WATER
(Eternity and Fairies)
A goal made of the lock,
Hand in hand, my dad and I
Crept on clouded glass,
Up-steam - the villagers'
Cacophony a memory.
Evening and praying reeds,
Willows' shadowed canopy
Covering my dad and me
The Thames in 1963
When the Thames froze, in the long winter of 1962-1963, my father found his skates and showed me how the blacksmith had made them with holes for bolts so that they could be attached to any shoe. Above the steep weir, at the bottom of the hill, and beside the lock, I felt the skaters there would wear a circular path through the ice and one day the crystal cut plate would sink, bobble hats and matching scarves floating up as if memorial lilies.
Violet's mother, Mrs Saunders had lived in the village for long enough to have known people who had known people who had lived there before the long double bridge had enabled an easier crossing from one side to the other of the river's broadly divided banks. Mrs Saunders would tut,
'That were a terrible drowning; mothers' sons, lost,' she'd say, her hands always moving one over the other in the pocket of her apron, worn with the water of washing, scrubbing, wringing and starching the laundry for the far too many who'd demanded of her in the manor in return for this rough cottage; just like her mother before her and Violet when she had first left school.
'Seeking brides,' Violet had explained, blushing as she said even she hadn't wed Sid till they were both well into their forties as, 'Sid were from Goring with his own mother, but he come across here, to live with us here, once his mum had died and we'd married. We couldn't leave our mums on their own after, what happened (meaning the war) and I couldn't leave Green Hill.' Violet had shown me where the fairies lived at the top of Green Hill with its feet in our gardens, the more rugged of the two hills that towered over the village. She told me also of the giants who'd cast rocks down the hills for sport and, myths are not just stories. The church at Aldworth contains their vast graves and the valley is littered with boulders. There was a lot of magic in the Thames Valley before the stockbrokers belted it up.
Seeking brides long ago, the villagers from this side of the river, which was our side (Violet's side, Mrs Saunders' side and my side) had boarded a boat and made the crossing safely to the dance in the other village. Goring was across the water and a far larger and more forward-looking place, having now had a station forever. But Violet explained, 'they'd had too much beer Mum; and the river was high,'
'Very high. Too high,' Mrs Saunders would repeat, turning her face to the wall. 'They should've known better being born here. They should've known not to go. God only knows if that bridge will stand the force, when it thaws.' We were all worried by the idea of the thaw, while, in the interim, pipes had had to be wrapped round with rags, and still they burst.
The river drew a line; if the doctor had come to supper, sometimes our phone would ring, the operator knowing he was with us. (We were, in our house, ahead of the time in having telephone of our own although we shared our line with the manor house - it was called 'a party line'; if the phone rang, you had to pick up the phone and find out who it was for; if it wasn't for you, you were supposed to put the phone down but it was quite possible to pick it up again to listen in on their shady dealings.) If the phone call was for the doctor, he might have to leave his supper, swearing, to rush off to someone in need; or it might be a phone call about a body in the river.
There was a body that had got stuck in the Mill gate once and that still gives me nightmares now. There were more than four or five other bodies in the river over quite a short period of time and during that time it was noted that the doctors on each side of the river were engaged in a dark and sinister competition. Goring was Oxfordshire's side, Streatley Berkshire's. Each county would send out launches on the occasion of a tragedy, and the GPs, one from each side of the river (and so county) would board their own vessel. When the mass, which was carried by strong and unpredictable currents, came within reach of one or other of their boats, rather than hauling it on-board, these GPs would instead prod and poke the body, cursing, as they strove to manipulate the corpse to fall under the other practice's administration. The river was everybody's foe and friend at once. We were drawn to it and we feared it.
When the river froze, stern warnings were given about the danger of walking on ice. It would be foolhardy to believe the sheet of static solid frozen water were as strong as the road that crossed the bridge, yet the skaters skated with confidence. It was impossible to understand how the roaring water that usually tumbled over the weir with enough power to fuel a small village, grind corn and drown a whole generation of young men, could have stopped, still, and stand stoned as if under a spell.
Higher up stream, the ice was less like a rock. My father and I, wearying of watching the skaters, had inched our way slowly away from the lock and up stream along the green ice, towards the mill where our canoe lived, and as we moved we heard an ominous creak; slowly, and despite the 48 year age gap, each of us in equal dread of the vacuum that might pull us suddenly to our deaths, we moved back towards the thicker ice, and climbed with immense stealth onto the mound of browning snow that had buried the towpath. 'A lucky escape' my father said, and he was right. This was just one of many risks we took on the Thames.
The bank narrowed upstream from the lock, at Cleeve where there was another lock, and the overhanging trees had on this occasion warmed the ice. A tributary, which formed a millstream here circled an island of trees, behind which was the boathouse where our canoe and my brother's kayak lived, inside the Mill on a floor that was built over water. You could see the river beneath the floorboards between the cracks but it was a proper building, with a locked door and ladders to upper floors, with lofts and terrifying places made for hide and seek. There was access here to a steep but smaller weir, alongside the islanded wood, a weir that we children had learnt to survive.
The game was to jump in as close to the bottom of the waterfall as you dare and be forced underwater; the water would spin you round like a fishy rag doll, but if you could hold your breath for long enough, just before you hit the rough gravel pebbling the river bed, you'd be caught in a funnelling current that would throw you high into the air so that you could somersault back into the Thames at its deepest point and be carried along safely on the bubbling foam dancing on the river's surface, to the land that bordered this active mill race. And luckily we could hold our breath, just long enough, so that this after school sport was an everyday game in late spring and the summer. I'd often go to play the game entirely alone.
The boat I loved was a renovated Canadian Canoe with heavy cushions, slatted wooden seat backs and polished paddles, and it had to be hauled from the water after use, onto the muddy bank and loaded, then carefully wheeled back into the boathouse, on an unsteady makeshift trolley made of two pram wheels and an orange box. Once, after school and all alone, the boat had slid back into the water, tipping me over into the reeds, which tangled my feet and held me inverted, scrabbling for my life. Now and then I'd cover myself in blood, mud and injury; frequently I'd float too close to a weir and overturn, spinning to escape from a capsized vessel, and despite several encounters with ghosts, and reckless daredevil foolery, my mother escaped the grief many other mothers suffered on the river's banks.
One of my very earliest memories is of my brother disappearing into ten-foot waves as he was launched from a Cornish beach, in a Kayak and into a storm on a grey day. Screaming, I was reunited with him as the sea returned him to the beach. Much later, when a storm blew up off the coast of the Algarve on a reconnaissance trip, my father and I were bodysurfing despite a red flag, and I had my first taste of terror, being trapped in a spinning current that drew me 500 yards out to sea underwater before it returned me to the surface, my lungs on fire, my stomach raw and grated. Scars on my hips recall diving into sharp rocks from a cliff, but the closest I ever came to death at sea was in trying to encourage a non-swimmer to float when, out of his depth and mine, he clung to my waist and dragged me under water. A Pedalo is a dangerous thing.
There is one steep climb, up a remote and powdering rock-face in the Algarve that I revisit when I can. As the sun sinks into the sea, watching the sky and the sea ripple and shine, ebbing and flowing as the breeze shapes time, we commune.
Absolutely beautiful writing, a joy to read. I love hearing about the river and how life was, just before I was born..
Wonderful. So evocative Cherry.