I nearly didn’t bother to try to find Three Cranes Wharf on a map. To expect to stumble on a place mentioned in the Old Bailey transcript of so long ago seemed ridiculous, like finding a Neanderthal cave, bison-paintings and all, in the basement of a skyscraper.
But two centuries in London was nothing more than a slow blink, and you didn’t need an antique map of London to find Three Cranes Wharf. It was right there—as Three Cranes Walk—on page 94 of my London A to Z, alongside Southwark Bridge.
The next afternoon the Centenary of Federation was able to manage without one of its writers: I had a couple of hours to myself. Guidebook in one hand, umbrella in the other, I made my way towards Three Cranes Walk.
Down there in the East End, by the river, was where some of the worst of the bombing took place during World War II. Now it was all big blocky office buildings in undistinguished 50s and 60s architecture. Street names, like archaeological remains, were the only evidence of what had once been here: Bread Street, Milk Street, Pudding Lane.
Until the last hundred years you’d probably have been able to see the river from all these streets, glinting between the low tight-packed buildings and the grey stone churches. All that remained now was the fall of the land, the streets flowing down the hill like streams.
I followed the slope but at the last moment, just when I thought I’d get to the river, I was blocked by a multi-lane road buried between office buildings. The din of trucks, motorbikes, cars at speed, was unremitting. I was conscious of how frail my body was compared to the lorries, the blank-eyed cars and the deafening bikes hurtling along this tube of bitumen.
No one ever waited for the traffic lights to let them cross as long as I did at Lower Thames Street, E3. By the time I got to the other side I felt shellshocked.
There still seemed no way to reach the river. A solid wall of buildings lined the road. If not for the map, fluttering in my hand in the slipstream from the lorries, I wouldn’t have guessed the river was there, a building’s thickness away.
With some sense of finding a sanctuary, I turned towards a church. It was like so many others: grey limestone, streaked and smeared with poisoned rain, some columns holding up a portico.
Down a narrow alley beside the church, a man in a stained polo shirt, an airline bag across his chest, was crouching to pick up a scattered mass of cigarette butts. He dropped them into his bag and scurried on, head down, scanning the footpath and the gutter.
Apart from the polo shirt and the plastic airline bag, he might have stepped out of Wiseman’s London. Wiseman himself might have walked here, stood under this portico to shelter from the rain. I laid the palm of my hand on the rough limestone, feeling the cold grit on my skin. His hand might have lain there too, leaving molecules behind, wedged in the grain of the stone, as he leaned on it talking to someone, or waiting for someone, or…what? Smoked a pipe? Drank from a flask in his pocket? Scratched the nits in his hair?
Bolted to one of the columns was a splintered piece of wood so old it was black and stone-like. A corroded plaque told me it was a piece of the ‘original Roman bridge over the Thames that once stood close to this site’. I stepped back and looked at it with more respect. Roman. Julius Caesar might have cast an eye over this same piece of wood. He might have leaned on it when it was part of the bridge, talking to someone, or waiting for someone, or scratching the nits in his hair.
This thing was two thousand years old. In Australia, it would be behind glass in a controlled atmosphere. Machines with flickering needles would be monitoring the humidity. Strings of children would be trailed past it. They’d be invited to marvel at the fact that those adze marks had been made by someone whose mother tongue was Latin.
Here, it was bolted roughly to the side of the porch, held up with steel brackets, out there on the street with the traffic roaring past a few steps away.
Was there so much history in Britain that it could be treated casually? There weren’t enough glass cases to hold it all. Was it a more transparent history, too, with none of the uneasiness that I was feeling about Solomon Wiseman?
I looked around and saw one of those ornate black-and-white church clocks high up on the wall. I stared at it, and was just working out that it said a quarter to five, when a voice spoke right into my ear from behind: quiet, pitched to slide underneath the hysterical traffic.
‘Nice old clock, isn’t it?’
I hated him even before I turned and saw him. He was shortish, with receding crinkly sandy hair and one eye higher than the other, a Punch-and-Judy sort of face, features somehow too prominent, his eyes too wide open.
He was obviously a crazy. What other sort of man would come up and speak into your ear like that?
