Of all the East Anglian towns Bury St. Edmunds, I think, is the most beautiful. It is little known to travelers. The majestic Abbey churches and the vast ruin of the old Abbey in the middle of town have given the place the grand style. It has fine squares and streets, whose eighteenth-century façades very often conceal back ways and building of a much earlier time. It has the serenity of something fixed forever. It is a place of steep hills.
As the cars and motor bicycles roar through the town on a summer evening, the people walk into the Abbey grounds and there is the complete English summer scene. Couples go in for that expert examination of the rose garden which few Englishmen can resist, for they know the names of roses as they know the names of cricketers. Boys are swimming in the river, girls are playing tennis, youths are playing rough-and-ready cricket and quarreling about whose turn it is next; and on the bowling green, that lovely close-cut lawn which is an English specialty and a sacred object of contemplation, sly men are rolling the big black balls.
“How does that smell, Tom?” the butcher calls as his ball rolls toward the pin and gives its sudden turn.
“Strong!” calls the draper from the other end of the green.
The decorum of the people, the quiet, the evening scents, the silence of the courting couples—for English courtships are sedate in public—the rich shadows of the elms, take your mind off the white scribble of the soundless jets in the blue sky. It is a thing we have got used to: the island is a fortress and you cannot drive many miles without coming to a runway.
I have written only about England and Englishmen, not about the Welsh or the Scots. It is all nonsense really; there are only the British. The English are a cultural fiction, the descendants of an early melting pot of Celts, Norsemen, Saxons, Teutons, Danes and Norman French, with an allowance of later Huguenots and the European immigrations of the last thirty years or more and the continuous inflow of the Irish. We now have West Indians too.
We have seen in the Englishman a barbarian who has been tamed by a mild climate.
Hippolyte Taine, the French critic who came here in the middle of the last century, did not agree that we were a silent and reserved race. He found us quick, affable, talkative, easily unbosoming. Our leisurely manner was a necessary pose. God help everybody if we abandoned our self-control.
Taine found us unexampled in our individual relation to society but poor in personal relationships; our unrelaxed nature was deeply private, he said, and this privacy found its supreme expression in English lyrical poetry. For the rest, we were too closely packed, shoulder to shoulder.
I don’t know. A few months ago I was standing on the walls of York looking over the rose gardens to the towers of the Minster and listening to the sound of the great bells. There were two bells, deep-sounding bells that hummed powerfully, covering all other sounds in the city. One was profound, grave and masculine, its note pronounced, impervious to argument. The other, though strong, was pitched a little higher, like an echo, still grave but feminine. I was listening to a colloquy of towers, a dialogue between those two aspects of the English nature, the outer and the inner, the governing and the private or poetic. They spoke for a long time and seemed to me to speak of the division that lies in the sober English nature.
In the end, if we ask what an Englishman is like, we have to say that he changes more from county to county than he does from class to class. The confident aggressor of the nineteenth century has become the peculiar, considerate and self-disciplined being of today who so often sacrifices his obligations to his emotions and whose teenage children show regular signs of wanting to burst out again. His fortune was once made out of wool; then out of coal, steel and ships; his skill—and skill he fosters and values far more than happiness—now has turned to the air and atomic power. If he accepts now a great deal of the standardization imposed by a mass society, he protects himself by a great tolerance of eccentricity and of what passes for madness. (All the English, Hamlet said, were mad.) He is a man who has always thought his own past was alive in him. It has been his fate to live in the crankish intimacy of that “little world” Shakespeare spoke of and yet to act compulsively on a far larger world outside in every century. It is the fate of the islands.
[1958]
13
Thames River of History
River life is male: Father Tiber; Old Man River; Father Thames. On the banks of rivers, civilizations are begotten. English civilization is the Thames. It is the preeminent British river.
