39 AND COUNTING

   

This is from John Buchan’s 1914 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps.  The narrator is Richard Hannay.

‘The night was fine and clear as I walked back to the flat I had hired near Portland Place. The crowd surged past me on the pavements, busy and chattering, and I envied the people for having something to do. These shop-girls and clerks and dandies and policemen had some interest in life that kept them going. I gave half-a-crown to a beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow-sufferer. At Oxford Circus I looked up into the spring sky and I made a vow. I would give the Old Country another day to fit me into something; if nothing happened, I would take the next boat for the Cape.’

 

The ‘real’ job I held down longest was managing the paperback department of a bookshop near Oxford Circus.  Most days I walked up Portland Place on my way to work, and I walked down Portland Place on my way home.  Sometimes I walked up and down it at lunchtime.  I was often bored and unhappy in my job, but I never thought of taking a boat to the Cape. That, I think, was because of lack of funds rather than lack of imagination.

                                                                     *

Most people these days know The Thirty-Nine Steps as a film rather than a book – and the best known, I think is the Alfred Hitchcock version of 1935. Mr. Memory is the invention of Hitchcock and/or his scriptwriter Charles Bennett, credited on imdb with ‘adaptation.’

This is from the Kenneth More version:

 

         The Thirty-Nine Steps is a long way from being a walking book, though there’s a good deal of trudging over the Scottish moors while being pursued, sometimes by an aircraft (not entirely unlike Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, 24 years later), and most of the action takes place a long way from London.  But there’s also this London-centric passage from an early chapter.

 

‘I felt curiously at a loose end … I went to the Savoy and ordered very carefully a very good luncheon, and then smoked the best cigar the house could provide. But I was still feeling nervous. When I saw anybody look at me in the lounge, I grew shy, and wondered if they were thinking about the murder.

‘After that I took a taxi and drove miles away up into North London. I walked back through fields and lines of villas and terraces and then slums and mean streets, and it took me pretty nearly two hours. All the while my restlessness was growing worse.’ 

 

         I think we can safely assume that Richard Hannay was a brisk walker, so that a two hour walk would cover, say, 8 miles.  So where did he go in the taxi? Where did he start walking? Hendon?  Upper Edmonton? Bounds Green?  I wish he’d told us more precisely, then we could walk in his fictional literary footsteps.

 

         Incidentally, when Buchan attended Kirkcaldy High School, he had to walk three miles there and three miles home.  That’ll build character in a boy. Today there is the John Buchan Way, a 13 mile walk between Broughton and Peebles.  That’s quite a lot of steps.

            Here is John Buchan, not walking, though looking ready to walk.

 

 

WALKING CRAZY

 I don’t say golf is ‘a good walk spoiled.’ I say it’s much, much worse than that, but I 

know that other views are possible. 

The earliest appearance of that ‘spoiled walk’ quip, according to Quote Investigator was in a newspaper article in Enniscorthy, Ireland in April 1901. The author was only identified as ‘a northern Gael.’ 

 

In 1905, they say, Henry Leon Wilson tweaked the expression and used it in his novel The Boss of Little Arcady.  No, of course I haven’t read it.  The line there apparently runs ‘This new game of golf that the summer folks play seems to have too much walking for a good game and just enough game to spoil a good walk.’  It’s a much better line.

 

However since golf dates back at least to the 15^th century, and the first18 hole golf course was laid out in St Andrews in the 18^th century it’s hard to understand how golf is ‘this new game,’ but perhaps it’s poetic license.

 

I’ve never play ‘proper’ golf and I know I’d be no good at it, but there was a short phase of my life when I had a taste for crazy golf.

 

Obviously the great thing about crazy golf is that it doesn’t spoil a walk because there’s really no walking in it to speak of, and there’s no real golf either, which is a real plus.

 

My idea, not one of my best, was that I’d turn my crazy golf interest into a TV format ‘Playing A Round With Geoff.’  We’d get Ian Botham or Helen Mirren or Salman Rushdie, and we’d putter around together and they’d be relaxed enough to lower their guard and say something wonderful.

 

Well, you can imagine how well that went down.  But as ‘research’ I did play a certain amount of crazy golf, mostly in East Anglia, with anybody I could get interested. And I did take some photos – above and below.

