The dog has run on ahead, nosing some scent to earth, and the man has to trot to keep up with him. As they round a bend in the river they hear shouting and both stop, look up, and see a woman on her hands and knees on an ice floe, bobbing and spinning out on the surface of the river.
She is screaming for help, down on all fours like an animal bawling at the slaughter.
The ice floe is tippy. From the shore the man can see how it is tilting first one way and then another in the river’s current. Every time the woman moves to stabilize herself she throws the balance off and the platform of ice where she is crouching threatens to slide her into the water.
“Stay put,” yells the man, and begins to run along the bank, keeping pace with the floating woman.
“Stay there.”
The dog runs along the bank as well, ahead of the man and barking excitedly.
“Help me,” screams the woman.
The man knows that the water is too cold for him to be able to swim out to her and pluck her from the ice pan. He would freeze before he could reach her. He wants to save the woman, but he doesn’t want to kill himself in the attempt. He looks frantically along the tow path. What he needs is a long stick or a rope, something he can use to throw or hold out to the distressed woman.
But there is nothing. There is nothing and the man is getting breathless from running along the bank. He is not a young man, is not used to going at such a pace.
“Help me,” cries the woman, and then there is another cry, from farther up the river. The man turns and sees another woman, this one standing on another ice floe, legs far apart like a sailor balancing on the deck of a sloping ship.
“Help me,” she yells.
The dog stops barking. The man stops running. He rubs his eyes to make sure he isn’t imagining what he thinks he sees. He isn’t. There are two separate women floating on two separate plates of ice down the river.
The first woman is almost past him now, and the man can’t wait any longer. There won’t be any other instrument of rescue besides his own body. He throws off his coat and stumbles to the water’s edge. The cold of the river is so strong that it knocks him down when he struggles into the shallow water off the bank. He can’t breathe, sitting in the cold of the river, water lapping at his chest.
And while he forces air back into his frozen lungs and pushes himself backwards and out of the river, both women topple from their ice floes and disappear into the Thames.
Later the man will find out that both of the drowned women were named Heather, and that they did not know one another. But now he sits on the bank, sputtering for breath and rubbing the feeling back into his legs. He cannot believe that he was unable to do anything, that it all happened so quickly and he was no help at all to those women. He sits there until his dog nudges him in the back of the neck and he remembers to get up and start walking, remembers how to save himself.
(image credit 1820.1)
1880
—
The girl wakes to darkness and birdsong. She lies in her bed, eyes closed, and listens to the sweet music that slides just ahead of morning. The blankets are tucked up to her chin, only her nose and forehead are exposed to the cold air of the bedroom. It is still too early for rising and, if the girl keeps her eyes fast shut, she can imagine that she is waking up in a spring meadow, not in the middle of a frigid London winter.
The girl lies very quietly, so as not to wake her sisters who sleep on either side of her. Smallest in the centre, that is the edict in their house. She feels cozy with her big sisters close in beside her, each of them breathing the slow, heavy breath of sleep. She listens to the bird and feels like she is in a nest, that she is a baby bird waiting for the mother to return to her with food. The bird sounds so close, and when the girl opens her eyes, there it is, perched on the bedpost at the bottom of the bed.
The winter has been so cold that all manner of trees and shrubs have perished. Hollies that were well over a hundred years old have died, as have peach trees, also older than any living man. Rabbits that are starving have started to eat the oil and grease from machinery in the rail yards. The Thames has frozen over. Birds have begun to freeze to death, particularly that small symbol of spring, the Robin Redbreast, and instead of allowing this to happen, the people of England have taken the birds into their houses so that they may shelter there until spring returns.
In the girl’s house there are two robins. They have built a nest on the roofbeam near the fireplace and they flutter about all day, gathering hair and bits of straw to furnish their little house. The girl’s mother is constantly swatting at them as they fly low over her when she is cooking. It was not her idea to let the robins into the house. The girl’s father, who worked at the rail yard, had come home one night with the story of the rabbits eating the grease from the trains. He was the one who mentioned the birds.
“It seems that people are letting the Robin Redbreast take shelter in their houses,” he said. “To spare them this killing cold.”
