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Down the River
A rare picture of rural England in all her moods and seasons-the wildlife, the trees, the flowers and people along the Ouse and the Nene---through Buckinghamshire,Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and the Fens, and to the sea." Beautiful full color illustrations by Peter Partington.
- GenresNature
152 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1937
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37 people want to read
About the author
H.E. Bates
278 books194 followersHerbert Ernest Bates, CBE is widely recognised as one of the finest short story writers of his generation, with more than 20 story collections published in his lifetime. It should not be overlooked, however, that he also wrote some outstanding novels, starting with The Two Sisters through to A Moment in Time, with such works as Love For Lydia, Fair Stood the Wind for France and The Scarlet Sword earning high praise from the critics. His study of the Modern Short Story is considered one of the best ever written on the subject.
He was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire and was educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he was briefly a newspaper reporter and a warehouse clerk, but his heart was always in writing and his dream to be able to make a living by his pen.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands of England, particularly his native Northamptonshire. Bates was partial to taking long midnight walks around the Northamptonshire countryside - and this often provided the inspiration for his stories. Bates was a great lover of the countryside and its people and this is exemplified in two volumes of essays entitled Through the Woods and Down the River.
In 1931, he married Madge Cox, his sweetheart from the next road in his native Rushden. They moved to the village of Little Chart in Kent and bought an old granary and this together with an acre of garden they converted into a home. It was in this phase of his life that he found the inspiration for the Larkins series of novels -The Darling Buds of May, A Breath of French Air, When the Green Woods Laugh, etc. - and the Uncle Silas tales. Not surprisingly, these highly successful novels inspired television series that were immensely popular.
His collection of stories written while serving in the RAF during World War II, best known by the title The Stories of Flying Officer X, but previously published as Something in the Air (a compilation of his two wartime collections under the pseudonym 'Flying Officer X' and titled The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave), deserve particular attention. By the end of the war he had achieved the rank of Squadron Leader.
Bates was influenced by Chekhov in particular, and his knowledge of the history of the short story is obvious from the famous study he produced on the subject. He also wrote his autobiography in three volumes (each delightfully illustrated) which were subsequently published in a one-volume Autobiography.
Bates was a keen and knowledgeable gardener and wrote numerous books on flowers. The Granary remained their home for the whole of their married life. After the death of H. E Bates, Madge moved to a bungalow, which had originally been a cow byre, next to the Granary. She died in 2004 at age 95. They raised two sons and two daughters.
primarily from Wikipedia, with additions by Keith Farnsworth
He was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire and was educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he was briefly a newspaper reporter and a warehouse clerk, but his heart was always in writing and his dream to be able to make a living by his pen.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands of England, particularly his native Northamptonshire. Bates was partial to taking long midnight walks around the Northamptonshire countryside - and this often provided the inspiration for his stories. Bates was a great lover of the countryside and its people and this is exemplified in two volumes of essays entitled Through the Woods and Down the River.
In 1931, he married Madge Cox, his sweetheart from the next road in his native Rushden. They moved to the village of Little Chart in Kent and bought an old granary and this together with an acre of garden they converted into a home. It was in this phase of his life that he found the inspiration for the Larkins series of novels -The Darling Buds of May, A Breath of French Air, When the Green Woods Laugh, etc. - and the Uncle Silas tales. Not surprisingly, these highly successful novels inspired television series that were immensely popular.
His collection of stories written while serving in the RAF during World War II, best known by the title The Stories of Flying Officer X, but previously published as Something in the Air (a compilation of his two wartime collections under the pseudonym 'Flying Officer X' and titled The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave), deserve particular attention. By the end of the war he had achieved the rank of Squadron Leader.
Bates was influenced by Chekhov in particular, and his knowledge of the history of the short story is obvious from the famous study he produced on the subject. He also wrote his autobiography in three volumes (each delightfully illustrated) which were subsequently published in a one-volume Autobiography.
Bates was a keen and knowledgeable gardener and wrote numerous books on flowers. The Granary remained their home for the whole of their married life. After the death of H. E Bates, Madge moved to a bungalow, which had originally been a cow byre, next to the Granary. She died in 2004 at age 95. They raised two sons and two daughters.
primarily from Wikipedia, with additions by Keith Farnsworth
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 27, 2016
The combination of thoughtful nature observations and the amazing wood engravings of Agnes Miller Parker makes this book a perfect choice for an outdoor afternoon read. If you can read it by water of some kind (and not just some in a glass), so much the better. Anyone who has lived by water will find something familiar in Bates’ writing. He talks about the effect it has on people, and I found myself nodding in agreement, over and over again.
[regarding the river]”It is a complete world. It has not only its own special life but it attracts an astonishingly diverse life from other things and places...”
“Water has some kind of powerful mystery about it. Still waters, moving waters, dark waters: the words themselves have a mysterious, almost a dying fall. Roads, meadows, towns, gardens, woods, are man-made; a river is a primeval piece of work. It is ageless, but at the same time, perpetually young. It travels, but remains. It is a paradox of eternal age and eternal youth, of change and changelessness, of permanence and transience.”
