I don’t get out on boats very often, admittedly, but there is a very appealing aesthetic, isn’t there, of being on a boat in a slow-flowing river in the middle of summer? Think of punting down the river Cam, with the hum of insects in the hot air, a straw boater shielding your eyes from the sun, and a hamper full of posh grub and champers (and some friend doing the actual punting). I’m thinking Brideshead Revisited, though it does occurs that that would have been the river Churwell, it being based in Oxford, and anyway, the nearest I’ve got to that in recent years is hiring a rowing boat for half an hour on the river Nidd at Knaresborough.
And then there’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K Jerome, perhaps the single most representative novel to treat the general theme of messing about in boats. Published in 1889, the comic novel describes a two-week boating holiday on the Thames, from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back again. The three men consist of the narrator “J” and his two friends George and Harris, along with a fox terrier named Montmorency (and plenty of tea, whisky, and pipe tobacco). Their voyage is punctuated by stop-offs at boarding houses and pubs and historical sites, and the three men argue and squabble throughout the trip, alternating between comic riffs and bants, anecdotes, and musings about timeworn truths.
The book actually started out with the intent to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, inspired by a real-life boating holiday Jerome had spent with his wife on a Thames skiff. However, humorous elements began to take over (Jerome had already cut his teeth in the genre of humorous writing with his 1886 essay collection, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow) and he soon abandoned the travel guide idea in favour of the comic novel. He swapped out his wife for two real-life friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel (called Harris in the book), who evidently offered more by way of comic resource than poor old Mrs Jerome (One Man and his Wife in a Boat perhaps doesn’t quite cut it)!
The book was a roaring success, and although his subsequent writings never quite hit those heights (his 1900 sequel about a cycling tour in Germany titled Three Men on the Bummel was only moderately successful), his humour lives on to this day in Three Men in a Boat which remains widely read and is as fresh and witty as the day it was written.
It probably comes as no surprise to learn that many of the comedy set pieces concern victuals; here’s an excerpt in which the gastronomically incompetent men try to puddle together an Irish stew from the leftovers in their hamper:
George gathered wood and made a fire, and Harris and I started to peel the potatoes. I should never have thought that peeling potatoes was such an undertaking. The job turned out to be the biggest thing of its kind that I had ever been in. We began cheerfully, one might almost say skittishly, but our light-heartedness was gone by the time the first potato was finished. The more we peeled, the more peel there seemed to be left on; by the time we had got all the peel off and all the eyes out, there was no potato left—at least none worth speaking of. George came and had a look at it—it was about the size of a pea-nut. He said:
“Oh, that won’t do! You’re wasting them. You must scrape them.”
So we scraped them, and that was harder work than peeling. They are such an extraordinary shape, potatoes—all bumps and warts and hollows. We worked steadily for five-and-twenty minutes, and did four potatoes. Then we struck. We said we should require the rest of the evening for scraping ourselves.
I never saw such a thing as potato-scraping for making a fellow in a mess. It seemed difficult to believe that the potato-scrapings in which Harris and I stood, half smothered, could have come off four potatoes. It shows you what can be done with economy and care.
George said it was absurd to have only four potatoes in an Irish stew, so we washed half-a-dozen or so more, and put them in without peeling. We also put in a cabbage and about half a peck of peas. George stirred it all up, and then he said that there seemed to be a lot of room to spare, so we overhauled both the hampers, and picked out all the odds and ends and the remnants, and added them to the stew. There were half a pork pie and a bit of cold boiled bacon left, and we put them in. Then George found half a tin of potted salmon, and he emptied that into the pot.
He said that was the advantage of Irish stew: you got rid of such a lot of things. I fished out a couple of eggs that had got cracked, and put those in. George said they would thicken the gravy.
I forget the other ingredients, but I know nothing was wasted; and I remember that, towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced great interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead water-rat in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say.
We had a discussion as to whether the rat should go in or not. Harris said that he thought it would be all right, mixed up with the other things, and that every little helped; but George stood up for precedent. He said he had never heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would rather be on the safe side, and not try experiments.
