‘By golly, it was cold in the river as I remember,’ he reminisced, ‘and that was only June. Things must’ve got warmer since then. You certainly seem to be enjoying your dip,’ he added before raising his hat politely, calling his dogs and sauntering off down the towpath. That was the last time I tried skinny-dipping in the waterways of England – my extremities have never been quite the same since.
Death and the Dreaming Spires
Slow let us trace the matchless vale of Thames;
Fair winding up to where the Muses haunt …
—THOMSON, Seasons, ‘Summer’
From Reading the Thames flows sixty miles south-eastwards to London, which meant that I could finish my journey in about four days. But as I rowed out onto the broad green river in glittering sunshine there was Caversham Bridge spanning gracefully over its reflected light and shadows, and I thought of all that lay upstream: the villages of Pangbourne and Goring with their willowy lawns and stately riverside manors; the old Roman town of Dorchester-upon-Thames; then Oxford, of course, and all its associations, and so on all the way to Lechlade in the Cotswolds where there lived a certain lady I had not seen for some years and thought I might surprise.
Besides, the breeze was blowing steadily from the south and like all those enviable heroes in every adventure story you’ve ever read, my time was my own – I was in no hurry to get to London. The decision was easy. I would go and chart the length of the Thames before turning around and making the final run down to the capital.
It was glorious to be out on a wide river again. I had barely been able to sail at all over the last eighty miles and my progress had been a fitful series of stops and starts. But here on the Thames it was different. With a southerly breeze I was able to ripple along upstream at a good pace, past the islands and outskirts of Reading, past the riverside houses with their velvety lawns, their elaborate Tudor boathouses and their monkey-puzzle trees, and so onward to the Goring Gap. This was a very different river from the Severn. Here was wealth, here was prime real estate, here along the waterside fringes of each stripy-mown lawn was a coil of brand-new razor-wire – a picturesque detail that somehow got left out of The Wind in the Willows. On the Severn, meandering down that wild Welsh border, people rely on the indefatigable brambles – or vicious swans or mad bulls or the Severn Bore – to secure their property from passing boaters, but here in the broker belt trespassers are warned off by movement-sensor spotlights, Securicor personnel and the absolute certainty that one will be sued for damages by the family lawyer if so much as a croquet hoop is displaced.
Above Reading long hills rear on either side. These are the Chil-tern Downs flanked with beech forests turning to red gold, and topped with grassy ridges seamed with bridleways and footpaths through the springy turf. At their feet nestles the mellow-stoned manor house of Mapledurham, the model for Ernest Shepard’s illustration of Toad Hall. Then comes Pangbourne crouching by its wide white weir. Here I stopped for the first afternoon and totally failed to appreciate its prettiness and charm due to the rain that had suddenly blown up from the south and settled into a steady soaking downpour.
I had, up until then, been extraordinarily lucky with the weather. Now, however, the rain seemed set to stay, so I moored up at the Swan Inn above the weir and trudged off to find my favourite of all places when in a strange town: a laundromat. You can keep your tea shops and coffee houses and pubs, where one is never far enough away from one of those cappuccino machines that sound like mating fire-extinguishers. On cold rainy days there is nothing quite so cosy, quite so warm and womb-like as the local laundromat. Outside the big plate-glass windows, shoppers hurry past in the downpour, heads down, coat collars up, dancing along the kerbs between dirty puddles and ducking in front of steamy-windscreened buses. But here is the blast of warm air and the comforting hum and rumble of tumble-dryers, the clean smell of soap powder and endlessly fascinating articles in eight-month-old women’s magazines about Forgiving His Nasal Hair Problem or Attractive Christmas Wreaths You Can Knit Yourself.
Laundromats are also the best place, the only place in fact, to write letters, which is how I planned to spend my rainy afternoon in Pangbourne. A long, important letter to write and hours to do it in. But first, a quick phone call from the booth across the road …
Here’s a good trick you can play if ever you’re bored. Take a cigarette, half-smoke it, and then, without stubbing it out, leave it smouldering in the Coin Return flap of a public telephone seconds before someone arrives to use it. Then watch from a distance as said person finishes his call and sticks a probing, change-searching fin-ger straight into the flap and onto the still-burning cigarette butt.
