Cyclogeography (13 page)

Thomas was a great aficionado of roads, of their surfaces and gradients and of what it felt like to travel
along them. In ‘The Path’ he described a track ‘winding like silver’, worn into the woods by children who, ‘With the current of their feet’ create a monument to their passing. In his poem ‘Roads’ he wrote:

In
In Pursuit of Spring
he pays as much attention to the individual character of the roads he travels over as to the birds, rivers and trees that he passes on his way. The book is a catalogue of pathways, an encyclopaedia of the surfaces of travel. In it he describes roads ‘as straight and sharp as a hog’s back’; roads ‘heavy and wet’; roads like living things, steaming as they dry in the sun. Roads and paths were for him symbols of common life, figured as democratic spaces. They were marked out by the slap of time and the unconscious dictates of collective movement.

On his way out of London Thomas recorded that he shared the road with ‘a few genial muscular Christians with their daughters, and equally genial muscular agnostics with no children; bands of scientifically-minded ramblers with knickerbockers, spectacles, and cameras.’ Picking my way through Wandsworth, Tooting and
Morden in the cold March air I was accompanied only by cars speeding to beat the Easter weekend rush and the odd muttering walker or jogger. I passed through Morden by the banks of the Wandle, once Nelson’s favourite trout stream, then for many years a grubby industrial river, now reclaimed by the Wandle Trust, who fish shopping trolleys out of it at weekends and have recently restocked it with trout.

Middle England was washing its caravans as I crossed Surrey, and when I got to Epsom, a crowd was crucifying a portly Jesus in the square. ‘Kill him! Crucify him!’ they yelled enthusiastically. I sat at a sandwich shop called the ‘Green Machine’ and ate a bacon sandwich as a man addressed the crowds. Across the square, the crucifixion continued. There were hymns. The sun came out and warmed my back.

On the way out of town flags of St George fluttered in the cold wind. A ‘VOTE UKIP’ sign hung from a tree. I crossed the M25 by a footbridge and looked down at the traffic surging around London. I felt I might have broken free from its centripetal pull, but the roads felt much the same. Outside the White Horse pub further on I spotted a pair of stocks. They felt like a warning. Thomas’s England was, a year before war was declared, similarly suspicious of outsiders. At Bradford on Avon he noted an election poster reading ‘Foreigners tax us; let us tax them.’ The Gypsies and Travellers that Thomas observed camping on common land all along his route have today been brushed away
under motorway bypasses or onto brownfield sites. The entrances to pitchable land are blocked with concrete blocks.

A few miles through Surrey I found and climbed Box Hill, famous in Thomas’s day as a picturesque picnicking spot. Now it’s a Mecca for cyclists who come to test their calves against its inclines. Box Hill featured in the 2012 Olympic cycling road race, and the surface of Zig Zag Lane, which winds seductively up it, is a model of macadamed perfection. There were signs painted on the road ‘Cav for PM!’; ‘Victory Ahead’, with the tell-tale splash and splatter of the paint giving them away as guerrilla jobs. Some were probably left over from the Games.

Half way up I encountered Richard Long’s
Road
River
, a meandering line of white road paint, a schizophrenic road marking which echoed the exaggerated, almost comic meanders of Zig Zag Lane itself. I counted 37 Surrey MAMILS go past as I sat and looked at Long’s sculpture. Cars climbed the hill too. Some drivers shouted things at the cyclists as they passed. Most of the cyclists didn’t look up or acknowledge me. Instead they concentrated on their own suffering, concentrated on trying to climb this hill slightly faster than they ever had before.

After a while it began to get cold, so I left the hill and re-joined Thomas’s route. I skirted the Hog’s Back, which Thomas described as ‘a road fit for the herald Mercury, and the other gods, because it is as much in
heaven as on earth’. Now it’s the vicious A31, not a pleasant road to cycle on, so I travelled along its flank and continued through Farnham, entering Hampshire through Alton, Chawton and Alresford. Chawton, Thomas records, ‘is well aware of the fact that Jane Austen once dwelt in a house at the fork there’, and now the ‘Jane Austen heritage trail’ is clearly signposted, leading you through a dingy underpass below the A31 to her cottage.

