A Splash in the Pant: Richard Bawden drew the infant Blackwater
You could have taken it for one of the many vineyards appearing all over Essex, taking advantage of the country’s sunshine records. But no: they’re blackcurrant bushes, rank upon rank, acre upon acre. I had never wondered where Ribena comes from; now I know. It’s the valley of the river Blackwater, a lazy stream that starts as the Pant, becomes the Brain, then changes its name once more and finally meets the Thames Estuary between Maldon and West Mersea in a flurry of activity: oysters, salt production and celebrities. The tidal causeway to Osea Island is familiar to singers using its recording studios.
We lived in Essex for forty years. We learned to counter its reputation as a flat and boring county. ‘No’, we used to say ‘Its undulating and boring.’ It certainly undulates, silver cricket bat willows marking the low points, its water courses, while its boredom is relieved by village streets of ancient gabled houses plastered in many colours.
In the water meadows along the river you wade through the lush grass, your knees soaked, scarcely able to tell where the grass ends and the weed-choked water begins, your head snared by the congestion of willows. Ratty would love it. Perhaps this is where he and his friends live.
We stayed with friends who cultivate blackcurrants in large numbers and provoke my envy in possessing a thing I have longed for all my life: a gushing spring at the top of the garden. The last bit is the most important. A spring at the bottom will give you a fine pond; possibly a stream. At the top it gives you all the energy of falling water. Theirs fills a calm broad pond, then overflows over a little wooden waterwheel into a tumbling brook to another pond, and then another, until it slithers through the willows into the tall grass and into the Blackwater.
In our Welsh woods we have water rushing over rocks, wild, glittering, noisy, untameable. My urge is to placate it, put a dam in its way, tranquilize it; arrest all that urgency. It is the converse of my poking about with stick and leaves to induce a tiny stream. Idleness (mine) meets elemental energy and treats it as a toy.
