‘When I went from Constance, it was on a small steamer down the Rhine to Schaffhausen.” So wrote DH Lawrence in 1913. While his lover Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen) was trying to explain their love affair to her family in Germany, Lawrence decided to walk south across the Alps, to Como and Milan, about 230 miles, taking steamers on the rivers and lakes where possible.
In 2022, I followed him with half an idea for a novel. I took the train to Konstanz and found a pretty little town of stone courtyards and half-timbered houses. But at once my reenactment ran into a hitch: , said the sign on the lakeshore – drought.
It was August, the Rhine was unusually low, the steamers couldn’t reach Schaffhausen, only Stein am Rhein. Half the distance. Lawrence had used his walk to observe the encroachment of industrialisation in the Alps Still, there was something appropriate about this.
Lawrence had used his walk to observe the encroachment of industrialisation in the Alps. He was fascinated and appalled by the way people’s age-old intimacy with the land and its rhythms was being replaced by “the mechanical money principle”. Well, now we have climate change to add to our anxieties.
As I boarded my paddle steamer at 9am, it was already far too hot. One of my novel’s protagonists would, I decided, be an expert on ecocriticism. Lake Constance has Austria to the east, Germany to the north and Switzerland to the south.
You’re in the heart of Europe. The steamer headed w.