Boogie Up the River

by Mark Wallington

  ‘Everyone asks me that. In fact you’ve just asked that.’

  ‘Ever been further upstream than Lechlade?’

  ‘Once. Wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Let’s talk about London Bridge some more.’

  ‘Have you ever found the source?’

  ‘No. But I met someone who did.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It’s by a tree.’

  ‘Any particular tree?’

  ‘Can’t remember. But the tree had TH written on it, or so I was told.’

  ‘TH?’

  ‘TH.’

  ‘What does TH mean.’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe Thomas Hardy went there and carved his initials, how should I know. I’m going to bed now. You be careful going to the source. You’ll lose all your spoons.’

  I left Ralph and walked round Pangbourne looking for a telephone. They were all broken so I went into a hotel and put mud on the carpet and asked to use a phone. As Jennifer’s number rang I rehearsed my speech: ‘This is getting ridiculous. You’re being unreasonable. I’m not prepared to take any more of this. If you’re not here by the weekend . . .’ The answering machine came on: ‘This is Jennifer Conway. I’m sorry I’m not able to take your call but leave a message and I’ll get back to you. And if that’s Mark, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: this is getting ridiculous. She’s being unreasonable. You’re not prepared to take any more of this. If she’s not there by the weekend . . . Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is I’ve got to go to Oslo. The good news is I’ll be back by Tuesday. Promise. Did you visit Reading Gaol? Of course you did. It’s where Oscar Wilde was imprisoned. That’s why I sent you that Oscar Wilde quote. I would have sent you lines from the Ballad of Reading Gaol but I discovered he wrote that in Paris not Reading but then I’m sure you know that. Leave a message at the office where you’ll be on Tuesday. I can’t wait.’

  I walked back to the boat, lit the lamp and began to prepare chicken in a paprika sauce. Tonight it would be me and Delia again. I looked at her picture on the cover of her book. How pleasant she appeared, standing there with her hands under her chin. She looked like a wholesome sort, good to travel with. Not the sort to let you down on an expedition to the source of a great river. She’d be there by your side doing her share of the paddling, no matter what. I sat in the shadows on the border of Berkshire and Oxfordshire and prepared chicken in paprika sauce and tried to imagine what it would be like to travel with Delia Smith. A journey across the Sahara would be more her forte. I could imagine her trading with the nomads for juniper berries to give her pepper steak piquancy. I could just see her bartering in the medinas of Tamanrasset for root ginger to give her stir-fried mange-tout that essential zest. She looked like a resilient woman, not the sort to be discouraged just because her brown kidney soup got full of sand. She knew the meaning of the word commitment – you only had to read her opinion on packeted Parmesan cheese to recognize that. By the same token though, you only had to read her section on tinned tomatoes to realize she wasn’t the sort of woman who couldn’t improvise if needs be. If we got caught short of food, for instance, she could probably rustle up something very nourishing from Boogie’s Winalot. These things are important when you’re considering a travelling companion.

  Inside the tent, the paprika sauce simmered. Outside, the water lapped on Maegan’s mahogany, and the shrill song of the night birds pierced the dark. The noises of the night were so sharp I could even hear fish; I was sure I could. They made a faint pop when enough of them got together and broke the surface. Only the river was quiet. For such a large mass travelling such a distance at such speed it was a remarkably silent work of nature.

  The chicken was wonderful. Tomorrow I would write a postcard to Delia and let her know. I lay back and made animal shadows on the ceiling. The lamplight shone on the Winalot packet. There was an offer on the back: fifteen tokens for a plastic dog bowl. Thirty tokens for a feeding mat. A hundred and twenty-five tokens for a giant wool-and-mixed-fibre blanket. On the side there was a chart recommending the size of meal to give each size of dog. It turned out that Boogie, who should have been eating the same amount as a corgi or a standard dachshund or a fox terrior, was putting away the recommended diet of a doberman. I cut out the coupons. At the rate he was going we’d have the mixed-fibre blanket before we reached Oxford.

