Bicycling the Mekong - Vietnam

I think my fascination with the River Mekong arose when I first read an article in the National Geographic Magazine in 1993, and recalling an iconic cover photo from a few years earlier of a small, smiling barefoot Vietnamese girl steering a coracle with a long pole, like a punt on the River Cam.* The article, which I think had the title: The Mighty Mekong, or something similar (sadly I no longer have my copy of it), was about a remarkable journey – apparently the first to follow the Mekong from sea to source.  The National Geographic expedition took three years and was recorded by the photographer, Michael Yamashita, with some truly remarkable images (some of which you can see here). It was these images which caught and fired my imagination, and I remember I resolved at the time that one day I would go there to see this remarkable river for myself. In 2009, some 16 years later, I realised that dream.

It is amazing to think that certain geographical facts regarding the Mekong were still being contested and established even at this very late stage of the twentieth century. It’s especially of interest to our family, as Louis Magrath King (a collateral relative of mine, and one of the subjects of my PhD research) is credited as being the first European to travel and map a portion of the Mekong’s upper reaches in Tibet. Two modern day explorers, one French and the other Japanese, Michel Peissel and Masayuki Kitamura, each claimed to have located the exact source of the Mekong in 1994. Kitamura’s claim is thought to have superseded Peissel’s, and subsequent measurements by Chinese authorities have marginally adjusted Kitamura’s measurements adding a further 5 km to the Mekong’s length. Hence the Mekong is now said to be the twelfth largest river in the world, measuring around 4,350 km in length, and an annual discharge of 475 billion cubic metres into the South China Sea, with its waters gathered from a vast drainage basin of some 795,000 square kilometres.

The Mekong, 1715

For most of its history it has been a river which divides rather than unites its riverine peoples. It forms a national boundary in many parts of its course, but more essentially, its rocky upper reaches with many unnavigable rapids have physically prevented it from becoming a conduit for people and goods as is the case with many other large rivers, such as the Nile or the Amazon. Mekong – the name by which it is best known around the globe is said to derive from the contraction of its Thai name, ‘Mae Nam Khong’, meaning ‘Mother of the Waters’ – it has many other names: in Tibet-China the ‘Dza Chu’, or ‘river of Rocks’, and ‘Lancang Jiang’, or ‘Turbulent River’; in Cambodia the ‘Tonle Thom’, or ‘Great River’; in Vietnam it is both the ‘Song Lon’, again ‘Great River’, or the ‘Song Cuu Long’, or ‘Nine Dragons River’, a name which alludes to the many channels and rivulets which make up its vast Delta region. 

It was Vietnam’s Delta which I visited in the summer of 2009. The following year I also travelled to within striking distance of its upper reach in the China-Tibet borderlands. Touring the Delta region in Vietnam using two distinct modes of transit – by bike and boat – is by far the best way to experience the river up close. The Mekong is a river of great transition, the geographical contrasts between its arid mountainous origin and its vast fertile delta flats could not be more stark. In Chinese territory it makes a rapid drop in altitude of some 4,500 metres. Early European colonial adventurers – including the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch – mounted limited expeditions from the 1540s onwards, but the first major, concerted exploration effort was undertaken by the French in 1866, when a three year expedition travelled from the Delta upstream to Yunnan Province in China. The French Mekong Expedition was led by Ernest Doudard de Lagrée and Francis Garnier, and is recounted in evocative detail in Milton Osbourne’s excellent book, Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future (2000). I came across this book whilst I was in Hong Kong in 2007, and reading it reignited the fire in my imagination to visit this marvellous river. From the wonders of Ankor Wat to the horrors of the Second Indo-China War, as depicted in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apolcalypse Now (1979) – the river’s course, flowing through time and through the different regional cultures who populate it, from China to Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, these countries and their different peoples all make the Mekong an endless fount of fascination for any prospective traveller.