Though Thomas noted the literary associations of the places he travelled through, he wasn’t particularly interested in the past. He wrote mainly as a passive cataloguer of nature and of the people he met, punctuating this stream of observation with disquisitions on such things as the decline of clay pipe smoking and the inability of civilisation to produce a decent set of waterproofs.

I stayed the night in Farnham and woke early the next day. I left with the sunrise and climbed out of Middlebourne onto the Hampshire hills. A torn up porno mag was scattered in the hedgerow by a stream, ripe pinks and reds glinting obscenely through the leaves. The sun came out at Winchester. At Itchen Abbot I stopped, walked down to the river on a footpath that ran across a bridge and through a garden alongside a private stretch of river, where I had lunch. Huge grayling flicked themselves around the stream.

I passed East Dean and West Dean, below the shadow of the Dean escarpment, which is still much as Thomas describes it, ‘Dotted with Yew, that is seen running parallel to the railway, a quarter of a mile away.’ At East Grimstead I met Malcolm, a farmer who was battling cockchafers in the churchyard. His eyes streamed continually from the cold as spoke. His family farm overlooked the churchyard, but he’d given it up now, he said. Five generations at least had worked that farm before him. His wife was from the same village, and his father and grandfather would both have been alive when Thomas passed through.

Malcolm still kept a few sheep, he said, which he used to keep the grass down on the land over the ridge I’d just passed. It made up some of the oldest yew forest in these parts. He was proud of the land: ‘a fierce patriot’. He was against the EU. ‘Can’t even bury your dead sheep on the farm anymore.’ He had written to his MEP about disposing of dead sheep but his letter had been ignored. The cockchafers were tough, he said, but he thought he was making progress. ‘I’ve dug wider holes this year,’ he said, ‘seeing as you can’t buy anything strong enough to kill them anymore.’

That night I slept for twelve hours straight in a friend’s house nestled in the Wiltshire hills. My friend was away and had left the key out for me, but I’d forgotten to buy provisions on my way in and the closest village was too far to ride back to after a day in the saddle. I drank whisky and ate cheese because I had
nothing else. Guinea fowl patrolled the lawns. A wire rabbit sculpture prayed to the setting sun.

I woke to bright dawn. A hawk was sunning itself on a fence post at the end of the garden. The world had been transformed during the night, from overcast to frosty and brilliantly bright. Ice flamed and flickered in the ditches.

The dirt roads that ran behind the house were hard going, frozen ditches and crackling frost. I stopped and pushed my bike often. Eventually the old farm tracks gave way to tarmac, to the most perfect cycling road. I slipped through this tree-lined tunnel in a blur, the wind whipping tears from my eyes. The rocket-like spire of Salisbury Cathedral flickered through the trees to my right. Pigeons and pheasants broke around me, following me along the road. A hawk flapped into the air. In the distance I could hear the faint pop-pop of shotgun fire.

I arrived in Salisbury as the bells were striking ten, but I left almost immediately to cross Salisbury Plain. The Plain has since before Thomas’s time been a military training area, and hasn’t been developed much at all. The vast expanses of it fell away in every direction. The sun was beaming down, but a cold wind blew at my back. Just before I arrived in West Levington, I came across a plaque:

Outside Steeple Ashton, I found a sparrowhawk freshly killed by a car. I put it in my pocket, hoping to find a more fitting grave than this roadside verge outside a caravan park. Stopping for lunch at a muddy fishing lake, I buried the bird under some ivy. Carp fishermen sat around the pond, using their Easter Sunday wisely, whistling to each other and catching nothing while I was there. Bullrushes bent in the wind.

The fourth day was colder, overcast. I rode back up the Avon along the side of a valley, along a canal towpath that ran parallel to the railway and to the river. It was lined with canal boats from many of which wood smoke was just emerging. Unfriendly joggers passed me. My cold hands were juddered by the bad surface of the track until I hit the good roads again, before attacking
a series of hard climbs into the Mendips, where the earth had become bright red.

It was easy going from Wells, across the Somerset Levels, wondrous and strange and empty, with dykes running across the crest of the land. I couldn’t see the horizon for the cloud. Glastonbury Tor stood above me, overlooking it all. I sailed rather than cycled across the Levels, using the strong winds to tack along the best roads. For a while I watched two ravens harry a buzzard. Pylons all converged on Glastonbury. I skirted Shepton Mallet, and at Chezdoy some dogs chased me, barking through the wind.

