Canada geese were another common bird, although not so exciting to observe. They were awkward creatures that waddled everywhere with their noses in the air. They’d march along the banks or paddle on the water giving their young lessons in how to be supercilious. They mixed well with all the birds except the great crested grebes. I remember seeing a grebe mug one once.
Coots and moorhens were intriguing. They scurried about the riverbank and built their nests precariously among the reeds, or in empty burger boxes wherever the willows stroked the water. I liked coots and moorhens, I couldn’t tell them apart but I felt we had a rapport. Great crested grebes didn’t like them though. They picked on them and pecked them severely.
Herons were the most mysterious birds on the river. They were loners that stood for hours on logs at the water’s edge, or by the weir streams. They were sad, silent fishermen, tall and sharp, skin and bone. Standing they reminded me of Fred Astaire in top hat and tails, and in flight their giant wingspan had a Wright brothers’ design. Despite their size however they appeared timid birds – great crested grebes would beat them up regularly.
In fact great crested grebes were a generally violent bunch. They had a snarl on their beaks and a scar on their faces and they shuffled over the water with ‘oi! are you looking at me?’ expressions, shouldering everything else out of the way. Only one group of birds frightened them, the same one that frightened me – the swans.
In the short time I’d been on the river I’d already come to regard swans as remote and intimidating creatures. They knew their own strength and I always gave them a wide berth. Only occasionally would they try and charm, and then they’d paddle up to the boat, lean over the side and see what you had to offer. But their arrogance would prevail and they’d nudge you with an ‘I’m beautiful aren’t I? How about some of your lunch? Come to think of it, how about all of your lunch? Or the boat goes over, get it?’
But swans can afford to behave badly. Since the time of Richard I their population has been largely royal property and highly valued. When in the middle ages the king wanted to show his appreciation to the trading guilds and city companies for their part in the military rearmament, he ceded to them the privilege of keeping swans on the Thames. Two guilds – the vintners and the dyers – still exercise that privilege today, and join in the annual Swan-upping ceremony when the swans are counted and marked by the Queen’s official Swan Keeper. Captain Turk of Cookham is the current incumbent of this position. I had an image of the swans with some sort of homing instinct that led them all to Cookham every July, but the truth is Captain Turk sets off from London Bridge in a ceremonial barge and heads upstream gathering the birds. It’s a splendid and historic custom but of note primarily because the swan-keepers manage to do it at all. Pictures and engravings throughout history depict the swan-keeper of the time casually branding the birds with a brush or knife, while the swan just lies there like a dog having its belly tickled. My own experience of the birds was quite different. If I got anywhere near one, it came hurtling down the river, running on the water, wings wide, like wild white horses with hooves flying, and anything but mute. They could hiss like snakes, and the beat of their wings was a clamour. The idea of grabbing hold of one and writing on its beak with a felt-tip ‘this bird belongs to the Queen’ didn’t seem like much of a job to me.
But Cookham is clearly proud of its role in the ritual. There’s even a pub called the Swan-upper. I leant at the bar, and asked the barmaid what she knew about the ancient custom and she said: ‘I don’t really know anything about it. Stan does but he’s not in tonight.’
Cookham looked lovely in the night time. Its moor was a spread of buttercups lit by the moon, and the floodlights from the parish church cast long shadows around the village.
And the next morning there was still a general yellowness. The village was lush and surrounded by rape fields and the buses were painted marigold. It was another beautiful day but you got the impression it was always a beautiful day in Cookham. It was such a reassuring sort of place: it had cottages covered in roses, there was a flintstone church by the river, and the local curry house had exposed timbers.
I’d stopped in the village to visit the Stanley Spencer Gallery. I liked his pictures for their irresistible wickedness, and for the way he never let the gravity of his subject matter smother his sense of humour. He painted the Last Supper with the apostles playing footsie under the table.