Brick Kiln

Fired & Unfired Bricks

Milton Osborne describes that sense of personal fascination well: “Like other travellers, I treasure my own special memories of the Mekong. What I find striking is how closely they accord with the memories and reflections of those who travelled on and by it before me. They too marvelled at the spectacular rush of water at the Khone Falls. And they remarked on the extraordinary contrasts of the river where it flows wide and deep for long stretches before being suddenly interrupted by rapids. I have found myself echoing their pleasure in the cool misty mornings of Luang Prabang and sharing their discomfort in the heat of high summer. Much of the wildlife that Father da Cruz described when he travelled on the river in the sixteenth century has vanished, but the kingfishers that were so often mentioned in nineteenth century descriptions are still there, darting down from the trees with a halcyon flash to pluck a fish from the water. And I have been struck, as have so many before me, by the changes in colour of the waters of the Mekong. At Jinghong the river is rich orange-red as it runs through the surrounding laterite hills. Further downstream at low water it appears dark green. At noon it will be blue and silver; in late afternoon a regal purple. As Francis Garnier rightly said, it is a singular and remarkable river.” 

But sadly all is not quite so idyllic and as unchanging as it might seem on the Mekong. There are many changes in its use, most notably with the swift increase in recent state-sponsored projects to build hydroelectric dams at various points along its course by the different countries through which it flows, most notably China. These projects, although a seemingly logical step for countries – many with poorer economies – to generate both jobs and electricity are of course also displacing communities, disrupting water and sediment flows, and destroying wildlife habitats, migration patterns and paths, as well as traditional fishing industries, and the like. The cultural and economic impact of such large national infrastructure projects can be devastating to local communities as well as having greater geopolitical implications for those nations located further downstream when they are undertaken without broader regional international consultation and agreement. The blog East by Southeast frequently gives very good commentary upon these issues (see here). Proving that while most major rivers of the world are mighty elemental forces in their own right, mankind still has the capacity to do significant damage to their integrity and the time honoured traditions they have enabled to flourish for centuries. The Mekong may well have frustrated earlier efforts by European colonials to tame it for the purposes of commercial navigation, but nowadays it isn’t so much being tamed but rather killed off by its domestication. Yet as with many wild beasts which mankind attempts to corral, box in and pacify there will come a moment, probably out of the blue, when it is least expected, when the Mekong will rebel and reassert itself. And when it does, the resulting hubris for mankind will undoubtedly be as deadly as it is devastating.

There is a Cambodian saying: “The Lao live near the water, the Cambodians on it, and the Vietnamese in it.” A trip to the Mekong Delta certainly confirms the last part of that cultural adage. Setting out from Ho Chi Minh City I made the first part of my Delta tour on an old bicycle, rattling down rough roads and raised mud paths through various villages and scattered houses dotted throughout the densely forested islands. There are all sorts of industries and agriculture which have made a home in the Delta, from traditional brick-making kilns, to fruit plantations, timber cultivation, sugarcane fields, rice paddies, and various fisheries. The range of fruits grown in the Delta is remarkable – all the fruits considered the most exotic at home which could only be grown in a greenhouse can occasionally be found growing wild. I can attest to this as I nearly cycled straight into a low hanging baby dragon fruit, which looked rather like the imagined tendril of a triffid from John Christopher’s eponymous sci-fi story. Touring the area by bicycle certainly gives one a good sense of the labyrinthine-like lowlands, but switching to a small motorboat broadens the scope out to reveal the vast watercourses which thread through everything, as well as the narrow channels through the mangroves which can only be navigated by smaller, flat bottomed boats deftly propelled by oarsmen and women, all seeming to converge in such a way to totally disorient the outsider. After a day travelling by these different means I had no way of knowing whether or not I’d been travelling in a straight line for tens of miles, or whether I had simply been wheeling, puttering, and paddling round the area in ever decreasing circles!

Baby Dragon Fruit

One of the genuine highlights though was watching little mudskipper fish doing as their name describes at low water on the mudflats amidst the mangroves. I’d first seen these remarkable little creatures on one of David Attenborough’s documentaries on television, probably Wildlife on One, when I was a kid, and seeing them now was no less enchanting.