Wait for the yelp, appreciate the faint smell of scorching flesh and the loss of temper, and then run like blazes. This stunt is provided courtesy of the Pangbourne High School student body and is guaranteed to prevent the victim from holding a pen comfortably for the next three days. So, while my washing went round and round, instead of writing letters I sat and read how to avoid unsightly earwax build-up instead.
The next few days saw the weather alternate between solid rain and bright skies, but all the while a blustering knockabout wind drove me up the river in a succession of squalling blows that patted the steely brightness of the water to slate-dark catspaws. It was so swift and exhilarating that I remember very little of the countryside and landmarks that I passed. All my concentration was on where the next gust was coming from, and watching for a sudden gybe that could easily capsize me.
I came to Oxford late one afternoon just as the purple skies opened once more. Before I could moor up, I was drenched to the skin and shivering with cold, flexing my cramped hands after long hours of holding the mainsheet hauled in. Abandoning Jack de Crow I hurried up Headington Hill to find warmth, dryness and a large drink at the house of an old friend, Jo.
Jo, an energetic woman in her late forties, has the zip and crackle you get when you throw a bicycle into an electrical substation. Over the last few decades I had enjoyed the hospitality of her family in Yorkshire farmhouses, villas on Ithaca, cottages on the Cornish coast or in deep Devon woods, the Dordogne, the Highlands and by quiet Surrey golf courses – that easy brand of hospitality that points out where the coffee is kept, throws you the Times’ crossword and makes it quite clear that sofas are for curling up on.
For the next four days the rain continued to blow in gusty waves, and Jo insisted that I stay until the weather cleared up. This I was only too happy to do; four days of sleeping under a quilt the size and softness of a cloud, of writing letters (my scorched finger had healed), reading books and cooking all the exciting things to be found in Jo’s kitchen cupboards that had not yet made it to the Ellesmere Supasave: sun-dried tomatoes and tzatziki, pesto, ciab-atta, Mocha coffee and Malaysian starfruit-flavoured yoghurt – things like that. Four days also of dashing out between the showers to cycle on Jo’s bike around Oxford: the Radcliff e Camera; the Eagle and Child pub where the Inklings met to read aloud their works in progress; the grounds of Magdalen College and its deer park; the wild, beautiful graveyard of the Church of the Holy Cross where Kenneth Grahame’s tomb lies amid a tangle of briar and seeding grasses; four days of renewed admiration for the group of Oxford dons and their friends who in the 1940s spun enchantment out of their scholarship like gold from dust and straw.
“And No Birds Sing …”
After four days of ease and Jo’s good company and artichoke pesto on pumpkin-seed toast, the weather brightened and I had no longer an excuse to linger. After bailing several bathtubs of rainwater from poor abandoned Jack, I set off once more to row upstream, through Oxford and beyond. I had always imagined the Thames (or River Isis as it is mysteriously called in these parts) to flow past all the Colleges, the dreaming spires, the lawns with their wallflowers and ancient groundsmen, the honey-warm stonework and mullioned windows, and black-gowned academics cycling absent-mindedly to lectures cancelled in 1945. But it doesn’t. Instead, it rather half-heartedly
dives for one edge of the town, slips under a few bridges, skirts cautiously around the Head-of-the-River pub where rah-rahing Oxford Rowing Club types sit on sunny afternoons and drink themselves silly, and then makes a dash for the countryside again without so much as a glimpse of a College Quadrangle or a Porter’s Lodge.
Above Oxford the character of the river changes again. It narrows to a meandering lane of green, wandering like a lost child between flat meadows and reedy banks – sailing around these wiggly curves had the old excitement of playing at follow-my-leader. Then in a more serious mood the stream straightens out between row upon row of iron electricity pylons and thin plantation trees whose paper-dry leaves whisper and rustle in the dying breeze.
