GIRL POWER

Heather Wastie’s fascinating journey with the Alarum project’s history celebration

- Heather Wastie

I Dig Canals is a project celebrating women’s involvement in campaigns to save our canals. I’m a professional songwriter and poet and wrote my first poem when I was at infants’ school in Cradley Heath. Looking through my childhood diary recently, I came across an entry from 1969 when I was 13 in which I invented new lyrics to ‘English Country Garden’: Prams and bikes and parts of cars. Drums and pushchairs, bottles, and jars.

Can you guess what I was writing about? Yes, the state of the cut and the kinds of rubbish my family battled with as we attempted to navigate canals in and around the Black Country.

In 2013, I wrote a poem looking back at that time, describing the canal as soap sud soup with beer bottle croutons, / peppered with cans, and the odd chunk of meat. Meat? Anyone who was boating at that time will probably know what I mean.

Since our first meeting in 2016, writer Kate Saffin and I have been writing and touring canal-related shows as Alarum Theatre. Our first, Idle Women of the Wartime Waterways, tells of the trainees who took on the challenging job of operating pairs of cargo-carrying boats during World War Two. Now, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we have just completed a major research project in which we interviewed people, mostly in the Black Country, who remember the canals in the 1960s.