Header overlay
Maidens’ Trip
  • ISBN: 9781408801253
  • Pages: 240
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury
  • Binding : Paperback

Maidens’ Trip

Emma Smith
From£12.99

SF Subscriber Prices

UK & Ireland £12.99 *save £2.00
Overseas £14.99 *save £2.00

Non-Subscriber Prices

UK & Ireland £14.99
Overseas £16.99
  • Gift wrap available
  • Pre-order
  • All prices include P&P. Overseas rates & subscriber discounts will be applied once you have selected a shipping type for each item during the checkout process.
  • Special stock order
Non Slightly Foxed title: Minimum 5-10 day delivery time.
● If you are a current subscriber to the quarterly your basket will update to show any discounts before the payment page during checkout ● If you want to subscribe now and buy books or goods at the member rate please add a subscription to your basket before adding other items

A classic and unforgettable tale of three girls who abandon their middle-class comforts for an adventure of a lifetime during the Second World War.

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.

‘Smith's writing exudes wisdom and humour, and her descriptions . . . are vividly drawn’ Times Literary Supplement



Three Girls in a Boat

In 1969, a friend and I rather rashly accepted a commission to produce from scratch a new set of guides to Britain’s inland waterway network. We were young, naïve, confident and in need of the...

Read more

Comments & Reviews

Leave your review

Similar Items

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.