Paul Kingsnorth (Oxford, writer): Summer 2005, and I’m working as an assistant lock-keeper on the river Thames. A parallel world has unfurled before me. I live less than a mile from this river – I’ve walked by it many times, swum in it, kayaked on it, passed endlessly over its bridges. Yet I’ve never really seen it. It is a new channel of human life: the people who live on it, from it, and work it, are a different world.
I work on three Oxford locks: Iffley, Osney and Godstow. Here we open and close the gates to let the boats through. We mow the lawns and weed the flower beds. We raise and lower the weirs, check the levels, answer questions from passing Japanese tourists and make and drink tea.
I learn a lot. I learn to tell what type of boat is making its way upstream from half a mile away. I learn to calculate by sight what will fit into the lock and what won’t, how much water to let through and when to stop it. I learn how to deal with bolshie tourists and narrowboats full of estate agents out on a pissed-up stag weekend. I learn precisely how much to raise and lower the weirs depending on the amount of rain that’s been reported upstream. The Thames is a teacher. It seems gentle but it also has a relentless force within it which a lock-keeper learns to respect.
This lessons came home to others last week. We live in a kingdom of rivers, but the Thames is not big, broad or bombastic enough to compete. It has no bore like the Severn, no foaming falls like the Tees, no broad, spectacular estuary to match the Forth as it slews into the sea. For sheer beauty there are other rivers that outdo it: the broad, shallow trout streams of the Scottish highlands, the sparkling, excitable torrents of the Lake District, even some of the sleepy, winding reed-swamped channels of East Anglia.
What the Thames does have is a human-scale beauty, and layer upon layer of history and meaning. Much of it converges on Oxford, my hometown, flowing under its low bridges and through the gates of its locks. The Thames is perhaps our most tamed and examined river. It is supposed to be our servant, not our master. Perhaps this is why its current behaviour has taken us so much by surprise.
Like a pet dog that turns or a slave that rebels, the Thames has broken the rules we have imposed upon it, and there is nothing we can do but watch. Exploring the city the other evening I saw pools where streets once were and cycled through them, the water above my ankles. Lines of sandbags marched through Osney, Botley and Grandpont, piled outside the doors of tiny terraces and monster mansions alike. My favourite riverside pub, The Isis, stood shuttered and dark, a waterfall flowing through it. People stood outside the as-yet-untouched Waterman’s Arms near Osney lock, watching the brimming banks with pints in their hands and joking about insurance claims. On the Botley Road, usually a stinking traffic artery between the ring road and the station, you could hear the water and the birdsong and the sound of voices.
Already, in Oxford as elsewhere, we’re flapping around looking for someone to blame. The Environment Agency, the City Council, Hillary Benn, Gordon Brown. What we won’t allow ourselves to think is that there is no-one to blame: that this could not have been stopped, because we were not in control.
This is not a message that humans in England like to hear. We are supposed to have conquered if not nature herself then certainly the Thames. We are homo sapiens and we hold the seasons, the soil and our destiny in the palms of our hairless hands. We are evolution’s pinnacle, reared on dreams of conquest and immortality. We do not lose control to rivers.
The Conservative Party is currently pondering the creation of a ‘Homeland Defence Force’ to “deal” with such emergencies as the floods have created. The Prime Minister has promised to “learn the lessons”. I doubt if he will. The true lessons are too uncomfortable. The usually docile Thames taught us this week that nature, and not humanity, calls the shots and that there is, despite all our sandbags and helicopters, not much that we can do about it. The Prime Minister, in search of lessons, might want to try talking to a Thames lock-keeper. They’ve known this for years.
