Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  Rayon, silk or even early nylon stockings hang out of the low stratified waste-filled cliffs, waving like windsocks in the breeze, and all around me are the broken and cracked bellies of teapots, their spouts and lids. It’s all very British and I imagine the millions of cups of tea that have been poured and drunk from the remnants lying here. Most of the teapots are stained brown inside with tannin. Some are delicately patterned and painted with pastel flowers, while others are plain glazed in rich green and blue. The most common are the ‘Brown Bettys’, traditional dark brown glazed pots that reached the peak of their popularity at the turn of the last century. The Victorians considered tea brewed in a Brown Betty to be the best, since its rounded shape allowed the leaves to circulate more freely, releasing more flavour.

  Much of the pottery is blue-and-white domestic china, most of it is transfer-printed, a technique developed in the mid-eighteenth century to enable the potteries to keep up with the demands of the emerging middle classes for affordable, decorated tableware. By far the most common design is the Willow pattern, a scene adapted by English potters from imported Chinese wares. By the time it has reached the river the Willow pattern is usually shattered and fragmented – two doves swooping amorously over a waterside landscape, a willow tree, three figures on a bridge, a boat and a pagoda-style house – but brought together they tell a story of love and devotion, albeit invented by the potteries to improve sales. One version, which has no links to China at all, goes something like this. The beautiful daughter of a wealthy Mandarin fell in love with a humble accounting assistant, angering her father. He dismissed the man and built a high fence around his house to keep the lovers apart. He had planned for his daughter to marry a rich and powerful duke, who arrived by boat bringing jewels for his new bride. The wedding was to take place the day the blossom fell from the willow tree, but on the eve of the wedding the accounting assistant sneaked into the house disguised as a servant. The lovers escaped over the bridge with the jewels, pursued by the girl’s father, whip in hand, and sailed away on the duke’s boat to an island where they lived happily for many years. When the duke discovered their hideaway, he sent his soldiers to kill them, but moved by their plight, the gods transformed the lovers into doves. It is the doves that are the most sought-after shard among foreshore collectors.

  For all its multifarious bounty, Tilbury is best known for its bottles. You can see where the bottle diggers have been at work, digging warren-like holes in the bank in search of their glass treasure. They dump their rejects, and throw them down onto the foreshore below. There are so many that I don’t take them home unless they are unusual, pretty or small. I have to draw the line somewhere. At the cove, there are small fish paste pots by the dozen and squat brown glass Bovril jars in every size. Knocking around among them are ink bottles, long thin phials that once contained olive and clove oil, and glass bottles with the names of chemists, cleaning products and cure-alls pressed into them. Heavy dark brown beer bottles with thick molten glass blobbed lips are common at Tilbury and usually discarded by the bottle diggers, but I’ve been lucky and claimed a much rarer Codd bottle, complete with marble, a small late nineteenth-century Schweppes torpedo bottle and three Victorian poison bottles. By the late nineteenth century there was an array of poisonous substances available to pretty much anyone who wanted to buy them. To help people avoid confusing arsenic with indigestion relief, they were sold in coloured glass bottles with raised patterns and designs that could be felt in the dark or by the dim light of a candle. One of mine is a beautiful dark blue and the other two are emerald green. They remind me of the magic potion bottle in Alice in Wonderland. But instead of ‘Drink Me’ my bottles come with a more sinister warning: ‘Poison, Not to be Taken’.

  Milk glass, opaque and white, is easy to spot against the dark cinder-rich mud. The pressed-glass jars that once held cold cream and cosmetics lie everywhere, but again I am choosy about what I take and only collect the geometric, linear, art deco designs of the 1920s that shout the Age of Jazz, flappers and carefree times. Perhaps they once shared a dressing table with the perfume bottles that occasionally tumble from the banks. I have one very special small bottle, dating from around 1905, that was a collaboration between the perfume manufacturer Coty and two of the world’s finest glass manufacturers. The bottle was designed by Baccarat, famed for its crystal glass, and the delicate frosted stopper wreathed with tiny flowers was created by René Lalique. I have tried to pull the stopper out, to sniff the dribble of yellowing perfume that is left in the bottom, but it is wedged in too tightly and the scent that would once have freshened the wrists of an Edwardian lady remains a mystery.