His descriptions have for me that quality of putting into words something I’ve seen and wondered at – a sense of recognition. For instance, this one about trout fry - “They lay, generally in sunlight, above stones, in the clear reaches that were no deeper than a childs’ ankle. They were like fish-ghosts, platooned, shadowy, still as death, no more than the shadows of willow-leaves until some muscle of the current moved and turned them gently over and flicked them back again, in a flash of silver.” I’ve seen that very thing – how wonderful to have it brought to mind so clearly and beautifully!
He writes about 2 rivers in Britain, the Ouse and the Nene, describing their differences. The different birds and plants, the different moods and people and trades engendered by them. He writes about water mills and fishermen, and, strangely enough – lace makers, who were well-known in this area. He gives them a chapter of their own, and it’s quite interesting. Each word in this book seems to me to have extra sweetness because of the gorgeous illustrations accompanying them. (Nature books should always have illustrations, I think.) A wonderful, meditative read for anyone who loves water, and rivers in particular.
“A road may go to any one of a thousand places: to the tops of hills, to towns, to solitary farm-houses, to the summits of mountains, anywhere. But a river, snaking to all points of a compass, has only one destination and one end.
And in the perpetual obedience to this never-shifting purpose lies, I think, some of the secret of the fascination of rivers: the fascination of the inevitable. We are attracted very greatly by the unknown, by the mystery of things in general and not least of ourselves in particular. But the fascination of the inevitable, the forest growth or destruction or the changing and dying of some object or living thing, is immense. The inevitability of death attracts us all into a state of wonder and terror. And in some such way we stand fascinated by the river’s end, foreseen, inevitable as night and day. Standing on the small bridges of brooks, setting sail the paper boats, watching the dash of mill-races, the storm of currents, we look forward continually to one point: the final moment of subjugation, the end, the supreme point of fusion that is, in a way, a kind of death. We look forward and think forward, in fascination, always to the sea.”
[regarding the river]”It is a complete world. It has not only its own special life but it attracts an astonishingly diverse life from other things and places...”
“Water has some kind of powerful mystery about it. Still waters, moving waters, dark waters: the words themselves have a mysterious, almost a dying fall. Roads, meadows, towns, gardens, woods, are man-made; a river is a primeval piece of work. It is ageless, but at the same time, perpetually young. It travels, but remains. It is a paradox of eternal age and eternal youth, of change and changelessness, of permanence and transience.”
His descriptions have for me that quality of putting into words something I’ve seen and wondered at – a sense of recognition. For instance, this one about trout fry - “They lay, generally in sunlight, above stones, in the clear reaches that were no deeper than a childs’ ankle. They were like fish-ghosts, platooned, shadowy, still as death, no more than the shadows of willow-leaves until some muscle of the current moved and turned them gently over and flicked them back again, in a flash of silver.” I’ve seen that very thing – how wonderful to have it brought to mind so clearly and beautifully!
He writes about 2 rivers in Britain, the Ouse and the Nene, describing their differences. The different birds and plants, the different moods and people and trades engendered by them. He writes about water mills and fishermen, and, strangely enough – lace makers, who were well-known in this area. He gives them a chapter of their own, and it’s quite interesting. Each word in this book seems to me to have extra sweetness because of the gorgeous illustrations accompanying them. (Nature books should always have illustrations, I think.) A wonderful, meditative read for anyone who loves water, and rivers in particular.
“A road may go to any one of a thousand places: to the tops of hills, to towns, to solitary farm-houses, to the summits of mountains, anywhere. But a river, snaking to all points of a compass, has only one destination and one end.
And in the perpetual obedience to this never-shifting purpose lies, I think, some of the secret of the fascination of rivers: the fascination of the inevitable. We are attracted very greatly by the unknown, by the mystery of things in general and not least of ourselves in particular. But the fascination of the inevitable, the forest growth or destruction or the changing and dying of some object or living thing, is immense. The inevitability of death attracts us all into a state of wonder and terror. And in some such way we stand fascinated by the river’s end, foreseen, inevitable as night and day. Standing on the small bridges of brooks, setting sail the paper boats, watching the dash of mill-races, the storm of currents, we look forward continually to one point: the final moment of subjugation, the end, the supreme point of fusion that is, in a way, a kind of death. We look forward and think forward, in fascination, always to the sea.”
July 28, 2019
Mr.Bates is good at turning a phrase and loves the two rivers he describes. He has no use for fox hunting or hunting of any sort. The nature woodcuts by Parker are magnificent.
January 11, 2017
A meditation on a life spent on and around rivers. Man, the writing in this book is beautiful.
It starts off a little rocky with a "rivers were the breasts which suckled me metaphor" but quickly picks up. See?
