DEEP RIVER
At what possible junction of truth and fiction could that river have been called deep? It had flowed past my boyhood home for longer than I care to remember or indeed CAN remember. They say memory only starts at the age of two and half. But I guess that differs from person to person. My memory was slightly before that — a vision of my grandmother in a black apron about to give me a bath, when my mother was in hospital. It was the black colour that pervaded all the other details that a painter would have meticulously added to the main blob of black. The painter would have got the lighting just right and the bathroom cabinet just to the left, and the sound of the river flowing past. There ARE sounds in paintings, if the painter is clever enough to convey them by brushstrokes. However, I guess it was not a river at all but the bathwater flowing into the bath that I could hear. The bath seemed very deep in those days, with everything being in black and white when trying to remember those days through the filter of how the 1950s are now depicted, unless someone has cleverly colourised the images flickering across the screen. Not only a deep bath, but made of cast iron or whatever they made baths from in those days. My first real full-fledged memory, however, was a different bath when we moved from that large house with the water flowing from my grandmother’s taps and lived in a smaller place whereby we had then to make do with a thinner tin bath that was hung battered on the wall ready to take down for filling with kettles of hot water. The day we moved there, was after the night of the great storm in 1953 and there was a veritable river flowing outside in the street from the nearby backwaters and a dinghy floated past our front door. The lower floors of our new abode were now flooded. I remember it all now in detail, but my palette still only has two colours, black and white. Life itself is a river that flows under a bridge, as the old saying goes. Whether deep or shallow depends on you. The strips of plasticine at infants’ school were my first real memories of colour. But the sea remained grey, as wide as it was deep. And its currents ebbed and flowed as tidal waves, rather than the onward travelling of water in a deep channel between two banks from a river’s source towards just such an open sea. All is now black, but can I possibly have future memories of that blackness? And who will hang it back on the kitchen wall?
THE WATER STRIDER
When rivers widen beyond ken they call them broads, do they not? Islands of land and islands of water. Isthmuses between. Tom was certain he would be able explore every diversion of route within the area where he had chosen for a trip in a single-steered craft, a certainty that had endured until he was already three miles up a branch of the broads at the point when he realised he had gone off any map he could find in the pack of dog-eared charts given to him at the towpath station or even on-line, an on-line signal that was now significantly fading just as he was off line in more ways than one. He hummed a self-composed song to himself which he had entitled ‘when rivers widen’ and contained a reference to certain narrows that broadened. He had never hummed it before or even knew the song at all, until he hummed it now, as if some ghostly muse hovering over the sparkling water either side of his craft was instilling it into his brain. ‘When sidetracks deepen and atolls shrink’ were further words he imagined whereby even Paul Robeson’s voice would not be deep enough to cover the song’s demands. Any deep river or dream archipelago, three miles up was as nothing to the distance down Tom had actually gone.
Those back at the towpath station scratched their heads as the dusk drew in. Tom had hired the craft for a single day of exploring the broads, and so he was not officially allowed to moor somewhere overnight. The stevedores and other workers had gathered after securing various craft already returned by their hirers, and they felt frissons of dread as a weather front approached that had never been forecast by those meteorologists they depended upon for organising trips on such dangerous waters. A low depression that deepened even as they watched. Blackening clouds seemed to reflect, like shadows, the land and water patterns below them that such towpath workers otherwise knew well from their own maps. But one such cloud was new in such a pattern of islands. And they heard a song upon the heat of freshening gusts that came off the sheen of each mirrored surface they envisaged, if subconsciously. They only hoped Tom had reached an island to weather the storm. But the song’s words told otherwise, and so they turned it into a sea shanty at the next convivial gathering they attended, as a sort of purging. But nobody had a voice deep enough for the notes required.
I met Tom years later. He had no memory of these events. He looked at me askance for having made him part of them. It was then I realised that I had at last met the man whose muse I was. I became, at last, able to exorcise any further widening of my powers into narrative channels that I should never now, in hindsight, have entered. Able, too, to hover now where I pleased without guilt of infecting others. Striding the pattern of waters, straddling them as they swelled from hip to hip, to the sound of a silent song sung not by me but to me.
