The Frozen Thames

by Helen Humphreys

  “What a day,” says the publican. He has lit the candle for bed and is standing behind his wife on the staircase. “Why did you stop?” he says. “Are you not as tired out as I am?”

  The publican’s wife is looking at the cable that attaches to the main beam of the pub’s ceiling and runs out the front window. “Do you think we should ask the Captain to release us?” she says. “It’s been weeks now. Surely the ice will be about breaking up soon.”

  All the ships have frozen solid into the river ice. There are no moorings to attach lines to, no water to drop anchor in. One enterprising captain, fearing the ice would melt and he wouldn’t be aboard his vessel at the time of melting, has fastened a cable around the beam of the pub and attached the other end to his ship. He has also deposited the ship’s anchor in the pub cellar, with the anchor chain leading through a cellar window and back to the ship.

  The publican has had a good day, but it has been a long day, and he just cannot be about doing even one more thing before bed. “Tomorrow,” he says, and he nudges his wife’s behind and half pushes her up the stairs.

  It is the moaning that wakes the publican’s wife. At first she thinks her husband is having a bad dream, dreaming he is the bear pursued on the ice by hunters. She lays a hand on his shoulder to wake him. But no, the noise isn’t a human noise. The noise is the groans of her house being pulled apart.

  The publican’s wife leaps out of bed and rushes to the window. Down on the river the ice has cracked apart and shifted. She can see the black shine of open water. The ship that is anchored to their house is floating free once again.

  “What?” says the publican, sitting bolt upright in bed.

  His wife doesn’t even have time to turn around and tell him what has happened before the house collapses on top of them and kills them.

  (image credit 1789.1)

  1795

  —

  The ice was bad. The floods are worse. Now that there has been a thaw the ice has broken up and the tides carry the huge floes up and down the river. Boats are cut from their moorings and driven against the pilings of the bridge. The ice floes jam up in places and flood the buildings along the shore. The streets are canals. In some of the flooded large country houses downriver the people in the houses travel from room to room by boat.

  Seven men have died this winter from falling through the ice, and the body of a man who had gone over the side of a boat was swept through the arches of the bridge, completely encased in ice.

  I had the good idea of blowing up the ice that has dammed against the south bank and threatens to flood the houses there. It was a very good idea while I was sitting in the pub having a glass of ale with my friends. It has lost a bit of its appeal now that I am rowing the explosives out towards the ice floes in a borrowed wherry.

  The gunpowder is wrapped in oilskins to protect it from the wet. I plan on setting it in the middle of the floes, igniting the fuse, and then rowing quickly away.

  It is harder than I’d thought to row through the blocks of ice. I keep crashing into them, alter my course accordingly, only to find that the floes have altered their course as well and I am liable to crash back into the same piece of ice a great many times before being able to squeeze past it.

  It is also colder than I’d expected out on the river and my gloveless hands are numb where they grip the ends of the oars.

  I am the only person out on the icy arctic ocean of the Thames. My friends who encouraged me to do this whilst we were drinking ale in the public house, saw me grimly off from the Hungerford Stairs, not a one of them showing the enthusiasm of a few nights ago. I am the only one among us who has the courage to see a thing through.

  “You’ll surely be drowned,” said Rupert, as he flung the painter into the boat and pushed it, rather savagely, away from shore.

  I don’t think that I will be drowned, but I do worry that I’ll freeze to death here at the oars. Best to just get this finished. I can’t wait for the perfect position for setting the explosives. Where I am will have to do. I nudge the boat up against a chunk of ice, throw the weighted length of rope out onto the ice surface to hold the boat, and wrestle the oilskin of gunpowder onto the floe.

  My hands are so cold that it takes a few attempts to light the match and ignite the fuse. Only when it’s burning nicely, sputtering slowly to its end, do I realize that my boat has drifted away. It is bobbing peacefully among the distant ice floes, well out of my reach.

  My friends are watching from the shore. They will see my predicament, will see me as I plunge desperately into the icy river, and they will think that their warnings were correct. They might not even be that sorry that I have died, so righteous will they be in thinking I went foolishly and needlessly to my grave.

  The water is so cold that it burns like fire. It scalds my skin and knocks the breath from me as I struggle to get away from the explosives. The fuse hisses on the ice behind me like a snake.

  I am not a good swimmer, but I am propelled by the fear of death and that does remarkable things for my abilities. I race through the water as fast as a bird slices through air, trying to move as quickly as I can before my arms go completely numb.

  I can see my friends on the shore of the river. They are waving stupidly, as though to warn me that I am in danger of drowning, as though they can tell me a thing I do not already know. I can hear the fuse burning down. I want to look behind me, but I do not dare in case I am not as far away from the oilskin of explosives as I think. I don’t want to know if I am to die.

  But it seems that luck finds me on the river. Just when I think I can swim no farther, I feel hands pulling me from the water, feel the rough bilge of a boat against my cheek. Someone forces my mouth open, none too gently, and pours a coughing amount of brandy down my throat. Someone else wraps me in a blanket.

