It was a curious thing that the greatest of the advantages of living in a barge disclosed itself unexpectedly. When we made up our minds to buy a barge I was free to live where I pleased, but shortly after we had bought her I received an offer of an appointment which would require me to be in London every day. I could not afford to refuse this appointment, and we reflected what a pretty mess we should have been in if we had taken a house in the town where we had intended to send the boys to school. We should have had to get rid of the lease of the house, and probably have lost a good deal of money in the transaction. As it was, we had only to withdraw the boys’ names from the school, choose another school within striking distance of London, and anchor our barge fairly near a railway station from which I could travel daily to London. The change of plan cost us nothing.

My work in London was to begin in September, but when I found it impossible to finish the barge in time, I applied for a month’s postponement, and the partners in the firm, who were yachtsmen, admitted the propriety of my request and granted it like sportsmen.

The barge had now to be completed at breakneck speed. The haste robbed the entertaining labour of part of its joy; still, we experienced a good deal of that satisfaction which is presumably enjoyed in primitive societies where every man builds his own house and goes hunting for his dinner.

We could bicycle from our cottage to the quay at Fleetwick in five minutes. I engaged to help me two handy men: Tom, a sailor, and Harry, a landsman, both, like myself, rough carpenters. Of course, everyone in the place came to see the Will Arding; never before had there been so many loiterers on the quay. People came on board so freely to watch the floating house daily grow into shape under our hands that I grew expert at mechanically repeating my explanations with nails in my mouth while I kept to my work.

The most keenly interested, as well as the most regular and most welcome of our visitors, was Sam Prawle, the ex-barge skipper already mentioned, who lived in a smack moored in the saltings. He made his living by looking after a few small yachts. He came most days during the dinner-hour, studied what we were doing, and gave us his views. ‘If more people knaowed what could be done with a little ould barge, less housen would be built,’ he would say, with a shake of his head. He was always ready to discuss the advantages of living in a vessel. As a matter of fact, since the death of his wife, who used to take in lodgers, he had been unable to afford a house, but to hear him talk one would have thought that he had been taxed off the face of the land. And after his prolonged visit to the inn on Saturday, where he learned all his news—for he could not read—and had discussed the political situation and the infamy of the local rates, and had got everything in his head well mixed up, he would be decidedly ‘agin the Government.’ ‘What I says is this,’ he remarked once, in summarizing the appalling situation. ‘We shall ’ave to ’ave suthen different to what we ’ave got, or else we shall ’ave to ’ave suthen else’—as illuminating a judgment as one commonly meets with in political discussions.

We worked up forward to begin with, because the main hold had in it about four thousand square feet of match-lining, two thousand square feet of three-ply wood, one thousand square feet of flooring, and half a mile of headings of different sorts, besides the bath, kitchen range, and a hundred other things which took up room. We gradually got rid of stuff from the hold as we worked our way aft. Within a few days the appearance of the Will Arding wonderfully changed. While we were still at Bridgend, the hold, the sides, coamings and bulkheads, had shown nothing but one great expanse of tarred surface, whereas now we had clean match-lining round the sides and on the forward bulkhead.

The total length of the barge is about seventy-four feet, and her beam is seventeen feet at the level of the deck and fifteen on the floor. At each end there is a bulkhead shutting off what used to be the forecastle forward and what used to be the skipper’s cabin aft. The length between the bulkheads is fifty feet. The headroom under the decks varies from four feet three to five feet eight, and under the cabin tops, which measure respectively thirty feet by ten and ten by ten, the headroom is between seven feet three and nine feet. We made the cabin tops out of the hatches by nailing match-lining on them lengthwise and covering them with tarpaulin dressed with red ochre and oil. Thus we had two fine roofs, and these were raised on strong frames supported by stanchions bolted on to the coamings. Between the stanchions we fitted the windows. As the windows are high up and there are plenty of them, the interior of the vessel is very light and airy. The saloon is sixteen feet long by fourteen feet nine inches wide, and is, of course, the most important room.