As I rowed into the featureless dusk, songs and stories and snatches of poetry ran through my mind in a steady litany to keep the weariness at bay: Father Brown and Flambeau rowing up a winding creek beneath a goblin moon to find Prince Saradine in his house of reeds and mirrors; Tolkien’s errant mariner who ‘wandered then through meadow lands to shadow-lands that dreary lay’; Saki stories where a walk among English hedgerows and flat fields reveals wild beasts and casual death – a child taken by a hyena, a girl gored by a stag; and from La Belle Dame Sans Merci the mournful words:
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the Lake
And no birds sing.
What can ail thee, knight-at-arms? Lack of food, lack of beer and an over-vivid imagination, that’s all. The twinkling yellow lights of the lonely Maybush Inn shining out through the darkness at last cured all three. An hour later the gentle rocking of Jack de Crow, a cosy sleeping bag and deep dreamless sleep drove all the dark phantoms far, far away.
I had visited Lechlade many years ago when I first arrived in England. Before I had left Australia one of my students, a gentle girl called Emily, had said to me, ‘Oh, when you get to England, you must go and visit my aunt. She’s just lovely. AND single,’ she had added pointedly. ‘Her name is Daisy May and she lives at The Meadows, Lechlade. You’ll get on so well.’
Daisy May of The Meadows! With a name like that, how could I not get on well with her? In my year’s travelling to England overland, especially on hot tropic nights, I had held a picture in my mind, a picture of a muslin-smocked Daisy May gathering forget-me-nots in her Cotswold cottage garden and waiting for me to turn up. Oh yes, and singing madrigals. She was bound to sing madrigals, from merry morn to moonrise, Daisy May of The Meadows … When I arrived in England, I found my footsteps meandering towards Lechlade and soon enough, just to be sociable you understand, I found myself standing on the doorstep of a cottage whose name-plate had half vanished under a cloud of honeysuckle and yellow roses, and knocking on the old green door.
Silence, while I went through various explanatory opening lines.
‘Hello, you don’t know me but I was told by your niece Emily whom I taught in Australia which is where I’m from to come …’
No, too convoluted.
‘Hi, Sandy’s the name, you must be Aunt Daisy. ’
No, too familiar.
‘Do you sing madrigals?’
Possibly, possibly …
My reverie was broken by the door being flung open and a voice snarling out of the gloom: ‘Yes? Well?’
The figure before me was not quite what I had conjured up in my mind on those sleepless tropic nights. She stood before me, a gaunt, iron-grey woman with short-cropped hair, a hatchet face and aggressive eyes, swathed in a crumpled dressing-gown. Visions of forget-me-nots and muslin smocks dissolved. She had something of the wolfhound about her, and if she sang madrigals at all, she would probably be taking the bass line.
‘Oh … er … um,’ I stammered.
‘Oh, er, um?’ she echoed. ‘Hardly helpful. What do you want? Speech therapy?’
‘Ah … I … oh,’ I continued.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she snapped. ‘Stop doing vocal warm-up exercises and tell me what the devil you want! Well?’
I decided flight was a better option than explanation. She had begun to bare her teeth.
‘Look, I’m terribly sorry to have disturbed you. You don’t know me, I was just calling on the off-chance but I see it’s not a good time to call and I’ll be off now,’ I babbled as I backed down the cottage path.
‘Oh no you don’t. You’ve woken me up. You’ve dragged me to the door. You’ll explain to me right here and now who the blazes you are and what you want or I’m calling the police. You have thirty seconds. One. Two. Three …’
Somehow an explanation, involving hot tropical nights, Miss Daisy May, my single status and forget-me-nots, tumbled out in a rush.
From the doorway came a snort of grim amusement.
‘Daisy? You want Daisy? She lives next door at The Meadows. This is actually Number Three, Meadowgate Cottage. People of low intellect like the postman are always muddling the two. Bell’s the name, Frances Bell. Come and have a drink.’
Relief and embarrassment swept over me in equal measure.