Mudskipper

At a lunch stop we were the first to arrive at a restaurant, and, Hai Truong, my guide was eager to introduce me to the restaurant’s resident python. After a quick exchange hollered with someone hidden deep inside the kitchen, Hai unlatches the snake’s cage and before I or the sleeping reptile have time to realise what is happening I find myself standing with an enormous Burmese python draped around my neck. As my photos now seem to attest I’m not really sure how I feel about this – asides from the natural instinct that it’s not the wisest thing to do with such a powerfully muscled killing machine, I feel bad that we’ve woken the poor fellow up. But the snake, seemingly rather good natured, starts to gently coil itself into position, slowly inching its head around and moving its face up closer to mine. Naturally it seems rather curious as to who I am. Me, however, I’m resolutely trying to keep myself cool and calm, but my reflexes are unconsciously tensing, telling me not to let the creature come too close to my face and without really thinking I half loop my finger and thumb around its neck. Yet I’m conscious enough of what I’m doing not to tighten my grip, I’m more attempting to guide its head away from mine, but Hai tells me to hold my palms flat so as not to frighten the snake. I do as instructed and before I know it the inquisitive (or perhaps over-affectionate) snake has stuck its tongue down my ear. It’s a strange sensation, as is the feeling of the python’s smooth skin against mine. Given how shiny and iridescent it is I had expected it to be cold, slightly wet and oily – but instead the creature is oddly dry yet also slippery. It is a heavy brute too (25kgs), quite definitely all muscle – as it tenses and relaxes to move ever so stealthily I can sense its very real strength. If it decides to squeeze I am a goner for sure! – My mind recalls the fact that pythons are constrictors; they sense you breathing and respond by tightening their hold each time you breathe out making it increasingly harder to breathe in, so that you are slowly killed by a crushing form of asphyxiation. Not a nice thing to recall at that particular moment, but having gingerly held myself as honourably still as I can I’m swiftly relieved of my burden. Hai returns the snake to its rather monkishly austere metal home. I’m not sure if these local creatures are kept as a source of curiosity for the restaurant’s visitors or as a means of deterring wild ones from venturing in from the jungle that surrounds the place. Several places along the ride, I noticed, seemed to keep pythons. At the last stop where we traded in our bicycles for a riverboat we came across another python in a cage. The one I’d rudely been made to befriend at lunchtime was something like 4 or 5 metres in length. This one Hai told me was longer, fatter and heavier (40kgs) – it was also probably much hungrier too, for no sooner had Hai reached into the cage to rouse the sleeping snake than an urgent shout from inside the house suddenly compelled him to slam the cage shut and ram the latch pin back into place. We grinned at each other like idiots. Evidently, sometimes it is best to let sleeping snakes lie. I, for one, was very glad to let this old fella be.

That night I checked into the gorgeous Victoria Hotel in Can Tho, where I was told there had been a problem with my reservation, consequently the room I’d requested wasn’t available due to overbooking. The nice young lady dressed in a lovely red and gold ao dai breaking this bad news to me left a pause just long enough for the disappointment to set in before telling me with a warm grin that she had upgraded me to a suite with a river view. The suite was bigger than my flat back home, and beautifully appointed. After dinner I stretched out on one of the couches to write up my diary of the trip, but instead I sat for a while watching the fans slowly rotating overhead and the little geckos scurrying about the walls. I never mind these joyful little lizards flitting about, seemingly defying the normal laws of gravity and at odds with basic physics, as I assume they are helping me out by keeping down the insects which could be a far more lethal type of pest. They also always remind me of the time I stayed at a hotel in Luxor, Egypt; where I managed to coax one gecko into letting me feed him by hand on the terrace when we were having lunch! – As I sat watching these little chaps flitting about with their almost opaque bodies silhouetted inside the lampshades I was struck by the fact that their sudden jerky movements were always such as to involuntarily catch the eye, yet, happily, not it the same but definitely more disconcerting way that one’s eye is caught by the sudden scuttling of a spider!

