Rising Damp
Someone in the audience at the Electric Palace in Bridport asked if I’d ever read the poem Rising Damp by UA (Ursula but published as UA) Fanthorpe. The name and title rang a distant bell, but perhaps only because someone, somewhere once asked the same thing. Either way I hadn’t, but on this grey and wet afternoon just past, dog walked and fire lit, I looked up Rising Damp. I’m delighted I did. It is a poem about the lost rivers of London and I’m quite sure Fanthorpe must have read the book of that title by Nicholas Barton before she wrote it. Too many themes come straight from Barton’s pages: the ‘spectral’ return of streams after rain, (I met someone who once cast a fly line on the Tyburn when it popped its man-hole covers), the bronchitis statistics (a map of bronchitis cases traces the underground rivers in Barton’s book), the salmon (wasn’t it in Barton that I read of the salmon found wedged in a water-pipe that flowed into the subterranean Fleet?).
Fanthorpe obviously liked the music of river names too: weird that I posted that list of chalk-streams only yesterday. Of course there are more under London than Fanthorpe’s verse allowed room for. Barton’s book shows: the Beverley Brook, the Wandle, the Graveney, the Falcon, Effra, Peck, Neckinger, and Ravensbourne. And then north of the Thames: Stamford Brook, Parr’s Ditch, Counter’s Creek, the Westbourne (‘caged at Sloane Square’), Tyburn, Fleet, Walbrook, Black Ditch, and Hackney Brook.
Back in April I read to a small but pleasant audience at the Yellow Lighted bookshop in Tetbury. An elderly man sat at the front and listened very carefully. Afterwards he came up to me and said, “I wrote a book about lost rivers once”. I knew right away that he was Nicholas Barton. Based on an historical essay which won the John Nichols Prize at the University of Leicester in 1960, his book The Lost Rivers of London was first published in 1962. I doubt that the editors at Historical Publications Ltd imagined they would still be printing this wonderful piece of history over fifty years later, and yet I suspect Barton’s book will be inspiring poets, writers and psycho-geographers for many decades to come.
Rising Damp by UA Fanthorpe.
‘A river can sometimes be diverted but is a very hard thing to lose altogether.’
(Paper to the Auctioneers’ Institute, 1907)
At our feet they lie low,
The little fervent underground
Rivers of London
Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet
Whose names are disfigured,
Frayed, effaced.
There are the Magogs that chewed the clay
To the basin that London nestles in.
These are the currents that chiselled the city,
That washed the clothes and turned the mills,
Where children drank and salmon swam
And wells were holy.
They have gone under.
Boxed, like the magician’s assistant.
Buried alive in earth.
Forgotten, like the dead.
They return spectrally after heavy rain,
Confounding suburban gardens. They inflitrate
Chronic bronchitis statistics. A silken
Slur haunts dwellings by shrouded
Watercourses, and is taken
For the footing of the dead.
Being of our world, they will return
(Westbourne, caged at Sloane Square,
Will jack from his box),
Will deluge cellars, detonate manholes,
Plant effluent on our faces,
Sink the city.
Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet
It is the other rivers that lie
Lower, that touch us only in dreams
That never surface. We feel their tug
As a dowser’s rod bends to the surface below
Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Styx.
charlesrangeleywilson.com 
One Response to “Rising Damp”
New edition on its way Spring 2016! A golden book, you are right!