Delights page 3

ANOTHER LEAVE-TAKING

Here’s another scene of departure: this time from J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. Frodo Baggins, having learnt from the wizard Gandalf that the all-powerful Ring of Sauron must be got out of the Shire as soon as possible, decides, with reluctance, to leave his beloved home, Bag End – initially for a new house on the far side of the land of the hobbits. This extract is from the third chapter: Three Is Company.

FROM: THE LORD OF THE RINGS
BY J. R.R.R TOLKIEN

The sun went down. Bag End seemed sad and gloomy and dhishevelled. Frodo wander round the familiar rooms, and saw the light of the sunset fade on the walls and shadows creep out of the corners. It grew slowly dark indoors….They shouldered their packs and took up their sticks and walked round to the west side of Bag End. “Goodbye”, said Frodo, looking at the dark blank windows. He waved his hand and then turned and, (following Bilbo, if he had known it) hurried after Peregrin down the garden path. They jumped over the low place in the hedge at the bottom and took to the fields, passing into the darkness like a rustle in the grasses… They went in single file along hedgerows and the borders of coppices and night fell dark around them. After some time they crossed the Water, west of Hobbiton, by a narrow plank bridge…Then they struck south east and began to climb into the Green Hill Country to the south. They could see the village twinkling down in the gentle valley of the water. Soon it disappeared in the folds of the darkened land, and was followed by Bywater beside its grey pool. “I wonder if I shall ever look down into that valley again,” said Frodo quietly.

The night was clear, cool and starry, but smoke-like wisps of mist were creeping up the hillsides from the streams and deep meadows….they marched in silence, and Pippin began to lag behind. “Are you going to sleep on your legs?” he asked. “It’s nearly midnight.” Just over the brow of the hill they came to a patch of fir-wood and went into the deep resin-scented darkness of the trees to collect sticks and cones to make a fire by a large fir-tree. Then, each in an angle of the trees great roots they curled up in their coats and blankets and were soon fast asleep. A few creatures came and looked at them when the fire had died away. A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed. “Hobbits,” he thought. “Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land but never of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer about this!” And he was quite right – but he never found out any more about it.

LONDON CAUGHT IN WORDS

Here’s a description of the kind of corner of London that you come across, unexpectedly, if you spend any time at all walking in the city: usually, in my experience, in the middle of a rainstorm. But this time, in Chapter Two of Margery Allingham’s classic detective novel “Tiger in the Smoke” – in thick fog.

FROM: TIGER IN THE SMOKE
BY MARGERY ALLINGHAM

The fog was thicker than ever over in St Petersgate Square … cosy, hardly cold, gentle, almost protective. The little close was well hidden even on the brightest of days. Then years before even the bombers of Luftwaffe had not found it and so, almost alone in the district, the quiet houses remained just as they had always been. By yet another oversight the railings round the tiny square in the centre had been spared by the scrap merchants, and the magnolia, two or three graceful laburnams and a tulip tree had overgrown unmolested. It was one of the smallest squares of its kind in the city. There were several houses on each of the two opposite sides, a wall on the third which shut out the steep drop into Portminster Row and the shops, and on the fourth, the sharp-spired church of St Peter of the Gate, its recotry and two minute glebe-cottages adjoining. The square was a cul-de-sac. The only road led in by the wall so that all wheeled traffic had to return by the way it had come, but for foot passengers only there was a flight of steps at the other end … worn and highly dangerous despite the bracket street lamp on the churchyard wall. There were lights in every window of the rectory, and the two which flanked the squat porch glowed red and warm-looking in the mist, but with visibility on the road below almost down to nil, the rectory might have been alone upon a moor.

The perfect setting for the saintly Canon Avery and his beautiful daughter to be stalked by the most dangerous man in London – with the prospect of medieval treasure lurking in the background.