Book review – Maidens’ Trip by Emma Smith

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 little different to the books I normally review in that it is part memoir and part fiction; Emma Smith takes her own experiences on the Grand Union Canal during the Second World War and condenses them into a single trip. Her fellow boaters, Nanette and Charity are fictional characters representing the girls that Emma met during her time on the canals.  Originally written in 1948, the latest edition of Maidens’ Trip was released by Bloomsbury this week with a fab new cover that really caught my eye and whichever category the book falls into, I found it an interesting insight into a lesser known area of work that women undertook during World War Two.

Emma’s descriptions of life on the canals are vivid and detailed capturing both the ups and downs (of which there are many!) of guiding a pair of canal boats loaded with cargo from London to Birmingham and back. The three girls battle inclement weather, inhospitable conditions, mistakes and accidents to see their cargo to its destination, with some interesting encounters with the true boating families along the way. The contrast between the three girls and the boaters is stark and I was fascinated by the way that Emma and her fellow boat-mates seemed in general to be accepted and supported despite their lack of experience. The book is as much a tale of the boating families and their ways of life as it is of the wartime volunteers and truly seems to capture a moment in time for both sets of characters.

What struck me most whilst reading was the girls’ quest for adventure and their ‘have a go attitude’ but also the lack of mention of events in the outside world. Although their are references to the conflict that had put them in the position to be accepted into The Grand Union Canal Carrying Company, the book is very much focused on events on the canal and captures the single return journey like a snapshot. I expected to find out more about the girls, their families and histories and this is where the book feels most like a memoir rather than historical fiction in that the focus is firmly on the situation as opposed to the characters even though strong personalities do show through.

Maidens’ Trip is a quick read at just over two hundred pages and will appeal to readers and history lovers of all ages. The book left me wondering what happened next to Emma and girls like her who volunteered for such a unique opportunity. Emma has published a number of other works since her debut with Maidens’ Trip and you can find out more about her and her books at www.bloomsbury.com/emmasmith

4/5

Maidens’ Trip is out now and I’d like to thank Bloomsbury for sending me a copy to review.