BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Old Man Thames Time on the Thames. By Eric de Mare. (Architectural Press. 21s.) A RECENT American film celebrating the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority presented us with one of those tremendous sequences of visual images which constitute the cinema's chief claim to be taken seriously as an art. Two raindrops coalescing on a grass-blade opened a long, detailed, watery crescendo ; gradual at first, with slow trickles a pebble could divert.; then brisk rills of water, and so to tumbling streams; and rivers fuller and fuller swelling to vast continental dimensions and on to the vertiginous terror of gigantic Mississippi in full flood ctirling over futile, breaChed levees to drown a country.
Small, tamed Thames does not drain or drown half a continent, but it also is a river, and its story also would seem to be best begun where two raindrops coalesce, and best ended where the pilot Litimbs down the rope-ladder and waves farewell to the outward-bounder. Mr. Eric de Mare, however, has chosen to describe his river in reverse, starting at Twickenham, the head of the tideway,, and urging his craft upstream past forty-three locks until above Cricklade naviga- tion is impossible even for canoes; and the few remaining miles to the source (or sources) are for pedestrians. The effect of this reversed progress is to make the Thames seem less a natural, organic river than an extended playground for Londoners' summer outings ; and indeed this is the author's theme, for he is chiefly concerned that the river and its banks should, as soon as possible, be formed into a narrow, winding National Park, a fluviatile National Park 130 miles long and perhaps half a mile wide • only so, he thinks, can we ensure that our heirs will see the same beauty that we do.
Mr. de Mare argues persuasively. He is particularly insistent on the need for a continuous right of way along the banks ; in fact he seems almost to prefer walking on the towpath to navigating the water. He writes " The towpath can be considered as a native bush track, more natural, safer, and easier (and, incidentally, cheaper) than the river as a line of travel." That riparian proprietor Ratty (so oddly dressed in a fur coat) would have had something to say about this. How odd that a discerning Thames-lover could ever write as if mere towpath-friendship were enough !
All who know the river will agree with the author that its beauty is superb and must be preserved at all cots. The chapter in which he urges the formation of a Thames National Park is the core and centre of the book; the rest, apart from some interesting history, is an agreeable, anecdotic-picturesque itinerary of a rather familiar kind. Not much of the material is new, but it is clearly arranged and will be useful to intelligent and enquiring holiday-makers. Of the inevitable omissions one seems to call for protest : How is it possible to write of swan-upping at Cookham without a mention of Mr. Stanley Spencer ?
There are 232 photographs, all but eight from Mr. de Mare's own camera. The rather scrappy arrangement and the vest-pocket size of many do not disguise the fact that he is an outstanding photo- grapher ; the illustraticins do all that photographs can do to call up memories of white-painted houseboats and neat geraniums, of the surging uprush as the lock fills, of noble trees, of the cool and echoing undersides of bridges and the shouts of children bathing. There is special attention to the man-made detail of the river, the curve of an iron handrail, the weighty timbers of the iock-gates ; but he has devoted less attention to the detail of nature, the meadowsweet and the yellow flags, the sapphire dragonflies locked in their strange insect embrace, the leaves of the arrowhead nodding in the wash of the boat.
As the hot day declines the colours grow stronger. Exhausted with sun and water we sit on the bank among the dry grasses. Soon it will be dark and it's a long way home to London, but still we sit, waiting for the moon to rise. After sunset the river seems mys- teriously to grow warmer ; it is tepid to our- dangling feet. The campers' tents glow dimly, lit from within ; and there, between two willows, is a yellow light. The harvest moon has risen at last. But the seasons do-not pause. Soon there will be misty mornings and yellow leaves in endless procession sailing downstream to plunge over the weir. Dark days will come and wet weather and rising waters until punts go between the pollard willows across a grey rain-pitted surface where the hayfields used to be. In rubber hip- boots the owner of a bungalow will make a pencil-mark on his door- post where there are other marks with dates—" March, 1947 " and the others. Will the townsfolk believe these marks when they come in the summer ? The tamed Thames will be no one's play- ground ; no one will be taking holiday photographs as the rains hurry to the sea ; our domesticated river will have quietly and irresistibly resumed its flood-plain as it did before it floated the first dug-out canoe.
" A great many books have been written about the Thames," says Mr. de Mare. " The Thames can stand yet another one." It can. And even another after that.
STEPHEN BONE.
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