Two men in a boat — a voyage of discovery
When a pandemic has the temerity to wreck your summer holiday plans, can I suggest leaping in the nearest boat and rowing down the Thames with your father?
I realise I may have to persuade you. But in early July a beach holiday wasn’t on the cards. So there seemed no better way to break out of lockdown claustrophobia than with a jaunt down a waterway. My Dad and I hit upon the plan of rowing from Oxford to Reading in an old wooden boat.
One grey Thursday morning in July we assembled under the concrete arch of Oxford’s Donnington Bridge to take possession of Rosalind, a 30ft Thames skiff. These are pleasure boats, if you count some decently serious rowing as pleasure. They have a long tradition of Thames outings in fine weather. Today, only about six or seven replicas of the originals remain available for hire.
Rosalind was transport and lodging all in one. Over hinged iron hoops that fastened into sockets at night, we hung the thick canvas and turned our boat into a floating tent. It was wide and long enough for the two of us to sleep — with only some minor discomfort... just about offset by the calm lapping of the water.
But this trip turned out to be about more than just rowing down one of England’s gentler rivers, languidly picnicking on the bank. In fact I’d been here before. After leaving university seven years ago I had rowed a different stretch of the river, further upstream, with my dad and sister (who couldn’t make it this time). Anniversaries breed reflection, as do weeks of house-bound lockdown. Time had often seemed to stand still in those long months and now, looking back to the same experience seven years earlier, there were opportunities aplenty for turning things over, observing present and past moments. The bigger questions loomed. Was my life going as I’d planned it then? Or hoped it would?
But before I sank under the weight of my own musings, we were moving. The banks were thick with trees and bushes. In the shallows, the water was clear enough to observe the darting movements of fish. In the middle of the river, especially towards dusk, we could see swifts cutting through the air above us. Round every easy bend, it seemed, there was a lone heron or wild egret.
We were cocooned in the peaceful world of our boat. No sooner had we pulled into a stretch of houses and gardens, we were out again, back into the long, canopied passage of water and trees. Often we just stopped rowing and drifted with the current.
When we stopped for lunch, mooring the boat up between two trees and lying out on the grass, it was idyllic. We enjoyed the freedom of the drifter: eating wherever we wanted and heading on our way at the loosening of a rope. In those days just after the lifting of the severe restrictions and limitations, the boat gave us a sense of immense freedom. And when the summer sun came out, there are few finer places to be than on the river.
It’s an open secret. In the baking heat of a Friday night, the people of Oxfordshire hit the water. Swimmers, paddlers, boaters, kayakers, eaters, drinkers, young, old, something in between — everyone was out. They were wading into the water in the sand-and-soil beach by Wallingford Bridge, they were splashing by the reed-fringed bank at Culham cut, they were floating on lilos, they were sinking Kronenbourgs under the shade of a willow.
Locks came and went, the deepest at nearly 7ft, a serious drop in an open-sided boat. I perfected the art of clinging to slime-covered chains to keep a vessel straight. And the art of wielding a boat hook like a rapier, pushing and thrusting my way out of the locks with aplomb. Not that the motorboat owners seemed to think the same.
There’s a lot of river-snobbery and as a self-propelled craft we were low on the pecking order, in the eyes of some. I was a little guilty of inverse snobbery myself, though there was one boat I felt a bit jealous of. A skiff like ours, it had an engine on the back, but it was the drinks cabinet a gloved lady was tucking into that set my heart beating: gin, claret, and champagne on ice. Good going for a Saturday afternoon.
There was, of course, the occasional downside: bucolic moments of hard and sustained rowing when we realised just how far we still had to go to make our evening pub dinner booking, our failed attempt to row up a tributary far too narrow for the manoeuvrability of this stately craft. But all stresses were smoothed away with an end-of-day drink in a riverside pub.
Was my life going as I had planned it, or hoped it would? In conversations, the bigger questions loomed.
As our conversation meandered like our journey, Dad asked about life, about work, about the future. It was easy talking, a time to mull things over. I didn’t have answers. Did anything really matter apart from this chance to get away from it all? Fortunately, he didn’t seem to mind. We rowed under the ridge of the Chilterns in the cool of the morning. We worked up a sweat overtaking a houseboat in the afternoon heat.
But just as it risked getting a bit too Wind in the Willows, the urban landscape of Reading in its sprawling glory crept into view. Perhaps I had soaked in nature for long enough. A solid bed and firm mattress beckoned.
So many of my thoughts had been about anniversaries, about pressing on, or pausing to stand still; about disappointments and successes, dreams and realities. But the bigger questions, prompted perhaps by the solitude of gliding down the river — who knew? — actually they could wait couldn’t they?
This situation we’re living through gives only an uncertain glimpse of an uncertain future. This was a time for living in the present as never before — and what better way to do that than when making headway along the water in our own private summer river trip.