Next morning was an early start in order to catch the “floating market” at Can Tho. Here a large number of boats gather each day, all piled up with different produce for sale – mostly fruit and vegetables. To make it easier to see what is for sale on each vessel a tall pole is set up vertically with pairs of carrots or melons and the like strung up at the top of the pole. Smaller boats with outboard motors zip about attempting to make quick sales ahead of their equally swift rivals. Hai hailed and secured us a bunch of lychee-like fruits from one boat and some cups of sweet Vietnamese coffee (which I think is one of the best coffees in the world) from another. It was far too early in the morning for any Mekong Whiskey – and once you’ve tried it anytime of day becomes too early to drink the stuff! – Although having said that, I did sample a few different species of local homebrewed spirits in the Delta, such that I’m not sure which was the true thing; ‘whiskey’ being a bit of a misnomer as it’s more of a ‘rum’, seeing as it is made from sugarcane, molasses and rice.

After perusing the floating market we put in at the shore in order to take a stroll around the more conventional type of market there, where a great variety of things were on sale – all kinds of foodstuffs, textiles, hardware, etc. Markets the world over have that same lively atmosphere; where eyes are both met and avoided; where vendors shout melodiously and raucously; where prices are haggled and settled with swift nods, handshakes, and fast produced and just as quickly concealed bills and coins, emerging and disappearing in the blink of an eye. It’s a scene which is common to all cultures, and one which has echoed down the ages and the generations. Some markets though seem more timeless than others, and the lack of ice or refrigeration at the fly-blown meat stalls make this one seem all the more venerably old and unchanged despite all the brightly coloured plastic and motor scooters. Even at this early hour of the morning it is still stiflingly hot in the tropics. 

Motoring up and down the river, glimpsing quiet wooden go-downs with rusty corrugated iron roofs standing upon stilts down sleepy inlets constantly reminded me of Joseph Conrad’s characters, Kaspar Almayer and Jim Eng, idling out a veranda-bound existence in these jungle-shrouded mangroves. This was exactly the kind of world I’d seen in Michael Yamashita’s National Geographic photographs; the one I had long pictured from reading Conrad’s novels, such as Almayer’s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Lord Jim (1900), and Victory (1905). It was also reminiscent of Gavin Young’s wonderful travelogue, In Search of Conrad (1991), in which he journeys around Southeast Asia attempting to trace Conrad’s old haunts from Conrad’s days as a merchant seaman at the dwindling height of Europe’s global colonial expansion. Young was a travel writer, friend of Wilfred Thesiger, and briefly an MI6 agent, who had a long lasting affinity and attachment to Vietnam.

Young girls on their way to school, dressed in traditional white 'ao dai'

It was still a fascination for me to see the rhythms of riverine life continuing into the present, but in many respects it is a world away from what it would have been in Conrad’s time. On the horizon at the edge of the vast expanse of the Mekong I could see the two concrete fingers of an enormous suspension bridge stretching out across the rich muddy brown waters, soon to touch one another in the middle, like Michelangelo’s hand of God reaching towards Adam’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, except here the spark of life would eventually flow in the form of commercial traffic, carrying large lorries and busloads of tourists in ever increasing numbers. In 2007 a big accident in which 54 construction workers were killed had halted construction for a while, but the building work had now resumed (it opened the following year in April 2010), meaning that the days of the large ferries operating along this stretch of the river were numbered. Hence, while the inimitable rhythms of the River Mekong might well seem timeless to those outsiders like me who pass over and along its powerful waters, quietly slinking through the Vietnamese jungle like a giant hungry python, it is not a place where time ever stands still for very long. And that perhaps is exactly what makes the Mekong so alluring.

 

 ~

*The hopes and dreams of similar children today, living near to Long Xuyên on the Mekong in Vietnam, have been captured in a moving short film called "Down the Stream" (2015), directed by Mai Huyen Chi, which you can view here. It is both heart-warming and heart-breaking to listen to the very modest aspirations of these very small children who speak about the future lives they hope to lead when they grow up, if they can escape the poverty into which they have been born. 