  Outside, an owl cleared its sinuses. Inside, Boogie came over and lay by me; he seemed to sense my solitude. He tried to climb in my sleeping bag; I seemed to sense his foul breath.

  He looked at me sorrowfully. ‘Don’t look at me sorrowfully,’ I said. ‘She’ll turn up. I know she will. You’ll see.’

  I turned the light off then turned it back on again and made a note on my mental state. I was concerned by the way I had taken it for granted that Boogie would be with me when I travelled trans-Sahara with Delia Smith.

  The rains came again that night and the river rose and was far too fast for me to get up early and have a swim so instead I had a lie-in. But I was there at the gates of Whitchurch lock as the keeper came on duty. He looked at me with great concern as I rose up to his level, then said: ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘Bugger,’ he said, then went back to his flowerbed.

  The current was a struggle again, but I was better able to cope with the vagaries of the river now. I’d learnt how to feather my sculls, and I bent my knees and pulled with my body, and I never took my wellingtons off unless I had to. I had the vernacular as well. I used expressions like ‘astern’ rather than ‘the back end’, ‘amidships’ rather than ‘that bit there’. I called the depth of Maegan’s water displacement ‘the draught’; the extreme front of her the ‘stem’; and the people who motored up the river at fifty miles an hour and disturbed the coots ‘bastards’.

  I pulled steadily away from the lock. The river felt thicker after the rain, and the sensation of being in the control of something powerful and inevitable grew stronger with each mile. The elixir-like flow drew all life to its banks. And not just wildlife – churches loved to hide in its recesses; the fine country houses that I passed were all possessive of their river views; the land and the farm stock all lurched towards the water for sustenance.

  And I began to find something significant and something personal attached to each meander, nowhere more sad than at Basildon where I arrived mid morning. I’d stopped to see Basildon Park, a splendid Georgian mansion with, so I’d been told, an Ionic portico and strange octagonal-shaped rooms. I understood it to house a unique collection of Anglo-Indian objets d’art, as well as some fine frescoes and a garden of great design. Unfortunately it was closed, so I rested for a while in the local churchyard. I’d pulled against the strong current for three hours and wanted to rest in some shade, and here was a haven of trees, long grass and wild flowers, a miniature wilderness, untouched by Black and Decker edgers, where butterflies flourished and grass grew to four foot in places. Boogie had three different species of spider crawling over him.

  I strolled around reading the gravestones. It’s normally easy to distance oneself from these brief biographies, but there was one here that brought a lump to my throat and illustrated what a taker as well as a giver of life the river is. It was a memorial, a stone sculpture to two young boys, erected by their parents. An inscription told how the boys had drowned in a backwater nearby in 1886. The family had lived at the church farm at the time. The river had flowed past only a few hundred yards from their door and was an integral part of the local life, but it shouldered no responsibility. It couldn’t be trusted. It acted imperviously and hurried on its way without a thought.

  There was no one about in Basildon. The village and the fields were deserted. Only the rooks and the aircraft caught the eye; the only noise came from the hammers of the British Rail workers on the bridge downstream. I left feeling like a voyeur – my biggest fear when travelling. And in this case particularly unsettling,
because with the ease of changing channels on a television, I went from the saddest part of the day to the most exciting.

  For if Basildon was sad and silent the Goring Gap, a mile upstream, had the air of a celebration. This gorge is the place where the post ice-age Thames burst through the ridgeway formed by the Berkshire Downs and the Chilterns, then swallowed the river Kennet and continued east through its new valley. Before I’d set out everyone had told me this was the most impressive stretch on the river and I remember feeling a tension that was strange because it was so unlike the Thames. As the banks tightened and rose into cliffs I could sense the land choke so that approaching the gap was like being poured out of a bottle.

