United Kingdom · 1940s
5 ideas
Three young women learn boats, engines, locks, and ropes while carrying steel and coal on Britain’s wartime canal network.
Work that is filthy, exhausting and dangerous can still feel like joy if it comes with control over your own hours, food and clothes. While most young women their age wore uniform and lived by strict schedules, the volunteers on the boats counted independence as the thing that made the wet ropes and dirty cargo worth it. Many volunteers still left quickly, so this trade suits some people and not others.
People placed in different hardships tend to rate their own lot as the lucky one and pity the others. The boatwomen believed their sisters and friends led lives of plain misery, and the sisters believed the same of them.
A small, tight working community that lives in constant view of itself polices behaviour hard and remembers everything. Among the canal families, taking a girl to the pictures once counted as courting her, so no other girl could get more than a nod. News of every accident, meeting and conversation spread at once, leaving no room for privacy.
Always moving on can make a tired worker feel that nothing can hold them, neither places nor misery. One boatwoman felt they spun past everything like a humming top, and the thought lifted her exhaustion. The same freedom can make the travellers seem to live a hidden life, passing through the middle of the country yet barely seen.
When war sends outsiders into a trade run by long-established families, the old hands are left puzzled and imposed upon. The canal families did not know what to make of young middle-class women who arrived with odd clothes, hard-to-follow voices and romantic ideas about hard work. The women joined the work, but the social gap between the two groups stayed.