Somewhere You’ve Never Been Before

AN: This is a piece I wrote for an assignment – go somewhere you’ve never been before.

The sun shines through shredded sky, night disappearing. From the decaying footpath, behind there are motors, in front there is splendour, to the left there are grandparents, to the right there are daffodils. The colossus reaches up into the sky and across for two miles, its younger sibling visible on the horizon, before it is camouflaged in morning’s mist.

The great, white bridge sings a lasting note in the whipping winds, threaded through hulking wires. Heady bass courtesy of fretful oscillation drives the knees of rare ramblers together, causes cyclists to clutch their handlebars. The thick fumes from rattling exhausts would be noisome, were they not carried downriver and out to sea in seconds. Instead, out here on rare flight over the untameable carried by the capable hands of human ingenuity, there is unexpected freshness.

Below, marbled mud is churned by the current, somewhere between maroon and marooned. When the sun disappears, she is silver with no shine. The estuary itself, well she is not a pretty thing, not so as the skeletons that reach across her. Through a sailor’s or salmon catcher’s eyes there is a beauty in her to be sure. Britain’s longest river, the severn is bested only in tidal movement by the amazon, feeding all those on her banks for thousands of years. She bares beauty, but it is not one of handsomeness.

There is blood on her hands.

Beside Montgomery’s Castle, flow wider now,

Past Offa’s dyke, where salmon spawn,

’Tis farewell to Wales that you are singing,

Slowing down to weave a ribbon.

On a foggy morning in 1929, the 70ft coal barge Finis leaves the dock at Bullo Pill. She carries no cargo, her crew of three already in mourning. The last vessel to make use of the village’s single source of income, the pill will be decommissioned once she takes her trip. For from this fateful sail, the Finis will not return.

Out the lock and into the flow, the Finis navigates the river expertly, used to the trip as far as Cirencester. Coal in, coal out, chocolate in, chocolate out and so on until it is stone. Stone in, stone out, again and again, all to stem the severn’s septic wounds. When stone becomes insufficient to stop the bleeding, it is the boats themselves tasked to bear the burden of bursting banks.

Young Edgar Trigg, alongside his father and cousin, watches the Finis’s movements quietly, blonde hair spilling out of his cap and onto his forehead. He guides his family’s livelihood to her final resting place. Here, underneath Arlingham, her corpse will be filled with concrete, ensuring the townsfolk have clean water for centuries to come. The flat bottom barge grinds against the mud. She whines and groans and wails in torment, and as her bow breaks amongst the reeds, so does the heart of her captain.

So goes the Finis in 1929, so goes her master, William Robert Trigg, in 1930. So goes the severn’s coal trade, so go the sailors paid in kind for the loss of their vessels and the broken promise of a life afloat.

In swift crescendo, flow majestically on,

The river god salutes from Dean’s shore,

Past red cliffs of Sedbury, she’ll take you to sea,

Sabrina’s river – song heard no more.

When first I crossed Severn Bridge in my father’s beat up car, I was awe-stricken like never I had been before. He has since told me that this childlike interest in most things I’d never seen or done was what gave him the courage to see the world in colour. That day, my father divulged everything he knew about the crossing, if only to indulge us both. Most interestingly, that when the banks of the severn were in danger of crumbling away, my great great grandfather had been paid to breach his boat, reinforcing the estuary walls before it flooded into nearby canals.

If you walk out of the beer garden at the Old Passage Inn, through the footpath gate and out toward the river from shady trees, you’ll find the Finis’s remains still half buried in the mud. My nana, Maud Trigg, remembers a 70’s scene vividly as we take the stroll. Sitting under the tree with her ageing mother whilst her father, Edgar, points a frail finger to invisible dents in the severn’s banks, each with its own anecdote. Her children play near the bones of the boat that both saved and ruined them.

Look to the other side of the sands and you’ll see Newnham church, spire high on Welsh cliffs, headstones spilling over in subsidence. Here lies Trigg after Trigg, Lord Rob and his brother Canon, their wives Sarah and Freda. In unmarked graves grassed over by nigh on a century lay my great great grandfather, the crushed captain William Robert and his wife, Sarah Ellen. My creators of whom, before today, I have barely known. From their beds they watch over the Finis, over the severn and all the souls that cross it.

There are fourteen Triggs alive and well in Newnham, no doubt my second cousins and great aunties of whom I know even less. How many times have they crossed the bridge, I wonder, do they know of the Finis so close and so far? I am unsure of their lives, their jobs, their children, their happiest moments and necessary sadnesses. But at the very least, of one thing I am sure, and perhaps have been since I was only a toddler in the backseat of a decrepit Clio: there is blood in my veins and DNA in my being that has lived and died on the banks of the severn.