The street was suddenly empty of another human soul. The river of traffic wouldn’t be stopped by someone running out and calling for help. I was frightened.
I reminded myself that I didn’t have to be mild-mannered Kate Grenville, respectable wife and mother, courteous to all. I could be anyone I pleased here on Lower Thames Street.
Abrupt, right into his face, I said, ‘Do you know where Three Cranes Wharf is?’
He was startled. Took a step back. ‘More or less,’ he said after a moment. He was watching me curiously now, as if I were the strange one.
‘Well, where is it?’ It was exhilarating being this rude.
‘Too complicated to explain,’ he said. ‘But it’s down there.’
I didn’t believe him. He wanted to lure me into that shadowed alley. I started to move away.
‘No,’ he called. ‘Down here.’
I hesitated and we stood staring at each other.
He was wearing one of those speckled rubbish-coloured jackets, with a checked shirt and the kind of tie that doesn’t go with anything. His trousers bagged at the knees. He carried a worn and empty-looking briefcase of the old-fashioned kind with a flap over the top. His forefinger was curled around it as if to keep it from springing open, even though this briefcase would never spring open but only sag from its handle.
I wrote a whole story about him as I glanced at that sad finger. ‘Here, son,’ the father said as he gave him the shiny new briefcase, too embarrassed to kiss or embrace or even shake hands, only giving a hard slap on the boy’s puny shoulders. ‘Now you’ve started at work.’ The father dying, of course, but the son hanging onto the relic, having it stitched crudely at the shoe-repair place when it started to go on the corners, the memory of his father embedded in the worn old thing.
Now he was a seedy balding middle-aged man trying to pick up a frowning tourist in Lower Thames Street, and wondering what he’d got himself into. ‘Why do you want to find it?’ he asked.
‘Just a bit of family history,’ I said, a fraction shamefaced now, half-regretting my rudeness. ‘A family connection.’ I didn’t want to launch into the whole story about Wiseman in case I couldn’t get rid of him.
‘Look, it’s down here,’ he said again, and turned away without waiting to see if I was following. At a rapid speed he led me into what seemed like the inside of one of the faceless office blocks, into a kind of tunnel underneath. We turned a corner and the traffic noise was cut off. I could hear our two sets of footsteps fast on the pavement. He led and I followed a few yards behind.
This was stupid. If I disappeared off the face of the earth here, there’d be no one to guess where I’d gone.
But I kept following, at a distance. He led me across a laneway, down some stairs, along an alley between two towering office blocks, round a dogleg. Through another tunnel with a blast of chlorine. A delivery van idling and a black man with a white bag of laundry. A sudden smart glass doorway: ‘Lotus Club’. Under an archway into a courtyard I glanced up and saw a naked stone woman holding a bunch of grapes in each armpit. We went beneath a long brick arch and suddenly we were out on a walkway, a building above and behind us, the river below, and a big black-and-white sign on the railing: ‘Three Cranes Walk’.
The man glanced at me, then turned and was off without looking back again, left right left right with his briefcase slapping against his leg.
‘Thanks,’ I called, but it was too late.
Three Cranes Walk was at the foot of a massive office building. Behind me, pressing down, was the blank bulk of the building. You could imagine someone insisting, there must be public access. Oh, okay, they’d have said, and added this narrow thoroughfare to the plans. Beyond the railing, a wall dropped away sheer to a black muddy beach affair. Beyond that the river ran sulkily under the low grey sky.
There was a bad feeling here, as if you were right on the edge of a cliff. I hung onto the metal railing, feeling it cold under my hands. The air was full of the constant roar and hum of air conditioners, the thrum of a building working at full blast.
Somewhere close by something was beeping and clanking. A steel container was rumbling down a gantry with a spooky smooth movement. The jaws of the machine released the container onto a tarry barge, then with a whirr slid back up again. No human was anywhere in sight, only this big dangerous piece of machinery with a life of its own. But somewhere in that featureless building people were controlling it: the inheritors of Wiseman’s trade, getting stuff into and out of boats as they had done for hundreds of years.
It was here, I told myself, trying to whip up a frisson. He was right here, sweating with fear. Right here.