Throughout the first half of this century Spencer was a familiar figure in Cookham pushing the pram that contained his artist’s tools through the streets. He incorporated many village scenes in his work including the Swan-upping ceremony and the Cookham Regatta. In his best known painting, The Resurrection, Cookham, he depicted a number of local villagers – himself and his wife among them – rising from their graves on Judgment Day, while the Thames slips by in the background. The gallery in the converted Methodist chapel where the painter used to worship houses a small but important collection of his work and I’d long wanted to visit it.
But it was shut. So I went to the churchyard to see if I could find Spencer’s gravestone. I asked a woman if she’d seen it, and she said: ‘Are you a visitor?’
‘Yes.’
‘So am I. Are you on the river?’
‘Yes.’
‘So am I. Who’s Stanley Spencer?’
‘A local artist.’
‘No, I don’t know him. We went to the Cookham Tandoori. George Harrison eats there and so does Vince Hill, or so I’ve heard. You know, him who sang “Edelweiss”.’
The current had eased and the day warmed, I took my shirt off and sculled past the cliff edges of Cookham Dean Woods. The river began to meander, and the accents to thicken. At Bourne End I saw some cows in the river watering and heard some folk on the bank talking about tractors. There were hills in the background for the first time.
But I was entering a different phase of suburbia, that was all. The indiscreet chalets that had lined the bank downstream had now gone and been replaced by big houses in the pavilion style with windows thrust open to let in the spring. The residents sat in their garden furniture with their guard dogs at their feet, gazing at the water. I waved and said hello and they waved back to me with their teaspoons or celery sticks dunked in dip.
There was a sense of display here, though, that was unsettling. Because the trippers who passed in boats took photographs of these riparian owners the same way they would have of Dogon tribesmen in their mud-brick villages. If the locals were true natives, they would soon be forced to capitalize on the business potential here: ‘We members of the Residents’ Association have decided that each photograph takes away a little bit of our soul and so from now on, in line with the recent rate increases in the area, we’ve decided to charge a fee of 50p a snap. Cheques accepted with a banker’s card only.’
As I passed one house I commented on the charm of the garden to the couple sitting in deckchairs on the lawn. In return they commented on the charm of Maegan. A rapport was established and their dog, an athletic-looking boxer, trotted down to the water front.
‘He’s been on TV, you know,’ said his proud owner. ‘He advertises a chain of hardware stores. He’s the dog in the back seat of the station wagon that belongs to the chap who buys the loft insulation material. We’re hoping to get him a role in the next series of Juliet Bravo. He was chosen for the glossiness of his coat.’
At this point Boogie appeared from under the covers and from then on relations went rapidly downhill. In my antique boat it was possible for me to melt into the scenery but Boogie stood out like a blot on the landscape. He has never been on TV, and he couldn’t give a toss about a glossy coat – the more congealed the better as far as he’s concerned. The couple in the garden took one look at him and called their TV star to heel – ‘Come here, Bergerac.’
It was typical, really, of the culture shock Boogie was experiencing. Surrounded by all these pedigrees he felt insecure. For the rest of the morning he took his role
as a passenger very seriously and lay on the back seat in protest. At the Marlow lock the keeper took a long look at him and said: ‘Either that dog’s dead or he’s been doing all the rowing.’
His assimilation problems came to a head in Marlow, a pretty, neat, tidy, well-swept, parking-allowed-for-thirty-minutes-no-return-within-an-hour, thirty-five-minutes-from-Paddington, Georgian, brick and flintstone sort of place, with a Bejam, a Victoria Wine shop, a Waitrose, an Anglian Window Centre and an assortment of designer pedigree dogs, I tried out a few of the town benches, put some litter in the litter bins, sampled a zebra crossing and read some menus in restaurant windows, while Boogie made an effort and introduced himself to a red setter, a blue poodle, a labrador and, hardest of all, an afghan. They ignored him to a dog, wouldn’t even point him to the local tandoori or the betting shop. He walked back to the river in disgust, only to find the boat surrounded by swans. Boogie doesn’t know much about other animals except what he’s picked up on Wildlife on One. When he sees something he’s not familiar with, like a sheep, say, he doesn’t chase it, he tries to nut it. I put him on his lead. I knew he wouldn’t take to anything with a long neck and flat feet. Sure enough, with a ‘red setters, afghans, swans, they’re all a bunch of wankers,’ shrug, he lunged at the birds. This moment of rashness coincided with the moment his lead snapped. He turned to me and gave me his ‘I don’t believe it, what sort of lead is that? I only lunged at these things because I knew you’d pull me back,’ expression. I feared for the worst, but it only took a hiss, and a clout from a wing tip, and Boogie was cowering in the bottom of my shopping bag. Buses on the Wandsworth Bridge Road he could cope with, swans would take time and a complete rethink.