  I hear the explosives and, as I struggle to sit upright in the boat, I see the great wave rise up before me, rise up and bear down towards the south bank, surge towards the exact spot where my friends are waiting on the shore.

  1796

  —

  The colder it gets, the better I like it. I love that there is a thick frost on the inside of my windows, and that the glass of water I left by my bed last night froze solid by morning. What I would really like is that I would wake with icicles hanging from my nose and ears.

  I find the cold wholly inspirational. Every morning I tromp along the icy Thames and every afternoon I come back to my small room and try and write about it.

  I want to compose a symphony for the frozen river. I want to write music to be played upon the ice, the way that Handel’s “Water Music” was meant to be played upon the water of the Thames. I want to write something as magnificent as Purcell’s “Cold Song,” which included in the music the chattering of teeth.

  My progress is slow.

  I come from a family of musicians. My grandfather was one of the violinists in the orchestra that premiered the “Water Music,” and my father, also a violinist, has played chamber music at Court. I can play most instruments tolerably well, but it is as a composer that I hope to make my name.

  Two years ago I had a small gavotte published and I have heard that many still dance to its tune, although whenever I have myself gone to a dance I have never heard it played. Still, I expect it lingers well in memory and perhaps, while people listen to the music of others, they are really still hearing mine.

  To have something played on the ice is a far superior idea to having a symphony played on the water. My grandfather told me of the troubles they had with Handel’s piece. The main problem was the water itself. There were two barges that travelled together down the Thames in the summer of 1717. On one barge was King George I and members of his court. On the other barge was the fifty-piece orchestra. The King had requested this concert on the river. The barges were Handel’s idea and the trouble was that they could not stay together, that the water moved them as it wanted and the music that was played was entirely dependent on the posi
tioning of the boats. If the King’s barge was close to the orchestra’s barge, slow, soft music was played. If the barges were far apart then the orchestra sent out loud, brisk passages across the water.

  With “Ice Music” there will be none of these concerns. The orchestra will sit on the frozen river and the audience will sit facing the music, just as if they were seated in the finest concert hall.

  But as I have said, my progress is slow, and the chief reason for this is that the ice – my inspiration – also impedes my abilities. Simply put, it is so blasted cold that the ink congeals in my pen and the blood congeals in my veins and I am possessed with a thick torpor of the mind that is, I believe, caused by the fact that I may be freezing to death. The brisk morning walks help, but when I sit down at my desk to compose in the afternoon, I have to be careful not to just lay my head down on my manuscript paper and fall straight asleep.

  (image credit 1796.1)

  So far “Ice Music” has only two bars, and I don’t really like one of them.

  But what keeps me going is the river ice in the mornings when I walk out upon it. I like the sound of my boots on the snowy surface. I like the sound of the skaters and the horses’ hooves and the cartwheels. The ice is a drum and everything resounds deeply upon its skin. This is what is in the first two bars of my symphony, this low, muffled thumping. I hope to return to it throughout the piece as a motif.

  The musical notation looks like the river itself. The bar is the Thames, with banks on the outside and ripples of snow across the middle. The notes are skaters and walkers, horses and carts. Perhaps if I approached the page as I approach the river, walking up this bank and down that one, it would make a certain sense. Perhaps the music needs to make the same journey as the man and in this way it will sound true and lasting.

  I blow on my hands and sit down; pick up my pen and begin to wander slowly up the frozen Thames.

  1809

  —

  At first they seem like apples, each one fastened to the ground by a thin skin of ice. But as the miller’s son begins to cross the field, he sees that this is not true. All around him, glittering like jewels in the early morning, is a flock of frozen birds.

  Last night the rain fell as ice and the birds must have become coated with it, dropped from the sky to earth, and now they cannot open their ice-encrusted wings to fly. Without flight they are apples, they are stones, a field lit with bright stones.

  The miller’s son crouches down beside one of the birds. The black of its feathers glimmers through the ice. It is dead, he thinks. It has been sealed shut. He reaches out and pokes it with his finger and the lump of shiny coal shudders softly. He cups his hand around the bird and brings it close to his chest, breathes on it, until the warmth from his hands and the warmth from his breath melt the rind of ice around the rook and it stumbles away from him, stumbles and lifts clumsily up into the sky.

  The boy walks through the field, warming each bird. Some are dead already, but many flicker back when he curls his hands around their frozen bodies. He counts them because the miller’s son is used to counting, is good at it. There are twenty-seven rooks, ninety larks, a pheasant, and a buzzard hawk in that field, and the boy visits each one. It is late morning by the time he finishes his work and he stands in the wet grass, looking up, his cold hands pushed under his shirt, held tightly against his own bony chest.

  In the sky above him are the birds he has freed, and the miller’s son knows that he will never have a moment like this again, a moment when he is such glory.

  The ice birds fell from the sky, he will say when he tells the story. I breathed fire back into their bodies. My hands were an oven that warmed them. I set them to flying again.

