Mudlarking
Page 25
Sometimes I stay on the hump and enjoy just being there. I’ve done it quite a few times and it’s magical. If the wind isn’t roaring in my ears, it’s quiet enough to hear barnacles turning in their cones and wormholes opening up all around me. Huge container ships slide by at eye level and flocks of wading birds pass in tight formation. I sit there mesmerised by the dark sheets of rain rolling across the horizon while James becomes a bright yellow speck in the distance. To sit on a hump of mud in the middle of the Thames Estuary is the most exhilarating feeling of absolute remoteness. But this time I decide to slap on through the mud.
It is a very different style of mudlarking out here. There is no point in looking down, because mostly there is nothing to see but plain, empty mud. You have to look ahead into the distance for objects, black dots that almost seem to be hovering just above the surface. James knows where the early bottles are most likely to wash up in this vast expanse, but even so often all we return with are muddy clothes, aching legs and flushed cheeks. Victorian bottles are easier to find out here, but they are heavy and slow me down, so I don’t usually collect them. I stand them up in the mud, however, so that I can see them more easily on my way back, in case my rucksack is empty. James sometimes leaves finds out on the mudflats too, including two human skulls that I wish he’d brought back, but which were too much for him to carry. It’s impossible to say where they had come from. Perhaps they had tumbled down the river from further upstream or maybe they are the remains of dead sailors, thrown overboard before their ship began its final journey upriver to port. It would have been a cheap and convenient way to cover up disease among the crew, which may have prevented the ship from docking and everyone on board from being paid.
It’s not unusual to come across human remains on the river. Mudlarks have found finger bones, jaws with teeth still firmly inserted into their sockets, ribs and long smooth arm and leg bones muddled in with the cow, pig, sheep and horse bones that litter the foreshore, but it takes some knowledge of anatomy to pick them out and I’m sure I’ve passed a lot by without noticing them. The section of human skull I did find was unmistakable though. I could tell it was human by the size and shape of it, a shallow, dirty, creamy-yellow cup that fitted neatly in the palm of my hand. On the inside were faint grooves and ridges where someone’s brain had once pressed against it and the edges were ragged where it had broken along its natural sutures. It looked very old, just like most of the human bones found by mudlarks on the foreshore, but they all have to be reported to the police just in case foul play is at hand.
I’m not squeamish about human remains. In fact, they’ve always intrigued me. I was ten years old when I found my first human bone. My birthday treat that year was a trip to the London Dungeons, a chamber of horrors, which was then beneath London Bridge station. It appealed to my fascination with the macabre and was gloriously terrifying. Afterwards, still buzzing on self-inflicted terror, Mum and I went to the churchyard at Southwark Cathedral to eat our packed lunches. Sated on honey sandwiches and a can of Pepsi, I decided to explore the small green space we were sitting in. The closely pruned roses had just been dug over, and to my joy, on top of the freshly turned yellow clay was half a lower human jawbone complete with teeth. As far as I was concerned, this was the perfect end to a perfect day.
I quickly finished the crisps I was eating and dropped my treasure into the empty bag, stuffing it deep into the pocket of my jeans before I was seen. It took all the limited self-control of a newly turned ten-year-old not to sneak a peek on the train home, but as soon as I was alone, I took it out and gazed at it. It was old and brittle and had been broken many years ago, perhaps by a gardener’s fork. Two of the teeth were in excellent condition and to my delight one had a gaping black cavity that had eaten away a quarter of the tooth. Either side were several empty sockets where teeth had been lost, either in life or more recently to the rose bed.
The jawbone became the star of my chest-of-drawers museum and rested in its own box, lined with scrunched-up pink tissues. I daydreamed about the person it might have belonged to – a wicked pirate, an old lady in a frilly bonnet, a brave man killed in a duel – and for weeks I went to look at it every day after school, until one day it disappeared. I searched high and low. I blamed the dog and I even debated its magical ability to move on its own, but I never found it. Years later my mother confessed. Alerted by my increased visits to the barn she’d looked in the museum and was horrified by what she found. The jawbone hadn’t disappeared of its own accord; Mum had taken it to the local vicar, who had buried it in consecrated ground.
