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By Root 411 0

and Herefordshire. Far below on the plain, the Severn beckoned us. It was a huge relief to meet it after a hot day’s walk across the dusty fields, even if we were doing so at one of its least appealing spots, directly beneath the new bypass bridge to the south of Worcester. We had to cross the bypass during evening rush hour, a moment that brought home just how quickly – in less than one day’s walking – we’d become completely desensitised to traffic. Dad and I stood timidly on the pavement, waiting for a break in the traffic that never came. Stone-faced drivers glared at us incomprehensibly as they slid by. After about ten minutes of nervy near-starts, a coach driver on the far lane took pity on us and stopped his bus for a couple of minutes, until there was enough of a break in the near-side stream of cars to let us scurry across.

Walking into Worcester, the path was diverted through the old wharfside district of Diglis. This is yet to be tarted up into some futureslum marina: the recession has stopped much of the transformation for now, so that half-built showpiece apartments sit under a carapace of new weeds. But there have always been plenty of people living down here, in streets of redbrick terraces tucked alongside little factories and warehouses. Diversion signs soon vanished, but suddenly the more powerful pointers of ancient memory brought it all back.

‘This is the football field where I scored my only ever goal,’ I squeaked to my dad. My sporting career must have been a sore point for him. A keen rugby player, he’d been desperate for a baby boy to follow in his studs, and had got me instead. At the age of eleven, I was the tallest in my class: this – and only this – had helped me inadvertently win the 100 metres dash on sports day. The rugby teacher pounced, and I was briefly placed in the First XV to bring a bit of speed to the front row. My strategy to get out of the team was to be as useless as possible, to drop every catch, trip over my own feet, squeal like a girl in the line-out and collapse the scrum if needs be (creating a sweaty, panting pile of lads was just an added bonus). There was no need to pretend. I was pathetic, and sent instead to play football, the school equivalent of the remedial class.

Even that was graded, and I was at the bottom. The better kids were sent over the river to the school playing fields, spectacularly located alongside the Worcestershire County Cricket Ground on New Road. This is always cited as one of the loveliest grounds anywhere, with its eternally Constable view of river meadows crowned by the soaring Gothic of the cathedral. Those of us in the bottom group were packed off instead to the Diglis Rec, a scabby mud-bath of a pitch enclosed by terraced streets and industrial estates. Failing miserably to do anything of interest with the ball were me and the other bookish jessies, together with the lads in bottle-bottom specs, the ones with one leg six inches shorter than the other and one gang in oversized old-man’s shorts who always coagulated around one of the goal posts, discussing algebraic formulae. Even amongst that illustrious crowd, I only ever managed one goal, but it is etched indelibly into my recollection, for there will never be another.

There were more memories of my sporting inadequacy as we made our way back to the river’s quay. Rowers from the school and city boat clubs swooshed past in the late-afternoon sunshine, lighting up the river with aqualine diamonds from their oars. I’d brought my partner here for the first time a year previously, on another perfect May evening. We’d sat on the lawn of the neighbouring hotel, sipping gin and tonics, watching the sun dapple on the Severn as the sculls glided noiselessly by. At just that moment, the deep bells of the cathedral began their peal towards the strike of six o’clock. I think it was quite an eye-opener for him, the son of a Welsh hill farmer. ‘God, this is like England in a bottle,’ he gasped. We laughed; it really was. Bronzed, confident people barked into their mobiles from behind designer shades. Ice