Once, I stood on the bridge of a container ship as we headed from the River Medway out to sea. The river pilot required to navigate these treacherous waters (the Thames estuary holds more shipwrecks per mile of seabed than any other part of Britain’s coastal waters) pointed out landmarks: a sunken US Liberty cargo ship, its masts now sea fence-posts poking above the water; the Shivering Sands towers, the marshes over which Magwitch escaped in Great Expectations. I had oceans ahead of me but I was intrigued, still, by this peculiar place, neither river nor sea, neither foreign nor domestic. And now here is a whole book of it.
Caroline Crampton is a child of the estuary, and the book is her praise-hymn to the muddy, marshy far reaches of a river that is often seen only as a backdrop to the great buildings of Oxford and London. Her parents, arriving on a sailboat from South Africa, arrived at St Katharine Docks in London and stayed, before moving back to the mouth of the river, to Kent. As a toddler, Crampton swung in a hammock in the boat’s cabin while her mother cooked. As a teenager, she had her tantrums on deck, on weekend sailing trips. She raged “against my parents’ obsession with sailing to nowhere”.
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