That afternoon I just dabbled slowly upstream, the river was in no hurry and neither was I. At Hurley lock the keeper, with an uncharacteristic display of officialdom, waited until I’d almost reached his gates, then looked at his watch, and hung up his Gone to Tea sign. The hydraulic locks on the Thames can be operated manually and the public are allowed to take charge when the keeper is off duty, but after an earlier attempt, when I left the river severely depleted and me severely exhausted, I elected to wait until the lock-keeper came back on duty. If the lock-keeper had a tea break, then so should I.
A few cruisers motored up to join the queue, I watched in horror as two adult coots or moorhens or whatever they were swam out of the reeds with their family of chicks, intent on giving them the hardest lesson of their lives – how to cross the river during rush hour. The adults headed off into mid stream, leading their family to what looked like a certain and very messy death as the brightly coloured hulls of the cruisers bore down on them like threshing machines. Used to the safety of the bank the chicks followed innocently, only to find themselves in heavy seas and having to paddle like riverboats just to keep their heads above the waves. They reached the other side somehow and had a roll call, but they would never have the same confidence in their parents again.
Presently, a beautifully decorated narrowboat pulled up. The man at the helm looked over at me and said: ‘It’s all right for the dog, isn’t it?’
I smiled and he asked if I wanted a drink.
‘I’ll have a glass of champagne please.’
‘I’ve got a cold beer,’ he said and handed me a hot one.
‘You know who you remind me of? Three Men in a Boat. My favourite bit is when they can’t open the tin of pineapples. I’d love to do what you’re doing and re-create their trip.’
‘I’m not actually re-creating their trip, I’m just . . .’
‘I mean the river’s not really changed at all in a hundred years, has it?’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure . . .’
‘I mean it may have motorboats on it and motorways over it, and the banks may be all privately owned, and most of the land developed, and all the commercial traffic may have gone, and the towns themselves changed unrecognizably, and of course all the mills disappeared, and there may be a fraction of the amount of wildlife there once was, and it might be impossible to find a mooring half the time, but it’s not really changed.’
‘Well, I think you’ll find that . . .’ But my point was lost as the lock-keeper opened the sluice gates and approximately eighty thousand gallons of water rushed off towards the North Sea.
The biggest Maid I’d seen joined us in the lock, Maid Enormous or something. It was like a bungalow. A man dressed in a suit leant out of the window and said: ‘Tell us if we’re going to squash you.’
They motored away and I was left to paddle out. The lock-keeper leaned on his gate, smoking, and I threw my eyes up in an ‘honestly, the things that true watermen like you and me have to put up with, eh?’ fashion, and he nodded and looked at my freshly sunbathed body and said: ‘You’re red, aren’t you?’
