In this new occasional column Lizzie Enfield, writer and walking tour leader, follows in the footsteps of a particular writer and shows us the literary landscape they inhabited
For many writers, walking is an essential part of their writing routine. As science fiction writer Orson Scott Card once observed, ‘It’s worth the time to take an hour’s walk before writing. You may write a bit less for the time spent, but you may find that you write better.’ There is great wisdom in this and a Latin phrase to underline it: Solvitur Ambulando, which means, ‘It is solved by walking.’
Dickens used to walk for up to three or four hours, sometimes as much as twenty miles, keeping his eyes open for the people and parts of London who later populated his novels. Poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge found inspiration in walking in the countryside and Hemmingway solved his writing problems by taking to the streets wherever he was in the world.
When Winston Smith wishes to escape the ugly totalitarian society that George Orwell depicted in 1984, he goes to a bluebell wood. There he finds the ‘Golden Country’ he has dreamed of all his life – a green pasture, with a clear stream where he can swim beneath willows. This rural idyll is not dissimilar to the Oxfordshire countryside where Orwell, christened Eric Arthur Blair, grew up. From the age of 9-12 he lived in a large Victorian home in Shiplake. His family later moved to Henley on Thames.
Walk
In Shiplake walk past Roselawn, the Blair’s family home. When living here he befriended the 13-year-old Jacintha Buddicorn who found him standing on his head in a nearby field. ‘You are always noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are the right way up,’ he told her and later that he wanted to write novels. He did, with Animal Farm and 1984 – his most famous. Jacintha later wrote about him in her memoir Eric and Us.
From Shiplake follow the willow-lined banks of the River Thames with the blue hills of the Chilterns in the background. Here the author loved to fish. So too did George Bowling, the hero of Orwell’s early novel Coming up for Air. He wants to escape his suburban life, leaving behind, his wife and family, job and the looming spectre of another war.
Head up to Binfield Heath. Here Bowling hopes to find peace in the tranquil fishponds but instead finds one has become a manicured lake where residents of the new posh estate sail model boats while the other is a filled-in dump.
Beyond the heath you will come across the dmasts and satellite dishes of Crowsley