I went back to where the walkway crossed the last courtyard, looking for a way to get down to the river, and saw a tall iron gate, conveniently ajar and, on the other side of it, steps going down to the shore.
Stepping through the gate took me into another place altogether. In front of me was a shore of dark grit, stones, glistening slime, then the turbid water of the river. A sudden fresh wind blew against my face. The air-conditioning noises, the traffic noises, dropped away.
The wind funnelling along the river reminded me that, underneath the streets and sewers and polite squares of grass, an earlier place was buried. London was once a wild estuary, gulls crying overhead, wading birds thrusting their long beaks into the mud, and the wind, the constant wind flattening the beds of reeds, the stunted marshy shrubs on the shore. A great pewter sky would have hung like a bowl over the eternal flatness of it, the grey water meeting the grey sky, and at low tide the sheen of cold mud would have framed the metallic water.
The current scoured downstream: fast, hard, dangerous, coursing away towards the sea. Under this lowering sky, the Thames was not benign or pretty. It was a brown and murky river, visibly ferocious. Its teeth tore around the bridge piers, bulging and splitting into white against the stone. Big iron buoys moored in the middle of the stream bobbed against their chains as the water surged around them. The Thames was no toy. The Thames could kill you without even trying.
Boats churned up and down: dragonfly-quick launches, low-slung barges throbbing away against the current making the buoys dance in their wake. There were cruisers, half-cabin boats, Water Police, Metropolitan something-or-other, and now and then a speedy powerboat bouncing along the rough water. Tourist boats with unintelligible syllables of commentary coming at me in snatches on the breeze, people stiff with chill staring at the river, at the woman standing at Three Cranes Walk trying to think about her great-great-great grandfather.
A duck nipped past me, bobbing along on the tide, swivelling its head to look at me, its round eye unblinking.
Beside the steps was a pile of stuff washed up against the wall—rounded brown pebbles, shiny black ones, dark twisted lumps of what looked like coarse glass with bits of sand and stone melted into it. Glass from the Blitz? Another layer of history, all those images of London burning?
There were shards of terracotta, smoothed by the river, all the same thickness, many with a hole in them about the size of a pencil. Old roof tiles, I thought. The hole was for tying the tile onto the battens. Maybe very old. From Wiseman’s time? From Wiseman’s house?
I picked one up. A bulge along one side recorded where someone had flattened it against a straight edge. The inside of the hole was grooved where a rough stick had been pushed through the clay. Feeling guilty, I slipped one into my pocket. There could be some special ordinance that forbade the pocketing of historical shards from the banks of the navigable River Thames.
I made my way between the muddy rocks and grit to the water’s edge. Down there I could see what I hadn’t from the steps—that the water was running along the side of a thick beam, the edge of some ancient dock that over the years had rotted away to this line of black wood, inches above the water.
As if someone had nudged me, I suddenly realised, he was here. This, right here, where I’m standing, is where it happened.
I stared at the wood: hard, shiny with slime. How old was it? How long did it take timber in the Thames to turn to stone? If it was as old as it looked, it could have been where Wiseman’s foot rested as he called up, ‘Damn your eyes, Ned, why did you not give me a hand with the lighter?’ But perhaps wood decayed quickly on the tide-line of the polluted Thames. Perhaps this was only a hundred years old. Or fifty.
Maybe I should save my awe.
But what did it really matter if Wiseman’s feet stepped on this exact piece of wood? Anything in the world has been trodden on by someone or other now dead and gone. The dust blowing around London must still contain molecules of Dickens’ whiskers.
The tide was extremely low. This slimy wood, those broken bits of roof tile—all of it would usually be under the water. At almost any tide but this, there would have been nothing to see but brown water lapping against the top of these steps. By chance I was there at the one moment when the curtain of water was drawn back.
Later, the writers I was travelling with had a drink together and I got out the bit of roof tile to show them. It went from hand to hand, everyone’s thumb smoothing the surface, everyone trying to fit their finger into the hole. ‘Is this all?’ someone asked. ‘You didn’t find anything else?’
Melissa looked at it for a long time, turning it over and over as if she were searching for something. She handed it back to me. ‘So where will you go next?’