'Down the Stream' (2015), directed by Mai Huyen Chi

Also on 'Waymarks'

Postcard from Old Saigon

Let sleeping (hungry) pythons lie ...

 

Seeking Solace & Sunshine

 

Life under “Lockdown” – A London Diary #7

 

Like a lot of people in the UK over the last year or so, I’ve spent a lot of time on my own. And even when out-and-about, either going for a walk or on my weekly trip to the supermarket, I’ve been alone even when in company. Passing strangers on pavements and paths, queuing with other customers all standing two metres apart. Hidden behind facemasks, like highwaymen or bank robbers. Atomised by our anonymity.

 

Being alone has never been much of a problem for me. I’m quite a solitary individual anyway. Before I got married I lived alone for many years, and whilst I travelled frequently in the company of colleagues for extended periods on work trips overseas, it’s never troubled me to travel alone for my holidays. In fact, some of my trips alone have been the most memorable and the most enjoyable. But like a lot of people, the isolation of the last year has (at times) been trying. On the plus side, it’s given me plenty of time to focus on my PhD studies, and I’ve managed to do a lot of writing and a phenomenal amount of reading. But it has also meant I’ve not been able to access the libraries and archives which I need for my research, as I had been planning to do. Other, even bigger and more important aspects of life have similarly been put on hold as I have been cut-off from my closest family members and friends, who have all been turned into faces seen only on computer screens.

 

Life has morphed unrecognisably. Everything which used to be exterior has become interior. It’s an odd thing to reflect upon; how a life put into limbo has played havoc with the natural rhythms of what used to be normal. It is almost as if, for the last year, I have been living a double life. On the one hand, the time has simply flown by because each day has basically been filled with the same now near ritualistic practices. This day last year seems like it was only yesterday, because it was exactly the same as yesterday. But, very oddly, this day last year also feels as though it were a lifetime ago, because it was another lifetime, lived by another me – a pre-lockdown “me” – someone whom I no longer seem to recall very clearly. What details I can recall about that person seem bafflingly unfamiliar now.

 

There are different ways of being alone. Being alone isn’t necessarily the same as being lonely. Many people find solace in solitude. Many more people feel lonely in the crowded confines of a commuter train, or whilst sitting at their desk in a busy office. Often what determines how we feel is the sense of control we have over what is happening to us. This is why lockdown has been hard for so many people. It is the fact that we have no control over what is happening, nor how long we will be subject to such social restrictions. It has put me in mind of a slim (but not slight) volume which I first read quite some time ago now – Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence (1957). As a writer famous for his travel writing, this short book very eloquently describes a different sort of ‘journeying.’ An inward and self-reflective journey in which Leigh Fermor describes the times when he stayed in some of Europe’s oldest and most venerable monasteries. He describes staying at the Abbey of St. Wandrille at Solesmes, famous for its revival of Gregorian chant. But here he finds that something deeper seems to be driving his search for solitude, eventually leading him to the monastery of La Grande Trappe, where the Trappist monks famously take a vow of silence. And his fascination for the lives of the earliest Christian anchorites finally leads him to seek out the remarkable rock-cut monasteries of Cappadocia, hewn from the unusual rock formations of the region’s lunarlike landscape. 

 

It is the modern world which Leigh Fermor is seeking to escape by going to such places, but once he is safely ensconced in these secluded retreats, he realises that this is in fact a more complex undertaking than simply hiding himself away in the meek austerity of a monk’s cell: “Mental discipline, prayer and remoteness from the world and its disturbing visions reduce temptation to a minimum, but they can never entirely abolish it. In medieval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be expugnable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, special targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism.”

 

I find echoes of ‘lockdown’ in such reflections. But during lockdown temptation comes in the form of the rabbit-holes of bickering which swiftly seem to be dug on social media, into which people readily seem to fall each time the Government has made its many U-turns in attempting to navigate us through this pandemic. Having listened to what often feels like the ever-decreasing circles of a deracinating form of logic during the daily briefings from Number 10 Downing Street at certain points during this strange collective social 'rite of passage' for our nation and the wider world at large, I have often despaired. In truth, I have had to tune out for most of it, especially during this second period of national lockdown. My head can no longer seem to fully comprehend what any of this means any more. All I know for sure is that I will continue to follow the rules, wear my facemask, and make the best of things, even though I have been segregated like a lone monkish inhabitant on a suburban Skellig Michael.