It is small, but the British specialty is, notoriously, smallness. The Thames could be swallowed whole by the Rhine, the Danube or the Volga; from its estuary far down on the east coast of England, to its source in the west among the hills of Gloucestershire, it is only 209 miles long; it is only 50 yards wide at Oxford, 250 yards at London Bridge, and 700 at Gravesend and Tilbury. Twenty-odd miles farther down is the estuary and the Nore Light Tower where the river ends its journey to the sea.
A ship bound for London will pass the Nore Light and pick up the river pilot off Gravesend Pier, where the river narrows. There are another twenty-four miles to travel before she can dock in the Pool below London Bridge in the center of the City. The pilot will take her past Greenwich on the south bank, and the Isle of Dogs—an island of docks, in fact—on the north, where Limehouse Reach begins. Beyond is Tower Bridge, cutting the Pool in half, and beyond London Bridge she cannot go. The journey farther up must be done by river steamer or launch. These craft pass under the bridges of Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster, Lambeth, Vauxhall and the rest, until we breathe less polluted air in the suburban greenery of Kew, Hampton Court and Richmond.
At Teddington the tidal water and the rule of the Port of London Authority end: then we are free for the pastoral river—for Windsor, Hampton Court and Richmond, for the pleasure waters of Maidenhead, the straight racing mile of Henley and its regatta, for Goring and Oxford and so into the west of England, through Lechlade, Cricklade to the source.
The secret of the power and prestige of the Thames lies in its location; the estuary is immediately opposite the mouths of three great rivers of continental Europe—the Elbe, the Scheldt and the Rhine. Handily placed at the crossing of the sea routes, the Thames turned the port of London into a huge warehouse and center of transshipment. Half the being of the river is mercantile; it is heavy with wealth and the advantages of trade and politics. To follow the Thames from estuary to source is to cut through the dense accumulation of English political history into the vegetative rumination and poetry of English life.
So we can say that the Thames is really two rivers: London river, which is the river of merchants and government, and, above that, the “sweete Themmes” of poetry and pleasure. Let us look at London river first. It stretches from the Nore Light Tower in the estuary to London Bridge, just over forty-seven miles of muddy and polluted water poor in oxygen—a River Policeman told me there is none at all—where no fish live. They get five hundred tons of driftwood, broken boxes mainly, out of this part of the river every year. The water is sometimes sadly silvered, but most often it is brown to look at, like dark ale, and very murky, fit only for rats. Indeed, a pair of kestrels made a nest and brought up a family in the roof of the Savoy Hotel in the Strand a year or two back, and lived off the rats of the Thames mud.
Toward the end of the day the dirty water takes on a ragged and weary gravity, for there is nearly always mist in London to blur and take the hard edge off a skyline or a warehouse wall. Sometimes, as it sweeps between Blackfriars and Westminster, or again by Chelsea, the river looks tawny, leathery and majestic. Smoke, fog, mist, all the umbers and purples of London haze, paint elaborate and baroque sunsets which suggest the back cloth of an unbelievable melodrama with a sentimental ending. What a place for a murder, a suicide, some life-and-death gesture, the river looks in these moments. One thinks of the low balustrade on Waterloo Bridge, which suicides are said to prefer—the police reckon they save half of them—or the peculiar fragment of an anonymous Londo
n love story painted by some passing amateur on a piece of iron on Hungerford Bridge, just above the red light that marks the channel: “John, come home to 63 Elm—” The rest is undecipherable; it was daubed there years ago, and the author evidently had an obsession, for it is repeated fifty yards farther on—with a change of address.
Sinister, its darkness glossed by scarves of golden light and the pinkish black of the London night, the Thames has in these hours some quality which I can only call imperial. The river has known everything; in the Blitz, bits of it even caught fire.
As with many important English things, there is nothing appropriately grand about the entry to the river from the sea. The estuary is wide and open, but narrows to five and a half miles at the Nore Light Tower. Joseph Conrad has described what it’s like to bring a ship into London. The pilot comes down to meet you, he says, and takes the ship through Queens Channel, Princes Channel or the Four Fathoms; sometimes he comes up to the Swin from the north. Conrad said that, of all the rivers he knew, this one lacked romance and grandeur in its outer approaches. Its quality, he said, was mysteriousness. There was no sign of a great city, no clatter of work, but the silence of low seawall and marsh, broken here and there by chalk bluff. His ship, he said, went deeper and deeper inland as if it were being lured. He saw more sky than land.
