engine and the judder of the hull, he shouts, “I’ll be coming back through here next Monday. If you’re lucky I’ll bring you something back.”
After the boat has passed out of sight and they’ve finished savouring their oranges, Ivan wishes that he’d asked the man where he was bound for.
[…]
The bargee is true to his word. The following Monday, under a flat, drizzly grey sky that lasts all day, he gives Ivan three fat, high quality Russian pencils (triangular cross section, so they won’t roll) and a pad of thick, cream-coloured paper. Michael also receives a gift: a tattered, folding map of northern Europe with a cloth cover, all worn away where the horizontal and vertical folds meet. On the map, the sea is a pale, washed-out blue, and the land a mixture of muddy brown and over-bright grass green. Despite the battered nature of Michael’s map, Ivan covets it, especially as it is imbued with the well-travelled mystery and experience of the bargee. [something of a father substitute??]
In the summer weeks that follow, Ivan and Michael spend more and more time down by the canal locks, opening the gates and running errands – for food and beer – for the boatmen. In return, they receive – as they had hoped and calculated – a series of [emoluments] from the men: a tin of sticky sweets dusted with sugary flour; a tinny little compass in a small cardboard box; a technical manual about boat engine maintenance that’s distorted with damp and oil stains; a painted wooden cube an inch on a side full of gramophone needles that sounds like some exotic percussion instrument when you shake it.
Ivan is always on the lookout for the bargee who gave them the oranges: he feels like the two of them established a special relationship of some kind, and he always feels privileged over Michael when they’re dealing with this boatman: Michael seems to recognise this too; normally he is the front-runner when they approach the boatmen, but he always hangs back, and is quieter, when the orange bargee is in the lock. They never talk about this, even though they’re both aware of it.
[…]
…at some stage, the bargee gives him the little package of rolled up, folded papers, saying, “This is for you, not your black friend.”
Sneaking it home, not knowing why he feels guilty about having it, but sensing that it’s right to feel guilty…
Pictures on smooth, thin paper. The men wearing false moustaches, the women wearing stockings and not much else apart from their standard look of innocent surprise. Their round lips saying ‘Ooh’. The shiny paper fixed into the old folds.
[…]