Like many people, I have found myself focussing on the solace offered by the natural world. In the brief thawing of the restrictions between ‘Lockdown 1’ and ‘Lockdown 2’, I managed to escape to Cornwall for a week. I wandered the cliffs, filling my lungs with the much-needed scent of gorse, sun-kissed granite, and the salty tang of the sea air. After months of being confined to quarters, seeing little beyond the four-square walls of my own world, to sit there, looking out across the limitless horizon of the sea was a liberation of both heart and soul. I sat watching a pair of grey seals, a male and a female, delighting in dancing together in the foaming breakwaters, and for a moment it seemed as though the world was being washed clean. But it was a bittersweet liberation, because winter was not so very far away and the impending inevitable second chapter of the pandemic meant the sky and sea were still limitless boundaries which I was not yet allowed to cross. It was a brief moment of respite from the on-going reality of a disjointed double-life caught in limbo. During the short days of winter which followed, when the lockdown was reimposed and I was once more cut-off and isolated on my own, I have often found the lines of a particular poem by John Keats arising quietly in my rather despondent mind. It is a verse which has buoyed me with its eye to the promise of future joys, waiting to be cherished in the personal reunions which are yet to come:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—

         Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

         Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

…

 

During that brief break in the lockdown, I also managed to ‘up sticks’ and move home. A process which had first been delayed interminably by the economic uncertainties of Brexit, only then to be subsequently stalled by the sudden onset of the pandemic. This had long been planned as the first step in a much longer journey of relocation from London to Tokyo. Moving briefly back to my ‘hometown’ was the first stage; moving back to the place where I had grown up on the outer edge of London, from the place where I’d lived for many years in the inner city. It felt like I was touching base once more with another life long since lived and left behind; touching base before launching off on a great leap around the globe. Walking around my old hometown, I found the place curiously changed but also still the same. Discernible perhaps only in hints and echoes, shadows and memories. A lot of people have commented on the resurgence of birdsong into the fore of our consciousness as traffic on the roads has been reduced during the lockdowns. In my most recent home, living on the banks of the tidal Thames for many years, I’d grown accustomed to the calls of seagulls, pigeons and corvids, as these seemed to predominate there. But here in the leafy suburbs I rediscovered the avian soundscape of my younger days. Here there is a backdrop which is filled with woodland voices: robins, wrens, blackbirds, thrushes, many different types of tits and a fusillade of finches, plus wood pigeons, collared doves, jays, and at night there are owls too. This is the soundscape I grew up surrounded by, and I realised it was still an elemental part of me.  

 

The part of suburbia where I spent the first two decades of my life is in fact an old rural Saxon village. A village which over time was surrounded and eventually swallowed into the cancerous concrete urban sprawl of greater London. These northwest hinterlands of the capital were dubbed as ‘Metro-Land’ in 1915 by the publicity department of the Metropolitan Railway. ‘Metro-Land’ was later turned into an eponymous ‘round-trip’ of rhyme in a famous film of that title by John Betjeman in 1973. Curiously a train trip along the Met’ Line reminded him of the sea in Cornwall:

Like the sound of little breakers

Spreading out along the surf-line

When the estuary's filling

With the sea.

 

Then Harrow-on-the-Hill’s a rocky island

And Harrow churchyard full of sailors’ graves

And the constant click and kissing of the trolley buses hissing

Is the level to the Wealdstone turned to waves

And the rumble of the railway

Is the thunder of the rollers

As they gather up for plunging

Into caves.

