The Joyous Wheel, James Arnold (1940)

A cycle-tourist’s pen portraits of his excursions about rural Britain in the last glimmers of the pre-world war two sun

Hamish Hamilton Octo 133pp

This is Arnold’s account of his joyful forays around the south of England and Wales during the 1930s. Each section describes a day on his bike, traversing the Downs, climbing about North Wales, and most of all, exploring the Chilterns and the Cotswolds.

Were he writing today, these might be posts in a blog – save that his prose has a light, joyful, beguiling simple, quality that is rare in any medium. Of incidents there are few, and upsets none. Instead, Arnold envelopes you with his manifest love for the countryside and the physical pleasure of making its contours his own. He is particularly good at marrying his own journeys into an overall idea of the topography of a place. Indeed, rivers are very often his points of reference.

He dates many of his jaunts precisely, and often reflects on earlier passages through the same parts. Clearly, given the decade about which he is writing, it is impossible not to reflect upon how different the world was then, with most of the roads all but free from cars and much economic activity genuinely local. There is nothing in this book, however, that feels at all dated – save for the journey’s-end pipe upon which the author frequently reports.
Nor is there anything of catastrophes of that era – before and after the years in question.

Like several other authors of that decade, particularly the little-remembered John Moore, or John Buchan, he conjures up a seductive, bucolic idyll into which it is hard not to be drawn.
Here he is at the start of something big.

“After breakfast, and having seen Bilbury before the mob, I took the Cirencester road. Now Cirencester, to my mind, is a grand gown. I like the curves of its Market Place. There are some nice Georgian houses here. The church has a good Perpendicular tower, but the south porch is just a little flamboyant to suit my taste. The vast Cirencester Park is not for you and me. Cirencester, of course, was a Roman habitation. Soon after, I passed a marshy field, was impelled to stop and meditate, for this was the source of the Thames. While my physical eye took in this tree-lined field, my mental eye visualised great ships coming up the estuary to discharge their infinite variety of cargoes; the little pleasure boats upon their sunlit waters between Teddington and Oxford, above which no steamers ply; and the placid river at Lochlade where there are more anglers than boats. So I came back to this field from which is derived one of the world’s rivers.”

As a written distillation of the pleasures of solo cycle touring, Arnold it is as good as it gets. It is also a beautifully produced book, the typography is exquisite, and the author also serves up a nice line in lino-cut illustrations.

PS Mar 10