Back to the source
At some point, my son Timothy and I decided to bond by walking. I have never been an especially keen walker, so I suppose it must have been his idea. He would have been about 14 at the time. So far we have walked 250 miles – from the Thames Barrier, out in that timeless part of east London where you feel Dickens’ spirit still resides, to Newbridge, west of Oxford, a lovely village built of Cotswold stone, though it was pouring when we passed through so we couldn’t pause to enjoy the views.
In case you haven’t guessed, we are walking the Thames path – in the wrong direction. There is a helpful book called The Thames Path, by David Sharp (Aurum Press, £12.99, when we invested), but it assumes you will do it from source to mouth. “A flight of steps finally leads up to the Barrier Buffet and – no doubt – to celebratory refreshments,” concludes Mr Sharp euphorically. I have always resented the fact that, because we have tackled it the wrong way round, we will never have that moment of revelation, what he calls “a satisfying sense that the river you have followed from its first modest trickle is opening out to its estuary ready to greet the sea”. Instead, if we ever do finish it, we will be wading about in a swampy field in Gloucestershire, where the river inconclusively rises.
How, you might be wondering, have we walked 250 miles without yet finishing a path that is only 180 miles long? Well, we have so far managed about 140 miles of it, but usually we have had to do it in both directions, only occasionally finding a train or bus to get us back to wherever we parked the car. We are, in effect, walking the Thames path twice, though occasionally we have found short cuts back to cut off bends in the river. No short cuts on the outward journey, though: our rule from the beginning was that every inch of the river had to be covered.
Does 250 miles sound impressive? It shouldn’t: Timothy is now 19. So we have been managing about 50 miles a year – an average of perhaps five or six walks a year once we were into our stride and away from London. One excuse for our tardiness is that we had to take a year off during the foot-and-mouth epidemic when the countryside was out of bounds. Another is that we have done nothing for the past year because of a disagreement over how to proceed. It would take us a couple of hours to drive to Newbridge and my view is that, to reduce the amount of driving, we should do the final 40 or so miles of the walk in one go, staying in B&Bs. Tim thinks we should carry on doing it in discrete chunks, 10 or 12 miles at a time. My scheme would see us finished in a long weekend; his would mean we would still be at it this time next year.
I have a theory about his attitude. I don’t think he ever wants the walk to end. It has been part of his adolescence, a rite of passage. To complete it would mean moving on, leaving this blissful past of riverside walks and impromptu picnics behind. He has even mooted going on well beyond the end of the Thames path proper and negotiating a way through the evocative riverside towns of Kent and Essex – Woolwich, Erith, Dartford, Grays, Tilbury, Gravesend, Canvey Island, Southend – to the point where the Thames can truly be said to join the sea. Not even Mr Sharp ventured that far.
Where will it all end? The Isle of Sheppey, perhaps. When we began the walk, I would stride on confidently; he would get a little tired. I recall him once pale and dehydrated after a 10-mile hike from Putney to Tower Bridge on a warm day. Now our roles are reversed and I have to keep telling him to slow down as he powers ahead. If he gets his way and we do eventually try to plot a path across the marshlands to Sheerness, he may be pushing me in a wheelchair.
We began one Christmas Eve. We live near the river in Kingston and walked to Hampton Court, a couple of miles, on a cold, clear afternoon, enjoying that lovely stillness that descends as the world shuts down for Christmas. Then, soon after, we did Kingston to Richmond, Richmond to Isleworth, Hammersmith to Barnes – short Sunday-afternoon stretches that led to the notion of doing the whole thing. We bought the book; we were off. Just the two of us and a plastic bag filled with sandwiches and cakes, chocolate biscuits and cartons of orange juice, though whenever we passed a riverside pub I would try to persuade him to stop and watch me drink a pint of beer.
I wish, now, that we had kept a log of the walk, but we never did. I have no idea of when we did which bits, and only incoherent recollections of how the walks went. I remember being frightened by a group of drunks shouting abuse at us in Deptford; of falling over on the ice at Maidenhead; of feeling bilious in Windsor (I had recently returned from a trip to India and was still recovering.) I can also remember a lot of walks through fields occupied by cows – Tim finds my cow-phobia amusing and it has become a standing, or perhaps walking-extremely-quickly-to-avoid-being-trampled-on, joke between us.
All my specific recollections seem to involve moments of doubt, but that is misleading. These periodic walks have been essential in bringing us together. I’m a hopeless father, not very good at communicating; he is introspective, not given to shows of emotion. Spending a whole day together, most of it walking, has given us time and space to talk and get to know each other; now, I hope and trust anyway, we are completely at ease in each other’s company. We didn’t talk about anything very much – cows, drunks, locks, barges; the gorgeous riverside houses with manicured lawns we saw en route; the occasional ancient church; where to have our lunch; how to navigate our way back; what to do when, as happened periodically, we got lost. But we were communicating and something stuck.
I, ever the small boy, like games, sports, pursuits – the simplified narrative that stands in place of messy life. He doesn’t much. So the walk became our sport, our pursuit, our narrative. Gosh, the river as metaphor. One day we might even finish it, though perhaps he’s not the only one who fears what that will signify.
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