  The number of bottles and pieces of broken glass at my second search site, 150 yards east of the cove, has earned it the moniker ‘Bottle Beach’. Bottles spill out of the banks and onto the foreshore and glass of one kind or another covers the whole half-mile stretch. The river is gradually transforming it into river-glass, spreading it over the foreshore and washing it into great piles of smooth, colourful glass pebbles. This is a different kind of treasure and attracts the sea-glass collectors, but I was the only person on the beach that day. In the four hours I was there I didn’t see another soul – and that might have been just as well, since I’ve recently learned about the hidden horrors of Bottle Beach.

  Lying among the bottles are hundreds of little black degrading batteries. Plastic bags and synthetic clothes are emerging from the riverbank too. This part of the dump isn’t as old as the cove. The bottles help to date it, and I even recognise one of them, a quarter-pint milk bottle like the ones we had at school in the 1970s. At a guess, I’d say the rubbish here dates back to around the 1950s. It’s a mixture of household, commercial and industrial waste and the truth is nobody really knows what’s here – it was dumped before records were kept – but a recent survey of the soil at Bottle Beach discovered asbestos, lead, arsenic and cadmium. It is filled with poisons and carcinogens, not to mention the micro-plastics, which are washing into the river and out to sea.

  I was glad I’d worn my latex gloves when I heard about this and I haven’t been back to Tilbury since. It is not my kind of mudlarking anyway. There is no real hunt or discovery here – it’s just picking through trash, a mound of mass-produced objects, many of which were made to be thrown away. It’s all too recent and there’s way too much of it. The stories are jumbled and massed together and the voices of the past are loud and angry: countless sobbing children and cursing housewives. Each smashed ornament is a sigh and every broken toy a tantrum.

  Tilbury paints a picture of emerging consumerism and of a society on the brink of overindulgence. It provides a depressing glimpse of our recent legacy. The wood, straw, reeds, leather and bone our ancestors left behind have mostly rotted away, and the bricks, tiles, pottery, clay pipes and glass they made and used are slowly eroding, chipping and wearing down, returning to the sand and mud from whence they came. But Tilbury is a reminder of the permanence of the things we throw away today. It tells a story of overconsumption and wanton waste, and sends us a message for the future. We may ship our rubbish east and hide it in landfill sites. We might even build nature reserves on top of it. But much of it is never going away.

  ESTUARY

  Did I ever find a dead body on the shore? Yes, a goodish few – eight or nine, I dessay. Five shillings reward it is to find ’em; but I’d a jolly sight sooner find a good boat’s grating, or a few fathom of cable. There’s a lot of trouble about finding a body, and what with the inquest and one thing and another it don’t pay. Still, it isn’t in human nature to see a fellow-creeter, man or woman, layin’ there, lookin’ like they do look, and know if you don’t look after ’em they’ll be took off again by the next tide.

  James Greenwood, ‘Gleaners of the Thames Bank’, Toilers in London, by One of the Crowd (1883)

  As the river slides eastwards from Tilbury towards the sea it rounds Lower Hope Point, a bleak, flat marshland, criss-crossed by wriggling creeks and drainage chan
nels and dotted with low ruined buildings, which are the remains of a gunpowder and explosives works that closed in 1921. The name ‘Lower Hope Point’ is an optimistic suggestion of the river’s final destination, where new journeys start and old ones end, but in many ways the river’s own journey never really ends. Instead, it merges imperceptibly with the North Sea, somewhere in the Estuary, at a point that changes with the wind, weather and tides, when the balance tips and the water becomes more sea than river.

