Bruce Ansley’s Long Slow Affair of the Heart
Sally and Bruce Ansley aboard The River Queen.
"Adventures are not simple events. They are complex things, filled with satisfaction, and moments of complete happiness, and danger, and shards of hardship, and fright, and despair. Otherwise they would not be adventures. They would be ten days in Fiji."
Men of a certain age will readily identify with author, and some-time Ligar Bay resident, Bruce Ansley's mid-life impulse to abandon home, family and job to buy a canal boat with his wife's inheritance and cruise the waterways of Europe. After almost a year on the River Queen, Sally and Bruce returned to New Zealand and headed straight for their house in Golden Bay before resuming their lives in Sumner near Christchurch.
Ansley's account of the experience, A Long Slow Affair of the Heart, is much more than a travel book. He writes well. Until 2006 he wrote for The Listener, but he has had wide experience as a journalist and writer in other contexts. He has also had a lifelong love of boats:
"Boats symbolised everything men, or some of them, desired: freedom, adventure, simplicity, self-sufficiency, order ... and boats were shapely too. Most of all they represented potential - what you might do if only life gave you a shot at it."
The book describes the process by which Bruce and Sally acquire the River Queen, and how they sail her through Holland, Belgium and France. It also provides background material, interspersed among the linear narrative of the Ansleys' voyage, to help us understand how their trip eventuated. The author excels, just as he did in his days as a journalist, at telling about people and the places they inhabit.
"Yet the villages along the way were fresh and lovely. In St Julien-sur-Dheune great slabs of stone marked the boundaries of the tiny port as if a monastery had been dismembered for the purpose.
"A fisherman threw old buckets into the canal and dredged its bottom, picking through the mud for worms. A man in a white shirt arrived at the boat and stood politely outside until I realised he wanted something: he was the lock-keeper and he asked what time we wanted to leave in the morning...
"A heron's nest stuck out of a dead tree so haphazardly I could not imagine such a large animal landing in it without toppling the lot to the ground. A dead water rat floated by. Did water rats drown?"
The journey becomes a test of the Ansleys' marriage. Bruce likes the canal boat life and Sally does not: she misses her home and the connectedness it gives her and dreads the constant locks they encounter on the canals.
A Long Slow Affair of the Heart is partly a cautionary tale, partly an autobiography and partly an unflinchingly candid look at a long-term loving relationship put to the test in unfamiliar surroundings.
Copies are available form Take Note Takaka.
Neil Wilson
