The Thames at Night

(Leaf 60) – Reflection

 

George Hyde Pownall - Tower Bridge at Dusk

Looking back, having grown up in London, it seems like much of my life has revolved around the River Thames. In the 1980s, London’s docks were mostly derelict. It was a quiet, forlorn and forgotten sort of place, empty but still somehow overflowing with the remembered imprint of lives lived through times long since passed. Memories which were etched into every brick and cobblestone. I later spent many years living close by the river, in Limehouse. Not far from the places where my grandparents, great grandparents and great-great grandparents had lived long before and during the Second World War, when the docks were the target of the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. In many ways, I feel like I have Thames mud in my blood. When I lived in Limehouse, I used to enjoy looking out over the Thames at all hours, whenever I could, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of the tides marking a timetable which London now largely ignores. I often used to get off the Tube at Tower Hill after work and walk slowly home along the river. It’s still quite a peaceful spot nowadays – and, despite all the redevelopment, I always feel as though I can still sense the memories of those generations of my forbears seeping out of the old brick walls and cobbled backstreets. Trying to find words to express this feeling while looking out over the river has always put me in mind of a poem by Thom Gunn, titled ‘The Conversation of Old Men’ (1993). It’s a poem which I’ve always admired and felt akin to, and it’s one which this poem of mine attempts to echo.

 

 

Full moon

over the Thames

 

alongside empty wharves,

the muddy waters

glint and glide.

 

 

The Pool of London (c.1927) Museum of London

Thom Gunn - The Conversation of Old Men
(Poems on the Underground/Faber, 1993)