BALFOUR BROGUES
Henry Balfour did not have four feet but he sometimes thought he had four legs. Hands served as extra feet as he crawled across the carpet ‘on all fours’, as the saying goes, between his dolls house and toy military fortress. Each day he had to make a choice of which structure he would play with most, but the imagination he needed to grant realism to his games with either of them remained the same. Projecting versions of himself to inhabit the tiny human models of those who thus inhabited the structures around them.
His mother seemed to understand his so-called behaviour, but his father failed to do so. A father who wore the fashionable brown brogues of the age. A man who was missing most days while conducting unknown business concerns in the city to which he commuted by steam. Why shoes needed perforations was beyond Henry’s ken, but he guessed his father was too rich to need much shelter from the rain. Shelters simply went with his father wherever he needed such shelters to be. Leaky shoes were not an issue, especially, as Henry soon learnt, when the shoes’ perforations were actually water-proof decorations for sake of a male version of vanity. A working-class vanity, where being rich was something worth the pride of any ambitious man. Henry’s instincts were large despite his small size. If the cap fitted, wear it.
He stared from under the dining table towards his two game ‘zones’, and wondered what would happen if the dolls house went to war with the fortress, or, more likely, if the latter went to war with the former, full knowing that it would win with greater fire power. Talking of fires, the coal grate across the other side of the room cracked and spluttered with the firewood that helped to ignite the black mountains beside which Henry Balfour would soon crawl on all fours when choosing which ‘game’ was today’s main one. He looked at his hands and smiled ruefully, as he listened to his mother sieving the flour in the nearby kitchen. He somehow knew he was later to be told, along with his mother, that his father had been killed by a falling roof slate in a part of the city where nobody could understand why he was there at all. Some men are rogues, some not. They would leave different sized holes for someone’s memory to fill. Or so this type of men at least did hope.
Henry decided to declare war straightaway. His four hands and feet scuttled past the now roaring fire, back and forth between the combatants.
RAGGED BOTTOM
Victorian kids were often said to have such a ‘ragged bottom’, as did kids even up to the 1950s just after the Second World War. Today, their bottoms are perhaps even more ragged making accounting-system columns in food banks as well as real banks even more unsure, wavering with double lines of figures broken in different places. The typesetting term with the same name, however, prevails separately. What is certain, meanwhile, is that the term ‘ragged bottom’ refers to the clothes on a bottom, not the bottom itself. Mothers, these days, sadly, are no longer seamsters, let alone tailors.
Victorian writers often used the term ‘ragged bottoms’ for waifs and strays, but the famous novel ‘Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’ of Robert Tressel neatened the thoughts as well as the paragraphs of later writers. Meantime, the Victorian kids needed to be of the male persuasion to allow the term ‘ragged bottom’ to be used effectively. The more classically feminine apparel, I guess, is more difficult to imagine as creating a ‘ragged bottom’ as such. Ragged stockings, perhaps, and, when push came to shove, laddered nylons, too, and indeed ragged frocks, but not ragged bottoms. The typesetting of prose such as this, it is to be hoped, will not end up ragged. But that remains to be seen when it is finally imprinted on paper.
Tom, an urchin of the first water, certainly wore clothes as if he were the Platonic Form of a ‘ragged bottom’ when he followed in the wake of the cat’s meat man pulling his cart, an old soul who was locally known as Blasphemy Fitzworth in the ancient London streets with his customary costermongering cry of “Gout cat, spout cat, watch the whiskers sprout, cat!” The kids, however, only knew him by the shortened name of Feemy. Tom’s younger sister Lettuce was also part of the gang that scavenged scraps from Feemy’s trade routes, dressed as neat as their mother could possibly make her. Pride halved was better than no pride at all.
Amidst all the trials and tribulations and the passing generations, Tom was ever to be seen tucking his shirt tails neatly into his tattered trousers — as if he was determined, against all the odds, not to become a certain future prime minister. But, instead, he yearned to be the would-be representative of voluntary goodwill through all direct histories and alternate worlds, and, as a token of his ambitions, he looked out for his sister and gave her the best scraps. ‘Bless Feemy’, he said, silently, almost like a prayer, as he watched the old man set out his wares on the trestle table that the meat-cart had become. The neatest ending that could be managed.
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