The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London. Tim Bradford

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       1. A Bloody Big River Runs Through It

      • London’s forgotten rivers

       Dream of a big river – river obsession – Danish punk explosion – Samuel Johnson – London – electric windows – pissed-up Jamaican grandads – Hemingway – burning Edward Woodward – global warming – the underground rivers – old maps – lots of rain – roads flooded – blokes digging up the road

      I have a recurring dream. I’m standing in the shallows of a silver-grey mile-wide river. My wife, in a blue forties-style polka-dot swimsuit, is next to me, with our daughter. We are picking bits of granary bread out of the river and putting them into black bin liners. On the shore stands a big wooden colonial-style house. I first had the dream before my daughter was conceived, in fact long before my wife and I even got together. Dream analysts might say I was crazy. But they are the crazy ones, thinking that punters will be fooled by fancy titles like ‘Dream Analyst’. I contacted a dream analyst, anyway, because I can’t help myself. It was one of those Internet ones with swirly New Ageish graphics which denote a certain amateur-cosmic badge of quality. You had to type in your dream, then your credit card details. I’m no mug, so I chose one that only cost sixty dollars. A few days later my dream analyst (whose name was Keith – I had expected something a little more along the lines of Lord Sun Ra Om Le Duke de Dream Chaos Universale) sent me an email.

       It is a pleasant dream showing you the very positive feelings of the family. You are together, safe, gathering and storing food. We survive best in a family and ‘tribe’, and this very primitive dream stimulus prompts you to make the most of that. You are lucky, most of the dreams like this work the other way by having the unit threatened. You might see your daughter drowning, thus frightening you (the objective of the dream) into increased protection in life.

       I like it! A good dream. You even had it before the event, stirring you on to make the union and reproduce the species.

      But I wasn’t totally satisfied. Why did my wife’s swimsuit have polka dots? Did the bread have something to do with religion? From my description, would he say the wooden house was designed in an Arts-and-Crafts style? And why were we in a river? Dream Analyst had gone quiet. Except for a ghostly hand that reached out from my computer terminal with a note that said ‘60 dollars please’.

      OK, I am obsessed with rivers. Especially dark ones, like the River Trent in the East Midlands, 20 miles from where I grew up. It’s deep and unfathomable. Like time, but with fish and old bikes at the bottom. My mum used to tell me a story about a local man whose daughter fell from a boat into the river. He jumped in and saved her, but was carried off by the tide. Is his body still there, in the river? Maybe. So how deep is it, then? Very deep, my parents would say, shaking their heads and sucking in their breath. Fantastic. I’d lie in bed thinking abut the river and what it must be like to drown. I couldn’t imagine the bottom. It was like visualizing a million people or the edge of the universe.

      I remember everything in the town where I grew up being smaller than elsewhere in the world (the cars, the voices, the people) and this was especially true of our ‘river’, the Rase. At its highest near the mill pond, the Rase could be up to 2 feet deep, but it usually flowed at a more ankle-soaking 8 to 12 inches. In early 1981, the placid river burst its banks and many people, my aunt included, were flooded out of their homes (ironically, my new copy of Lubricate Your Living Room by the Fire Engines floated off past her sofa). A couple of months later my friend Plendy and I decided to try and placate the Rase by making a pagan sacrifice. It was important to give something that we both treasured, but in the end were too stingy and instead nailed down a copy of Bullshit Detector (an anarcho-punk compilation album I’d bought some months earlier) to a wooden board, placed it in the water and watched it head off downstream. We liked to think it eventually found its way to the North Sea then travelled the world, spreading its gospel of three-chord mayhem and anarchist politics.

       The men with the powerHave pretty flowersThe men with the gunsHave robotic sons.

      ‘The Men with the Guns’

      At СКАЧАТЬ