 

But my native part of London never lost that sense of itself as a rural village. Pinner is filled with old buildings, many dating back to Georgian or Tudor times. And it still has a working farm, meaning that there are still fields which can be wandered through as well as ancient weald land, with woods and copses surviving in pockets neatly bordered by cul-de-sacs, closes, avenues, and old country lanes which have long since been macadamised into London’s quintessential leafy garden suburbs.

 

When I was at junior school my class went on a long ramble on a sunshine-filled summer’s day through ‘the village’, with our teacher telling us the history of the old buildings, showing us how we could identify their respective ages by comparing certain characteristic architectural features. It was one of the first things to ignite in me a passion for history and a fascination for archaeology. During the summer holiday, wading along the local brook which flowed through a wooded oasis behind our house in my welly boots, I stumbled upon a small ceramic jar which bore the berried monogram of ‘J. Sainsbury.’ It dated back to somewhere between the 1920s-1940s. 

When I was a few years older, I trained as a bell ringer at the parish church at the top of the high street, and I relished the fact that this gave me access to one of the most fascinating and hidden parts of the church building. I loved looking closely at the stone sets of the stained-glass windows into which church-goers, decades and centuries alike before my time, had carved their initials and floral doodles into the soft stone. It felt like history was something which could be found all around wherever one went, if you only knew how to look for it. But some elements of history as it had been lived locally could only be etched into memory, unless it was fleetingly caught in the old flickering images saved on celluloid; like the memory my grandmother re-told, of her standing on the steps of the village bakery where she worked, waving goodbye to my grandfather as he walked off down the high street on his way to fight in Italy during World War 2; or the old cine film of my great grandfather, who was the blacksmith in Wealdstone, showing him shoeing a horse.

 

Illustration by J.W. Ferry in 'The Villager' (1943)

My grandfather may have set out from here and travelled overseas to fight in the War, but the War itself came to Pinner and has left its traces here too. Only the other week, while on my regular amble through Pinner Park Farm, I stopped and scanned the corner of one of the fields which I’d seen on a WW2 bombsite map, which had shown that two "H.E." bombs dropped from a German bomber had exploded there in 1943. And sure enough, I could just make out the slight indentations of the impact craters still faintly discernible in the grass. My aunt had been friends with the daughter of the family who lived and worked at the farm, and they had ridden on the farm’s cart horses in this very field in the late 1940s/early 1950s.

The farmland at Pinner Park was one of the places where I used to seek solace and solitude when I was growing up. In the summertime, I’d frequently install myself at the top of the hill in one of the fields which still command a wonderful semi-rural view even today. Fringed by tall oak trees, many with trunks thick enough to be several centuries old. I’d sit there in the warm sunshine, reading a book, or meditating. Casting an inward eye to the future, thinking of ways and means to escape one day, setting out in search of far-away places. A hole in the fence in one of my school’s playing fields meant I could sneak off and elude the tumultuous rabble of the school yard, disappearing up here at lunchtimes, seeking a moment of stillness during the school day. There is something about the solace of nature, even (or perhaps more especially) in the midst of an otherwise built-up environment which is a true tonic. A balm to soothe the senses, reset the mind, and help us to breathe freely once again.

 

Now that I am back here, but stuck yet again in another lockdown, waiting for my exit visa back into the ‘real’ world which we have all been banished from for a second time since the pandemic began, I have reverted into my sixteen-year-old self. Making my weekly trudge through those old familiar fields of the farm, as well as ambling around the streets and back lanes of my old hometown; revisiting and pondering once more upon the respective ages of old buildings and thinking about the layers of time which this place has accumulated through the centuries, ending in the here-and-now with me and my personal memories of growing up here as did the generations of a part of my family before me. Now augmented by another fresh and unexpected set of memories which are currently being formed and laid down in my psyche having found myself becalmed here once again, waiting for lockdown to lift so that I can get myself a genuine exit visa to leave these Betjeman-like native shores once more, but this time cutting those natal ties and sailing away for good, emigrating to a new life, to permanently sink my anchor in a bay located somewhere along the sheltering coast of Japan.

