Of four infernal rivers that disgorge.
Into the burning Lake their baleful streams
Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus, nam’d of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.
Far off from these a slow and silent stream,
Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls
Her wat’ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.

John Milton – Paradise Lost

My post on Day 46, the one about my father’s time as a PoW, is still receiving comments, both on this blog and directly to my inbox. My point about the power of small kindnesses in a time of seemingly overwhelming adversity seems to have resonated with a lot of people. For anyone who enjoyed reading my VE Day blog post, I suggest you also take a look at Simon Lavery’s post on a similar subject HERE. In fact, Simon’s literary blog Tredynas Days is a good one to follow if you appreciate  sensitive, perceptive analysis.

Last week’s blog post was the first time I’d written publicly about my dad’s wartime experiences. It strikes me that, as my awareness of the nearness of my own mortality grows each day, I need to record these experiences in a more comprehensive way before they are lost forever. One of my three daughters has been encouraging me for years to do precisely this. Lisa Hill, commenting about the Day 46 post, suggested there is often someone in each family who is best suited to adopting the role of listener and recorder.

The only other time I shared any of my dad’s story in any kind of public forum was when I used it as the basis for a creative writing essay in my A Level class. In that essay, which I recall I rather pretentiously called Betweeen Time and Timelessness, I drifted back  through time to speak to my father in his PoW camp. I think I was reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut in those teenage years! Mr Pryce, my rather wonderful English teacher, was full of praise for my essay, though I’m not sure it actually matched the brief we’d been set. He described it as my ‘ghost story in reverse’, an evocative phrase that has stayed with me for all these years, and he encouraged me to work at becoming a writer.

So when I do write that story, it will be for my father, my daughter and for Mr John Pryce.

Picture of River Dee near Aldford ©Bobby Seal

As for the river, it just kept moving, as river do–as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro–to and fro. If, at this moment in time Twisted River also appeared restless, even impatient, maybe the river itself wanted the boy’s body to move on, too, move on, too.

John Irving – Last Night in Twisted River

Picture of Canyon Sainte-Anne, Québec ©Bobby Seal

Ema went to the river to wash her baby. She sat on a rock with her feet in the water, beyond the place where the children played. The tepid, roundabout flow wet her skin. She cupped a few drops in her hand and washed Francisco’s face. He wriggled. It was quiet and calm; she let a daydream carry her away.

César Aira – Ema the Captive

Confluence at Sunset ©Bobby Seal

Come on, people, come on, children
Come on down to the glory river.
Gonna wash you up, and wash you down,
Gonna lay the devil down, gonna lay that devil down.
I got fury in my soul, fury’s gonna take me to the glory goal
In my mind I can’t study war no more.
Save the people, save the children, save the country now

Laura Nyro  – Save the Country

Thank you to everyone who contacted me to say they liked yesterday’s VE Day post. I wrote it in one intense and very quick session with hardly any editing, but it turned out to be one of my most satisfying and authentic pieces of writing in a long time. So many people said they found it moving, and several said the story of the Polish girl moved them to tears.

I’m very grateful to my dad and his generation for the sacrifices they made to defeat Nazism. But I feel uncomfortable with all the flag-waving and jingoism that seems to creep into so many of our national commemorations. At this time of global pandemic and planet-wide climate crisis, co-operation and fellowship across national boundaries is more important than ever.

Picture of River Barle, Devon ©Bobby Seal

Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all the liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. […] Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! […] Night night! […] Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

James Joyce – Anna Livia Plurabelle (Finnegans Wake)

River Gate ©Bobby Seal

Winter brings the sound of water gushing below low points in the suburban streets and shopping parades as the streams that rise on Scarp swell and are channelled beneath Edgware, Pinner or Ruislip and flow towards their confluence with two broader rivers which embrace London’s northern margins, the Lea and the Colne. . . . I, too, flow downhill through time and distance from some as yet undiscovered point of origin on Scarp, and the growing awareness of this builds in me a desire to return. . . . I realise yet again that my destiny is bound up with Scarp.

Nick Papadimitriou – Scarp

It was back in 2010 that I first became fascinated with the idea tracing the hidden urban rivers of our towns and cities. I felt inspired to do so when I came across a podcast called Ventures and Adventures in Topography that year. John Rogers and Nick Papadimitriou both had a passion for walking and exploring the forgotten areas of London and the city’s liminal outer spaces. Nick, in particular, had an interest in London’s hidden rivers. An obsession he explored at greater length in his 2012 book, Scarp.

But other towns and cities have their buried rivers too. Taking my prompt from Nick, I soon became adept at tracing the courses of forgotten rivers and streams using old OS maps and quickly came to learn the tell-tale signs on the urban surface-landscape. Some of the results of these explorations have been reported in this blog and, in a fellow blogger called Dave, a work colleague of a friend, I met another hidden river enthusiast.

There is a rich literature embracing hidden rivers, particularly those of London. Iain Sinclair and Aidan Andrew Dun see them as veins of energy vibrating beneath the city’s streets. Inspired by Blake, Dickens, Conrad and other earlier wanderers along London’s rivers, Sinclair writes:

Which brings me to the haunting complexity of London’s buried rivers. They’re not lost, not at all. Just because you can’t see a thing, as Ed Dorn points out, doesn’t mean that it’s not there. The rivers continue, hidden and culverted as they might be, to flow through our dreams, fixing the compass of our moods and movements. The Walbrook, the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Westbourne, the Effra, the Neckinger: visible or invisible, they haunt us.

Iain Sinclair – Swimming to Heaven: The Lost Rivers of London

Picture of hidden stream ©Bobby Seal

The Clitterhouse Brook gushed from a concrete pipe and flowed beneath the North Circular to make its confluence with the River Brent on the far side of the road near Brent Cross Shopping Centre. It was a majestic sight to see this suburban stream rushing to meet its mother river before working its way to the Thames at Brentford.

John Rogers – A walk along the Clitterhouse Brook with Nick Papadimitriou

Dreaming Brook picture ©Bobby Seal