 

And then a couple of weekends ago I went for a more or less proper walk in Felixstow, not at all in search of crazy golf, and if you’d asked me if I’d ever played crazy golf there I’d have said no, but it seems I did.  See below, Then and Now: the obelisk doesn’t lie.  Unless it’s been moved.

 

Which brings us to Bing Crosby who died on October 14^th1977.  He’d finished a round of golf at the La Moraleja course in Spain, with three other golfers, and he said to his partners ‘That was a great game of golf, fellas, let’s go have a Coca Cola’ which sounds a little unlikely to me.  The picture below is obviously from a different time.

 

But anyway, he was walking back to the clubhouse, full of the joys of the links, had a heart attack, fell over and died.

 

It must really have really spoiled his walk.  It probably didn’t enhance the walk for the other guys he was playing with either.

 

 

WANDERING CLOUDILY

 Fresh over the transom comes a copy of the revised edition of the excellent The Art of 

Wandering by Merlin Coverley, subtitled ‘The Writer as Walker,’ published ten years after the 

first edition of 2012.

 

As yet I haven’t been through it all looking for changes and updates, but because of vanity and narcissism I obviously did check the index.  There you’ll find 8 references to Geoff Nicholson, as opposed to a mere 2 in the first edition. These are the small things that keep us writers going.

 

On the other hand there is no reason to be smug.  Wordsworth is in there with 12, up from 10; and Walter Benjamin is up from 4 to 8.  But best of all Lauren Elkin is there in with a bullet – 7 citation, up from not there at all in the first edition but that’s because her book Flaneuse wasn’t published until 2016.  So good for her.  Good for all of us.

 

         I can hardly wait to see the next edition of the Art of Wandering in 10 years time.

 

A WALK IS A WALK IS A WALK

 

This is new to me but it appeared in the Harvard Crimson in February 1959, written by one Alice P Albright under the Headline ‘Gertrude Stein at Radcliffe: Most Brilliant Women Student.’  Stein died in 1946.

In the article, which (you may be surprised to hear) does not display precisely the same attitudes that are current in Harvard today, Albright writes,

‘As an undergraduate, Gertrude spent her leisure time in argument ("the air I breathe"), at the theatre and opera, and in taking long walks. To the end of her life, she liked walking; someone has said that she moved like a souped-up glacier, or like a mass of primordial mud. Though young ladies did not usually walk alone at night in those days, Gertrude knew she was safe. In fact, she promised to climb a tree at the approach of a masher--then drop on him and squash him!’

 

I can well believe that Gertrude Stein was a walker, but I’m less sure that she was much of a tree climber.

 

Some of those deeply unauthoritative online quotation sites have a few good lines from Stein.  Like this:

 

And this, even better, I think:

 

I’ve not been able to find sources for those two quotations but I did find this in Stein’s‘Mallorcan Stories’ which you can read in Geography and Plays.

 

‘A walk is not where the door shows a light, a walk is where there is a request to describe a description. A walk is when a place is not to be exchanged. There is a respect in every walk.

‘There is a result in every walk and the turn is there, the foot and the boot have that union that there can be slippers. Talking of the return of that shows that there will not be an opening. There is no reason to exchange the joke.’

 

Words to live by, words to walk with.

A WINNER IN PINNER

 

So off we went to Pinner, primarily to visit the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner Memorial 

Park, but also for the chance to have a walk in Pinner, terra incognita, a place I’d never set 

foot, though Elton John, Michael Rosen and Ivy Compton Burnett had all been there before me.

 

It’s not much of a walk from Pinner tube to the museum, and I’m not sure that Heath Robinson was much of a walker but images of walking do feature in his work, both in his own fantastical creations:

 

and also in his illustrations for others.  Until I went to the museum I didn’t realize he’d done so much illustration for authors – Poe, Rabelais, Cervantes, Kipling, among them.

 

Actually I think the best part of the museum was probably the ceiling:

 

In Pinner we’re in Metroland – the tube opened in 1885.  Heath Robinson lived there from 1908 to 1918 and one assumes it was less suburban then than it is now, although Robinson’s House in Moss Lane, now with a blue plaque, and actually a fair hike from the tube station, looked plenty suburban, as did many of the other (perhaps later) houses in the street.  

Robinson and family left Pinner in 1918 to move to Cranleigh in Surrey.

 

Finally a word to the wise, if you type Heath Robinson into a search engine there’s a reasonable chance it will autocorrect as Death Robinson, which has its appeal but doesn’t really fit the man himself.