Three Miles Up

THREE MILES UP by Elizabeth Jane Howard

“The alternative is to go up as far as the Basin, and then simply turn round and come back, and who wants to do that?”

I can quite appreciate what is implied there. I experienced, many years ago, having to turn round unexpectedly in a narrow boat on a canal ring. This whole story’s canal ambiance rings true with me, even the main story within that ambiance, having read it many years ago, too. But it comes up darkly fresh and seems even more telling than I remember it, a classic ghost story, no mistake, one that will haunt you forever, and then re-haunt you anew and differently! The story of two men who argue with the frustrations such travelling entails, as well as its slow motion chugging pleasures, two men who are well-characterised and individual, finding it hard with all the coping and catering, and they somehow pick up a chance young female as a foundling called Sharon who helps them by being allowed to travel with them, affecting them differently in emotional terms with gender issues (“‘She is what women ought to be,’ he concluded with sudden pleasure; and slept.”), as they find a third fork of the canal that, according to the map, should not have been there at all, as they chug slowly along it into a territory of pent-up ghostliness that each village they think they see on the bank is eventually not there at all; and the grey old man from the previous story curtly and darkly appears on that bank and later becomes a little boy on the towpath, a journey that can only be experienced by those reading this and travelling with them, “….stretching their time, and diminishing the distance” towards a distance that never diminishes but infantilises as well as infinitises. But they did want to ‘explore’, as Sharon said — as we all do. This work itself is a special byway of literature that we all need to explore at least once. Trees and banks becoming heavy and black. A little white mist hanging over the canal. Black huddles of would-be cottages. This work also possesses the Zeno’s Paradox ‘half-measures’ of Le Fanu, plus the grey fungal absorptions of Hodgson, “Half wilderness, half marsh, dank and grey…”, “Clifford had begun to hate the grey silent land”, the sunken feet to reprieve the embedded shoes in the Hartley, “his shoe sank immediately into a marshy hole”, later the boy with no shoes. And like the “fiancée” amid the grey fungus of Hope as well as of Hodgson, how should we interpret what happened to Clifford’s ration of Sharon? The search for the ultimate winding-hole, I guess.

Full context of above: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-1st-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/