Fresh Water
by Andrew Motion, from Salt
Water, Faber, 1997
In memory of Ruth Haddon
1
This is a long time ago. I am visiting
my brother, who is living
near Cirencester, and he says let's go and see the source of the Thames.
It's winter. We leave early, before the sun has taken frost off the fields,
and park in a lane. There's a painful
hawthorn hedge with a stile.
When we jump down, our boots gibber on the hard ground.
Then we're striding, kicking ice-dust off the grass to look confident-
because really we're not sure if we're
allowed to be here.
In fact we're not even sure that this is the right place.
A friend of a friend has told us; it's all as vague as that.
In the centre of the field we find
more hawthorn, a single bush,
and water oozing out of a hole in the ground. I tell my brother
I've read about a statue that stands here, or rather lounges here-
a naked, shaggy-haired god tiltingan
urn with one massive hand.
Where is he? There's only the empty field glittering,
and a few dowager cows picking among the dock-clumps.
Where is Father Thames? My brother
thinks he has been vandalised
and dragged off by the fans of other rivers - they smashed theold man's urn,
and sprayed his bare chest and legs with the names of rivals:
Trent, Severn, Nene, Humber.There's
nothing else to do,
so I paddle through the shallow water surrounding the spring,
treading carefully to keep things in focus,
and stoop over the source asthough
I find it fascinating.
It is fascinating. A red-brown soft-lipped cleft
with bright green grass right up to the edge,
and the water twisting out like a rope
of glass.
It pulses and shivers as it comes, then steadies
into the pool, then roughens again as it drains into the valley.
My brother and I are not twenty yet.
We don't know who we are,
or who we want to be. We stare at the spring, at each other,
and back at the spring again, saying nothing.
A pheasant is making its blatant kok-kok
from the wood running along the valley floor.
I stamp both feet and disappear in a cloud.
2
One March there's suddenly a day as
warm as May, and my friend
uncovers the punt he has bought as a wreck and restored,
cleans her, slides her into the Thames near Lechlade, and sets off
upriver. Will I go with him? No, I
can't.
But I'll meet him on the water meadows at the edge of town.
I turn out of the market square, past the church, and down the yew-tree walk.
Shelley visited here once - it's called
Shelley's Walk -
but he was out of his element. Here everything is earth
and water, not fire and air. The ground is sleepy-haired
after winter, red berries and rain
matted into it.
Where the yew-tree walk ends I go blind in the sun for a moment,
then it's all right. There's the river beyond the boggy meadows,
hidden by reed-forests sprouting along
its banks. They're dead,
the reeds - a shambles of broken, broad, pale-brown leaves
and snapped bullrush heads. And there's my friend making
his slow curve towards me. The hills
rise behind him
in a gradual wave, so that he seems at the centre
of an enormous amphitheatre. He is an emblem of something;
somebody acting something. The punt
pole shoots up
wagging its beard of light, falls, and as he moves ahead
he leans forward, red-faced and concentrating.
He's expert but it's slow work. As
I get closer I can hear
water pattering against the prow of the punt,
see him twisting the pole as he plucks it out of the gluey river-bed.
I call to him and he stands straight,giving
a wobbly wave.
We burst into laughter. He looks like a madman, floating slowly
backwards now that he has stopped poling. I must look
like a madman too, mud-spattered and
heavy-footed on the bank,
wondering how I'm going to get on board without falling in.
As I push open the curtain of leaves to find a way,
I see the water for the first time,
solid-seeming and mercury-coloured.
Not like a familiar thing at all. Not looking
as though it could take us anywhere we wanted to go.
3
I've lived here for a while,and up
to now the river has been
for pleasure. This evening people in diving suits have taken it over.
Everyone else has been shooshed away into Christchurch Meadow
or onto Folly Bridge like me. No one's
complaining. The summer evening
expands lazily, big purple and gold clouds building over the Cumnor hills.
I have often stood here before. Away to the left you can see Oxford
throwing its spires into the air, full
of the conceited joy of being itself.
Straight ahead the river runs calmly between boat-houses
before losing patience again, pulling a reed-shawl round its ears,
snapping off willows and holding their
scarified heads underwater.
Now there's a small rowing-boat, a kind of coracle below me,
and two policemen with their jackets off. The men shield their eyes,
peering, and almost rock overboard,
they're so surprised,
when bubbles erupt beside them and a diver bobs up -
just his head, streaming in its black wet-suit. There are shouts-
See anything? -
but the diver shrugs, and twirls hi smurky torchlight
with an invisible hand. Everyone on the bridge stops talking.
We think we are about to be shown the story of the river-bed -
its shopping trolleys and broken boat-parts,
its lolling bottles,
its plastic, its dropped keys, its blubbery and bloated corpse.
But nothing happens. The diver taps his mask and disappears,
his fart-trail surging raucously for
a moment, then subsiding.
The crowd in Christchurch Meadow starts to break up.
On Folly Bridge people begin talking again, and as someone steps
off the pavement onto the road,a passing
grocery van -
irritated by the press of people, and impatient with whatever
brought them together - gives a long wild paarp as it revs away.
4
Now the children are old enough to
see what there is to see
we take them to Tower Bridge and explain how the road lifts up,
how traitors arrived at Traitor's Gate, how this was a brewery
and that was a warehouse, how the river
starts many miles inland
and changes and grows, changes and grows, until it arrives here,
London, where we live, then winds past Canary Wharf
(which they've done in school) and
out to sea.
Afterwards we lean on the railings outside a café. It's autumn.
The water is speckled with leaves, and a complicated tangle of junk
bumps against the embankment wall:
a hank of bright grass,
a rotten bullrush stem, a fragment of dark polished wood.
One of the children asks if people drown in the river, and I think
of Ruth, who was on the Marchioness.
After her death, I met
someone who had survived. He had been in the lavatory when the dredger hit,
and fumbled his way out along a flooded corridor, his shoes
and clothes miraculously slipping off
him, so that when he at last
burst into the air he felt that he was a baby again
and knew nothing, was unable to help himself, aghast.
I touch my wife's arm and the children
gather round us.
We are the picture of a family on an outing. I love it. I love the river
and the perky tour-boats with their banal chat. I love the snub barges.
I love the whole dazzling cross-hatchery
of traffic and currents,
shadows and sun, standing still and moving forward.
The tangle of junk bumps the wall below me again and I look down.
There is Ruth swimming back upstream,
her red velvet party dress
flickering round her heels as she twists through the locks
and dreams round the slow curves, slithering on for miles
until she has passed the ponderous
diver at Folly Bridge
and the reed-forests at Lechlade, accelerating beneath bridges and willow branches,
slinking easily among the plastic wrecks and weedy trolleys,
speeding and shrinking and silvering
until finally she is sliding uphill
over bright green grass and into the small wet mouth of the earth,
where she vanishes.
