Floating Onhappiness

The Age

Saturday April 30, 2005

SUE TOWNSEND

When Adrian Mole creator Sue Townsend signed up for a canoeing course, the aim was to conquer her fear of deep water. Instead, she found herself deep in love and on course for a life of messing about with boats - and books.

In the late 1970s I was a lonely divorcee in my 20s, so forlorn that I sent in an advertisement for a lover to a newspaper personal column. They returned my advertisement together with a sniffy finger-wagging letter informing me that they did not run a lonely hearts service. I was not a great catch in those days. I had three children and constantly smelled of bonfire smoke from the adventure playground where I worked; and it has to be said that the big boots I was obliged to wear were less than alluring.

You can find happiness in the most unlikely of places. For me, happiness and canoeing are inextricably linked. It all started on a harshly cold morning in February 1978. I sat in the back of a minibus parked next to the River Soar in Leicester, removing my clothes. In an attempt to conquer my fear of deep water, I had enrolled in a kayaking course, with the ultimate aim of achieving a British Canoe Union proficiency certificate. This was a huge departure for me; the only exercise I had taken since leaving school was turning the pages of a book.

Outside, lumps of ice were floating downstream. Stupidly, not knowing what one wore in a kayak, my sportswear of choice was a T-shirt, cardigan, summer shorts, woollen socks and sandshoes. As I changed into these inadequate garments, I looked out of the window of the minibus and saw a thin man with dark eyes cross his hands over his shoulders and deftly pull his sweater over his head without dislodging the burning cigarette in his mouth. I looked at him and thought, "He fits his skin." I was instantly in love.

The other trainee paddlers were assembling on the bank and were wincing in the icy wind, but the man I had just fallen in love with, Colin Broadway, seemed perfectly at ease.

Our instructor, Bill, called us together. I had thought I was unsuitably dressed but I was not the worst offender. There was a man there dressed in full postman's uniform (though minus the cap); my colleague from the adventure playground, Paul, was in an open-necked shirt, shorts and sandals. We were given paddles suitable for our height, allocated a kayak each and shown how to embark. Within a few minutes the postman had fallen out of his boat into the icy water. Bill gave

an exasperated sigh and hauled him to the bank where he clambered out. We never saw him again.

I spent the first lesson trembling, not only with cold but with abject fear. I could not make the kayak go in a straight line and I hated the rubber skirt, called a spray deck, that had to be fitted around the cockpit of the boat and theoretically kept your body dry from the waist down. When Bill took us on a 200-metre trip down the river, I was at the back of the group, mostly going round in circles. Eventually Bill attached a rope to the front of my boat and towed me downstream. It was a humiliating start.

That evening, after my three children were in bed, I sat hunched over the gas fire in my council house trying to get warm and thinking about the horrors of the day. But I was happy. I had fallen in love. True, the object of my love had not spoken to me, or even glanced in my direction. But I had to see him again, and the only way our paths would cross would be for me to attend the next kayaking lesson.

The next week the group had dwindled from 12 to six. We had to break the ice to launch the kayaks. Eventually, as the course progressed, the numbers dwindled further and finally settled at four, including me and Colin Broadway, who had still hardly spoken to me - though he had rescued me after I had capsized into various rivers on several occasions. To my growing horror we were now paddling down whitewater rivers which had rapids and falls with names like Devil's Elbow and Hell Hole.

We took the proficiency test on the River Trent at a place called Kings Mill. It was autumn, the river was in spate and the test consisted of paddling upstream through the rapids and back down through a slalom course. The water was horribly dark and thunderous. But when I put my boat on the water I felt curiously light-hearted. I paddled up through the rapids easily and then returned down the slalom course without touching a single pole. Bill's jaw dropped. On that day and at that hour I was his star pupil.

The following winter our group of four became qualified kayak instructors. On one occasion I took a blind man out in a double kayak on a lake and taught him the basics of paddling. Had I known that I would be registered blind myself one day I might have shown more sensitivity to what he was experiencing, and perhaps allowed him to get a word in edgeways.

I was still in love with Colin, but he seemed unaware of this and did not show by a word or a gesture that he felt the same.

Then, on a night in January 1979, he walked into my adventure playground. I was standing by a blazing bonfire with a large group of unruly teenage boys. The pockets of my sheepskin coat were full of carpet tacks to stop the boys stealing my purse and cigarettes. Colin Broadway asked me to go for a drink with him that night. Dear reader, I went. We have lived together ever since.

One day I confessed to him that I had been a secret writer for more than 20 years, and he encouraged me to join the Phoenix Theatre Writers Group. I wrote a play called Womberang which won me a playwrights' bursary; within a few months, to the astonishment of my family and friends, I was working as writer-in-residence at the Phoenix Theatre.