‘Oh, look … no … I … ’
‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t start that again,’ she growled. ‘You’ll come in and have a drink now that you’ve disturbed me, or I will call the police. Daisy’s out but will be back in an hour. And if you stutter again, I’ll have you shot.’
And that is how I met Mrs Frances Bell. Within minutes I was seated on a large shabby sofa with a gin and tonic in hand and deep into a conversation about T.H. White, C.S. Lewis, William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the deplorable state of Eng. Lit. among Oxford graduates these days and terminal cancer – the last of which, by the way, she had. Hence the mid-afternoon nap, the dressing-gown, the cropped hair and wolf-like expression.
Her reaction to the condition was to give it extremely short shrift, along with anybody presumptuous enough to express sympathy. Bouquets of flowers left by well-wishers, I later learnt, were put immediately through the compost shredder, wrapper and all Repeat off enders had the resulting mulch returned to them in small paper bags. ‘Get Well’ cards were cut up into individual letters and rearranged in the manner of a hostage note to spell rude anagrams.
When I questioned her about this, she replied very firmly, ‘Look, Sandy, to the whole village, goodwilled or not, I have suddenly become an object of interest, of tattle, of gossiping sympathy – a potential invalid with a dramatic disease that can handily become the focus for all their latent mothering instincts, all their charitable Sunday impulses and a boost for the bloody florist. Once I accept that role, the role of dying mother of two boys, the brave-but-cheerful-to-the-end victim, then I’m done for.’
But aren’t you anyway? I thought but could not of course say out loud. She read my mind.
‘Of course I’m not done for. This is my body and my mind where I live, and I will not have things going on uninvited inside it. And I will certainly not pander to it by smiling wanly and building a tomb for myself out of flowers and bloody cellophane. No buts, Sandy. If it’s a choice between playing the tragic but gracious invalid or staying alive until my boys are grown up, then I think I know which is the more important, don’t you? I’m not fighting it, because there’s nothing to fight. Unlike the local council – now there’s a battle worth fighting!’
And her grey eyes sparkled as she lay on the sofa and told me about her ongoing campaign against the idiocy and greed of various council members who were planning to build a housing estate on the quiet brook-bordered meadow that lay beyond her window Frances was conducting a one-woman war against the proposals and had so far, it seemed, been successful. All over the Cotswolds, members of the Lechlade Council were known for their nervous twitches and haggard eyes, and sales of hard liquor had soared at the local bottle-shop.
Before I departed that first afternoon, she invited me back to dinner to meet the family the following Wednesday. When I explained that I would be in London then, she c
urtly handed me a train timetable and said, ‘There are trains, you know. Big choofy things that get you from A to B. London is A, Lechlade B. Work it out, chum.’ I reckoned the local council didn’t stand a chance.
In years following I was invited over once or twice and continued to come away exhausted, exhilarated and more admiring than ever. (I think on one of these occasions I did actually meet Daisy May, but she rather paled in comparison.) But the last I had heard from Lechlade was that the cancer had gone into remission – panicky retreat from Moscow more likely – as had the local council, whose members had finally given up the unequal struggle and left the meadows to the larks and dragonflies and forget-me-nots.
It was four years since I had seen Frances and the family, and I pulled in eventually under the Ha’penny Bridge on an afternoon of blustery rain. For the last few miles the tall Cotswold-grey spire of St John’s church had dominated the horizon ahead, wavering to and fro like a swinging compass needle as the river meandered and wound through gentle meads.
I left the boat moored under a willow by the old woolpack bridge and made my way through the wet streets. Even under grey skies the Cotswold stone glowed with characteristic warmth, and the shops and houses on either side of the broad High Street looked prosperous and well proportioned. Antiques and old prints sat comfortably alongside genteel fabrics; second-hand books and William Morris tapestry cushions tempted me from shop windows but in vain. I found the little lane between stone walls that led to Meadowgate and walked along it, startling a blackbird bathing in a puddle. It flew off in a glitter of scattered raindrops and sat scolding from a nearby pear tree whose golden fruit hung over the wall as perfect as one of those Morris cushions.
The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Page 11