Narrow Boat

Bucolic, poetic but a sometimes uncomfortable level of snobbery. It’s a lovely guide to a world that had just come to an end, but which was - largely thanks to this book - soon to be recreated in a new form.

To step down from some busy thoroughfare on to the quiet tow- path of a canal, even in the heart of a town, is to step backward a hundred years or more and to see things in a different, and perhaps more balanced perspective.

The beautiful ‘show village’, on deeper investigation, often turns out to be as lifeless as a stuffed bird in a museum,

‘If no one went no faster than what I do,’ came the sonorous reply from the canal, ‘there’d be a sight less trouble in this world, and what’s more, young man, you’d be out of a job like as not.’ Even old Jack, wise though he is, cannot realise what a volume of truth lay in those few words.

The English inn holds a place in the life of the village or country town as important as that of the church. For generations it has been the hub about which the vigorous life of the rural community revolved; it has been the poor man’s parliament and platform, his playground, and his solace after labour. It is an institution which the milk-bar, the cinema and the social club can never replace, but the brewers have transformed it into a sordid drink-shop as characterless as their liquor

Man has built himself wings before he has fully learned how to walk.

Seeing them, so simple in construction and operation, and yet so lastingly wrought, one marvels that man has seen fit to abandon their tireless elemental powers in favour of the intricate, short-lived internal-combustion engine, which is dependant upon a fuel destined one day to become exhausted.

The end of the day brought no anti-climax, no closing of doors

The heron, on the other hand, rises into the air as lightly and swiftly as blown thistledown; the slow beat of the wings is full of rhythmic grace and the poise magnificent, the neck laid back and the legs extended to make a perfectly horizontal line, like long tail-feathers.

When we were ready to cast off again the sun had gone in, and we travelled on through one of those grey and windless afternoons peculiar to the Indian summer of late autumn, when the richly scented air is still mild and so calm that the eye can detect no movement of faded leaf or reed blade, while even the birds are still and silent. On such a day all Nature, save only restless man, seems to pause from the endless labour of the seasons, as though to gather strength to face the winter.

This ageless quality was particularly strong in the cathedral close, reminiscent of Salisbury, where gracious houses of every age overlook the trim grass quadrangle where stands the great church. Places such as this are backwaters in time, surviving in a frenzied age to speak of a more ordered world than ours. Standing upon this green while rooks cawed in the trees and high overhead the bells chimed the quarters in leisured repetition, the mind saw gardeners in green baize aprons pruning roses, the dean at tea upon the lawn, and heard the click of phantom croquet mallets.

When I stopped her engine, silence fell swiftly, no breath-bating hush of suspense, but a soundless calm that seemed to lap as closely about us as the water round our hull and which brought with it a sense of peace unassailable and timeless.

The restoration of that spirit does not involve, as many suppose, a reactionary ‘back-to-nature’ process, but simply the adoption of the aim of the good life. Controlled by such a principle, science, of which the machine is the symbol, would become a slave instead of a master, a complement to, rather than a substitute for, the creative ability of man.