... Approaching the boatyard on the edge of town and still crawling along at about 2mph I heard a sound from behind me that made me freeze. Dogs ... yapping.
Some years ago I had a neighbour, Yappy-Dog Woman. This is how I met her.
I bought my present boat from the Bodger and the Fireman who had bought it from the Chippy who had sold up and moved to Bulgaria. The Chippy sold them his boat for a song and they thought they would tidy it up and sell it on at a neat profit, which they did ... to me. The Bodger lived on his 60' narrowboat on the next door mooring and, a couple of years after selling me my boat, couldn't resist adding to his fleet by buying what could only be described as a floating night club now up for sale. He had first seen the shiny boat with the chromed interior, polished aluminium walls and ceiling, the mirror-tiled bar and the programmable disco lights some years earlier and, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, had coveted it since. He bought the boat which left him with a surfeit of boats for the available mooring space. He advertised his 60' boat on e-Bay. There were no takers for several months and he became despondent. His face did light up though when, in the fulness of time, he received an enquiry from a woman wanting to move up from Plymouth. She had no boating experience whatsoever, but fancied a change from living in a house and having neighbours the other side of a shared wall. She gave the boat a thorough looking at and liked what she saw. She commissioned a survey and the report came back positive. The Bodger offered to let her stay on the boat for a couple of weeks to see how she liked it. Apparently she liked it well-enough and stayed all summer. The Bodger had no idea whether she would ever pay up the agreed price, but eventually she paid a deposit and his blue face turned a little more pink as he began once more to breathe. As summer drew to a close, Plymouth Lady gave the Bodger the balance. He waited several days to make sure the cheque cleared and, on confirmation that the transaction had indeed concluded, they had a formal celebratory drinks party on the boat to which I was invited.
The three of us imbibed our favourite poisons (water for me and wine for them). Someone suggested a game of Scrabble. I used to enjoy playing Scrabble. I had a Scrabble dictionary and had spent some time learning useful two-letter words. However, by majority vote, my "Scrabble Dictionary" was deemed invalid, while the 1950s Chambers English Dictionary was decided by the two of them to be the reference of choice. I lost the game by a long way since very few of my words were in the Chambers and I had to miss several turns. None of the two-letter ones I had learned were in the Chambers either. After the second glass of wine I noticed a change in the atmosphere. The woman became increasingly abusive, loud and unpredictable. It didn't take long for me to decide I needed to leave. I was almost sorry to leave the Bodger in her gentle clutches, but I figured a man in his late sixties ought to be able to look after himself or deal with whatever was coming next - and I knew he was actually rather hopeful. The thought of that made me shudder, but by that time I was well beyond caring what happened to him. The two of them had turned rather horrible.
Within days she returned to Plymouth to wind up her affairs there. This seemed to take longer than expected, but the solitude and peace were what I enjoy most about living here. Eventually, though, she reappeared like a hurricane except that, this time, she had two Yorkshire terriers in her van. I heard them coming from miles away. This was the first that anyone of us at the farm were aware of her two boys. There were already five dogs living on the farm (along with three regular visitors, who were mostly well-behaved). Their arrival, however, signalled the beginning a a new kind of hell.
Around that time I was working on a complete new repertoire for a ceilidh project and the first performance was almost imminent. I did not realise it was possible for dogs to yap twenty-three hours of every day for months on end. These dogs excelled. I don't know if you, dear reader, have ever attempted to compose and arrange music to the overwhelming accompaniment of yapping terriers, but I would not wish that on Salieri were I Wolfgang Amadeus himself (and I assure you I have not one smidge of that man's genius ... nor any other as it happens). With a deadline fast approaching I was really struggling. I explained the situation and I pleaded with her to try and give me some peace to finish, but she didn't get the urgency. She was my new neighbour and I should learn to be more tolerant. Somehow I got through the writing and the gig was actually a success of sorts. My tunes came to have titles like "Dog In The Drink" and "Two Terriers And A Chainsaw". There may have been a connection.
Things didn't get much better. She used a shared cancer diagnosis to make friends with the Horse Woman, a powerful ally to have. She managed, though, to alienate everyone else for miles around. I have no idea what kind of skill it takes to upset the owners of the village chip shop, but she possessed it by the bucketload. She upset publicans and punters in most of the pubs within a six mile radius. She complained so hard and so often at the Bodger, that he bought a riverside plot forty miles away and left the farm after living there for more than seven years. She was rude to the Engineer, who spent a lot of time trying to work out just what the Bodger had done to his boat while he was living on it. She ordered people around; resistance was futile, specially from men who were deemed chauvinistic simply by nature of the sex listed on their birth certificates. As it happens she only called me a sexist a few times, but it hurt more when she accused me of "turning" the larger of her two male dogs who started trying to mount the smaller one. "What have you done to him? He's never behaved like that before!" she exclaimed. She spent all day shouting at the dogs and, when not shouting at them to "shut up", was perched on the foredeck of her boat, having loud and prolonged telephone conversations with traders who had failed to meet her exacting standards of whom there were many. It was a nightmare. The only relief came when she fell in the river (twice) in her first fortnight as my new neighbour. She couldn't get out of the river and on to the bank without assistance. After the second dip the Farmer fixed a ladder in the water against her mooring for the next time ... I was called out to tow her broken-down boat back a few times too.
I was there the day she went too far. For nearly thirty years a very nice couple from the Midlands had a mooring for their small cruiser at the farm. They came to visit two or three times a year. They also had two terriers. These, however were kept under far better control. Yappy-Dog Woman's boys had psychological problems. They were rescue dogs who had been raised on a puppy farm and treated poorly by (of course) men (chauvinistic ones too, no doubt). One of the Midland terriers decided to assert his superiority, presumably to shut up the neurotic yappy dogs. It was behaviour I had seen amongst the dogs on the farm many times - dogs doing what dogs do, nothing too serious. However Yappy-Dog Woman was having none of this. She asked me what I would do. I said I would leave it and let the dogs sort themselves out. She broke off the conversation she was having with me and may have thought about my reply for a nano-second before launching into a high-speed conversation with herself that ended with something like, "I'm not having this!" She fair stormed along the bank to let go at full shriek at the Midland Woman. I had never before heard Midland Man or Midland Woman swear, but there ensued such a high-octane exchange of profanities that I had to leave the scene.
There were two further incidents following this exchange. The first was that the Horse Woman gave Yappy-dog woman her sailing orders, "Be gone by Friday or I'm cutting your ropes!" Unfortunately a few weeks later Midland Man had a heart attack and died. Horse Woman regrets the way she ganged up against the Bodger. It is the only time I have heard her express regret.
"Yap! Yap! Yip! Yap! ..."was coming up from behind and it froze my very blood. I turned round to see a familiar green boat. I try not to hold too fast to grudges, so I hailed Yappy-Dog Woman as she surged past. She didn't recognise me at first, because my boat is a different colour these days, but she returned the hail.
It took me ten or fifteen minutes to catch up with her. She had pulled into a place to moor next to the town park and was engaged in a row with another boater who was there before her. Her skill at upsetting people remains almost without parallel in my personal experience.
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