Being locked out of halls since my first exam, time had to be killed somehow. One of these was walking along the Thames riverbed.
At low tide, it’s wonderful. A quick scramble down some rickety old steps and you’re free to frolic all along the revealed outstretch of sand and rocks. You can slip underneath the jetty, where I dream of reading The Waves once my exams are done, and see the line on the flood walls of the Jubilee Walkway where the water stretches up to, far over your head, where the green and black slime (which sadly is nothing to do with organic chocolate) slithers out it’s last and the cold mottled white of the wall resumes. You can crawl right down close to the water’s edge and look out over the dull polluted expanse of brown and hear the rush and throb of the so-called River of Suicides. It’s quite powerful, feeling the movement and sheer volume of all that water further out but standing next to the lapping of ripples against huge chucks of rock, each like a miniature crag, every one like a genuine cliff face to eternity, where the water is not much deeper than your standard puddle. And yet, right by the wall, just where that thick sludge begins, there’s sand as soft as any desirable beach – not as clean, obviously – but sand good enough that people will make sculptures out of it come summer to be washed away by the dull heaves of water next tide. And it sinks beneath your feet like sand, and you can turn around and see you little footprints like tracks stretching off to the distance.
There are other little marvels down there too. Most of them aren’t necessarily marvellous, I should admit – swollen up condoms and discarded beer cans and similar – but there are many every day treasures to be found down there. On this particular day there was inexplicably within a few metres of each other a collection of pens, as if the current had wanted them to stay close. One was even personalised; Christine lost a beautiful gold fountain pen a while ago. I picked up an exquisite silver Parker pen, and hope to clean and restore it to glory. Another thing you regularly find is bones – sounds morbid but stay with me – that people have thrown for dogs, or, for chicken bones it’s probably falling into the first category of the not-particularly-marvellous remains of a drunken night out. But you can imagine it’s a wild bird, a water bird who finally gave in to the throws and drags of the Thames and died; and the waves hauled the body to it’s final resting place, the eternal sleep on the bed of the river where it had lived. And pottery, too, is everywhere – little fragments of plates and jars and only knows what else some plain shards no bigger than a thumbnail and others as big as your face elaborately painted with flowers and glazed over for protection against the angry seas. Sometimes you can find the stamp, saying it was made locally in Lambeth, or similar. I’ve always dreamt of finding some jewellery down there – not because it’s value fiscally, but sentimentally, jewellery often carries value that would have pained someone to lose it. And I think the riverbed holds many untold stories, and a lost necklace would resemble the hopes and fears of another individual that I will never know about.
And I think there’s something very beautiful to be found in that.
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