One of Thomas’s last stopping points was at Nether Stowey, sometime home of his great hero Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though Coleridge’s cottage was bought by the National Trust in 1909, Thomas couldn’t get inside. Now you’re encouraged to sit by the fire next to which Coleridge wrote ‘Frost at Midnight’ and poke at the embers. It wasn’t an auspicious end to my ride. ‘Nether Stowey offered no temptations to be compared with those of the road leading out of it,’ wrote Thomas, and I tended to agree.

After a while I left and headed back towards Taunton via Cothelstone hill, the summit of the Quantocks, where Thomas had concluded his own ride. It was a stiff climb along a dirt track. A bin overflowed with plastic bags full of dogshit. I sat at the windswept top next to the seven sisters, the rocky foundations of a long-destroyed folly, on a log bench much like that
which Thomas describes in
In Pursuit of Spring
. There were views over the hills, and out over the sea to Wales. The wind howled at my back. I ate Kendal mint cake, which I’d bought in the gift shop at Coleridge’s cottage, while peewits cried about me. There was still no sign of Spring.

I
n Pursuit of Spring
was a forward-looking book. Telegraph poles thrum through Thomas’s arcadia as regularly as oaks and elms; the sounds of factories and city life are just as present as birdsong. Railways run beside the roads and canals he describes along his way. In 1913 his roads, he recorded, were ‘travelled by an occasional (but not sufficiently occasional) motor car’. The car was a warning, but also something to be documented: a premonition of an automobile-centric future. ‘Is this not the awakening of England?’ he concluded, a question that wasn’t entirely rhetorical.

Yet one thing of the near future he didn’t mention was the war. In
In Pursuit of Spring
he ignores the fortifications installed at Box Hill and Guildford in anticipation of invasion. He mentions the military encampments which still occupy Salisbury Plain, but offers no further comment on them. Perhaps it was a wilful lapse, for he surely knew what was coming. He was killed during the first day of the battle of Arras, on Easter Monday, 1917, four years, almost to the day, after he made his journey. His heart was stopped by the pressure-wave of a shell that also stopped his watch, yet left no mark on his body.

My pursuit of Thomas’s Spring was to be my last
journey while working as a courier. Not long after I returned from the Quantocks I gave up the job. It was never, for me, a long-term proposition. Many of the riders I knew over thirty began to regret it. After three years, they warned me, you can’t get away. You forget you ever knew how to do anything else. ‘Leave while you still can.’ It was a warning written on their bodies. Some of the older riders looked as though they were falling to pieces. The work had taken its toll. Knees start to creak, legs seize up. Skin, weathered by the city’s mercilessness, tightens about the skull. After a while it seemed as if their bicycles were the only things keeping these riders together. Their bikes were functioning as prostheses, as mineral skeletons, ensuring that their legs kept spinning and their arms continued their twitching dance over the tarmac. It was a future which frightened me. I didn’t want to become a donkey, a long-term career courier, and so, that Spring, on returning from the Quantocks, I gave up my life on the road.

I still dream of the job, for it taught me a lot. In his memoir
The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills
, William Saroyan describes his early love affair with the bicycle as a form of literary and moral education. ‘On the way,’ he writes:

I felt bicycle couriering had given me a similar education. As a courier the ride I loved best was the last of the day, the ride home, when your legs had gone through weariness, stiffness and fatigue, and finally felt unburdened: light and easy. Then you felt like you weren’t riding the bike but being drawn along with it. Once the day was done you got a burst of speed, a home coming rush that willed you on and made you forget your tiredness. Freed of the need to conserve anything for a possible final rush-job, you let yourself go.

I still cycle daily, but I never really get that feeling any more. Now my commute to work – along the Lea Bridge Road (past club riders heading in the opposite direction, escaping London), through Hackney Marshes and Dalston, along the Essex Road and up the side of the Pentonville escarpment by Angel, and then down through the basin of the valley of the river Fleet and onto the Strand – is a meditative one, dulled and deadened by repetition. I have become a gentler cyclist too. I no longer run red lights or buzz pedestrians at crossings. I no longer race in alleycat races. I miss the work, but I’m glad I’m no longer a courier. I’ve heeded the warning of Flann O’Brien’s Atomic Theory, and of Jarry’s contracted racers who rode themselves to death. Though the wheels still turn, I’d learnt enough from the job. I got out while I still could.