The Lock Keeper at Dawn

Gwen woke before the light, as she always did, and lay for a moment listening to the water.

It was never silent at the lock. There was always the weir, off to the left, a long steady rush that after thirty years she heard only when she listened for it, and the smaller sound of the top gates leaking, a trickle, a drip, water finding its way through oak that had been shut against it all night and was tired of the argument.

She got up. The cottage was small and the floor was cold and she put her feet into her boots by feel, and her coat over her nightdress, and went out.

The mist was down. It lay on the canal like something poured, white and level, so that the water underneath it could not be seen at all and the far bank was a guess. The balance beams of the gates came up out of it, black, and the tops of the reeds, and, further off, the arch of the bridge. Everything else was gone. It was the kind of mist that would lift in an hour and be a fine day, she thought, though she had been wrong before.

The lock was full. She had left it full, because the last boat through the evening before had been going up, and she liked, when she could, to leave things as they had been left. The water in the chamber stood level with the top, dark and still, with a skin of mist on it, and a leaf, one leaf, turning very slowly in the middle where some small current had it.

She checked the paddles. She checked the gates. It was not necessary. She did it every morning.

Then she stood on the lock side with her hands in her coat pockets and waited for the day.

It came the way it comes on a canal in autumn, which is slowly and from no particular direction. The mist did not lift so much as thin, so that the far bank came back, first as a darkness and then as a bank with a hedge on it, and a field beyond with the shapes of cows lying down. The sky went from nothing to a pale grey and stayed there. A moorhen came out of the reeds, saw her, thought about it, and went back in. Somewhere across the field a dog barked twice, at nothing, and was told to be quiet, and was.

And then, a long way off, a boat.

She heard it before she could see it. A narrowboat engine has a sound like nothing else, a slow deep one-two, one-two, so low it comes up through your boots, and it carries a long way over still water. She turned her head. It was coming from below the lock, from the long straight pound with the willows on it, which meant it wanted to come up, which meant the lock would have to be emptied first.

She went to the bottom gates and put her back against the beam and waited.

It was a long time coming. Narrowboats are not built to hurry and neither was she. The one-two grew, and grew, and out of the mist at the far end of the straight there came a shape, and then the shape was a boat, long and low, green and red where the paint had lasted, with a chimney sending up a thin line of smoke that went straight up because there was no wind at all, and at the back of it, at the tiller, a man in a flat cap and a coat much like her own.

He raised a hand. She raised a hand. That was the whole of it, for the moment.

She drew the paddles on the bottom gates, and the water in the chamber began to go down. It made its noise, a rushing roar under the gates and a chuckling out into the pound below, and the level dropped, an inch, a foot, and the leaf that had been turning in the middle went down with it, still turning. The walls of the chamber came up out of the water, green with weed, dripping, and the smell of them came up too, cold stone and wet.

When the chamber was empty she put her back to the beam and walked the gate open. It went slowly, as it always did, with a groan from the collar and a long swirl on the water, and then it was open and the boat came in.

“Morning,” said the man. His name was Arthur. She had known him, in the way of the canal, for years, which was to say she saw him twice a year and knew his boat by its sound.

“Morning,” said Gwen. “You’re early.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” said Arthur. “Thought I’d get up and not sleep somewhere else.”

She shut the gates behind him. She went to the top and drew the paddles there, and the water came in, and the boat began to rise.

This was the part she liked. The boat lifting. There was nothing to it, only water going from one place to another, but there was something in watching a long heavy thing rise up out of a stone box towards you, an inch at a time, with a man on the back of it who was also rising, until his boots were level with your boots and you could talk without shouting.

They did not talk much. Arthur said the pound below had been quiet. Gwen said the pound above was quiet too. Arthur said there was a heron on the bend by the willows who had been there when he went down last month and was there again this morning, in exactly the same place, and he wondered if it had moved at all in between. Gwen said probably not.

The chamber filled. The roar of the paddles went to a rush and the rush went to a trickle and then, with a small settling, the water inside was level with the water outside, and the gates could open.

She opened them.

Arthur put the engine into gear and the one-two picked up and the boat went out of the lock into the top pound, into the mist that was still lying there, thinner now, with the sun somewhere behind it, and he raised his hand again as the stern went past, and she raised hers, and the boat went on up the cut, and got smaller, and went round the bend by the bridge, and the one-two went on for a while after the boat had gone, and then that went too.

Gwen shut the gates behind him. She dropped the paddles. She left the lock full, because that was how the last boat had left it.

Then she went and stood where she had stood before, with her hands in her pockets.

The mist was going now. The sun had got over the hedge and was on the field, on the cows, who were getting up one by one in the unhurried way of cows, and on the water in the pound above the lock, which had turned from grey to a colour like the inside of a shell, and on the reeds, which were dripping. The moorhen came out again and this time stayed out. The dog across the field had gone back to sleep, or been let in.

A lock keeper’s morning is not a busy one. There would be another boat by ten, perhaps, and a hire boat in the afternoon with a family on it who would need telling which paddle was which, and she would tell them, kindly, and they would get it wrong, and it would not matter. But that was later.

For now there was the weir, rushing, which she could hear again because she was listening for it. And the top gates, leaking, a drip, a trickle. And the leaf, which had come back up with the boat and was turning again, slowly, in the middle of the full lock.

She watched it turn.

The kettle was on in the cottage. She would go in soon.

But the light was on the water now, all of it, and the mist was nearly gone, and the day was going to be fine, she had been right, and so she stood a little longer, on the lock side, with the water at her feet, and let the morning come.