Three Men in Maidenhead
To say nothing of the boat (and of course the dog!)
Three Men in a Boat is easily the most enjoyable book I have read till date. The first time I read it was in 1997. I was in the final year of my Electrical Engineering course in India and instead of paying attention to “Alternate Energy Sources for Power Generation” lecture, I was reading this book (Cardinal sin for reasons described in the next few paragraphs. Never do that.) The chapter I was reading then, specifically dealt with a chap trying to get rid of a block of cheese.
Long story short, I ended up laughing loudly while the class was in session with the professor in his elements discussing how one can harness the power of wind to conjure electricity from thin air (pun surely intended!). Everything ground to an abrupt halt and pin drop silence engulfed the whole auditorium.
The professor could not fathom how his lecture, which enjoyed the ignominy in the university as a strong contender for the title of the most boring lecture ever, could invoke such a reaction from a normally quiet and shy pupil seated in the backbench of the classroom.
“Get out” He said in a very calm but firm voice.
I ran away from my wooden desk — a little bit of which had already seeped into my personality. It was the first and last time I was shown the door in school.
Years later, a twist of fate took me to Maidenhead, a sleepy consumer town on Thames twenty miles west of London away from its cacophony. People here take comfort in the fact that it is part of the so-called Royal Borough (of Windsor and Maidenhead). For the uninitiated, the Windsor Castle is home to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. It has been months (as of this writing) since the Queen set foot in Buckingham Palace thanks to 2020 — the year of Covid19. We are all her neighbours now.
As a consumer town, Maidenhead boasts of an idle way of life. There is nothing much to do and that seems to be the best feature of the town. People move here from London so that they can get up early in the morning; catch the 7:20 fast to London on the Great Western Railway and travel for about 30 minutes perched in a strange angle sandwiched between a hundred other hapless travellers who cannot wait to get out of the carriage in Paddington and run to their respective and more-or-less similarly cramped offices. The scene is replayed in its entirety at 5:30pm on the way back home with an accuracy that would astound any statistician — who is, perhaps, not in the middle of that collective mass of humans hard to see apart in the train carriage.
At some point, Maidenhead might have had something that set its personality apart from similar towns scattered all over England. However, as things stand today, the influx of people fleeing London in search of literally greener pastures, have resulted in the cost of living soaring high in and around Maidenhead. It is one of the most expensive areas to live outside London. The reasons are straightforward.
1. It is close to London. Shuttling between London and Maidenhead daily is not a preposterous idea.
2. It is NOT that close to London. You wake up in the morning and smell wet mud and not carbon fumes.
3. The only thing it has in abundance is greenery. It is everywhere you see — except of course in winter when the whole place looks straight out of a black and white movie’s depiction of an idyllic countryside.
By this time, of course, it has been a while since I read Three Men in a Boat. So, the details have escaped my rather unremarkable memory. However, I chanced upon an excerpt from the book today that mentioned Maidenhead. It piqued my interest. I downloaded the book from Project Gutenberg and searched for Maidenhead. I could find six references to it and more than a dozen if you include Marlow and Cookham.
Some of the funniest episodes in the book happen near Maidenhead. Do you remember the dude and the lady “towing” a boat that had their auntie in it? “No boat was near, no boat was in sight. There must have been a boat attached to that tow-line at some time or other, that was certain; but what had become of it, what ghastly fate had overtaken it, and those who had been left in it, was buried in mystery[i]”
George, in a moment of sheer brilliance, attaches that towline to his boat. The couple, oblivious to all these developments, keep carrying the boathook all the way from Maidenhead to Marlow — the entire 2 miles of it — chugging along the four chaps including George, serenely enjoying the river with their pipes lit!
The next reference to Maidenhead comes right after the infamous pine-apple tin and the trio’s efforts to open the tin. Spoiler alert: They do not succeed.
“Maidenhead itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the river swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of showy hotels, patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls. It is the witch’s kitchen from which go forth those demons of the river — steam-launches. The London Journal duke always has his “little place” at Maidenhead; and the heroine of the three-volume novel always dines there when she goes out on the spree with somebody else’s husband[iii].”
The boat then goes through Maidenhead beyond Boulter’s and Cookham locks to Clieveden Woods.
Whether that description suits the 2020 Maidenhead is something I do not want to comment on because I understand it is one person’s impression of the town in the 19th century. Likewise, this writeup is also one man’s view on Three Men in a Boat and Maidenhead. To each his own!
Humour owes its existence in a large part to being politically incorrect. You call a spade, a spade. Period. Someone somewhere will get offended by it. That is alright. A learned man once said of humour “For every laughing entity out there, there is a sulking one and together it all balances beautifully”. (In case you are wondering, that is yours truly!)
Personally, I would not live anywhere else. I love Maidenhead and its quirkiness. While my abode of peace is nestled just outside its south-western boundary in Cox Green, I identify myself as a Maidonian if you will. The luxury of walking a mile and ending up in a densely wooded area with only birds, squirrels, the occasional rabbit, and plenty of dog poop for company? Priceless!
But I digress.
I reckon, my dear reader, that you remember the man Harris and his adventures in a certain maze just outside London? “Harris asked me if I’d ever been in the maze at Hampton Court. He said he went in once to show somebody else the way. He had studied it up in a map, and it was so simple that it seemed foolish — hardly worth the twopence charged for admission. Harris said he thought that map must have been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn’t a bit like the real thing, and only misleading.”
I was there last year and tried the maze. It wasn’t that bad of course (Thank God for Jerome’s exaggeration skills and sense of humour) but it did take some time to get to the centre of the maze. There was a plaque there that talked about this episode from Three Men in a Boat.
When I read the book in 1997, the humour element appealed to me alright, but it was all set in a place and time that I could not relate to. I think I can relish the book much more if I read it now. At least the geography is not alien anymore although 19th century England is still very much a mystery.
If you have not read this book so far, you should do yourself a favour. Just drop everything else and head to your local library or Gutenberg website. Some good things are free in life. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome is one of them on Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/308/308-h/308-h.htm)
Before I end this, a few clarifications on the spellings used above: ‘Tow-line’ and ‘boat-hook’ both are hyphenated phrases in the book. However, Cambridge Dictionary states that the current accepted terms are Towline and Boathook.
References — All excerpts discussed in the article are from Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) by Jerome K Jerome. The illustrations used are from the same book by A. Frederics.
[i] Excerpt from Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome — Chapter IX
[ii] Illustration by A. Frederics from Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome — Chapter IX
[iii] Except from Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome — Chapter XII
