The start of it was hopping off the bow onto the aqueduct – inelegantly into the arms of a passing couple – and following them through hawthorn and campion to the steps. They dropped some comment on the way; I told them my name and melted away into the hedgerow.
Actually, maybe it began two nights earlier on the tow path. Goldfinches landed in a young ash tree and swifts skimmed above. I thought; it is too lovely an evening to die.
Or perhaps it was at the gravestone – the first time I really felt it. I knelt to place forget-me-nots in its shadow and found, to my embarrassment, that I was snivelling.
I must be fair; it started years before that. It was when my fixation with narrowboats first arose, when I read every romanticised perspective about life aboard. It was my research into canals that built towards the moment that our lives would come spinning together across a century – when I read about the murder of a woman on the Trent and Mersey canal at who just happened to have exactly the same name as me.
What morbidly fascinating coincidence. And there were other similarities between the two of us: she was also petite, like me. She also referred to her husband by his last name, like I do. And she was also thirty-seven – like me, and on a boat in the same place, when she was raped and murdered by four boatmen and left in the canal at Rugeley in June, 1839.
But there it is, I suppose. It becomes all a bit less quirky when you put those words together.
****
Researching a murder of someone with your own name is unsettling. We’ve all googled ourselves but let me tell you, seeing your name next to the word ‘murder’ over and over gets uncomfortable. I found a comprehensive internet article with pictures of the aqueduct and bank where her body was found and the Bloody Steps, up which her body was carried to town – which, legend has it, ooze blood. I read a book by John Godwin; a pretty well researched text published in 1999, which details as much of her life as could be known, her journey by a Pickford’s company boat down from Liverpool towards London, and the public response to her murder. It had pictures too.
All taken in winter. There are the bloody steps, with their un-gothic, municipally painted handrail, sodden with rain and mud. The only green is the bleak dark of ivy and the sky’s greyness adds to the sombre mood. Good for a ghost story, isn’t it? You need a bit of pathetic fallacy to get in the mood.
When Christina was actually murdered, it was June. It’s my favourite month – my birthday. Her own birthday was July, another summer child. I was thwarted from shivering with evocative atmosphere as I strolled along the towpath on a May evening, because the cow parsley and bluebells were too glorious. But the uncanny feeling crept in as I pondered the exact place she may have been strangled. I am here, it is evening, she was also here on a summer evening. Did these flowers comfort her? Remind her of some fresh world outside the confines of the stuffy boat cabin? Or did the moist fragrance of late spring become eerily warped by the anxiety of darkness and spending ten hours in that cabin with four drunk men?
I followed the journey in Godwin’s text. Stoke, Stone, Hoo Mill. Place after place where she reported the behaviour of the boatmen, to people who later bore witness to her obvious distress yet did nothing to help her. Then that dark, five hours from midnight when she was last seen alive, yawning to dawn, when the worst thing had happened. And I ended, like her, on the aqueduct at Brindley bank, to stand looking into the water where her body was found floating, face blackened, in her dark gown and faun neckerchief.
It wasn’t spooky and exciting. I found it all very sad. What is it about our attitude to history, where the passing of time can somehow turn sickening tragedy into gory myth? As children, our class was shown grainy photographs of the Ripper’s mutilated victims. We lapped it up, admiring his precision. Why do we show children this and make it some kind of ghost story? Why do we sensationalise and make a spectacle of very real violence against women? In a hundred years, will we have a sign on Clapham Common where Sarah Everard was murdered? Will people take selfies with it, and dress up as policemen?
Much of what you can read about the murder now, is Colin Dexter’s own take in his novel, The Wench is Dead. From his two days of research after reading Godwin’s text, he concluded the court’s verdict over three of the boatmen was unsafe and wrote a version in which Morse effortlessly vindicates them from a hospital bed. This idea was taken up by the BBC’s show Murder, Mystery, and my Family in 2020, where investigators refer to Christina’s murder in quotation marks and bring on a descendent of one of the hanged men to get emotional.
Forgive my waspish tone. Like Dexter, I want to go through all the witness statements to better corroborate Godwin’s presentation of the facts. To be sure in myself that there was actually a murder, and not a madwoman who fell in the canal.
But as women, aren’t we so used to being discredited? To being ignored and disbelieved when we challenge the abuse we face at work, on public transport, in clubs, in our homes. So used to others looking for culpability in our own actions when bad things happen to us. Or even challenging that the bad thing happened at all, like Dexter and the BBC. The tired narrative of the hysterical woman is preferred over accountability. Is it really so hard to believe four drunk men got handsy in a confined space with one woman over ten hours, and turned to violence when she tried to fend them off? We see this play out in our own lives every day. It’s simpler than a healthy woman on a journey to her lover suddenly being seized by such a fit of melancholy that she throws herself in the canal.
The Wench is Dead, after all. Why worry about her?
Unlike that first Christina, I have had wonderful experiences on boats. I was never a passenger, dependent on others to transport me. I owned my boat, NB Encharnted (yes, that’s how it was spelled, in great big letters); I lived on her gentle rockings with the musical scrape of piling hooks when the locks shifted the water, and I steered her up and down the cut. When I walked the towpath at night, it was not for escape, but to collect wildflowers and put them in jugs on the gas locker. I filled her with water, emptied her toilet, lit my fire in winter and drank whiskey with the owls. I chose that life, in my safe and secure fifty-seven feet of steel that I helmed. Not a constrained trap of horror.
So coming in to Rugeley for this Christina Collins, aged thirty seven, on a canal boat, was very different from the first. And I walked the towpath; thought of her; remembered; wrote tributes and put flowers on her grave. And did not die.
Through all life’s rhythms that cycle through moments and ages – when we try again to do things better; maybe for now, that is the most I can do, for her.