the strangest of days - a Thames memoir

This is a true story, or at least it's as true a story as I can tell, peering back through the murk and the mist of the forty years between then and now. And murky and misty so it was, that morning, that early morning by the Thames. And if I could step back across those years I would find my twelve year old self sitting hunched against the cold on an angler's wicker creel. 
 
Holy Trinity Church, Cookham, sits behind me. Gothic frets of mist creep from the lawns of the graveyard towards the river and slither down her banks to hug the water, so that I cannot see the waterfowl I hear and I cannot tell if the sun is yet risen. It is grey and it is cold and there will be no Swan Upping today Sir Stanley. Even old man Turk, Keeper of the Queen's Swans, to whom we pay our fishing rent, is still in bed.  But the whispered promise of roach keep me fixed to the Avon float I am laying on against the flow. 

Perhaps even a chub will grace my net. Perhaps even that chub, lost here last year. In forty years it will haunt me still as I type this out on a lit screen in the snug of my kitchen. But that is another story and I push it away to the back of my mind now as I did back then, and so I am sitting again on that creel wishing for a roach and for a thicker cushion for my seat. 

I was blessed then with the best angling friend an angler could need and best friend he is still, and (did I not mention?) he happens to be my father. He is fishing just a swim downstream this morning, which is good fortune because it means, you see, I have a witness to this story. I promise you my story is true, but I promise you too that you would not believe it, and who can blame you, for I would not believe it, had it not been for my father.     

The mist is not yet lifted, it hangs like a heavy cloak on the world, but soon enough the sun will burn it all away and the shiny new morning will be filled with walkers of dogs and Sunday strollers. Though for now at least, this is our world and we are free to sit and to think and to fish. I know it now but I knew it not back then: these for me were  times of meditation and healing, a philosophical escape from Cold War Britain. And for my father? A quiet space that I am lucky to share, away from the factory where he makes tables and cabinets and chairs.


Deep am I in meditation, the object of which (being the orange tip of my float) is so deeply burned now in my mind's eye, that its disappearance when it comes will hesitate to provide a revelation. Taken together with cold-slowed reactions, a bite could easily be missed, so I nod awake from reverie and it is now that it happens.
        
Rudely, abruptly, an object parts the flow next to my float, rising vertically. It is long and straight and flat like a sword. Like  a sword. Very much like a sword because it is a sword. The point that pierces the surface from beneath is followed by the blade which is broad and long, and yes - the hand guard, and a hand and then an arm holding the sword aloft! Merely a rod and a half's distance from my feet it is surely meant for my benefit alone. But my compass is unequal to the task of navigating this strange new landscape and I am unable to react save for slack jawed wonder and paralysis. Am I to be the anointed one or have I just lost hold of my mind?

I dart a glance at the reassuring figure of my father just down the bank. He is fiddling with some adjustment to his float, oblivious to the supernatural colour the morning is taking on. I turn back hoping for this trick of the light to have vanished, but no it is there still. My widened eyes now narrow and focus more sharply and I see rivulets of water dripping like blood from the blade and making little rings in the water. The arm wavers and I see, oh horror of horrors that its skin is black and smooth and dead looking. The ghoul's arm lowers and the sword points at my heart and a fell dread freezes my blood.

Then, the things that happen at once are three: I snap my head around and mouth a voiceless appeal to my father who is rising from his seat and peering into the water in front of him. I can just see a dark sinuous shape writhing in the river at his feet when my ghoul cries "Excalibur!" and stands up in my swim and removes his scuba mask. (I recall he fair pissed himself when his diving partner joined him from my father's swim.)

We share the laugh, it is rare sport after all and well done, but we are more than curious about that sword. My father, the reasoned man that he is, proffers an explanation that by way of local papers we find out to be true. A spate of burglaries have been visited on the big houses across the river, the proceeds spirited away by night-boat. The river police lay await on a waning  moon, but too late to stop the loot finding its way overboard. A sword is among the hoard to be recovered one chill morning from the river bed. I know, I was there, and now forty years on my old dad and me we laugh still.     

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