In this extract from Nothing Ever Happens in Wentbridge, Janbo goes on the school's Easter barge trip with a rubber band on her finger.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them.
He had a way with words, did Enobarbus. Wouldn’t mind coming back as Shakespeare’s Cleo in the next life, if there is one. There was a woman with the looks, and the lifestyle, if this holiday is anything to go by. She can keep her asp though.
It’s six weeks since the Pill conversation, and disapproving parents are the last thing on my mind. I’m miles away from them, and Mark, basking in glorious sunshine on the warm metal roof of Falcon, a traditional narrowboat, Sugar Minott’s ‘Good Thing Going’ distorting out of a tiny radio balanced precariously between other prone bodies, and I’m being fed purple grapes by Mandy.
‘Janbo, how very decadent,’ shouts Sian, from somewhere behind the top of my head.
Stretching my arm up towards the clear blue, I wave, lazily. ‘Try them Sian, they really are the best grapes I’ve ever tasted,’ I shout back. ‘God, Mand, these are gorgeous. Where did you get them?’
‘Supermarket back there, where we stopped for water,’ she says.
‘Bridge!’ The disembodied yell comes from the roof of Blue Swallow, the boys’ narrowboat up ahead, and everyone flattens themselves closer to the roof of our temporary, floating home.
The bridge warnings were introduced yesterday, after one of the boys had a very painful encounter with canal masonry.
Mr Gaskin’s pipe smoke lingers beneath damp brickwork as we sail under Bridge 59 on the Stourport Ring. He’s steering Victoria Shane, the teachers’ vessel, immediately in front of us, while Coot, carrying more boys, brings up the rear of the Cottingham High convoy.
The school’s Easter-break narrowboat holidays are legendary, to me at least. Every year I’ve cycled off Easter-egg torpor beside my friend Karen, listening to breathless tales of food and water fights, cooking and cleaning rotas, and – as she moved further up the school – towpath vomiting after too much rum and black, and furtive comings and goings between berths under the cover of darkness.
Julie and Mandy are ‘barging’ veterans. It seemed natural for Sian and I to book a bunk on the very last barging holiday ever for the upper sixth. Lying in the sun, drifting beneath thinning wisps of white cloud on day five out of Alvechurch Marina, I’m so glad I did.
Being away from Mark is hard, in a kind-of delicious, hugging-to-one’s-self missing way, and I’ve phoned him every night, usually after too many ciders, slurring my love to him while people waiting behind me yawn loudly. But though I can’t wait to be back home where he is, I am having my best holiday ever.
And while Mark may be far away, I’m wearing his ring. Well, a brown rubber band but it might just as well be diamonds and gold for the way my tummy twists every time I look at it.
The schools’ rugby season had reached a crescendo just before the Easter holidays, with the Cott High first team beating Beverley Grammar in the final of the East Riding cup. There followed a couple of nights of drunken mayhem, which had resulted in a proposal half way down Hull Road.
Diary: Wednesday 8 April, 1981
Today was yet another of those days when rugby takes centre stage. Tonight it was old boys versus the first team and a presentation. Jilly and me made the teas and coffees. At 8:30 it was everybody to the Tiger. Wingy, Gary, Jilly, Gaffs, me, Mark, Mr Simms, Mr Dawson, Stannard, Nige Dixon etc. We all got drunk to celebrate last night and them winning the cup. Mr Riley gave me, Gary, Jilly, Gaffs and Mark a lift to the disco at school where we had fantastic fun. Mark and me got engaged tonight with a rubber band and when we were walking home we both cried.
Mark and I were swaying down Hull Road, arms around each other more for balance than anything else, bits of privet hedge sticking to his beige wool jumper from a fall through a robust garden boundary on Thwaite Street.
We stopped, and turned to each other. Taking my face in his hands, he kissed me gently, and then harder, his arms round me, pulling me closer, bodies touching and then the kiss stopped as abruptly as it had started, our breathing slowing as we stood together. Holding on. I didn’t ever want to let go.
He pulled away from me and fumbled in his pocket. Distracted. ‘Hang on, hang on… got something, here.’
Grinning, he held up… a rubber band?
He took hold of my left hand and, holding it in his, sank down on his knee to the pavement, where he looked up at me, his face serious.
‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.
Putting my hand up to my mouth, I giggled, then realised he was serious.
There was only one answer.
‘Yes. Yes, I will.’
He put the rubber band on my finger, twisting it round several times so it wouldn’t fall off, and then he stood before me, looking quite lost. I couldn’t stop the tears, and he pulled me close again. We sobbed together, feet fixed to pavement, heads in the stars, at the centre of a beautiful universe of moonlit rivers, winning rugby teams and wonderful friends, our eternities pledged with a strip of brown rubber.
