River Combing
As the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education — https://www.dur.ac.uk/creativitycommission/ — makes clear, ‘teaching for creativity’ is, and should be, a vital part of what we do in the classroom. But there are days when I have to dredge my mind for ideas, and then trawl the internet for help. This sort of imaginative emptiness will usually strike me mid-term, when I am headachy, sleep-deprived, overwhelmed with administration, and facing a gloomy backlog of marking. I have learnt that, at these times, I need to walk away from my desk and go out into the world. As long as I make myself busy in other dimensions of my life then ideas will return, just as the housemartins reappear in the village in late in April or early May.
I grew up in a dry part of the country, in Wiltshire, on the chalky flanks of Salisbury Plain. There were ditches and ponds but running water was not a part of my daily life as a child and so I love the wateriness of Cumbria. The presence of moving water is never something that I take for granted and one of our reasons for buying this house is that it sits just a few hundred metres from the River Kent.
The Kent rises high in the Kentmere Valley and then makes a short, fast twenty mile run down into Morecambe Bay, collecting the flow of tributaries as it goes. The steepness of the river’s catchment makes it a dynamic presence in our lives. The river reacts swiftly to heavy rainfall and snowmelt and so in bad weather its sedate flow is transformed into a torrent of white water and racing brown flood spill that deposits branches in the middle of fields, leaving us with tidelines of twigs to collect for kindling.
I didn’t know, until I lived here, that river combing is possible. I come from a family of passionate beach combers and my parents, my siblings and I still exchange Whatsapp pictures of treasures that we find on holiday explorations of beaches. Now, though, I can river comb too because — walking the banks of the Kent after flooding — I notice fragments of pottery and china and stoop to collect them. It seems that the churning and froth of the river in spate throws up domestic debris and as I collect it my mind re-fills with ideas.
There are stories to be crafted here. Can the students make one of these objects whole again by re-constructing it in words into a jug or a plate or perhaps a teacup? Can my students work in pairs to tell the story of why the pink edged piece of china got smashed? And then can they hand their work on to another pair who will tell the story of how that smashed china ended up in the river?
There is so much to explore about the reasons why someone might consign rubbish to a river. Have attitudes to our rivers changed over the centuries? Or might these pottery, porcelain and earthenware fragments have been dumped in gardens and only washed into the river by flooding? Why might people living a century ago have much more china and pottery in their lives than we do today? And how did blue and white porcelain journey from fourteenth century China to every day use in nineteenth century Britain?
Mostly, though, I find myself wanting to have a brew with the woman who owned the spongeware bowl that is now just a small rectangle of blistered green paint with a tiny petal pattern in pink. I imagine her in an apron, hands on hips in the kitchen doorway, bellowing at her eldest son who had bumped the bowl off the table as he blundered towards the front door and school. Despairing of her clumsy lads, she stamped down the garden path and hurled the bits of her favourite bowl into the river. Then she sighed and returned up the path to feed the chickens and then put the kettle on.
