Ebook: Maidens' trip: a wartime adventure on the Grand Union Canal
Author: Smith Emma
- Tags: Biography & Autobiography--Personal Memoirs, Freight and freightage, Freight and freightage--Great Britain--History--20th century, Inland water transportation, Inland water transportation--Great Britain--History--20th century, Memoirs, Women, World War 1939-1945--Women--Great Britain, History, Smith Emma -- 1923-, Inland water transportation -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century, Freight and freightage -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century, World War 1939-1945 -- Women -- Great Britain, Grand
- Year: 2011
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
- City: England;Grand Union Canal;Grand Union Canal (England);Great Britain
- Edition: New edition
- Language: English
- epub
In 1943 Emma Smith joined the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company under their wartime scheme of employing women to replace the boaters. She set out with two friends on a big adventure: three eighteen-year-olds, freed from a middle-class background, precipitated into the boating fraternity. They learn how to handle a pair of seventy-two foot-long canal boats, how to carry a cargo of steel north from London to Birmingham and coal from Coventry; how to splice ropes, bail out bilge water, keep the engine ticking over and steer through tunnels. They live off kedgeree and fried bread and jam, adopt a kitten, lose their bicycles, laugh and quarrel and get progressively dirtier and tougher as the weeks go by.
Maidens' Trip is a classic memoir of the growth to maturity of three young women in the exceptional circumstances of Britain at war.