The Daily Novel

Godfrey Hodgson takes a holiday from American politics to celebrate his local river.

‘Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.’

So said the ghost of Francesca in Dante’s Fifth Canto: that there is “no greater sorrow than to remember in misery the happy time”. With the greatest respect to Francesca and to the poet, I have learned that the reverse is true. There is no greater joy available in a time of misery than to remember a happy time.
About a year ago I committed myself to a project that would give purpose to my great love for the part of West Oxfordshire where I live. Three times and for some twenty years out of the last thirty-something, we have lived within a mile of the river Evenlode, and for most of the rest we lived within three miles of where that small but perfect stream loses its identity by joining the Thames.
One of my favourite books is Claudio Magris’s masterpiece, Danube. As a Triestino, Magris was bilingual in German and Italian, and with an acquaintance with Slav languages; villages where they speak Slovene are almost in the suburbs of Trieste, and there is even a Slovene Orthodox cathedral on the foreshore in that remarkable city. Magris took the Danube as his thread, and hung on it the whole bloody history of Mitteleuropa, with learned digressions on the fish, the navigation, the hydrology and the culture of the great river.
I formed a project of my own: to write as it were a mock-heroic version of Danube, exploring the course and honouring the history of our beloved little river. A neighbour who is a publisher has agreed to bring it out. We set out to walk the length of it in a series of circular walks. At that rate a two-mile stretch of the river was at least a four mile walk. The 42 miles (against the Danube’s 1,770!) would take ten or a dozen weekend walks.
We began with the little tributaries which come together west of Moreton-in-March. Only one has cultural dignity, the brook that runs down through the pleasure gardens of Sezincote, an Anglo-Mughal palace on the southern slope of the Cotswolds ridge that runs north-east from Stow-on-the-Wold to Moreton. It was built for a nabob, Sir Charles Cockerell, by his brother, the architect S.P.Cockerell, who later imitated the style for the Prince Regent’s Pavilion in Brighton.
Weekend by weekend we followed the little river, past Adlestrop, where Edward Thomas heard from the train “all the birds, Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”, past Shipton, home of John Foxe, the author of the gruesome 16th century bestseller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, past Ascott-under-Wychwood, where the martyrs were nineteenth century housewives, imprisoned for a week for supporting their menfolk in an agricultural strike, and compensated with scarlet petticoats by Queen Victoria, no less.
We followed the valley in a great curve round the northern rim of Wychwood, which locally we call simply The Forest. We skirted Chilson, where we used to live, past Shorthampton, tiny gem of a church with box pews and fourteenth century wall paintings, crossed the Coldron brook from a mushroom field on a footbridge, and marched up the mill field, between the mill race and the mill leet, into Charlbury. This is the largest of the “hundred little towns of stone” in Hilaire Belloc’s poem about the river. Charlbury has many claims to fame, including the proximity of Cornbury, where the village barber recognized Bonny Prince Charlie who was hiding there, and the patronage of the present archbishop of Canterbury, who had a weekend retreat here incognito. In our time, this was the home of W.D. Campbell, naturalist of prodigious learning who wrote the Country Diary in The Guardian for thirty years.
We duly admired the black Dexter cattle on Stonesfield Common, and revisited the Roman villa at East End. We paid homage to a private shrine, Rupert’s Beach. This is a sandy bend in the Evenlode near Combe mill, named after and beloved by my late Labrador collie cross. Once when I was filming an interview there about the rustic quality of my new life, two mute swans, cob and pen, sailed round the corner into shot, followed by their six cygnets; no assistant stage manager in history could have managed the timing more perfectly. We went as far as the ingenious works being carried out by the Environment Agency at the corner of Blenheim Palace, within sight of Bladon church, where Winston Churchill is buried. The Agency has deliberately slowed down the course of the river by heaping gravel on alternate banks to create an artificial meander, to the great benefit of fish and the whole food train, up to the otters who have come back from near extinction from dieldrin poisoning and are now recolonizing the Evenlode valley.
And that is as far as we got.
On January 12 we went for a walk, not along the river, but for a couple of miles. I remember congratulating myself, with a twinge of superstitious guilt, about how well I felt. Then I went to my office, sat down and signed off on one book, a biography I had been working on for five years, and literally finished a second, a history of the American feast of Thanksgiving. For good measure, I polished off a proposal for a third book to be sent to my agent in New York. I was so pleased with the afternoon’s work that I stood up, unwarily, planning to reward myself for my hard work with a celebratory martini, permitted only as a rare treat.
I tripped over a cable (still un-martinied, I need perhaps to specify). I fell heavily on both knees. I was carrying a parcel and could not save myself with my arms. The tendons connecting my kneecaps to my quadiceps were ruptured in both legs. I was taken to hospital, in great pain. My knees were brilliantly restitched. While I was in hospital, the doctors investigated my high nightly temperatures. They found I had a life-threatening abscess in my stomach and gut. Another operation, four hours long. Realistically, breaking my knees saved my life.
I was four months in hospital. Now, another four months further on, I am still learning, slowly, clumsily, and not without fear of falling, to walk, first with a frame, then with crutches, then with a cane and now, sometimes, cautiously and timidly on my own. (“How are you, grandpa?” asked my three year old grandson Angus. “I’m well”, I boasted. “I’m learning to walk”. “Oh, grandpa” — with a smile to show he had got the joke — “everyone knows how to walk!”
It will be a long time before I can walk the last four or five miles of the river bank, from Bladon to Cassington mill, for which the rent paid in Domesday Book was 175 eels. Realistically, I may never be able to manage it. But in a hospital bed, unable to move, and still today, hobbling round the house, to remember the tempo felice of our explorations along the Evenlode is anything but dolorous.