The bridges over the creeks of the water meadows had been built to high specifications; but over the years they had rotted in the water and had been further broken up by the growth of vegetable matter, even sturdy, tall-stalked nettles, and especially by the growth of the roots and trunks of willows. There still remained, that first spring of my walks and discoveries, a heavy gate at the end of the first bridge. This gate dragged; but its posts, though black and green with damp and disagreeable to the touch, still stood, and the gate could still be pulled shut and latched with a rusting catch. As a gate, a barrier, it was meaningless. The levels of ground and water had changed; the gate no longer guarded a dry walk across the water meadow. One could simply walk around the gate. There was a merest dip in the ground now, and the only inconvenience came from the nettles. But the nettles were everywhere.
At one stage of this cross-meadow walk the weeds and reeds and willows and other wild growths were so tall it was hard to see the river. Then, quite suddenly, from the very last bridge — with many broken planks, big rusted nails alone remaining whole, the planks they had fixed having rotted away altogether — suddenly from the last bridge the end of the bush was clear, and the trimmed path along the river-bank, beside the collapsed boathouse.
This boathouse was a spectacular ruin. The mooring for the boat or boats was in a creek, one of the old channels of the water meadow. The thick timber posts or pillars of the corrugated iron-roofed shelter stood on either side of the creek. But tame though the river looked — a few feet deep, a few feet wide — the water it channeled was a force of nature, not wholly predictable; and the banks of that river and its inlets were constantly changing. The boathouse creek, widening or simply shifting, had caused the boathouse to collapse on one side. The angle of collapse, the rotting timber, the black-looking water, the rusting corrugated iron suggested a tropical river ruin, somewhere on the Orinoco or Amazon or the Congo. And yet, passing this ruin, and as though belonging to another order of nature, another order of society almost, was the trimmed path along the riverbank.
It was to that easy path, a path for fishermen, that the water-meadow bridges were meant to lead. And the river itself flowed tidily and gently; and neat planks bridged the channels from the wet meadows to the main river. It was the hand of man, the hand of the water bailiffs and people like them, that suggested an orderly nature. Left to itself, the river, like the water meadow at the back of the manor, would have become a forest ruin. It took only one collapsed willow — blown down during a gale, say — to create a mess in the river: the banks wrecked, easy passage gone, tangled islands of river weeds and river dross with rippled skins of milky-brown scum building up in a few days between the branches.
The color of the river depended on what grew on the banks. And small though the scale was, the bank was varied. Where there were tall reeds or grasses on the water’s edge, and the bank was overhung with trees, and if there were little indentations — miniature coves — in the bank, then the water was dark green, deep-seeming, and mysterious. Where the bank was clear the water was clear, showing the white sand or chalk of the bed or the rippling green river weeds.
There came a stage on my walk along the riverbank when I stood directly in front of the water meadow where the yellow irises grew. Beyond that was the old orchard, with the box enclosure that lay to one side of my cottage. Above the orchard and the vegetable-garden wall I saw the roof and chimneys of my own cottage below the beeches, and was surprised all over again, every time, that that was where I lived.
Not far beyond this point the walk that was permitted to me came to an end. Beyond that was another river “beat,” belonging to another landowner, and though it would have been easy to climb over the makeshift fence, I preferred not to do so.
The river curved here. On the opposite bank the down ended abruptly in a wooded cliff, giving a great depth and a hint of surrounding forest to the river color. There was also a new channel here from the bare down, a spring breaking out of the chalk and quickly turning into a noisy cascade. So that again, in this neat, tame, smooth landscape, with a bare green-white down and with a river a few feet deep divided neatly into numbered beats, there was a reminder of the unpredictable force of water. Old corrugated-iron sheets served as hatches in the new channeclass="underline" an unexpected touch, in a landscape without people, of the urban slum.
The water bailiffs had released young trout near here, and they hadn’t wandered far. They were unexpectedly unattractive, as nervous as rats, of that color as well, and as swift and devious and silent as rats as they made for the camouflage of the dark river weeds.
This was the river walk, barely ten minutes, hardly a walk to someone used to walking most days for about an hour and a half. But the walk was always new; the river and what I saw always changed. There was the blue iris I saw in my first spring. Solitary among the weeds and nettles at the edge of the water meadow. I was transported at the sight, and instantly had the wish, if I ever were to plant a garden of my own, to try to achieve that effect. And then, in the light-headedness of my convalescence, I began (until I sobered up again) to walk through the nettles to the iris, as though the beauty of what I saw lay not in the setting, but in that particular iris.
There were the scented old roses in the wild rose bed. And the roses I saw that first summer were the last: I was in at that particular death. Because in the autumn Mrs. Phillips pruned them, “cut them right back,” as she said; and those old rose bushes, cut down to the quick, all turned to brier again.
There was a time of the spring or summer — every year — when a pale blue lawn weed floated like a blue mist above the daisy-spotted lawn. And always there was the river. It was the river, with its overwhelming beauty of reeds and weeds and moving water and changing reflections, that made me say, long before I felt myself in tune with other plants and truly in tune with the seasons: “At least I’ve had a year of this.” And then: “At least I’ve had two years of this.”
And just as, on the walk over the downs past Jack’s cottage, I always in the beginning looked for the warm brown fur of the hares, so on this shorter river walk I looked for the miniature volcano of the salmon’s nest in the white chalk of the riverbed; and the still, dark pike waiting in a deep pool where the water was dark in the shadow of reeds. And I looked for the vole or water rat. I knew the little tree on whose lower branch he liked to sun himself, after shaking his fur. I often saw him swimming across the river; and once I saw him so soundly asleep that — thinking he was dead — I went and stood over him. I often heard the surprised plop of his fellows as they dived into their river holes, sending up silent muddy clouds.
Every winter and spring created fresh havoc in the manor gardens and water meadows. The bridges over the channels decayed and decayed. The gate at the very last (or the first) bridge was eventually left open one year and collapsed finally of its own rot. The river changed its course by a few feet, washing over the path that the water bailiffs had kept clear; and the planks that spanned the channels were lost below water. New two-plank bridges were built, one plank plain, one covered with wire netting, for the grip it gave both to shoes and to the wheels of the bailiffs’ barrows.