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SAM BOURNE
PANTHEON
For my mother, both the gentlest and strongest person I know
Table of Contents
ONE
Oxford, July 8 1940
It hurt him, this journey, it pained him, yet day after day he came back for more punishment. Every morning, whether the skies were dark with rain or, like today, lit by searing sunshine, James Zennor would be here on the water shortly after dawn, sculling alone on the Isis stretch of the Thames.
James loved these early mornings. The air smelled fresh, the sky was empty, everything was quiet. A family of moor-hens puttered by the water’s edge, but even they made no sound as if, like him, they preferred to keep their counsel.
The boat was gliding now, James’s wrists flat and straight, the feathering motion – twisting the oars so that they entered the water vertically before slicing horizontally through the air – all but automatic. He gazed at the river ahead, sparkling as if jewelled by the sunlight. At moments like this, when the true exertion had only just begun, when the sky was blue and the breeze was as cool as a caress, he could almost forget what had happened to his ruined body. He could almost feel like the man he used to be.
Barring that one, fateful, year abroad, he had come to this same spot for a decade, ever since he had been an undergraduate, grateful for a place in his college team. He had even become the stroke for Oxford against Cambridge in a famously close boat