river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface, and then when the sun comes up a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames.
And there is more. What we see on a map is only the half of it. A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page. Take Trewsbury Mead, for instance. That photograph, do you remember? The one they were so quick to dismiss, because it wasn’t picturesque? An ordinary ash in an ordinary field, they said, and so it appears, but look more closely. See this indentation in the ground, at the foot of the tree? See how it is the beginning of a furrow, shallow, narrow and unremarkable, that runs away from the tree and out of the picture altogether? See here, in the dip, where something catches the light and shows as a few ragged patches of silver in the grey shades of muddy soil? Those bright marks are water, seeing sunlight for the first time in what might be a very long time. It comes from underground, where in all the spaces beneath our feet, in the fractures and voids in the rock, in caverns and fissures and channels, there are waterways as numerous, as meandering, as circuitous as anything above ground. The beginning of the Thames is not the beginning – or rather it is only to us that it seems like a beginning.
In fact, Trewsbury Mead might not be the beginning in any case. There are those who say it’s the wrong place. The not-even-the-beginning is not here but elsewhere, at a place called Seven Springs, which is the source of the Churn, a river that joins the Thames at Cricklade. And who is to say? The Thames that goes north, south, east and west to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forwards, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky whilst meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark, inaccessible place. Better study where it goes than where it comes from.
Ah, tributaries! That’s what I was meaning to come to. The Churn, the Key, the Ray, the Coln, the Leach and the Cole: in the upper reaches of the Thames, these are the streams and rivulets that come from elsewhere to add their own volume and momentum. And tributaries are about to join this story. We might, in this quiet hour before dawn, leave this river and this long night and trace the tributaries back, to see not their beginnings – mysterious, unknowable things – but, more simply, what they were doing yesterday.
What Do You Make of It?
THE DAY BEFORE the coming of the child, at half past three in the afternoon, at a farmhouse in Kelmscott, a woman stepped out of the kitchen door and in some haste crossed the yard to the barn. Her fair curls were tucked neatly into her bonnet, and her blue dress was simple, as befits a busy farmer’s wife, but she endowed it with a prettiness that suggested she was still young at heart. She had a swaying gait; with every second step she stooped to the left, with every step in between she rose again. It did not slow her. Nor was she hindered by the patch that covered her right eye. It was made of the same blue fabric as her dress and a white ribbon held it in place.
She came to the barn. It smelt of blood and iron. Inside was a man who stood with his back to her. He was powerfully made, unusually tall, with a broad back and wiry black hair. As she put her hand on the door frame, he tossed a crimson-stained cloth to the ground and reached for his whetstone. She heard a ringing rise in the air as he started to sharpen the blade. Beyond him lay a row of corpses, neatly arranged snout to tail; the blood ran from them and found the shallows in the ground.
‘Dearest …’
He turned. The darkness of his face was not the hale brown achieved by a lifetime’s work out of doors under an English sun, but the kind that originated in