For the best thing about a river is its permanence. You may grow up to cherish a memory of the house in which you were born, only to find in ten, twenty or thirty years, that circumstances have knocked it down; you may cling to the remembrance of a wood or a field or a garden or a single tree or even a road, only to find that time or circumstance or the local authority had changed it or effaced it altogether. ...If a tree or a wood or a house stand in the way of man, he can, for very little expense, remove them. But if a river stands in the way there is nothing for it but to build, at very great expense, a bridge. A river triumphs. ... It is at once a thing of wildness and solitude, of motion and stillness, of music and silence, of life and solitude, of simplicity and secrecy, of idyllicism and tragedy. (9)
Or:
Water share with woods some power of tranquillising the spirit, of quietening it almost to a point of dissolving it away; so that nearly all the best enjoyment of a piece of water comes from the mere act of sitting near it and doing nothing at all. It must surely be this power which attracts human beings in thousands to narrow strips of sand and shingle all over the world, which lures them to sit there, hot and crowded, and gaze for hours at the expanses of sea and sky. The eating of whelks and winkles, the drinking of beer, the wearing of cock-eyed hats, the promenading, the riding of donkeys, even the parade of nudity could all be done elsewhere. There is no law, so far as I know, to prevent men riding donkeys, while wearing the hats of American sailors, up and down the country lanes of England.
Or:
Space is restful; and a great space of one kind of thing, of grass or sky, corn or landscape, or water especially, can be profoundly restful.
See!
The number of twiddling little streams in England is fantastic. They look, on the map, less like veins on a leaf than a jumble of black snakes with their heads drinking at the sea.
Isn't this adorably sweet?
He would be engaged, very often on those summer evenings, down that quiet meadow-lane where there was no traffic, in taking his hens for their evening walk. Very slow and deliberate and dignified, he would walk down towards the river, and the three hens, like three small white dogs, would follow him, clucking with happiness.
I'd put in his some of his writing about flowers, but this is getting too long. Well worth the short time it takes to read this book (and nice pictures).
It starts off a little rocky with a "rivers were the breasts which suckled me metaphor" but quickly picks up. See?
For the best thing about a river is its permanence. You may grow up to cherish a memory of the house in which you were born, only to find in ten, twenty or thirty years, that circumstances have knocked it down; you may cling to the remembrance of a wood or a field or a garden or a single tree or even a road, only to find that time or circumstance or the local authority had changed it or effaced it altogether. ...If a tree or a wood or a house stand in the way of man, he can, for very little expense, remove them. But if a river stands in the way there is nothing for it but to build, at very great expense, a bridge. A river triumphs. ... It is at once a thing of wildness and solitude, of motion and stillness, of music and silence, of life and solitude, of simplicity and secrecy, of idyllicism and tragedy. (9)
Or:
Water share with woods some power of tranquillising the spirit, of quietening it almost to a point of dissolving it away; so that nearly all the best enjoyment of a piece of water comes from the mere act of sitting near it and doing nothing at all. It must surely be this power which attracts human beings in thousands to narrow strips of sand and shingle all over the world, which lures them to sit there, hot and crowded, and gaze for hours at the expanses of sea and sky. The eating of whelks and winkles, the drinking of beer, the wearing of cock-eyed hats, the promenading, the riding of donkeys, even the parade of nudity could all be done elsewhere. There is no law, so far as I know, to prevent men riding donkeys, while wearing the hats of American sailors, up and down the country lanes of England.
Or:
Space is restful; and a great space of one kind of thing, of grass or sky, corn or landscape, or water especially, can be profoundly restful.
See!
The number of twiddling little streams in England is fantastic. They look, on the map, less like veins on a leaf than a jumble of black snakes with their heads drinking at the sea.
Isn't this adorably sweet?
He would be engaged, very often on those summer evenings, down that quiet meadow-lane where there was no traffic, in taking his hens for their evening walk. Very slow and deliberate and dignified, he would walk down towards the river, and the three hens, like three small white dogs, would follow him, clucking with happiness.
I'd put in his some of his writing about flowers, but this is getting too long. Well worth the short time it takes to read this book (and nice pictures).
December 30, 2017
A beautifully produced paperback edition of Bates' 1937 work, essaying the rivers Ouse and Nene winding through his native Northamptonshire; taking in the landscapes, the wildlife and above all the people of the rivers. I read this very much as a companion of sorts to the author's masterpiece, the semi-autobiographical "Love for Lydia" published some fifteen years later, in which the River (taken to be the Nene) is central to the plot and whose brooding restless presence is a motif throughout the book.
As ever, Bates is economical with his prose, and resists the temptation to idealise the pastoral - many of the book's most evocative passages are the often not too perfect characters and workers of the area. In particular the short chapter on the lacemakers (originally Huguenot refugees to England), beautifully illustrated with the intricate wood engravings of Agnes Miller Parker, along the Nene is a wonderful portrait of the river as it flows.
As ever, Bates is economical with his prose, and resists the temptation to idealise the pastoral - many of the book's most evocative passages are the often not too perfect characters and workers of the area. In particular the short chapter on the lacemakers (originally Huguenot refugees to England), beautifully illustrated with the intricate wood engravings of Agnes Miller Parker, along the Nene is a wonderful portrait of the river as it flows.
November 5, 2018
It's the use of language that makes this book stand out, it creates a wonderful picture of the early 20th Century rural England of Bates' childhood. At times nostalgic as it was written in 1937 when things were changing, it is still interesting to see that the concerns of rural life then are still relevant today. I read the 1987 edition that has lovely water colour illustrations by Peter Partington.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews