The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (30 page)

‘This is the football field where I scored my only ever goal,’ I squeaked to my dad. My sporting career must have been a sore point for him. A keen rugby player, he’d been desperate for a baby boy to follow in his studs, and had got me instead. At the age of eleven, I was the tallest in my class: this – and only this – had helped me inadvertently win the 100 metres dash on sports day. The rugby teacher pounced, and I was briefly placed in the First XV to bring a bit of speed to the front row. My strategy to get out of the team was to be as useless as possible, to drop every catch, trip over my own feet, squeal like a girl in the line-out and collapse the scrum if needs be (creating a sweaty, panting pile of lads was just an added bonus). There was no need to pretend. I was pathetic, and sent instead to play football, the school equivalent of the remedial class.

Even that was graded, and I was at the bottom. The better kids were sent over the river to the school playing fields, spectacularly located alongside the Worcestershire County Cricket Ground on New Road. This is always cited as one of the loveliest grounds anywhere, with its eternally Constable view of river meadows crowned by the soaring Gothic of the cathedral. Those of us in the bottom group were packed off instead to the Diglis Rec, a scabby mud-bath of a pitch enclosed by terraced streets and industrial estates. Failing miserably to do anything of interest with the ball were me and the other bookish jessies, together with the lads in bottle-bottom specs, the ones with one leg six inches shorter than the other and one gang in oversized old-man’s shorts who always coagulated around one of the goal posts, discussing algebraic formulae. Even amongst that illustrious crowd, I only ever managed one goal, but it is etched indelibly into my recollection, for there will never be another.

There were more memories of my sporting inadequacy as we made our way back to the river’s quay. Rowers from the school and city boat clubs swooshed past in the late-afternoon sunshine, lighting up the river with aqualine diamonds from their oars. I’d brought my partner here for the first time a year previously, on another perfect May evening. We’d sat on the lawn of the neighbouring hotel, sipping gin and tonics, watching the sun dapple on the Severn as the sculls glided noiselessly by. At just that moment, the deep bells of the cathedral began their peal towards the strike of six o’clock. I think it was quite an eye-opener for him, the son of a Welsh hill farmer. ‘God, this is like England in a bottle,’ he gasped. We laughed; it really was. Bronzed, confident people barked into their mobiles from behind designer shades. Ice tinkled in glasses; a heron soared by. Everything – the lawns, the flowers, the river, the faces – looked as if it had been starched and pressed. And the gap felt as wide now as it had then.

I’ve always loved Worcester’s quayside path from Diglis, as much under grey skies and winter floods as on a bright-green May evening. In fact, the regular floods were probably my favourite, because this often meant sport would be cancelled, if the school playing fields on the opposite bank were under water too (although still firmly in the bottom group, I’d graduated by now from Diglis Rec). It was no guarantee, however. Frequently, we were sent wading along the towpath, through fast, filthy water, in order to reach the bridge and the other side. Various sports teachers seemed to compete in just how high they would allow the water to be before grudgingly calling off the afternoon’s running around. A quite terrifying thigh-high was deemed acceptable by some of the more Neanderthal members of staff – almost inevitably, the ones who also taught geography. I don’t think there ever was a member of the geography department who didn’t teach sport as well; it was obviously deemed the softest touch for the intellectually compromised, a fact that always rankled in me. You never found a PE teacher in the physics lab.

Down by the Water Gate, from where the cathedral ferry plied across to the other side (a practice occasionally revived lately), there are numerous plaques and carved stones in the sandstone wall, recording the maximum height of various Severn floods since 1672. Despite the breathless insistence that our water levels are rising and that floods will be both more frequent and more deadly, the wall stoically refuses to confirm or deny it. 1672, two days before Christmas, was the first mark, and it is still the highest, well over six feet above the towpath. Then, in order, come 1947, 2007 and 1886. Global-warning sirens could doubtless find a pattern there to alarm us. Those who believe the exact opposite probably could too.