Hurley was surrounded by chalk cliffs and dark islands where herons with beady eyes kept watch on the weirs. I paddled out of the lock cut to find I had the river all to myself. The flat calm returned and with it the acoustics lost on the winds of the previous two days: I could hear cuckoos everywhere. I leant back and thought about the most enjoyable thing I could think of. The truth was that when Jennifer did finally arrive it would be the first time we’d actually spend a night together, alone, in the same room as it were. It would have to be handled carefully. I couldn’t be presumptuous. We were travelling companions, that was all. When she said she’d come on a journey with me nothing was implied. The important thing was to be reasonable. The river was good for being reasonable. It was soothing, and suitable for thinking things over. Since I’d made that phone call to Jennifer in Maidenhead, I’d realized my anger was simply directed at our different approaches to the journey. Mine was methodical, regimented. Hers was spontaneous, impulsive. But then Jennifer had always been an unpredictable sort. She’d made that clear from the start. We met by accident – a road accident that is. She knocked me off my bicycle. I was cycling to Italy, following the path of the first Roman legion to reach Britain in 55 BC, and I’d got as far as Blackheath and the start of the A2 when she reversed into me. I fell off and she insisted on buying me a drink. We went to a cocktail bar near the Blackwall Tunnel and she bought some champagne and said how she could easily fall for a man who cycled all the way to Italy. I explained to her that since my front forks were now bent beyond repair and my pedals made a noise that suggested a cracked bearing case, I would probably have to abandon the trip. But she said that such talk spoiled the romance of it all and she loaded my bike into the back of her TVR and took me to an Italian restaurant in Leytonstone where we had artichokes and garlic butter, and she got into a heated discussion with the waiter over the political role of the Catholic Church in Italy’s social reform as a result of the unification. Over the zabaglione I said to her: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we got married because you knocked me off my bike?’ And she laughed and said we must stay in touch. She gave me her phone numbers and we arranged to go out the following Wednesday, and that was the last I saw of her for six months.
‘It’s a contemplative thing the river is,’ I said out loud, and I saw myself climbing up a slippery slope until it disappeared into the ground. ‘A bit like life really,’ I added, and a lone canoeist whistled past me.
‘Pardon?’ he said.
‘Nothing. Nothing.’
A mile upstream I moored by the most beautiful house I’d seen on the river so far, Medmenham Abbey, a jumble of architecture, four hundred years old, standing in cool gardens. But its peaceful present disguised its decadent past, for here during the eighteenth century the Hell Fire Club met, that infamous, dissolute and ultimately rather silly band of men who under the aegis of Sir Francis Dashwood dressed up as monks and had get-togethers every Wednesday under the motto: Fay ce que voudras – do whatever you want.
To join the Hell Fire Club two qualifications were needed: 1) to have been drunk, 2) to have been to Italy. Meetings contained a variety of agenda, but virgins and satanic rites and the perverse things you could do w
ith them seem to have been the most popular. Afterwards the gang would repair to the Dog and Badger in Medmenham village to unwind after a hard night’s decadence. The pub has changed rather since those days. Now there are no cabals sitting in corners discussing whether or not to give the holy sacrament to an ape next week. Instead the pub is popular with RAF sorts sitting down to gammon steaks with pineapple rings. I sat at the empty bar. The barman said: ‘It’s always quiet on a Tuesday.’
I said: ‘So what’s all this about the Hell Fire Club?’ and he said: ‘I don’t know anything about it.’
From somewhere Boogie came back with a half a fish-burger with garnish and tartare sauce. A man in a suit sat next to me and said: ‘Huh, the dog’s got the right idea.’
I recognized him from the big blue boat which shared the lock with me that afternoon. We sat in silence for a while then I said: ‘Saw you on the river today.’
‘What?’
‘I saw you on the river today. We were in the lock together.’
‘I haven’t been on the river in twenty years.’
‘You remember, you were in that big boat. I was in my camping skiff.’
‘In fact, I haven’t been on the river since Macmillan was Prime Minister.’
‘And you said to me: “Let us know if we’re going to squash you.”’
‘I can tell you an interesting fact about the river, though.’
‘I’m sure it was you.’
‘Herons eat ten thousand fish a year. Each.’
I found a phone box and left a message on Jennifer’s answering machine for her to meet me in Sonning the following evening, then I took Boogie for a walk along the river towpath. A mist was down over the meadow. It swirled around my knees, and around his ears. It was a crisp cool night. I said: ‘I’m glad in some ways Jennifer has given me a couple of days on my own.’
Boogie sniffed and clicked his tongue.
‘And that’s not to say I’m not missing her. I am. It’s just that a trip like this is a time to be on one’s own. That’s the big difference between Jennifer and me. She doesn’t like her own company. She doesn’t like to be on her own for any long periods. I think that’s why her poems are all so short.’
Boogie Up the River Page 6