His daughters immediately supported this idea, and the mother’s cries of protest were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the girls. It was not hard to find two frozen robins, huddled in the cave of their cold feathers on a stone wall near the railway station. The girl’s father carried the birds home in his coat pockets – one in each pocket. For the first day they hunched miserably together on top of a doorframe, but the heat of the house soon revived their spirits and now they fly about quite happily. The girl leaves out bread for them and bits of fat from the supper meat. Sometimes they swoop down and pick things from the table – a rind of apple, a piece of cheese – while the mother shrieks and bats at them with a tea towel. The girl thinks they enjoy this and sometimes do it for their own pleasure, not because they are hungry. She likes to watch them flicker about the room, bathe in the basin of water that sits on the table at the end of her bed and is for washing her face in the morning.
“Well, well,” said her father, when he first saw the nest on the roofbeam. “They seem to have made themselves quite at home.”
The girl cannot wait until there are eggs in the nest, and then the little heads of the baby birds leaning up, mouths agape, chirping for food. The adult robins don’t like to be touched, will not land on her finger, even though she has stood dead still for hours in the centre of the parlour with her finger extended. But the babies might be more easily tamed. The girl is hoping for this, hoping that the baby robins will want to stay with her even after the spring is here and the doors will be opened so the birds may leave the houses and be free again.
The girl looks at the robin on her bedpost, and he cocks his head and looks back at her. Somewhere downstairs the other robin is singing. All over London, the girl thinks, all over London this very same thing is happening. Each house is a dark lantern, and each one holds the lit flicker of bird within its ribs.
1895
—
This was the winter of the twelve-week frost. From the end of December to the middle of March the whole of England was plunged into bitterly cold weather. For a week in February the Thames was completely blocked by huge ice floes, some of them as much as seven feet thick. The non-tidal sections of the river froze solid. Horsedrawn coaches crossed the Thames at Oxford, and on the ice at Kingston there was a carnival, topped off with the ceremonial roasting of an ox.
(image credit 1895.1)
Ships were frozen into their moorings and the lightermen weren’t able to land to off-load their cargo. On the Grand Surrey Canal between Rotherhithe and the Old Kent Road, crews of men were dispatched to break the ice so the coal supplies could travel their usual river route. The ice the men broke and threw up onto the banks formed an enormous ice wall, ten feet high and two miles long.
It was a winter with little snow, and skating was enjoyed on all the rivers and canals. A pond in Yorkshire froze all the way to the bottom.
This winter was as cold as the winter of 1814, and yet there was to be no Frost Fair on the ice of the Thames
because the nature of the river had been changed by the destruction of the old London Bridge and the building, in 1831, of the new one. Where the old bridge had numerous arches and starlings to impede the flow of the Thames, the new bridge, designed by John Rennie, had only five arches and the water moved quicker and freer through those arches. The river was also being dredged at this time and the deepening of the channel strengthened the ebb and flow of the tides. The Thames was simply moving too swiftly to freeze where it had frozen in the past. The new bridge did not work as a dam, the way the old bridge had, and the Thames would never, will never, freeze solid in the heart of London again.
POSTSCRIPT
1927
—
The story begins on the frozen Thames. Suddenly the sun … A young nobleman meets a Russian princess on the ice during a Frost Fair in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He is entranced by the princess, by the spectacle of the wonders on the ice. They skate together. For some time, her silence … The young nobleman has an open and unguarded heart. He is a poet, moved ardently by his own words and feelings, given quickly to love. & when the sun dropped below the horizon … on an evening like this … He is besotted with the Russian princess, declares his passionate love for her without fear or hesitation. This happens as the evening is ending, with rockets being sent up into the night sky, to shake out their petals (the image was Orlando’s) as they reached the darkness.
Orlando and Sasha will be separated in the novel, not just by culture and language, but also by centuries. This is a story that thaws the imagination, sets it spinning along a swift current of words. The novelist is playful and serious. She writes these words. She crosses them out. The book is written with an ease and quickness that she has never experienced before, and will never experience again. When she writes of Orlando, looking back through hundreds of years and remembering his love for Sasha, it is as though she is also recounting her own experience in writing the book.
love & the ice … & her veins had sung … in that white world like fire.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
—
This book is intended as a long meditation on the nature of ice. Each story is a story of transformation, as ice itself is the result of a transformative process. Because of climate change, brought on by the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we are in danger of losing ice from our world. If ice disappeared, we would not only lose the thing itself and its stabilizing place in the balance of nature, but we would also lose the idea of ice from our consciousness, and all the ways in which we are able to imagine it.
