In 1943 Emma Smith joined the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company under their wartime scheme of employing women to replace the boaters. She set out with two friends on a big adventure: three eighteen-year-olds, freed from a middle-class background, precipitated into the boating fraternity. They learn how to handle a pair of seventy-two foot-long canal boats, how to carry a cargo of steel north from London to Birmingham & coal from Coventry; how to splice ropes, bail out bilge water, keep the engine ticking over & steer through tunnels. They live off kedgeree & fried bread & jam, adopt a kitten, lose their bicycles, laugh & quarrel & get progressively dirtier & tougher as the weeks go by. ” Maidens` Trip” is a classic memoir of the growth to maturity of three young women in the exceptional circumstances of Britain at war.