Dannel was born on the canal bank, in amongst the long grass and cow parsley, just a few hundred yards from the Barge Inn. Topper Sandford found him, as he told it, “swaddled in newspapers, ‘e were screaming with all the breath in his lungs, ‘im fists balled as tight as a badgers ass’ole”. There was nothing to show where or who he came from, so Topper took him straight back home to Pamp, handing him over with a shrug, “there you go girl, found a littl’un by the cut needs tending”.

Sure enough, Pamp tended him. They called him Dannel because that was the name given to the runt of a litter of pigs, unnurtured by it’s mother. In an act of almost wilful defiance Dannel grew awful big and not anything like a runt at all, fed as he was on Pamp’s fatty roasts and suet puddings. Dannel lived with Pamp and Topper but inhabited the villages around, navigating tracks and meadows, railway lines, and most often the canal paths, he came to be known by everyone. Dannel was made strong lifting stooks of straw at harvest time for the farmers and fetching whole carcasses off the van for the butcher down the road.

He went to school but didn’t seem to settle, unsure what use it was knowing the names of creatures he would never see like Terrapins and Capybaras, or why he needed to count further than his fingers.

Dannel’s favourite spot by the canal was near Three Ladies bridge, under Woodborough Hill. He would sit there for hours making musical instruments of the wide bladed grass. This way he became familiar with many of the regular narrowboat folk that came by, travelling to or from Bristol and Reading. He chatted with many of them, doing small jobs for them where he could, but his favourite boat was small, brightly painted and called the Dragonfly. It was decorated with plastic flowers, enamel pots and a parade of garden gnomes.

There was a small blonde girl who travelled on the boat, along with an elderly man and a sad looking younger woman. The Dragonfly came past every month and Dannel would always shout “hello”, but with no response. Sometimes he would run alongside, hoping that the girl would wave or smile, but she never did, she just watched him. Sometimes he made her gifts, a small corn dolly, a whittled stick, a daisy chain, and dropped them onto the boat from the bridge. He would watch her quietly retrieve them with no acknowledgement and stow them in a small box on the boat roof.

Then one day it was war and nothing seemed the same. The boats on the canals were different, there were planes overhead at night, soldiers with strange accents in the villages, and even a bomb dropped in a field in Beechingstoke. The Dragonfly’s journeys became less frequent, until the last ever time Dannel saw it, down the canal having passed by before he got to the bridge.

Nestled in the grass at the bottom of the bridge was something wrapped in newspaper. Dannel opened it to find a gnome with a fishing rod and a stem of plastic flowers, and as he looked along the canal, in the distance, he saw the young woman and the girl waving.