  I entered the gorge and came upon the village. The postcards in the local shops were all pictures of the gap and of the lock, and Goring was undoubtedly a picturesque place, a fine example of what nature can do given beech trees and chalk cliffs. But the most compelling part of this village is something that could never be photographed – not unless Ralph’s idea for time travel got off the ground – for above all else the village is an historic junction, the place where the two ancient trade, military and stock routes, the Ridgeway and the Icknield Way, linked up. Since stone age times news from the east met news from the west here, and as I walked round the village and its neighbour, Streatley, I had the feeling I was treading on a very worn and smooth pavement. I must have been looking very intense because as I towed Maegan into the lock a man with a briefcase saw me and said: ‘Cheer up.’

  ‘Sorry, I was ruminating on stone age man and the ice age, and thinking how insignificant in general we all are,’ I said.

  Then he saw Maegan: ‘Of course, Three Men in a Boat. You realize, of course, that it was in Goring they stopped to get their clothes washed? They got a woman to do it in that pub over the bridge. I suppose you’re re-creating the trip. It’s a hundred years ago that Jerome wrote the book, you know?’

  I asked him if he lived in Goring. He said he did and it was pleasant enough. He’d played for a pub darts team a number of years ago. But he was too tired most evenings now. He said: ‘The best thing about Goring though, is it’s handy for Junction 6 on the M4 and only thirty-five minutes from Paddington.’

  It was a casual remark, but as I pulled away from the lock I realized he’d perfectly described the commuter-land ethos. To me Goring felt a long way from London. It had grown because of its role as a crossroads and was independent of the capital. That is to say it had a heritage. But now, like everywhere else the river had led me through, Goring had been revalued on the strength of its proximity with Paddington and the motorway, and I was sure the circling Boeings of Heathrow were a comfort to most folk rather than a disturbance.

  There was, of course, a price to pay for this convenience. Commuter towns and villages had such a high desirability status that everyone wanted to live there, but by the time the commuters had purchased their property they had nothing left to spend, so the communities were dead. Not only did folk spend all day in London, they then came home and spent each night indoors. Something fundamental to the village had been lost. The community spirit was reduced to a Neighbourhood Watch sticker in every front window.

  I sculled away through a sea of dandelion seeds. The gap soon disappeared and the river retained its composure after its brief fling. Ahead was Moulsford Bridge, a grand and angular span of red brick skewed across the water. I could see its elegant form from a distance, and yellow-nosed 125s flashing over. And I smiled when I thought that there was a man who could be held responsible for the creation of the commuter belt, our old friend Brunel, the man who never saw a hill without seeing a tunnel, never saw a river without seeing a bridge. His railway line had given all the Thames’ towns and villages their high-speed link with the capital, and ultimately their convenience rating.

  At yet, unlike the roads which crossed the river, the railway line seemed woven indelibly into its fabric. Part of this was nostalgia, but part of it was because the railways seemed under control whereas the roads were an impossible strain on the land. I waved to the passengers on the trains and they all waved back and I knew that, if anything, I found the railway lines reassuring. I remember them especially in the dark. I’d peer out of the tent some nights and see carriage lights tracing their way through the dark countryside and I’d feel a strange comfort.

  Now I stopped under Moulsford Bridge and waited for an Intercity. I could feel the vibrations a long way off: the river began to crease as the train came over the adjacent field, pushing the air before it. The bricks began to roar, the whole bridge to groan, then the train screamed overhead and the river rattled.

  I sculled long and hard that evening, almost reaching Wallingford. In the dusk I tied up under a high bank with the mist crawling over the fields towards me. A grebe paddled into a clump of reeds. There was a thump and a scream and an oof! and a duck limped out, winded.

  I pulled out the canvas and struggled to tie the ropes which had shrunk in the rain of the previous night. Boogie was lying languidly in the long grass and I said to him: ‘It’s your decision of course, but I’d be really grateful if you could hold this end of the rope in your teeth because it would aid me considerably in securing the canvas. I’m not saying you have to, it’s your right as a dog to refuse, you might for example prefer to be up in the village in the local pub right now, but if you could assist . . . Come back here!’