The dictionary quoted in these pages is Samuel Johnson’s dictionary.
The italicized passages in the postscript are deleted lines from the first draft of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. These lines never made it into the final version of the book.
Most of the incidents referred to in The Frozen Thames are based on documented events. I am particularly grateful for the following three books: Frost Fairs on the Thames by Edward Walford; Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs by William Andrews; and, Frostiana: or A History of the River Thames in a Frozen State by G. Davis.
For Valerie Ashford
and in memory of Elizabeth Ashford
—
Acknowledgements
Further to the books mentioned in the Author’s Note, I am grateful to Frost Fairs on the Frozen Thames by Nicholas Reed, and Frosts, Freezes and Fairs by Ian Currie.
Information regarding the frozen state of the Thames has been obtained through various meteorological sources, most notably The Met Office in the UK.
The lines from the first draft of Orlando are used with permission from The Society of Authors, who represent the literary estate of Virginia Woolf.
Information regarding Bess of Hardwick’s household inventories was taken from Of Household Stuff: The 1601 Inventories of Bess of Hardwick, published by The National Trust.
The rhyme describing the death of Doll the apple-woman on this page is attributed to John Gay.
The gravestone inscription on this page is from a cemetery in Dorset, England.
The recipe for Jugged Hare is based on Hannah Glasse’s version in The Art of Cookery, 1747.
I am grateful to the Environment Canada Library for allowing me access to Frostiana: or A History of the River Thames in a Frozen State.
I would like to thank the Banff Centre for the Arts, where this book was begun; and The Canada Council for financial support while it was being written. As always, I am grateful to my agent, Frances Hanna. And I would like to thank my editor, Susan Renouf, for her enthusiasm and her care.
Image Credits
Front matter 1: Frost Fair on the Thames in the Time of Charles II/ London Illustrated News, 1885 (Courtesy of the author); Front matter 2: The Frozen Thames at Swan Stairs, 1677/ Abraham Hondius (© Museum of London); 1142.1: Detail of a plan of Oxford Castle, 12th century/ Anonymous (public domain); 1282.1: Detail of Old London Bridge, of the section built between 1176 and 1209/ Anonymous (© Art Resource, NY); 1363.1: The First Book of Urizen from A Small Book of Designs, 1794/ William Blake (© The Trustees of the British Museum); 1565.1: Detail of the earliest printed map of London, 1574, from Gern European Cities, 2nd ed./ Braun & Hogenberg (© Museum of London/HIP/Art Resource, NY); 1608.1 and 1608.2: Bess of Hardwick, 1592/ Rowland Lockley (© The National Trust Photo Library); 1621.1: Study of Fish: Two Tench, a Trout and a Perch/J.M.W. Turner (© Tate, London 2007); 1666.1: Plague boats on the Thames, from a broadsheet, 1665-66 (© Museum of London); 1684.1: A Frost Fair on the Thames at Temple Stairs, c.1684/ Abraham Hondius (© Museum of London); 1689.1: A Thames Waterman in uniform/Horace W. Petherick (© Image Select/Art Resource, NY); 1716.1: A contemporary frost fair poem, 1716/ Mrs. Anne Robins (© Thames Pilot Authority); 1740.1: The Thames during the Great Frost of 1739–40/ Jan Griffier (© Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London/Bridgeman Art Library); 1784.1: Still Life with Rabbit and Game, 17th century (© Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY); 1789.1: A View of the Thames from Rotherhithe Stairs during the frost of 1789 / Engraving by W. Birch after G. Samuel, 1789 (© Museum of London, Museum of the Docklands); 1796.1: Georg Friedrich Handel, 18th century / Anonymous (© Scala, Art Resource, NY); 1811.1: Contemporary cartoon of Mad King George, Ode for the New Year/ Thomas Rowlandson (© Tate, London 2007); 1814.1: The Fair on the Thames, 1814/ Luke Clennell (© National Maritime Museum, London); 1820.1: Ice on the Thames at London Bridge (© Science and Society Picture Library); 1895.1: The River Thames, frozen over, at The Hollows, Brentford, 1891/ Anonymous (© Thames Pilot/ London Borough of Hounslow).
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