The entry is most mysterious in a light sea fog, when an extra brush stroke of unearthliness may be given by the sight of the high brown sails of one of the few remaining sailing barges of the river—some “bricky,” low in the water, still surviving against the competition of the roads, making for the Essex or the Kentish brickfields, or carrying a cargo of rubbish and clinker. Tall, melancholy, these stained and rusted sails rise over craft that seem to be standing still until, as you pass one, you can just hear the whisper of the water at the stern. I believe there are not more than half a dozen of them left. Presently, as you move upstream, the oil stores, the power and gas plants appear in the marshes, standing up like cathedrals. If you should ever walk across these flats you will come upon gunnery ranges, forgotten lime workings, factories abandoned generations ago and broken up; this desolate country is a natural scene for the writer of thrillers.
It is not until Gravesend, with its old fort on the midstream island and the thickening of industrial chimneys, that the Thames really begins. This was the nearest point to the sea at which the river could be defended by shore batteries. The Norse raiders and invaders got this far without hindrance; after that they met trouble—although, as we know, some of them settled down: the “hythe” of the nearby river towns of Greenhithe and Rotherhithe is their language.
At Gravesend the sea pilot drops off and goes ashore to the Pilot Station at Royal Terrace Pier. Here he reports, no doubt, to the officer known as Ruler of Pilots—with no definite article, as if he were Ruler of Heaven and Earth. He has a den in that green-painted row of offices on the pier down which the north wind blows. You will notice a strong smell of tea here. There are hundreds of parked bicycles: you are confronting the touchy bureaucracy of the river, with its ancient pomps, privileges and jealousies. The Port of London Authority founded in 1908, now rules, administers, preserves and improves the Port of London as far as Teddington, the tidal limit; but the old hard-won rights and privileges, dating from the time of the trade guilds of the Tudors when every trade defended itself by charter, still have their place. Trinity House is represented among the governors of the Authority, but it sticks to its ancient roles: sea and river pilotage and the buoying of the Thames. The fixed lighthouses between Gravesend Reach and Galleons Reach are in the control of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House—“the guild or fraternity of the most glorious and undividable Trinity of St. Clement,” founded by Henry VIII in 1514, when the royal shipyards were at Deptford. (Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind was built on the Thames.) Trinity House also has interests beyond the Thames; it controls the lighting and buoying of a good part of the coasts of England and Wales.
Just above the Royal Terrace Pier is the Gravesend Ferry, and on the opposite shore is Tilbury, the first dock one reaches coming up the river, where the Oriental liners lie at rest, flashing white like new hotels. Here begin the cement works, the paper mills, the power stations: the drab processions of wharves, dock gates, warehouses and factories will continue for twenty-four miles to London Bridge, in the middle of the City. It is a long way—a packed, populous, smoking, clattering stretch, with only one or two patches of green and no fine building to relieve the eye until Wren’s superb, cold, grand Naval College at Greenwich, and beside it, the first Queen Elizabeth’s charming house at the end of its classical vista.
Gravesend is a pretty little town, with a good deal of Regency about it and the air of having been drawn by Cruikshank and populated by Dickens. Indeed, all this part of the Thames is full of Dickens—from Rotherhithe, where Bill Sikes hanged himself, to Gadshill, where the novelist lived; from Rochester to the Medway, from which Mr. Micawber hoped for something to turn up. At Gravesend the shops sell shrimps, cockles and winkles from the estuary flats. There is talk of “up-anchoring” in the pubs. River life has even affected the parking lots, for on the wall of a boat house are the words “Please park pretty.” Customers in the bar of the Clarendon Royal raise their tankards and, as they do so, cannot resist a sideways glance at the river to note the ships going by, two a minute at high tide, and to listen to the peremptory blasphemies of the tugs.