  I decided to cook outside. I set the stove up and suddenly there was a greyhound standing next to me, eyes ablaze. It was a shock that made my heart jump. The thing pinned me to the boat, its face not two inches from mine. Out of the half-light its owner approached, a man whistling a tune tunelessly. He said: ‘People are always terrified by my dog, can’t understand it, myself.’ It was the second most stupid comment I heard all night.

  The most stupid came from the same gentleman but a little while later when it was dark and the railway was a distant flash and clatter. I was washing my dishes in the river. A spoon fell in the water never to be seen again – I was down to my last one. I sat there watching the ripples slowly iron themselves out when suddenly the greyhound was sitting next to me again. It was uncanny, like turning a light on and off. One minute he wasn’t there the next he was. I called out for help to my faithful travelling companion who had come back from the pub now and was having his meal, but Boogie’s a lousy guard dog at the best of times and with his nose in a bowl of Chum he’s stone deaf. ‘I’ve saved your life three times on this trip!’ I screamed, but he put his paw over his eyes and continued eating.

  The owner turned up again, whistling a different tune, although just as tunelessly. He called his dog away: ‘He likes you,’ he said. Then he looked at Boogie and said: ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘He’s getting on.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then he looked stuck and he smacked his lips and said: ‘They get old, dogs, don’t they?’

  And that was the most stupid thing I heard all night.

  But it could well have been a crucial point in the journey as far as my mental state was concerned. Because the next day when I reached Wallingford a strange thing happened to me which left me rather unsure of the effect the river was having on my general condition. A woman walking along the towpath saw Boogie and said: ‘What sort of dog is that?’

  ‘Maltese spaniel.’

  ‘Thought so,’ she said, then skilfully changed the subject by giving me some indispensable piece of knowledge concerning Maegan and Victorian rowing boats in general, finishing with a lovely story of her grandparents who had gone on a camping skiff holiday on their honeymoon from Wallingford to Oxford and back.

  Had I been fresh on the river I’d have joined in conversation with this delightful person on the whimsical joys and contemplative pleasures of the Thames. But it was as if having been on the water for a while I badly needed the bilges in my brain pumped out. I could feel myself becoming more the sort of person who walks up and down the towpath at
nightfall, whistling tunelessly, and so I said: ‘Huh; it’s all right for a dog, isn’t it? The dog’s got the right idea.’

  And she looked strangely at me and said: ‘Travelling on your own?’ And I thought of Jennifer for the first time that day and hurriedly said: ‘No, no, a girlfriend’s joining me on Tuesday. She was supposed to be starting the trip with me in London, but . . . well, she’s a busy woman, and then she got delayed when I was in Hampton, and then in Windsor and then in Sonning, and then she had to go to Oslo or somewhere, but she’s coming on Tuesday for sure.’

  The woman nodded but looked as though she’d meant to shake her head, and said: ‘Well, I hope so.’

  7.I’ll Wait for You Outside Boots in Oxford

  NEXT DAY I called Jennifer’s office. Her PA answered.

  ‘I’d like to leave a message for Jennifer Conway,’ I said.

  ‘Ms Conway is in Os . . .’

  ‘I know she’s in Oslo.’

  ‘It’s you again, isn’t it?’

  ‘Tell her to meet me in Oxford on Tuesday.’

  ‘She won’t be there.’

  ‘That’s her decision.’

  ‘You really expect Jennifer Conway to go with you in your silly little boat up the Thames?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘Just give her the message.’

  ‘Listen. You must be meeting all sorts of nice girls, why don’t . . .’

  ‘Just tell her to meet me outside Boots at two o’clock.’

  One thing this trip had taught me was that every town has a Boots.

  It was Saturday, and the cruisers were out in numbers, I had a couple of near misses but generally other boats cleared a passage for me – it was an advantage of travelling backwards.

  Near Benson though I collided with a very expensive-looking vessel and since it was stationary I had to take the blame. But the owners were very understanding. They leaned over the side, saw Boogie asleep on the back seat and said: ‘Ah! poor dog. We didn’t wake him did we?’