Joan Kettering

A ferry-mistress of the lower Thames, whose judgement poor servants trust in foul weather sooner than any polished municipal assurance.

Joan Kettering runs ferries on the lower Thames, and her name belongs to that small company of practical Londoners whose presence makes a threshold feel safer. When rain and dark have made a crossing feel less administrative than bodily, it is her boats that servants look for, and her judgement they trust before any official notice.

Her reputation rests on refusal as much as on crossing. She is known to hold a boat at the stairs rather than put out into a squall, to tell a passenger plainly that the tide is wrong, and to set her own fares in bad weather without apology. Nobody on the lower river remembers her losing a passenger, and she intends to keep it so. She reads the water by her tide watch and her own long memory of it, and treats a municipal assurance about river conditions as an opinion.

Companies meet her when they need to cross at night, in bad weather, or without drawing notice from the larger stairs. If Joan Kettering declines to take them, it is worth asking why before looking for another boat.

In person

In person, Joan Kettering is short and extremely stocky, a woman of fifty-two standing barely five foot three, with thick shoulders, powerful forearms and broad, scarred, rope-callused hands. Her thick, curly copper-red hair, heavily greying, is usually bundled beneath a scarf. Her face is broad and round, ruddy, freckled and wind-burned, with dark-brown eyes and a gap between her upper front teeth, and the upper half of her left ear is missing. She dresses for work on the water in a mustard-yellow wool skirt, a dark-brown leather bodice-waistcoat over a cream blouse, a red knitted scarf and a battered brown waterproof coat, with river boots, palm guards and a utility belt. Her ferry pole, rope, boat hook, brass handbell, storm lantern, river knife, fare purse and tide watch are always to hand, and she works by the practical tide signals and plain river machinery of the ferry stairs. She looks every inch a working ferry-mistress rather than a river official, which is much of the reason she is trusted.