A Start for the Far North—From Reading to Warwick.
“O spires of Oxford! domes and towers,
Gardens and groves;
I slight my own beloved Cam to range
Where silver Isis leads my wandering feet.”
Wordsworth.
“A curious Gothic building, many gabled,
By flowering creepers hidden and entangled.”
There is to my way of thinking a delicious uncertainty in starting on a long caravan tour, without being aware in the least what you are going to do or see, or even what route you are going to take.
As regards a route, though, I did throw up a pebble with a black tick on it before the horses pulled out at the gate, and twice running the spot pointed to the north-west.
So we steered for Reading, and on without stopping as far as the Roebuck Hotel at Tilehurst. Nine years ago this hotel was a very small one indeed, but all gables, thickest thatch, and climbing roses and honeysuckle. The thatch has given place to red tiles, and an addendum of modern dimensions has been built. The old must ever give place to the new. But what lovely peeps there are from this hotel, from the balcony and from the bedrooms. It is a river house now in every sense of the word, though not old as a hotel of the kind, and all day long, and far into the night, the bar and passages and the coffee-rooms are crowded in summer with men in snowy flannels, and with some in sailor garb and with artificial sailor swagger.
The road leads onwards through a cool elm avenue towards Pangbourne. The copses here are in earlier spring carpeted with wild hyacinths. On the hilltop the scenery opens out again, the tree-clad valley of the Thames, fields of green grain, with poppies here and there, or wild mustard, and fields crimson with blossoming trefoil. Surely milk and butter must be good when cows are fed on flowers.
“Lay till the day” in the great inn yard of the George. Rather too close to the railway embankment, for the trains went roaring past all night long. This did not make sleeping impossible, for a gipsy, even an amateur one, can sleep anywhere; but the earth shook and the lamps rattled every time a train rolled by. Some villas are built right beneath the embankment, which is far higher than their roofs. Facilis descensus Averni. What a strange and terrible accident it would be were one of those trains to leave the line and run through a roof! An old lady of the nervous persuasion, who lives here, told me that she oftentimes trembled in her bed when she thought of this dread possibility.
Pangbourne is a well-known haunt for those who love boating and fishing. It is quiet, and so well shaded as to be cool on the warmest summer day. But Pangbourne is not a hackneyed place, and never, I believe, will be so.
Left about nine o’clock on June 19th. It had been raining just enough to lay the dust and give a brighter colouring to the foliage.
Ivy leaves, when young, are, as my country readers know, of a very bright green. There are on a well-kept lawn by the riverside, and just outside Pangbourne, a coach-house and a boathouse. Both are well-built and prettily shaped. They are thatched, and the walls are completely covered in close-cropped ivy, giving them the look of houses built of green leaves.