  Lower Hope Point is on the south, or Kent, side of the river on the Hoo Peninsula, a spur of marshland that lay in one of the Saxon divisions of England called ‘hundreds’. Once known as the Hundred of Hoo, it was a thriving area until the sixteenth century, when malaria, carried by mosquitoes that bred in the brackish marsh water, began to decimate its ancient communities and it grew desolate and lawless. The north, or Essex, side, has been at least partially tamed by London’s deep-sea cargo port, the London Gateway, and Southend-on-Sea, a grey mass on the horizon, but the south side is still wild, remote and empty, a bleak but beautiful land of pewter skies and wind-blown, treeless marshes, little changed since Abel Magwitch crawled away from his prison hulk and chanced upon young Pip, whose family lay in a pitiful row in the graveyard of one of the Hoo’s ancient churches.

  There is no simple way to get to the river here. There is no train or bus that will conveniently drop you off at the riverside, no set of stairs leading to the water. For the most part, the foreshore is inaccessible, and with its fast tides and deep mud, mudlarking here can be treacherous. I never attempt it alone, but always go with my friend James who calls ahead to let the coastguard know we’ll be on the mudflats. James knows the mud as well as it can be known and is an extra pair of eyes on the turning tide.

  We usually choose an early-morning tide for our visits and it’s still dark when we meet in a car park far from the river. I jump into James’s car and we drive down winding empty roads for fifteen minutes or so, past sleeping houses and shadowy churches until we get to the first of a series of metal farm gates that leads onto rough tracks and eventually out to the tufted marsh meadows. After another ten minutes of bumpy driving, scaring frogs that jump in our headlights, we reach the bottom of a tall bank where the marsh ends and the river starts, though it’s still a good walk from here to where it is safest to step off the riverside onto the mud to begin our search.

  Our main quarry is early wine bottles. These dark green, almost black, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century beauties are classified, according to their shape, as ‘onions’, ‘shaft and globes’ and ‘mallets’, while those that have morphed between them over time are called ‘transitionals’. Since they are all free-blown they are delightfully individual, all a bit wonky with trapped bubbles of air and twists in the glass from being turned on the glassblower’s blowpipe. They survive cushioned and preserved in the thick soft mud, though the river is fickle and can be reluctant to release them. Early bottles are elusive, lucky finds and we often don’t find any, although once, typically when I wasn’t with him, James found so many he couldn’t carry them all back. He made do with four and photographic evidence of those he had left and that had vanished back into the mud by the next time we went.

  Leaving the cosiness of the car, I notice the sky is beginning to lighten, and I can smell salt in the air. We pull on our hi-vis vests and waterproofs, check the batteries on our phones, then set off on foot along the bottom of the bank. The sun rises behind us as we walk, casting a warm orange glow across the empty marshes, but it doesn’t last long and the light soon grows hard and bright. It is March and we have come for one of the very low spring equinox tides in the hope that the water will pull back far enough to reveal our hunting grounds and give us time to search them.

  As dawn breaks, birds come to life all around us. I can’t see them, but I can hear hundreds of geese and ducks and, somewhere in the distance, the mournful cry of a lone curlew. We walk for perhaps three-quarters of an hour until we finally reach the point we want and climb the bank, grabbing handfuls of dry tufted grass to pull ourselves up. The river has been hidden from us until now and when I reach the top I’m hit by the wind and a wonderful sight. For as far as the eye can see, there is mile upon mile of smooth sludge, its watery surface reflecting the thin early-morning light. The Estuary is where boundaries blur, where the river meets the sea, and the earth, water and sky blend together. I can barely distinguish the river in the distance; the north shore is only a dark pencil line that separates the concrete-coloured water from the light grey sky above it.

  The specks on the horizon, to the east, are Maunsell forts, metal towers that look like alien sentries, built to defend the nation from German attack in the Second World War. To the west, just out of sight, behind the wall at Lower Hope Point, is the Waterman’s Stone, the obelisk which marks the most easterly extent of the old Thames waterman’s licence. Just east from where I am now are two more obelisks: the London Stone on the Kent side and the Crow Stone on the Essex side. The London Stone was erected in 1856 and stands at the mouth of Yantlet Creek on the Isle of Grain at the furthest end of the Hoo Peninsula. It is almost impossible to get to. The other obelisk, the Crow Stone, stands in the mud at Southend-on-Sea and is only accessible at low tide. The invisible line drawn across the river between the two is known the Yantlet Line. It is around thirty-four miles from London Bridge and once marked the limits of the City of London’s control over fishing rights and tolls on the river.

