Day 3—Lechlade to Tadpole Bridge

Last night was rough.

Anne and I had walked from our hotel dinner to St Lawrence Church, which was next door. Percy Shelley had written his poem A Summer Evening Churchyard in St Lawrence’s churchyard. We walked along a path beside the church which, according to a sign beside the path, is the Shelley Walk.

It was twilight. Willow trees and their branches overhung the path and filtered out the remaining daylight. Along the path, gravestones filled the churchyard. Many had toppled over and were weathered smooth and stained grey and green. I pointed out to Anne the gargoyles lining the church’s cornices and doorways.

I pulled a folded-up copy of Shelley’s poem out of my pocket. I read the first few lines and stopped because, as I told Anne, I felt stupid. She was surprised, so unlike you, she told me. She asked what the poem was about. Death, I told her, and read to her the last two lines of the first stanza:

Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,

Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.

We walked back to the hotel and went to bed.

When Anne is overtired, she sometimes yells while falling asleep. It’s always a quiet yell. But last night, while falling asleep, it was a full-throated bellow. She said that she had dreamed that someone opened the door to our hotel room and bats had poured into the room. 

The next morning at breakfast she asked what I thought her dream was about. I told her that it was a mistake not to have read to her the poem’s final stanza, which I then read:

Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild

And terrorless as this serenest night:

Here could I hope, like some inquiring child

Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight

Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep

That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.

According to a sign on the hotel, Percy Shelley was also a guest when he had visited Lechlade.

Today, we walked almost 11 miles to the Tadpole Bridge near Buckland. Much of the walk was along the river, where we saw a well-known statue of Father Thames.

Much of our walk was through open fields. We have been walking through very rural regions with only a handful of widely spaced villages.

That night at dinner at the Trout Inn, beside the Tadpole Bridge, I looked at Anne while she wasn’t watching. I do this occasionally—I look at her carefully and see her. And it’s always the same: I am amazed at how beautiful she is. Much has changed in the almost-50 years that I have known her. But when I look at her carefully, what I see hasn’t changed. If anything, that beauty that I see when I look carefully has only deepened. It’s what I hope and expect to see the final time that I look at her. 

But that is some time off. For now, the river is flowing behind us, and the bats are off in a pasture far away.