Slow travel by canal

Text 1: A Day on the Packet Boat, by Eleanor Fairweather

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Tuesday. We left the basin at seven o’clock in the swift packet, which is swift only by the standard of coal barges, for a man walking briskly upon the towpath kept pace with us for a full mile and then, growing weary of our company, went on ahead. The horse is changed every few miles, and the boy who rides him sounds a horn at every bridge with an air of great importance.

I had expected to be dull, and I was not. The canal shows a country from behind, as it were: the backs of mills, the yards of public houses, washing hung out by women who never supposed that a lady would be gliding past their linen. One sees what the turnpike road is careful to hide.

Only at the tunnel was I uneasy. The horse was led over the hill, and two men lay upon the cabin roof and walked the boat through the darkness with their feet against the wall. I could hear their breathing for half an hour, and I confess I was ashamed to sit idle in the cabin while they laboured so close above my head.

Text 2: Four Miles an Hour, by Daniel Okafor

An original contemporary memoir.

The man at the boatyard told us the speed limit was four miles an hour and we laughed. By the second morning nobody was laughing, but nobody was complaining either. Four miles an hour turns out to be the speed at which you notice things: a heron standing in the shallows like a folded umbrella, a kingfisher that may or may not have been real, the exact moment the rain begins to pock the surface of the water.

The canal took us into the city through its back door. Instead of shopping centres we saw the rear walls of old factories, a man fixing a motorbike in a yard, somebody’s tomatoes growing in buckets on a fire escape. It felt slightly rude, as if we had wandered into a house through the kitchen.

The locks were the real lesson. There was a flight of twenty-one of them, and my teenage son and I wound paddles and heaved gates for most of a day while my wife steered. A retired volunteer in a yellow jacket helped us through the worst of it without being asked. I fell asleep that night with blistered hands and a strange feeling of having earned the view.

Both writers describe a journey by canal boat.

What are the similarities between what the writers notice and feel on their journeys?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.