The difference between the Severn and the Thames can best be seen in the towns and cities that line their banks. The Thames, Father of the nation, comes to its triumphal climax through London, after having watered mellow Cotswold burghs, rich and plump as far back as the medieval wool trade, the dreaming spires of Oxford, luscious market towns like Abingdon, Henley and Windsor, and the capital’s most prestigious outer burbs, such as Richmond and Kew. With the sole exception of unlovely Reading, it is a 200-mile thread of luxury, desirability and the most consistently expensive property in the land.

Not so the Severn, its supposedly senior sister. The Thames spends the nation’s cash, while the Severn earns it. The great riverside palaces of the Thames – Kelmscott, Cliveden, Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, Ham House, Westminster itself and Greenwich – are the epicentres of power and prestige. Its Severnside equivalents – Elmore, Ashleworth, Chaceley, Ribbesford, Dowles Manor, Dudmaston Hall, Attingham, Powis – are new money incarnate, the homes of industrialists and chancers, those destined never quite to make the grade. And although there are plenty of handsome towns along the route of the Severn, almost all are a little blowsy and chipped around the edges, battered by successive waves of wealth and poverty. The river’s three great county towns – Shrewsbury, Worcester and Gloucester – have many handsome corners, but often laid cheek-by-jowl with dereliction and some truly grotty post-war development. One of Britain’s most handsome Georgian streets, Bridge Street in Worcester, is a fine case in point: the classically proportioned houses thick with grime and dust from three lanes of traffic hurtling down to the main city bridge.

After a night at a farmhouse B&B to the north of Worcester, Dad and I walked the last section home. In the distance, we could hear the thrum of traffic on the main A449 dual carriageway, a road we’d both ploughed up and down thousands of times. For ten years, I’d commuted to school every day by train on the same route. Yet neither of us had ever walked it, despite this stretch of the Severn from Worcester to Stourport being the riverside walk of your fantasies. It is stunning. Sometimes, the path snuck surreptitiously through dark little woods, over tree roots and stiles, at other times it shimmered into the distance as a green swathe through buttercup-filled meadows. Bluebells, anemones, campion and comfrey danced in our wake. Clouds of pink and white hawthorn blossom leaned down to meet us, and all the while, the flat beer-coloured river sidled quietly by. It was like walking through one of those sentimental Edwardian watercolours you see on the walls of pubs.

There were also copious hints of the world that appeared from the other side of the Great War, in the shape of the chalets and other nuggets of arcadia that littered the banks. These are everywhere along the Severn, much-needed boltholes for metal-bashing Midlanders, for whom the coast was an unimaginable distance away. Some had been craftily rebuilt into more permanent structures, many remained as basic and wooden as the day they were knocked up, only the addition of a satellite dish nodding to the modern world. Dinghies, picnic chairs, gnomes, flags and barbeques were squeezed on to rickety verandahs, while old cars rusted away alongside. The chalet sites, often strung like a cheap necklace along the riverbank, alternated with the more regimented atmosphere of the caravan parks, squadrons of big metal boxes lined up like tanks. Leathery pensioners in shorts and sandals nodded politely as we trotted past.

The workaday spirit of the Severn showed itself again, when the path veered away from the riverbank for a mile or so leading up to Thomas Telford’s bridge at Holt, half-way between Worcester and Stourport. I’d managed – and not for the first time – to misread the map, so we ended up having to scale gates and hurry through the middle of a busy quarry, past young workers picking asparagus in a dusty field, before being reunited with the official path and led right through the middle of a strange cluster of light industrial units: a caravan sales office, a catering company, an equine supplies set-up, a charity headquarters and who knows what else, all getting on with it in the quiet of the Worcestershire countryside. As an ex-pat Midlander, I always feel absurdly proud of these odd little industrial estates that you stumble across almost anywhere in the region. Queen Victoria famously demanded that the blinds be drawn as her train passed through the smouldering hubbub of the Black Country, but she didn’t know what she was missing. These numerous units, churning out widgets, sprockets, gizmos and thingummies galore, fascinate me, and I’m always glued to the window as the train trundles through any part of the West Midlands, full of ignorant appreciation of these hives of entrepreneurship by the line. People still making stuff! In this day and age! It seems little short of a miracle. That they’re probably manufacturing bits of weaponry for dodgy regimes is where I choose to draw my curtains.

One of the many blogs about the Thames Path that I read called it ‘a 180-mile pub crawl’. It’s a good point. Waterside boozers are some of the best of all, the presence of unhurried swans and weeping willows somehow hypnotising us into kicking back and having another round, and then perhaps – oh, go on – another one after that. No worries about breathalysers when you’re walking either. On the Severn Way with my dad, I’d purposely chosen our overnight stop for its proximity to a remote riverside pub that I’d loved in my early drinking days, but hadn’t been back to for 20 years. He’d never been at all, and I was nervous that it would have changed beyond recognition. It hadn’t, not in the slightest, and we had a wonderful evening in there, eating hearty stew and drinking well-earned pint after pint of Flowers IPA, while the pub’s peacocks crowed outside and the setting sun turned the river into pink fire.

The relaxing quality of paths by water is their strongest card, and it’s in marked contrast to the nerdy competitiveness on some of the upland trails. They are also the paths that most easily lend themselves to sensual suggestion. ‘Footpaths are our routes to a licensed intimacy with the landscape, to a carnal knowledge of nature,’ wrote poet Kim Taplin, and it is far easier to appreciate her point in a luscious water-meadow than a force nine gale on the side of a craggy fell. I remembered the steamy fertility of the path through the Undercliff, with the sea plashing gently far below, but walking through the landscape in which I’d grown up reminded me too of my clunky schoolboy attempts at seduction, most of which seemed to occur on out-of-sight waterside paths.

There was the Severn, of course, but rather more frequently, it was on the extensive Midland network of canal towpaths that I, and many of my mates, had our first snogs and gropes. Before they were transformed by ersatz waterside apartments, the canals were semi-derelict threads of illicit possibility – not just sex, but bottles of cider, ciggies, a much-prized joint if someone had managed to nick a tiny blim from their older brother. They formed an alluring no man’s land, beyond the grumpy rules of adulthood. Our Narnia, our
Secret Garden
, was reached through a broken archway in a Victorian wall, through muddy puddles and thickets of nettles.

The possibility of sex, even if it came only in finding some jettisoned copy of
Forum
on the towpath, raised also the possibility of danger. Paths anywhere could be tainted with this, but none more so than the towpaths or the alleys, snickets, ginnels and shuts that twisted their way through every urban wilderness. The reputation is still there today. Although you are far more likely to be flashed at or felt up on the Tube or in a motor-way service station, it is paths that are instantly demonised on the thankfully rare occasions that something awful happens on their route. Even when it hasn’t, siren voices still demand the closure of urban paths, just in case. A favourite place for kids to gather and let off steam is enough to bring on the hysterical opprobrium, for who knows what they might get up to if we don’t put a stop to it now?

This is the Nicholas van Hoogstraten mindset, the idea that paths are places only for flashers, perverts and reprobates. It’s the golfer-rambler split again too. Walking paths, themselves a penetration of an otherwise unattainable landscape, can indeed be a woozily erotic experience, and who’s to deny that bubbling over perhaps into quiet coitus in a shady nook? Chances are it won’t, but no harm in letting the possibility carouse through your veins. Perverts, say the men who do the decent, normal thing by shagging their secretaries in Premier Inns just off the M1, and getting the boys from the golf club to cover for them. What kind of weirdo gets his kicks that way when there are five lap-dancing clubs in the vicinity and two pages of escort ads in the evening paper? The kind who’s too tight to pay, that’s who. Thinks sex is free! Bastard.

In an age much less brutally sexualised, the paths were where you went courting, and waterside strolls were the most romantic of all. To writers like Henry James, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, E. M. Forster, Flora Thompson and Edward Thomas, paths were used as both settings and metaphors for erotic charge. In many of his works, most famously
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, D. H. Lawrence made much of the connection between illicit trespass on land and forbidden pleasures of the body. And in the Wessex of Thomas Hardy, the public paths were often the venue for idle, hopeful dalliance. Almost all of the various courtships in
Far from the Madding Crowd
– its title even tailor-made to the theme – take place on paths, such as the ‘sunken groove between the embowing thicket’ where Gabriel Oak lures Bathsheba in order to warn her against Sergeant Troy.