Against the Tide

On the boat, I woke to the play of light on the ceiling, reflecting off the river through the portholes behind my bed. I slept under five duvets and better than I ever had, with the water rocking me to sleep. Sometimes I was woken by the dawn chorus which the river seemed to amplify. Sound works strangely by water, and I could hear each word of the intimate conversations on the opposite bank, in The Kidneys, where students came for break-ups and boat people gathered for parties at full moon. At dusk, a flotilla of geese came honking down to the jetty where they slept, followed after sunset by party boats blasting Noughties hits which disappeared mid-lyric around the riverbend.

I was moored on the strange lawless stretch between Oxford’s Folly and Donnington Bridges, on that part of the Thames locally called the Isis. There were, strictly speaking, no moorings here ‒ the riverbed belonged to Christ Church, and so through some fluke of the city’s arcane town planning regulations, the Environment Agency had no jurisdiction over us. The inhabitants of this part of the river were, as a result, more bedraggled and of a worse sort than the boaters on the canals and further down the river, past Longbridges, where there were such things as licence fees and Boat Safety Certificates. When I moved on to the boat, my life having fallen apart, three people within one week asked if I’d read Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore. The third was Penelope’s great-granddaughter Heather, whom I’d met by chance. I was running, then, on fate, chance, a sure conviction that things would work out if I followed the signs, and I saw threefold occurrences as particularly indicative of providence. I went to Blackwell’s and bought the book. In its first pages, Fitzgerald describes the barge-dwellers moored along the tidal Thames by Battersea and Chelsea, whose ‘certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway’. My boat’s owner, having driven up from London to clear out engine parts, miscellaneous metal implements and years of dust and spider corpses, had said something similar to me: ‘People roll downhill and the river catches them.’ Few end up on the river when their lives are going well. In 1960, Penelope Fitzgerald moved with her three children on to a boat on London’s Chelsea Reach. Though she came from a well-off family (her father was Evoe Knox, editor of Punch and one of the distinguished Knox brothers about whom she would later write a biography) and had married a decorated war hero and lawyer, Desmond Fitzgerald, their fortunes declined through the Fifties. By the Sixties, Desmond’s promise had dried up ‒ he was drinking heavily and bringing in little money from his legal work. The barely habitable barge was all they could afford in London, and even then they scraped to afford food and had to wash in the public baths on the King’s Road. Penelope was stubborn, though, and too proud to ask for money. Visiting friends were amazed at the state the family found itself in and at their unwilling ness to accept help. When Desmond privately asked Evoe to send money, Penelope was furious. In 1962, Desmond was tried and found guilty of stealing from his Chambers, put on probation for two years and expelled from the Middle Temple. Later that year, the boat sank, and Penelope and the children moved into a homeless shelter for four months. These years became the basis for Offshore, Fitzgerald’s third novel, which won the Booker Prize after its publication in 1979. In the book, Nenna and her two daughters live on a barge on the same stretch of the Thames while Nenna’s husband Edward lives in a friend’s flat in Stoke Newington. Neither Nenna nor Edward is willing to admit the separation, much less make moves towards ending it. Nenna imagines herself in a ‘perpetual magistrate’s hearing, in which her own version of her marriage was shown as ridiculously simple and demonstrably right, and then, almost at exactly the same time, as incontrovertibly wrong’. She is grilled on her decisions, which, related in a courtroom, sound absurd and unreasonable. ‘The river is thought of as romantic?’ asks the imagined magistrate. ‘Yes, that’s so!’ ‘More so by those who do not know it well?’ ‘I can’t answer that.’ Offshore is full of characters whose self-appraisals are unreliable ‒ they understand, on some level, that their lives have gone wrong, but they still cling obstinately to delusion, unwilling to admit defeat. Regarding Edward’s lost squash racquets, Nenna’s invented magistrate asks, ‘You mislaid them deliberately?’ ‘I don’t do anything deliberately,’ replies Nenna. ‘That seemed to be true. Some of her actions were defensive, others optimistic, more than half of them mistaken.’ Nenna’s constant refrain is ‘I don’t know.’ Her own mind and choices are opaque to her. But Fitzgerald has a way of revealing a person’s true nature through the perceptions of others. The children, as in Fitzgerald’s other novels, are particularly clear-sighted. Nenna’s two girls, observing a neighbour, discuss what he cannot acknowledge himself: ‘You saw the strain on his features?’ ‘Oh, everyone does.’ The resultant effect is a kind of collective self-portrait, where anxious and limited self- perception is fleshed out through the observations of neighbours. There are no villains in Offshore. The faults of its characters are treated But Fitzgerald has a way of revealing a person’s true nature through the perceptions of others. The children, as in Fitzgerald’s other novels, are particularly clear-sighted. Nenna’s two girls, observing a neighbour, discuss what he cannot acknowledge himself: ‘You saw the strain on his features?’ ‘Oh, everyone does.’ The resultant effect is a kind of collective self-portrait, where anxious and limited self- perception is fleshed out through the observations of neighbours. There are no villains in Offshore. The faults of its characters are treated with grace and generosity, the kind of understanding that generally comes from having known deprivation oneself. From their dilapidated barges, the boat-dwellers hear the tour guides on passing pleasure steamers: ‘On your right, the artistic colony. Folk live on these boats like they do on the Seine, it’s the artist’s life they’re leading there. Yes, there’s people living on these boats.’ From my own deck, I would hear the same commentary, and I found it consoling that others thought my lifestyle romantic and bohemian. I adopted this narrative because it was easier than entertaining the alternative ‒ that, despite my potential, I had ended up in poverty at the bottom of the heap. In my eighteen months on the boat, friends tried to lure me back to land, but I insisted on seeing out the winter ‒ even when the condensation froze on the windows and the wood-burner gave me carbon monoxide poisoning and the pipes froze and burst, flooding the hull with hundreds of litres of water. Fitzgerald’s Grace, like my boat, was barely fit for human habitation. It leaked and always listed to one side when the tide rose so that all the cupboards jammed; water collected in a recess in the floor between the kitchen and the living-room and had to be bailed out after every high tide. The boat sank twice and, on the second occasion, she managed to salvage a bottle of champagne to give to the river police who’d come to their aid. When the book was translated, Fitzgerald bemoaned the fact that its various titles implied a distance from the shore. ‘By “offshore”,’ she wrote, ‘I meant to suggest the boats at anchor still in touch with the land, and also the emotional restlessness of my characters, half-way between the need for security and the doubtful attraction of danger.’ Despite the precariousness of their habitat, Fitzgerald’s boaters are relentlessly optimistic. There’s a resigned joyfulness that comes from having no alternative to one’s situation and therefore no bitterness towards it. This is not to say that Offshore is a sentimental novel. Threats of violence and exploitation hum in the background; one character is attacked and hospitalized, another’s boat sinks. The children are already wise to the world’s brutality. ‘It’s his own fault if he’s kind. It’s not the kind who inherit the earth, it’s the poor, the humble, and the meek,’ says one of Nenna’s daughters. ‘What do you think happens to the kind, then?’ asks her sister. ‘They get kicked in the teeth.’ The wit and levity of Fitzgerald’s style are, at least in part, a means of coping with misfortune. In a rare personal essay, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, she admitted her concern with the ‘tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?’

Later, in 1989, reflecting on her time on the barge, she wrote:

I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost. They are ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but they don’t manage to submit to them, despite their courage and their best efforts. They are not envious, simply compassless. When I write it is to give these people a voice.

Reading Offshore, I felt as if the catastrophe of my life might still be worth something. Perhaps I could write about it. Perhaps something beautiful and true might still come from the wreckage.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Rose Lyddon 2026