‘The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. The other, of course, is the river’
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
‘Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads’
Olivia Laing, To The River
Five Miles From Anywhere, No Hurry Inn.
The name alone was enough to convince me that this was exactly where I needed to be during some much-needed time off work - a few days I had set aside for a slow submersion in words and water without venturing far from my own doorstep.
It was late afternoon when M drove us to the river, deep into the green swathes of Cambridgeshire flatlands where my ancestors had once come to drain the fens. The narrow single roads rose and fell over tree roots, grey and cracked in the sun like an elephant’s skin, as if the earth had exhaled heavily and split its seams through the tarmac.
We found the pub in the village of Upware, its garden teeming with families tucking into Sunday roasts while basking in that singular kind of Bank Holiday sun. Bordered by a wide and inviting stretch of the river Cam, daytrippers and seasoned canal boaters moored up alongside before sinking pints as dark and cloudy as the murky river. A mecca for boatfolk, their admiring calls aimed at a passing vessel carried across the water, while on land, instantly familiar chatter flowed as easily and idly as the river itself and its surface cargo of kayakers and paddleboarders.
Further along, a canal boat bobbed lazily on calm waters, its red paint faded and flaking, and its roof strewn with the detritus from overhanging trees. I have always dreamed of a life on a boat, but we settled for sampling it just for the night. Inside, the sun bouncing off the window-height water set the place ablaze and filled the space with the scent of warm wood.
I spent the afternoon teetering on the boat’s edge in full sun, reading of women and rivers while my feet traced circles in the biting cold water and M snoozed inside to the sound of ripples smacking between the side of the boat and the muddy riverbank as another leisure vessel drifted by.
I had picked up two books in anticipation of our riverbound sojourn - Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under and Olivia Laing’s To the River - on an afternoon visit to Ely in search of exactly the right books to frame my time away and put me in the headspace to write and to think. The day had passed in a biblical downpour, rain lashing the cathedral’s stained glass windows while we wandered under the dark vaulted ceilings of the Ship of the Fens. It was as if the City of Eels had ingested the Great Ouse and now wished to expel it in force once again back to its waterways. Toppings & Co. provided welcome shelter and I left with the words I knew I needed
As lavender clouds lined the horizon and the sky blushed to the same shade of sunburnt pink that spread across my chest, we sipped champagne on the riverbank and talked until the stars came out, punters leaving the pub one by one until we were the only voices in earshot, save the trilling calls of the river birds.
Herons flew so close you felt you could reach out and touch them, and every now and then, the sound of a daring fish broke the water’s surface before disappearing again. Two families of Canada Geese, linked by a trailing fuzz of goslings, passed us silently before we spotted a single constellation that M confidently assured me was Venus, both for its light and for being out so early.
Back in Cambridge the following afternoon, I nosedived into new city rituals. Reading the Laing, a woman ‘haunted by waters’, I decided to return to a long-abandoned essay of the Waveney and that particular river’s relation to my own meandering journey of mental well-being. Boldly, I plunged my uninitiated self into the University Library and its hallowed pool of silence, vowing to treat my own silly little stories with the same gravity as the students around me wrestling with doorstop hardbacks of Joyce and histories of ancient civilisations.
The day was book-ended by water, the 8am dip in the Cam from the boat framed by a thunderous downpour that caught me out while running home from the University Library, my laptop cradled under M’s Barbour as the river water was showered from my hair and swallowed by the city’s drains.
When the words wouldn’t come, I went to the lido and swam for almost a mile up and down its elongated body. As long in yards as years in history, it had been built that way exactly a century ago to mimic the river outside. Under skies heavy with storms, myself and two other swimmers breaststroked through a scurf of petals while two bored lifeguards chattered over walkie talkies from opposite sides of the pool.
The days drew to a close with an afternoon in The Orchard at Grantchester, where I finished the last pages of the Laing struck by the many happy links between her references and my own location; Virginia Woolf, who famously wrote in those very tea rooms, or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes following the same path along the Granta that I used to get back home, and write of rivers.
‘I remember how on the river, everything’s sinking, the half-bodied shape of the locks beneath the scum, the intestines of roots and trees. And I know that further upstream it grows narrow as a corkscrew; that there is a yellowing of foam along the banks and a heron stands in the chug of weir as if he’s waiting for something.’
-Daisy Johnson, Everything Under