Having never been a madly enthusiastic paddler, and having got my man, I left the canoeing to Colin - apart from the occasional weekend dalliance - and concentrated on my writing. Colin, on the other hand, was becoming an obsessive, regularly going off on day-long trips. Sometimes our worlds collided: on one occasion Colin paddled the annual 210-kilometre Devizes to Westminster canoe race with his paddling partner, Kevin, winning the open canoe class in a little over 36 hours. I met them at the finish at Westminster Bridge and gave them tickets for the first night of my play The Great Celestial Cow, which was opening at the Royal Court Theatre. That evening they gratefully settled their weary limbs into the red plush seats and slept through the performance.

Colin set up a business providing adventure holidays for different groups. He also ran survival courses for business executives, for which they foolishly paid too much money to sleep in garbage bags and live on a diet of river water, wood lice and Kendal mint cake.

A fundamental change took place when Colin changed from kayaks to open canoes. A kayak is a little black dress, a canoe is a ball gown. Kayakers tend to be younger, slimmer and more competitive. Canoeists, and I choose my words carefully, are wiser, fuller of figure and contemplative. Kayakers have an easy-to-keep cat at home; canoeists take their old dog in the boat with them. Kayakers are restricted by being connected to their craft by a neoprene spray deck; canoeists are free to roam around their craft - open the picnic hamper, take out the wine, cut a hunk of bread and cheese, then lie back and sunbathe while the boat drifts down the river. If it rains, a canoe can provide shelter by being turned upside down on the bank. Suddenly my interest in paddling was renewed.

In 1990, my husband announced that in July he was taking his staff team on a canoeing trip in Russia, close to the Finnish border, and did I want to come and bring our 13-year-old daughter, Lizzy? A few years before I'd been to Finland to meet Colin at the end of the Arctic Canoe Race. On the train to Tornio where the race finished, a Laplander had tried to buy my sexual favours by offering my eldest son a baseball cap, a hunk of dried reindeer meat, a comb and an iceblock. My son politely refused and the Laplander was later arrested for drinking on the train, and taken away in a police van. I had been plagued by mosquitoes in Finland, so I suggested they would be in Russia, too. "Not in July," my husband lied.

Colin's Russian friend Sasha met us at the airport, took us to a grand restaurant where we were served a banquet of seven courses, plied us with drink and talked mournfully about God. Then he whisked us on a tour of Red Square and St Basil's Cathedral before taking us to his apartment in the outer suburbs where his mother, wife and daughter had been waiting hours for us, having prepared yet another huge banquet. We were unable to eat a thing. Enraged, his wife and mother turned on Sasha.

It was our turn to be enraged with him when we found out that our canoes were in fact double kayaks and were not beside the lake waiting for us, but in an apartment on the other side of Moscow. Each kayak was split into five components, placed inside each other, like Russian dolls, then packed in a huge rucksack.

We met our non-English-speaking river guides on the station platform and discovered that Sasha would not be coming with us. There was no time to argue; the train was leaving. After a hideous overnight journey in an overheated carriage, the train made an unscheduled stop in remote countryside and we were forced to disembark three kilometres from our lakeside destination. Sasha had not provided us with the correct papers.

The assembled boats were held together with large elastic bands and tiny screws, and they leaked. The waves on the lake were huge, and one boat sank. Our Russian guides, who could barely paddle, watched helplessly as my husband and I rescued two of our party. I turned around to see if our daughter and her friend, Andrea, were still in their boat, and was astonished to see them happily ploughing through the waves.

Our bedraggled party made for a swampy island in the lake; the mosquitoes fell upon us like starving wolves and continued to plague us for two weeks. We paddled through spectacularly beautiful woodland and wildflower meadows, made uninhabitable by the black clouds of vicious insects. They were in our food: we ate them and we fed them. A photograph exists somewhere of me with 300 mosquito bites on my back. I had an allergic reaction, blew up, and had to be carried in and out of the boat.

On the penultimate night, we camped on swamp land and ate the last few slices of mouldy black bread which our Russian cook kept in a damp hessian sack. I cowered inside my little tent and cried, cursing Mother Nature for creating mosquitoes. The next morning, after paddling for only five minutes, we turned a bend in the river and saw a large village and a beautiful, mosquito-free camp site. Once we were on dry ground, Lizzy turned to her father and me and said, "I ought to report you for cruelty to children."

I have not canoed on white water since, not least because I'm now blind and in a wheelchair [due to complications from diabetes]. But only yesterday my husband said to me, "I've bought a new canoe that can take your wheelchair. Do you fancy going to France and paddling the Ardeche?" I am thinking about it.

Sue Townsend's latest book is Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (Penguin, rrp $35).

© 2005 The Age

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