While working as a teacher in the 1960s, Penelope Fitzgerald lived with her impoverished family on a rusting barge anchored on the Thames in London. The home, which sank two times in as many years, was not entirely sea-worthy. Indeed, Fitzgerald once recalled, family members "were only allowed to use the lavatory on a falling tide."

["It was terribly difficult to get respectable enough to go into work..." Her experiences living on the Thames led to her Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore.]