  1811

  —

  All is madness. The King is locked in his private apartments at Windsor. The river is frozen solid. My brother has joined with the Luddites and is destroying the wool and cotton mills of Nottingham.

  We can’t move backwards. We can’t move forwards. We are fastened in place, as the ice fastens the river.

  King George III is mad. It is said that the recent death of his daughter, Amelia, from tuberculosis has pushed him past the borders of sanity, but he has had episodes of madness before this. This one, though, is particularly bad. He has addressed parliament as “Lords and peacocks” and has spoken to people long dead. He imagines that London is flooded and claims to talk to angels. Someone told me he once greeted an oak tree as King Frederick of Prussia.

  (image credit 1811.1)

  I have been fond of the King, the only monarch who has ruled during my lifetime. I like his interest in agriculture, like that he has gained the nickname of “Farmer George” because of this. When the great agriculture writer Arthur Young was working on his Annals of Agriculture, it is said the King furnished him with farming information under the pseudonym of Ralph Robinson.

  Now Ralph is a prisoner in his own apartments. The Americans will be pleased with this. They have blamed him for all their problems when they were still a Colony.

  The King is mad and yet no one must acknowledge it. Shakespeare’s play King Lear has been banned from performance because his portrayal of a mad king is considered alarmingly similar to the real situation.

  My brother is not mad, but he will surely be locked up for what he is doing in the north. One cannot wilfully destroy the instruments of progress just because they put honest working men out of jobs.

  There is nothing I can do about my brother’s beliefs or the mad King’s conviction that he is communing with angels. The frozen river, however, I can have some effect on. I am making an ice road on which men and beasts may cross. Every day I walk the section of river that I have chosen for the construction of this road. I make sure it is still passable, that there are not places where the ice has begun to melt and the water burns through. I keep traffic moving over my portion of the river and in these times of uncertainty, this at least feels like I am doing something. This small act of movement feels like some sort of progress.

  1814

  —

  The winter began with fog and ended with fire. During the last days of December 1813, the fog was so thick throughout London that people carried lanterns in the daytime. Coachmen led their horses through the streets rather than risk overturning their coaches. Even those who knew the city well became lost in the labyrinth of streets during the days of the fog – a darkness that can be felt.

  After the fog came the snow and the cold. For two days the snow fell; all traffic was impeded and great drifts rose like waves in the fields.

  After the snow was a frost. Schools of fish called Golden Maids were washed ashore at Brighton. It is said they were blinded by the snow and had lost their way, had swum in the wrong direction and beached themselves instead of swimming out to sea.

  After the frost came the cold. The river Thames froze solid and a Frost Fair was once again set up on the ice. The public way constructed between Blackfriars and London Bridge was named “City Road” and soon became choked with booths and amusements, and taverns with names such as “City of Moscow” and “The Free and Easy on the Ice.” Goods were peddled with the written tag that proclaimed they were “bought on the Thames.” A sheep was roasted and sold by the slice as “Lapland Mutton.” An elephant was led across the river below Blackfriars Bridge. There was even a book printed on the ice – Frostiana: or A History of the River Thames in a Frozen State. Many sketches and paintings were done of the festivities occurring on the frozen Thames.

  It was to be the last Frost Fair on the Thames, but no one there knew this. It lasted for only a few days and then there was a thaw and the tides shifted the great slabs of ice and they drifted as floes down the Thames.

  As the Fair was literally breaking up, nine men were left to guard one of the on-ice public houses. Most of the alcohol had been removed already, but the men drank the last of the gin that remained there. They fell asleep in the booth and when they awoke in the night their patch of ice had broken fr
ee and was floating fast through the river darkness. One of the men had the idea of starting a fire so they would be able to see the surroundings, but the flames quickly leapt out of control and set fire to the booth. Now the men were hurtling through the river darkness on a flaming ice island. They managed to hurl themselves into a lighter boat that had been torn from its moorings and was drifting past their island, but the lighter hit the piers of the Blackfriars Bridge and was dashed to pieces. The men were able to cling to the piers of the bridge and haul themselves, exhausted, up to safety.

  The frozen Thames was not such a rarity in 1814 as it had been in earlier times. The freezing of the river was not a singular event in people’s lives. They had memories of other freezings, other Frost Fairs.

  Even the animals were becoming used to the frozen state of the river. On the last day of the Frost Fair, people watched as four donkeys crossed, by themselves, on the ice road that joined one side of the Thames to the other.

  (image credit 1814.1)

  1820

  —

  The man is walking with his dog along the tow path by the river at Kew. Only yesterday he had been walking on the river ice, but it had unseated itself in the night and today the Thames is littered with ice floes and is too unstable to stand on.

  Ice forms in secret and dissolves in secret. The man has been witness to the river freezing twice before, and each time he watched for the moment when the ice unhinged, and each time he somehow missed it. It is like the dying, he thinks now, walking along the tow path after his dog. The dying wait until you leave the room before they will let themselves die. Some acts are not for witnessing and perhaps the river covering and uncovering herself is one of these.