Ledbury, England: Drowned rats

July 2, 2015

I FELT rough late yesterday afternoon. I had to lie in cool grass repeatedly because of the humid heat and then lie on my bunk in a wet towel.

Today was just the reverse. Cold. Wet. And afflicted by gravity.

Stow's hostel, as honey-coloured as the rest of the town

There were five of us, the three musketeers and then our friends Neil and Caroline. They, of course, were riding with little more than a handkerchief and a toothbrush, so our stately progress came as a disturbing contrast. It was also horribly hilly, though through the warm honey of the stone villages of the Cotswolds. And through fords.

The first ford we skirted daintily. The second was more exciting

The first we walked round, daintily and wisely. The second we took like ship launches, crashing through the water. Sadly, crashing was the world. Caroline went down, although I didn't see her because I was in mid-stream. Karen plunged in to rescue her sunglasses, that seeming important at the time, and in the process blocked my route out of the water.

I shouted but she froze. I've no idea if I braked but it didn't matter. The least hesitation on the slimy bottom of a ford gives the same slimy bottom to you. As Caroline picked herself up, I fell at speed on my right. My first worry was that I had broken a hip bone, as I did in a drier fall in America. But I could stand again and, dripping, Karen and I discussed the wisdom of blocking someone's exit from a ford and we rode on.

Caroline in the stocks for not bringing her rain jacket

After a while the soaking didn't matter. The sky grew darker and the rain came falling down. Water sprayed from our tyres. Neil was especially thrilled because he had given his waterproof jacket to Caroline, who hadn't thought to bring one.

Dripping, cold but determined to be tourists, we stopped at a church we had been assured had bullet holes from the civil war. It probably did, almost certainly round the door because that's where those inside would have fought off those outside. But old churches have lots of holes and we rode on wondering whether we were wise to bother.

We picked our way through Tewkesbury, which among other things makes mustard. Shakespeare’s Falstaff speaks of “Wit as thick as Tewkesbury mustard”. No mood to think of that, though. We saw just modern housing and hissing bypasses and pubs anxious that someone should come in and solve the barman's boredom. But the rain did stop.

The route led through a gate and into a car park beside the Severn. To one side, the black boathouse of Cheltenham Ladies' College. On the other, a noticeboard hint that there should be a ferry. In the middle, a damp bank with no sign of a ferry at all.

"Shout and wave your hands and the ferry will come..."

My spirits sank. I felt responsible for the bad weather, which I'm sure was spoiling Neil and Caroline's day along with our slow, loaded riding. Then a woman wound down her car window a millimetre. "Shout," she said. "And wave your hands."

But we didn't need to. The ferry was on the other side, sheltering by the bank beneath the pub that stood there and to which, it turned out, Cheltenham Ladies were forbidden to take the ferry.

The ferryman spotted us and set sail.

"I've only been doing this a few months," he said at the tiller of the outboard motor, a round and contented man. "I was a lorry driver, the sort of load that needed a police escort, that sort of thing. Then I retired and I started doing odd jobs for the pub, mending tables, painting, whatever they needed doing. And then they asked if I'd take over the ferry. I can't do it every day but trouble is that it's hard to get kids to work on Saturdays and Sundays because they want to go clubbing.

"And you know what? I had a man on the opposite bank once, shouting and waving his hands. So I sailed over to him. And when I got there, he said he'd been shouting at the ducks."

He shrugged in amused despair.

Steph sulks and wonders why Karen is getting a cuddle and she's not. This is what made the rain start

We could have stayed at the pub. Neil and Caroline weren't camping and so it was an option. But it'd have been cheating. Not because there are rules but because we weren't going to ride so far today and to ride even less, just because we were wet and only starting to get warm again, would have, well... been cheating.

Rare CTC sign. A century ago they were everywhere, on pubs and hotels that cyclists had recommended

We rode on instead, on flat and winding roads from which steam began to rise as the world returned to rights, and reached Ledbury. I hadn't been there since the Animals sang House of the Rising Sun, an oddity I remember because it was there that I heard it for the first time, when I was touring at the age of 16.

I went to Ledbury because my father was in HMS Ledbury during the war. It was a Hunt class destroyer, flat-bottomed so that it was immensely fast but at the price of discomfort as it skipped across waves like a stone. All the ships were named after fox hunts and his was alone in not getting socks, tobacco and chocolate from the town after which it was named. I don't think he ever forgave or ever visited the town.

Ledbury: the town's fathers came close to pulling it down

The most striking aspect of Ledbury isn't its historical stinginess but the timbered buildings, which look like someone has scribbled with a broad black pen. In its centre is what I think is the old market hall. With that grim realism of the 1960s, the town wanted to pull it down and replace it with something concrete. Happily, saner minds prevailed.

There is never an excuse for not eating a curry and so that's what we did, while Caroline tried with increasing distress to find a hotel to answer the phone and say it had an empty room. We rode on a little further and camped on a hillside looking towards Wales.

I can feel a pain in my rib cage and a graze on my hip isn't wonderfully comfortable, but maybe a good sleep will sort out both.

Today's ride: 79 km (49 miles)
Total: 1,162 km (722 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	1
Comment on this entry	Comment	0