Maidens' trip : a wartime adventure on the Grand Union Canal / Emma Smith.
Publication details: London : Bloomsbury, 2010.Edition: New edDescription: xi, 225 p. ; 20 cmISBN:- 9781408801253 (pbk.) :
- 1408801256 (pbk.) :
- 386.40424092 22
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item reserves | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | Melbourne Athenaeum Library | Non-Fiction | 386.404 SMI | Available | 058161 |
Originally published: Great Britain, 1948.
This edition first published: 2009.
"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." -- Amazon