 

We’ve all been stuck in limbo during the lockdowns. Counting the days and months. Waiting for the future to arrive. Waiting for the past to return. All the while, both consciously and unconsciously, recalibrating our experience of each. And yet, once this strange time of stasis is gone, many of us may well come to feel like nothing has happened because it was all so unreal, the days all blurring into a single undifferentiated mass, but I think we will all come to realise eventually that in actual fact a lot that is unseen has shifted during these long days in a time of dark shadows. It might not be so readily visible on the surface, but surely something will have changed within all of us once this pandemic eventually ends and we regain our freedoms. Our right to roam further afield will certainly feel very different. In the same way that I felt different sitting in the autumnal sunshine on those Cornish cliffs watching a pair of seals in close company bathing in the bubbling foam of the breakers upon the beach. It felt as if I was watching “The moving waters at their priestlike task / Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”

 

I hope the things I’ve learnt and the insights I’ve gained from being enforced to remain alone at home will help me to appreciate, and so never lose, the relevance of my reflections upon the importance of place to who we are and how it shapes our individual worlds. Because home is not just where we are, it’s also who we are, because we take that essential element of ourselves with us wherever we go – whether we wander near or far, but most especially when reunited we make our homecoming returns.

Harrow-on-the-Hill, by John Betjeman.

Pinner Fair in 1918 (Pathé News)

 

PINNORA’S LAND
 
 
Think of the Ancients in their easeful sleep
As you walk the way through Pinner Park Farm,
Along green hedgerows where the sparrows cheep
And black marauding crows squawk their alarm
At the fork-tailed kite wheeling high above.
Climbing the cinder track up Wakehams Hill,
To see the view which all the locals love;
Then onwards to Tooke’s Green, wand’ring at will,
First down then up the dip along Church Lane,
To the place where Saxon Pinnora’s band
Settled long ago. Where each yeoman thane
Built here a homestead on Pinnora’s land
In the shelt’ring lee of Pinner’s proud church,
Where old Skenelsby and the Loudons lie;
Its flint-walled tower looks down from its perch
Atop the High Street, vaunting the blue sky
With its tall cross, sheathed in godly green bronze;
Shading the green weedy brook which winds by
The foot of ancient Pinner’s sacred mons;
Flowing on, along leafy Cannon Lane,
Through Cheney Fields towards Haydon Hall Park,
Where blackbirds chorus at the evening’s wane;
Over Eastcote Village the sky burns stark
With the sunset’s red-golden flames alight,
As another warm summer’s day becalms
Itself asunder, passing into night.
Yet the birds keep singing; their vocal charms
Lulling the Ancients in their easeful sleep,
Lying content in comfort, as long time
Slowly accrues the centuries they keep;
Their lives and memories enshrined in rhyme
Scripted while walking these old lanes and ways,
Through the farm fields and over the green hills,
Along the winding brook’s soft purling maze,
Listening to the bird’s sweet chirps and trills,
Just as joyful birds have always sung here.
Our forebears from Saxon Pinnora’s day
Live on in local sounds which echo clear
In old paths and place names, which oft’ we say;
Our history hands down through the ages,
But the birds, trees and streams recall them too,
Like strolling players telling the stages
Of a play ever enacted anew –
And so, I dwell with full warm-hearted care
Upon my early kin’s generations
Who lived here long before me, unaware
Of their future’s far accumulations;
And I think of them in their easeful sleep
As I walk the way through Pinner Park Farm
Along green hedgerows where the sparrows cheep,
And black marauding crows squawk their alarm
At the fork-tailed kite wheeling high above;
Climbing the cinder track up Wakehams Hill
To see the view which all our kinsfolk love;
Then on towards Tooke’s Green, wand’ring at will
First down and then up the dip along Church Lane,
To the place where Saxon Pinnora’s band
Settled long ago; where a kindred thane
First made our home, here on Pinnora’s land.
 
 
By Tim Chamberlain – 14 April 2021. Hatch End.

 

Also on 'Waymarks'

A Distant View of Harrow

The Old Village Bakery, Pinner, c.1930s

Silent Film footage of Pinner in 1926 (BFI)