Sometimes a complete human skull, or even an entire skeleton, pushes its way out of the foreshore. In 2009, a mudlark found a partially submerged skull at low tide on the Isle of Dogs. It was removed by the police and once they had concluded that it wasn’t a recent death, they passed it to the Museum of London. It was radiocarbon dated to 1735–1805, a time when the area was largely empty save for a line of windmills that stood beside the river along its western side. Archaeologists returned to the site eight months later and found the mostly complete skeleton of what turned out to be a twelve-year-old girl, who had been buried in a hole deliberately dug into the foreshore close to the low-tide level. This made excavation difficult. It meant they had about an hour when the tide was at its lowest to lift the remains. Every time a boat passed, the site was swamped by the wake and the bones risked floating away, so they worked quickly, lifting and photographing each bone one at a time until the girl was finally free of her cold and lonely grave. Her life and death remain a mystery. Whether she was killed by accident or murdered, whoever disposed of her body had gone to great lengths to ensure she was not found.
Bodies found their way into the river in all kinds of ways. Georgian and Victorian London was notoriously dangerous and people disappeared easily. Corpses could be disposed of with no trouble at all in the stinking body of water that flowed through the capital and the Thames was a useful conspirator. It swallowed the bodies of elderly relatives to save their families the shame of a pauper’s funeral, and centuries earlier it hid those of plague victims from terrified neighbours. Even taking a wherry from one side of the river to the other was fraught with danger. Slippery stairs and jetties, poor lighting and often an excess of ale or gin, meant that many simply fell in and were washed away with the city’s refuse. People fell from the ships and barges that moored along the Thames; ropes tripped the unwary and wooden decks became slippery in the rain. Sailors with a belly full of grog from riverside taverns often fell in. It was considered bad luck for a sailor to know how to swim and many found themselves welcomed into Davy Jones’s riverine locker sooner than they had expected.
The battles that have taken place along the Thames also added to the river’s burden. The Romans fought the Britons on its banks; Viking raiders sailed upriver to attack the Saxons from their longboats; and the great Iceni queen Boudicca laid siege to Roman London in ad 60, slaughtering every man, woman and child in her path. There are the bones of Napoleonic prisoners who died on board the prison hulks in the eighteenth century and Second World War pilots whose planes crashed in the wide expanse of the Estuary. Every century has added more victims of warfare to the river.
Their bodies sank down into the brown water and tumbled away with the tide. Swollen flesh separated from bones, rings slipped from fingers, shoes were pulled off feet, knives fell from belts and swords slid from hands. Clothes worked free from corpses and became embedded in the thick mud. As the fabric rotted, clusters of buttons, buckles, cufflinks and brooches were left behind for the mudlarks to find. Often the tides and currents swept the bodies many miles away from where they first entered the water. Some were never found, sucked down into the mud or washed far out to sea. I’ve been told stories of corpses found on the Estuary filled with river shrimp and crabs, and others so bloated they were mistaken for armchairs.
If you spend enough time around the Thames you will eventually come across a dead body, or a part of on
e. A few years ago, a mudlark found a severed human foot at Bermondsey, which came from a particularly grisly murder nearby. The Marine Policing Unit recovers around thirty-five bodies every year – about 90 per cent are attributed to suicide, some are tragic accidents, but either way the Thames is a master at claiming its victims. Survival depends on a set of circumstances: tide, water temperature and the height from which someone falls. The Thames is at its coldest in April, after the winter months have sucked out any warmth it might have had, and at its warmest in September, after it has spent all summer absorbing the sun’s rays. But it is never actually ‘warm’ and the simple shock of entering the water suddenly can be enough to stop a heart beating.
