Book description
'Tim and I both understood we had done something really stupid. We
had underestimated the danger involved in going out to sea. We had
no radio, compass, life raft or flares. In other words, we were a
couple of idiots.'
This is the story of Shane and Timothy Spall and their Dutch
barge The Princess Matilda. After a summer on the Thames they
head out to sea with only a road atlas and a vast amount of ignorance
- and it is absolutely terrifying!
On their travels, memories are triggered of childhood trips to the
seaside, but also of more recent times. A decade before, Tim had been
diagnosed with acute leukaemia and was given only days to live.
Shocked at how life can pass you by they decided that when, and if,
Tim got better, they would buy a boat.
As Tim and Shane explore the coast from the Medway to Cornwall,
eventually they start to wonder, could they make it out of England
altogether? Could Matilda make it to ... Wales?!
Taking over five years, The Voyages of The Princess Matilda
is a minor epic, charting a very personal, moving and uplifting
story of an everyday couple's adventure around their much loved homeland.
** Winner of the British Travel Press's Narrative Travel Book of
the Year Award **
SHANE SPALL is from a large Midlands family. Her mother called her
Number Five and her father after a character in a Western, played by
Alan Ladd.
As a teenager in the 70s she worked in a Quaker hotel in Birmingham
and on her day off would sit in New Street station and wonder where
everyone was going. She now knows they were mostly going to work or
coming home. The day that the young actor Timothy Spall arrived at New
Street in 1981 she was in a council flat a few miles away. They could
have been ships that had passed in the night but he sought her out
because he had fallen passionately in love with her when he had
accidentally touched her arm one night. The young actor now gets to
play parts called 'old man' but is considered to be a 'national
treasure'. He's a bit of a show off, but his wife doesn't mind, she
keeps his feet on the ground. They have three children and used to
have a bulldog that couldn't swim and a goldfish but they fostered it
out as it got lonely staying home on its own.
