RIVER OF THE MIND


I was pleased when a friend gave me
on my birthday a copy of
Selected Poems by U.A. Fanthorpe.

The name was new to me
but looking through the book something
caught my eye in a poem about
the underground rivers of London:

"Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet
"

Something geographical and historical
rather than aesthetical or poetical
(though the recitation of the eight names
is pure mellifluous hedonism)
because when I was a child,
this was back in the fifties,
I often used to roam and play
down in the valley where the suburbs
yielded to fields and woods,
lost in a wonderful adventure playground,
messing about by the river
under the blazing summer sun
that only exists in childhood.
You'd never have guessed all this was
only ten miles from Trafalgar Square.

Not that it was a river:
eight feet across at the most,
a few inches of water trickling northwards.
I traced it on the Ordnance Survey map
and partly on foot and bicycle:
rising on the Holwood Estate at Keston,
through Crofton, Petts Wood, Chislehurst,
Sundridge, Grove Park, Mottingham,
Lee Green, then into the centre of Lewisham,
where it joins the Ravensbourne a mile below
that river's junction with the Thames at Deptford Creek.

But no name for my river on the O.S. map.
I never believed my father
when he told me its name
(he had been a boy in these same parts
some thirty years earlier):
it seemed impossible,
a joke, a leg-pull.

But later I saw it on the London A-Z,
the joke come true,
the impossibility actualised,
superbly black-and-white: Quaggy River
(note the order of the words:
the name is adjectival).

No, not much of a river,
stream, perhaps, or brook but
(I must differ from U.A. Fanthorpe)
not underground for most of its ten miles:
with the assistance of the O.S. map
most of it can be traced on the A-Z
and spotted slinking between suburban gardens
or across the sports fields of South East London.

In those distant sunny days
it was paradise to play in and about,
down in the woods and the fields,
the streets and lanes around the railway line
that paralleled the river through the valley.
And all I can do now is to retrace my life
against the flow when the future
doesn't beckon with much seductiveness.
So thanks for the memory.

OK, not much of a river
but I'm prepared to bet
that this is only the second time
that my river of ravishing remembrance
has been commemorated
in English poetry.

Andrew Belsey

If you've any comments on his poem, Andrew Belsey would be pleased to hear from you.
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