As has been said, we began our work forward, and the first job was to divide the forecastle into a triangular sleeping cabin and a scullery of the same shape. Then we divided the space under the fore-cabin top and put up a partition, forming on one side a large cabin (the owner’s cabin), and on the other a kitchen, a narrow passage, and a bathroom. The bath had to be put in position first, and the bathroom built round it, as there would have been no room to turn a bath in the narrow passage.

We have often wondered since what we should do if anything happened to the bath, for a considerable part of the ship would have to be pulled to pieces to get it out. Perhaps we could have a rubber lining made for it; but still it is a good solid porcelain enamel bath, and ought to last as long as the ship.

The one space without light and with little headroom was abreast of the mast, and this naturally offered itself as the best place for the water-tanks. We could not afford to buy new water-tanks, so we went to a shipbreaker’s, and were lucky enough to find two four-hundred gallon tanks measuring four feet by four feet each, which just fitted in under the decks. At the same place we bought six mahogany ship’s doors for £4, and these we scraped and varnished, so that they looked very handsome. The tanks had to be put in their places at a very early stage, as they were to be built in like the bath. Empty they weighed about five hundredweight each, and were bulky things to handle. However, with tackles and guys and Sam Prawle’s help, we got them through our furniture hatch and safely down into the hold, where we levered them into position, and wedged them in safely. The great size of our water-tanks was the only fault Sam ever found with the barge’s internal arrangements, and his eye brightened sympathetically when I pointed out that if we found that they held more water than we wanted, one of them could always be filled with beer.

At the after end of the narrow passage already mentioned we made the dining-room, which opened aft into the saloon. Forward of the saloon on the starboard side came the spare cabin. Aft of the saloon on the same side was our daughter’s cabin. On the port after side was a lobby with steps descending from the deck; and aft of the lobby was the boys’ cabin, which had been the skipper’s cabin in the barge’s trading days.

The rapid progress we seemed to make during the first few days at Fleetwick was in a way deceptive. It does not take long to put up partitions and hang doors. The result looks like cabins. Yet only the fringe of the work has then been touched. The finishing is the true labour. The underneath part of the rough tarred decks, for instance, had to be covered with three-ply wood, well sand-papered, before it could be painted and enamelled. The deck beams, worn and knocked about, had to be cased in; nail holes had to be stopped with putty, and the joins all covered with headings. Then there was the making of the cupboards and shelves and bunks. There was never a right angle; we were always working to odd shapes. Indeed, there was so much to do that at times I was bewildered where to begin, and only by tackling the first job I saw, whether it strictly should have been the next or not, and putting Tom and Harry on to it too, could I regain a sense of performing effectual labour.

The wood bought in London was not much more than half what we ultimately used. Before we had finished we used over a mile of beading. Oppressed with the continual sense of working against time, my brain became so active that I slept badly. My life seemed to consist of sawing up miles of wood, and driving in millions of nails. I was pursued by dreams, after the manner of illustrated statistics in magazines, in which I saw black columns denoting the various amounts of material used, or tables showing how the material would reach from London to Birmingham, or pictures demonstrating that the nails in one scale would balance a motor omnibus in the other.

When the dining-cabin was nearly finished we gave a tea-party to celebrate the occasion, and while we were sitting round the table we saw through the windows the legs of a party of strangers. The fame of the Will Arding had spread so far that people came on board who had not the most indirect of excuses for taking up my time. Being proud of the ship, however, and sympathetic towards all inquiring minds, particularly in nautical matters, I was glad to explain things to everybody. At least, I did so to all whose manners were passable. I developed a high power of curtness to the quite considerable class of people who seemed to think that it was my duty to provide a sort of free exhibition for which it was not even necessary to say ‘Thank you.’ Tom, for some not very good reason, regarded the arrival of strangers during our tea-party as a particular offence, and we heard him begin to parley with them on deck with: ‘The guvnor says this is a ’alf-guinea day, and yaou can get the tickets at the Ship Inn.’