  I zip my coat high around my ears and climb over the wall, sliding down the concrete slope on the other side to a pile of rocks that’s covered with slippery brown bladderwrack, evidence of how far the tide comes up when it’s in. There is no other option here than to cross this slippery mass, so I crawl low to the ground, hands outstretched. I don’t want to fall and risk a broken bone. Where the rocks and seaweed ends, before the mud begins, there’s a thin strip of coarse yellow sand and I pause for a moment to prepare myself for what is to come.

  I look briefly towards the invisible Yantlet Line and out over the mudflats that I’m about to try and conquer, then I step off the reassuringly sound strip of sand into the thick, custardy mud. Instantly, I sink six inches in and I have to keep treading to stop myself from sinking any further. If I stop, I will get stuck, so I keep walking, leaning forwards, half stooping, knees bent, walking on tiptoe to avoid creating a vacuum. And it hurts. I try to ski my foot across the surface, pressing down as gently and evenly as I can. I feel like a kung fu master. I am walking across rice paper without breaking it. Except I’m not. I’m a five foot ten inch middle-aged woman, dressed in an electric-blue waterproof and hi-vis vest with wellies that are a bit too big and keep slipping off.

  I manage to walk about a quarter of a mile before I stumble and fall with a splat onto my knees, leaving a wellington boot behind, my socked foot squishing into the cold wet mud. I struggle to my feet and stand on one leg, twisting around and trying to pull my lost boot out with my hands, but the mud stops my fingers from getting a purchase on it. Now that I am standing still, my other foot is sinking. I am in a bit of a pickle, so James comes to my rescue. He pulls my boot out of the mud with a delicious slurp, helps me back into it and hauls me out of my predicament. Then he takes my arm to help me along and we’re off again, heading towards a small hump that’s darker and dotted with bricks where the mud is firmer and we can rest.

  James is really, really good at mud walking and I’m jealous because I’m rubbish. He once bought me a pair of inflatable snowshoes to stop me from sinking so deep, but I kept falling over them and eventually they popped. I’ve watched him and tried to copy what he does, but I still sink. He’s tall and his feet are bigger than mine, so I like to think that’s his secret but really I know it’s more a matter of technique. He’s got a knack I haven’t, a kind of quick slide, twist and hop.

  I’m exhausted by the time we reach the hump. I must make a decision. If I go on, I’ll need enough strength to get back. Should I shelve my eagernes
s to go further, to where the bottles are, in favour of good sense? If I give up, I’ll probably make my way slowly back to the edge of the mud to look for the Roman pottery shards and Victorian bottles that sometimes wash up where the rocks meet the sand, or I’ll crawl back over the seaweed and find a strandline of plastic to search for bottles with messages in them. I’ve found quite a few of these in the past – children’s drawings and fantasies of pirates and deserted islands corked into bottles, stories of captured princesses, invading aliens and superheroes. I have also found deeply personal notes, demons trapped and thrown away: heartfelt wishes, regrets and disappointments, and once an intimate goodbye to a loved one.

  Some bottles ride the currents for years, like the one containing a message written in 1914 that was found in the Thames Estuary in 1999. It was written by a soldier to his wife as he crossed the English Channel on his way to France, and had been pushed into a ginger-beer bottle. The note read: ‘Sir or madam, youth or maid, Would you kindly forward the enclosed letter and earn the blessing of a poor British soldier on his way to the front this ninth day of September, 1914. Signed Private T. Hughes, Second Durham Light Infantry, Third Army Corp Expeditionary Force.’ Hughes was killed twelve days later and the bottle remained at sea for another eighty-four years before it was snagged in a fisherman’s net. Hughes’s daughter Emily, who was only two years old when she lost her father, was an eighty-six-year-old grandmother living in New Zealand when she was tracked down and given the letter.