I have seen two bodies in the Thames. I saw my first as I was walking along the river path from the Isle of Dogs towards Limehouse. It was a particularly high spring tide, and the water was lapping closer than usual to the top of the river wall. It was overcast, cold and grey, and the water matched the sullen clouds. The wind was in my face and I paused for a moment on a bend in the path to look back over the river and that’s when I saw her, caught where the wall stepped in and the currents couldn’t reach her. She was in a dark coat, floating face down, arms outstretched, her long hair spread out like a soft halo. Small choppy waves broke gently over her head and she looked peaceful, angelic. In that moment I surprised myself. Instead of panic and shock, I felt a deep connection with the woman held in front of me by the turning tide. She was a stranger, but I was the first to be with her after her final and most private moment.
The second person I saw was in central London very early one morning. Two police officers had arrived before me and were standing beside him, discussing what to do next. I caught a glimpse of the body between them as I walked past. It was a young man with short dark hair and a white shirt and jeans, lying face down in the jagged dip of an eroding barge bed. He didn’t look as if he had been tumbled around in the river. His shirt was still tucked in and his hair was already dry. He could have been sleeping, but he lay awkwardly with both arms beneath him and his bottom slightly raised in the air. One of the police officers caught my eye and I looked away slightly ashamed. By the time I walked back, he had been taken away. Even now, I don’t like to linger or search the spot where I saw him, but I think about the young man often and wonder who he was.
For all its bleak beauty, the Estuary is merciless and its tides and currents have claimed its fair share of lives. There are estimated to be around a thousand shipwrecks lying on its bed along with several planes, one of which I learned about through a chance find on the foreshore. Several years ago, I found a small die-cast brass brooch in the shape of an old-fashioned plane. It wasn’t in good condition – all of the green enamel had gone and the pin was missing – but I could just make out the name ‘Amy’ written across its wings and a tiny map of Britain on one wing tip and of Australia on the other. These were the clues that led me to its story. ‘Amy’ was Amy Johnson, who flew solo in May 1930 from England to Australia in nineteen and a half days. The event began as a small and private affair, but as her journey progressed she became an international media sensation. Songs were written about her and badges were cast in commemoration, and it was one of these that I had found.
As I read about this woman I had never heard of before, I discovered the life and death of a remarkable individual. Amy Johnson was the first person to fly from London to Moscow in one day; she set a solo record for her flight from London to Cape Town, and time records for flying from Britain to Japan and from Britain to India. She continued her flying career into the Second World War, joining the newly formed Air Transport Auxiliary and moving Royal Air Force aircraft around the country. On 5 January 1941, while flying from Blackpool to RAF Kidlington near Oxford, she went off course in adverse weather and bailed out as her plane crashed into the Thames Estuary. The crew of HMS Haslemere spotted a parachute floating down through the snow and then saw a figure wearing a pilot’s helmet calling for help from the water. They watched as she was pulled closer to the ship’s propellers by the current, and although there was no hope of saving her, Lieutenant Commander Walter Fletcher dived into the freezing water to rescue what he took to be a passenger. He failed and died from exposure in hospital days later. It is likely Johnson was sucked down into the blades of the ship’s propeller and although parts of her plane, her logbook, chequebook and travelling bag were washed up nearby, her body and that of the ‘passenger’ were never recovered.
Ahead of me, James turns. I can see his lips moving, but his words are snatched away by the wind and I shake my head. He points to his watch. We have been out here almost two hours and it’s time to go. The river is sliding past, still heading seawards, which is good, but it will turn in thirty minutes. I look at our footsteps, snaking back around patches of deep mud and rest spots of rubble vanishing in the distance towards the shoreline. We are far from where we need to be and it’s not a direct route back either. We must retrace our footsteps east before we can start to head south to the safety of the shore, and that will take time.
