Bradford - The groundwater diaries : trials, tribituaries and tall stories from beneath the streets of London

Londons 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. Im 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 cant 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. Im 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 wasnt totally satisfied. Why did my wifes 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. Its 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. Id lie in bed thinking abut the river and what it must be like to drown. I couldnt 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 Id 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 power
Have pretty flowers
The men with the guns
Have robotic sons.

The Men with the Guns

At the very least, most Scandinavian punk music must be down to us.

Scene 1: A farm in Denmark. A big-boned farmer finds a record nailed to a board on the shore near his house. He removes it then puts it on a record player. Its good. He starts pogoing.

Scene 2: A few days later, in the farmers barn, a punk band is practising. The farmer is on lead vocals.

Scene 3: A tractor lies half-buried beneath long grass. There are cobwebs on the steering wheel.

Scene 4: A painting of the farmer and his wife in the style of Gainsboroughs Mr and Mrs Andrews. The farmer has a mohican. The wife looks very, very angry.

Long before we were offering third-class punk records to the water spirits, rivers were worshipped as gods. Those red-haired party animals, the Celts, threw things they most valued shields, swords, jewellery, and other anarcho-Celtpunk memorabilia into them (a residue of this is our need to chuck loose change and crap jewellery into fountains). To different cultures across the globe, rivers have represented time, eternity, life and death. It is believed that our names for rivers are the oldest words in the language, some predating even the Celts. Many major settlements were located at healing springs sacred to the pre-Roman goddesses, and many rivers, such as the Danube, Boyne and Ganges, were named after goddesses. The Thames is one of these, its name apparently deriving from a pre-Indo-European tongue and referring to the Goddess Isis. Some posh Oxbridge rowing types still call it that. Well, weve got names for posh Oxbridge rowing types. Like big-toothed aristo wanker, etc.

London is beautiful. Samuel Johnson, in the only quote of his anyone can really remember, said, When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. He may have been a fat mad-as-a-hatter manic depressive in a wig, but there is something in his thesis. Londons got its fair share of nice parks and museums, but I love its underbelly, in fact its belly in general the girls in their first strappy dresses of the summer, the smell of chips, the liquid orange skies of early evening, high-rise glass office palaces, the lost-looking old men still eating at their regular caffs even after theyve been turned into Le Caf Trendy or Cyber Bacon, the old shop fronts, the rotting pubs, the cacophony of peeling and damp Victorian residential streets, neoclassical shopping centres, buses that never arrive on time, incessant white noise fizz of gossip, little shops, big shops, late-night kebab shops with slowly turning cylinders of khaki fat and gristle in the window, the bitter caramel of car exhaust fumes, drivers spitting abuse at each other through the safety of tinted electric windows, hot and tightly packed tubes in summer, the roar of the crowd from Highbury or White Hart Lane, dog shit on the pavements, psychopathic drunken hard men who sit outside at North London pub tables. London has got inside me. Ive tried to leave. But I always come back. Its love, ysee.

As you can probably tell, Im a sentimental country boy. No real self-respecting Londoner would love their city the way I do (and before you ask, Dr J. was from the Black Country).