PENTON HOOK
[Illustration]
Penton Hook is quite peculiar. To a select little coterie of people it
is _the_ place on the river, but to hundreds of others it is not known
at all. To its own manifest advantage it is off the "hard high road,"
and the scorchers and the bounders, and the multitude generally, fly by
within a comparatively short distance, little knowing what they have
missed. But one or two of the favoured few turn down to quiet little
Laleham, and wheeling round a corner come right on to the tow-path by
the river's brink; in a hundred yards they are at Penton Hook. But
though the Hook is very select and highly favoured, that is not to
say it lacks population, only--it is a population of the right sort.
Little camps of charming bungalows dot the banks both above and below
the lock. Some are built on ground leased from the Conservancy, some on
that of private owners. To each man is allotted a strip of ground, with
so much river frontage, whereon he builds to his own taste and fancy a
little one-storeyed white-painted house, and lays out the tiny garden
from which his own white steps reach down to the water. Think of the
joy of it! The leader in an important case has been in a stuffy court
all day, burdened with his wig and gown, seeing all the dust and stains
of unswept corners of human nature; accusing, with upraised finger,
the brazen witness who has just perjured himself; dragging from that
yellow-faced man the secret he thought buried. Faugh! But the court
rises; he is away. The motor takes him down in less than an hour. Gone
are the stifling garments; the worn and wicked faces. The dull roar of
Strand traffic is replaced by the splashing of the water as it bounds
over the weir. The freed man tumbles into flannels and lies full length
on the green grass, smoking, with the water flowing at his feet, or he
dawdles in a boat round the Hook, tempting the fish with all the decoys
he knows. Happy man!
The trees near the bungalows, and those that fringe the meadows near,
are not pollarded; there is space between their tall stems. The short
grass, gemmed with pink-tipped daisies, can be seen everywhere, and
there is air, and freshness, and openness for everyone. The white
paint of the bungalows and their neat green or pink roofs, the rows
of geraniums, roses, and other flowers carefully kept and tended, add
touches of gaiety and brightness.
There are three weirs, for the river here makes the neatest horse-shoe
in its whole length, and the authorities have cut through the neck
of land, so that the greater part of the stream goes rioting and
tumbling in joyous confusion beneath the great new weir, provided with
a pent-house roof, under which it is always cool on the hottest summer
day, with transparent reflections dancing on the wall and a ripple
and splash below. The second weir, a mere tumbling-weir, is only a
few yards away. The water does not often leap over it unless it is at
flood time, when it affords a safety outlet. The third and widest is a
mixture, half sluice gates and half of the tumbling kind. At one time
there was no weir here, and boats could avoid the lock by navigating
the Hook, but that is now no longer possible. There is one advantage in
it; it keeps the Hook more secluded. The little red water-gauge house
is connected by wires with Staines, and so to all the rest of England.
By an automatic arrangement, the register shows simultaneously here and
at the offices of the water company what depth of water there is, so
that they may know how much they can take.
At Penton it should be always summer, with dog-roses and sweetbriar,
with placid red cows grazing on the tender grass, with boats tethered
in the lazy current round the bend of the Hook.
An uncommonly good place for fishing it is, this Hook, as the
kingfishers have found out, for they are yearly increasing, and
apparently do not mind the gay tide of summer company that invades
their haunts. Right down on the banks near the lock one pair nested
this year. No steamers churn up the waters and frighten the fish; only
a slow-moving house-boat or two towed to position and there left, or
those drifting boats belonging to young men and maidens who are content
to drift metaphorically as well as actually.
The Abbey river starts away on its own account on the far side of the
Hook, and begins its short course of about a couple of miles, to fall
into the Thames again at Chertsey. It used to be possible to get up
it in a boat, but now it is barred. However, visitors have nothing to
complain of, for the meadows around are singularly open to them, and
the place is not hedged about with restrictions as are so many river
resorts. Numbers of people come down to picnic, and it is no uncommon
sight to see quite a row of motors outside the lock-keeper's house,
while footman or chauffeur carries across the luncheon hampers to what
was once a peninsula but is now an island. Tradesmen's carts come round
too, finding in the swallow-colony quite enough demand to make it worth
their while; and year by year the bungalows grow. A whole new piece of
meadow, hitherto osier bed, is even now going to be devoted to them.
"Why, I get as many as twenty to thirty applications for land every
week," says the lock-keeper. It is to be hoped Penton Hook will not
become over-populated, or the delightful freedom from conventionality
which now characterises it might die away. "Ladies who come down
here--why, some of them, they never put a hat on their heads the whole
time, and I was going to say not shoes or stockings either!" The place
is particularly sought after by theatrical people. Miss Ellen Terry
still holds the bungalow she has had for many years. It is surprising
how early the season begins; even at the end of chilly March a few of
the first of the swallows appear.