Several Victorian bottles and plain stoneware pots are standing in the mud along our path back. If I have the energy, I’ll collect them as we pass, though they’re not particularly special and I’m thinking I will probably leave them today. I’m happy with the three barnacle-encrusted early free-blown wine bottles we found, a beautiful clay pipe with roses and thistles entwined around the bowl, and the lid of a Gosnell Brothers Cherry Tooth Paste pot. I have seen these before. They are often embellished with a portrait of the young Queen Victoria to support the manufacturer’s claim that the paste was used by ‘all the courts in Europe’, but I hadn’t realised how brightly coloured the pots once were until now. Freshly plucked from the Estuary mud, the pot I picked up had a few vivid moments of almost-newness before the air dulled it, ageing it 150 years before my eyes.
We begin our laborious trudge back, James half pulling, half supporting me. He has one of the precious free-blown bottles tucked under his other arm and I have two in my backpack. They are leaking liquid mud and it is dribbling out of the bottom of my bag, but I am up to my elbows in it anyway. It is splattered across my face and squelching in the welly that came off earlier, warm and soft. This is MUDlarking. I am starting to flag when we see a small hump of rubble that’s just large enough for both of us to stand on. We catch our breath and rest our legs, and I look to the land, which is getting closer, but still seems desperately far away. Then I look back over my shoulder, past James, along the winding path we’ve made in the mud to the river. The tide has turned behind our backs and the water is chasing us.
The speed at which the water moves varies in different parts of the river and according to weather conditions. It is mostly influenced by the tides, but above Putney the amount of water flowing over Teddington Weir also plays a part. The speed of the water above London Bridge is usually between 1 and 3 knots. Below London Bridge and as far as Woolwich, the average speed is around 2.3 knots on the falling tide and 2 knots on the rising tide. Further downstream, the speed of the tide is affected by pressure and wind that can act with or against the tide to create positive or negative storm surges. In the Estuary, the tides move at an average of 2.6 knots, or 3 mph. The average walking speed of a human being on flat, sound land is about 3.1 mph. I estimate that we are barely touching 2 mph.
With the river fast on our heels I think of the wall of water that inundated the Estuary one cold night in January 1953, gushing through homes and sweeping people away. The Estuary is the first part of the river to feel the effects of the sea, and when exceptionally high tides combine with storm surges in the North Sea, the Thames can flood. Floods have been recorded in London since ad 9. In ad 38 a great flood is thought to have killed as many as 10,000 people, and in December 1663 Pepys recorded in his diary the ‘greatest tide that ever was remembered in England’, which inundated Whitehall. The last major flood in central London was in 1928, when the Thames overwhelmed the river wall at Hammersmith
and Millbank in the dead of night, drowning fourteen people, filling the streets with up to four feet of water – and taking T. J. Cobden-Sanderson’s ashes from their nook in his garden wall. In virtually every recorded century, heavy rainfall upriver combined with tidal surges from the North Sea has caused severe flooding. By the law of averages, it won’t be long until London floods again.
Out on the Estuary, the only protection from the river is sea walls and flood defences, which were improved and updated after the flood of 1953. The most crucial structure protecting central London is the Thames Barrier at Woolwich, which is one of the largest movable tide barriers in the world. Since becoming operational in 1982 it has closed 183 times: 96 against tidal flooding and 87 against the type of combined tidal and fluvial conditions that caused the flood of 1928. But although it was designed to last 200 years, people are doubting its longevity: the plaque on the Barrier reads ‘Here the tide is ruled, by the wind, the moon and us’, but there is no mention of rising sea levels and global warming.
Once a month the Thames Barrier is tested and partially closed to allow maintenance work to take place. On these days strange things can happen to the river upstream. Sometimes it takes for ever to drop, never fully reaching the low tide that was promised; other times it stays low far longer than it should and rushes back in faster than normal. When I’m planning a trip to the river, I try to remember to check what the Barrier is doing. On the one day a year that the Thames Barrier closes fully against a high spring tide, usually in September or October, the river stays low for hours and a mudlarking session can extend all day.