Offshore – Penelope Fitzgerald

This offshore community is only a gangplank from dry land, on Thames barges permanently moored on the tidal reaches of that river in the heart of London. It is the sixties but these folk are neither swinging nor fashionable, though some may stretch to Bohemian.

There is an artist, Sam Willis, aboard Dreadnought, a vessel he needs to sell while it still floats. There is Maurice, aboard the conveniently renamed Maurice, who makes a living from picking up men from the shoreline pubs and from providing a repository for dodgy, probably stolen, goods. Aboard Grace is Nenna James, estranged from her husband and so effectively a single parent of her two daughters. Respectability is represented by retired company director Woodie Woodrow who takes pride in keeping his Rochester shipshape, and by Richard and Laura Blake, on Lord Jim, default leaders of the mooring.

Over the course of a few days, we share the small dramas of their lives as they fret about not only their own problems but also that of their neighbours, whom they are quick to help or at least comfort. The slowly sinking Dreadnought, the vulnerability of Maurice, the marital problems of Nenna, are all symptoms of the social decline of the floating community.

Immune from the general gloom, Nenna’s daughters, 11-year-old Martha and 6-year-old Tilda, have known little else and are as at home on the river as the rats that are kept at bay by the greased mooring ropes. They radiate freshness and hope.

At under two hundred pages, the book gives a taste of life on the river, a glimpse into a community rarely featured but here portrayed in realistic, if affectionate, style.