From now on up the Pool there will be no silence on the river, but a daylong, nightlong cacophony carrying briskly across the water; an orchestra of phutting cranes, rattling conveyors, shovelings, chuggings, whinings, the clanking and croak of anchors, the spinning of winches and the fizz of steam—broken every now and then by the whistles of ships’ officers to their crews or occasionally by a plain human voice uttering an unprintable word.
The last time I came up from Gravesend by water was on a tug. It is a good way to see how the Thames works. A dirty damp light was breaking on a cold morning. To climb from one tug to another as they lie doglike and close together at the jetty is not easy, especially under the faraway gaze of a tug’s crew. In fact it is a delusion that there is anything faraway about the gaze. It is strange, too, to find yourself steaming up the river in a barnyard cackle of radio telephony: “Calling Sun 17. Take the Florian and go in with her, over. Calling Sun 16. Has that little Spaniard moved? What’s the matter with her? O.K. I’ll be back.”
Our job is to take the Florian up to Millwall. There she lies, white and clean as a new castle in midstream, home from the Persian Gulf. A grinning Irish officer and the unsmiling Persian crew in their astrakhan bonnets look down on us as the anchor groans up. We put a waterman on the Jacob’s ladder and he climbs up calling for his breakfast, and then the tow is thrown and the tug’s crew grabs it. It takes three men, with gloved hands and all their strength, to get this tow in and lock it down with a mallet. In a moment the Florian’s siren blows, the tug curses back twice; ship and imp are talking and we are turning the monster round.
“Been on for forty-eight hours,” says the skipper. He has had to bring his wife and a television set because he never knows when he’ll be home. For a few hours, as we move upriver, we stand stamping our feet in the smell of oil, taking lungfuls of coal smoke and wharf smells that blow across the stream. Those warehouse doors and yards breathe out strong: gusts of raw timber, clouds of coal gas, camphor and the rich gluey smell of bulk sugar. The Thames smells of goods. Ahead of us are ancient names of ugly places. Poplar, Stepney, Limehouse, Wapping, Shadwell, Deptford—where King Henry VIII had his ships built—the dockyard at Woolwich, the Isle of Dogs—where the royal dogs were once kept—Blackwall, whence Captain John Smith sailed (fourteen years before the Pilgrim Fathers left Plymouth), to found the colony of Virginia, and Cuckold’s Point, where a king of England, one of the Henrys, once gratified a loyal innkeeper by seducing his wife. But we are still a good hour or two from there, staring at a gasworks, watching the iron ore being grabbe
d out of the lighters at the Ford plant, seeing it travel overhead to the furnaces and pour out in red liquid. As the skipper says, with that special bitterness river men have when they think of road transport, “It comes in by lighter and goes out on wheels.”
The lighters are the distinguishing craft of the Thames, marking its difference from all other rivers. They are moored by the score, all over the stream, forming vague low islands and archipelagos. It is the commonest sight of the river to see a tug rushing along with a double row of these poor, black, blind hulks behind her; they never sheer or get out of the line of tow; they pass under bridges and dodge the traffic with the ease of skaters. The big ships must unload in the docks, but whatever can be dropped overside onto lighters saves port dues.
It is surprising to stare at one of those ugly, seemingly rotting islands of craft which look as though they have been lying there for years, and then suddenly see a couple of tugs appear and a dozen men spring off. In a few minutes of shouting and rushing work the island splits into pieces, and in a quarter of an hour it has gone. They are mostly “dumb,” these barges—that is to say they have no engines. One of the grotesque sights of the Thames is to see a barge adrift and askew on the tide with one or two men in the stern, steering with their long oars. Their job looks hopeless. The lump looks as though it will foul all traffic and blunder into the piers of any bridge in its way. But the Thames waterman has not just tumbled into his job. He has been apprenticed; he has had to earn his license.
At Home and Abroad Page 36