The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys

Forty times over the course of recorded history, the Thames has frozen through, giving rise to frost fairs and temporary bridges, royal spectacles and common fare, ice skating and drownings. Winters cold enough to freeze a river freeze ale, wine, ink pots, too. They kill those who don't keep moving. They precipitate new forms of entertainment, and despair.

In forty brief chapters, in a book called simply, The Frozen Thames, Helen Humphreys conjures a scene from each of the forty freezings—an oxen driver persuading his charges to trust the ice, a queen out for sport, a purveyor at a frost fair, a frozen-in ship. Some of the pieces are no more than vignettes. Others go a bit deeper. All take the reader through time, through plagues, through inventions, through the evolution of weather itself.

Humphreys has always been an interesting writer—her language straightforward and often stubby, her ideas expansive. In a novel of a few years ago, The Lost Garden, Humphreys took readers back to the Devon countryside of 1941, where a handful of young girls from the Woman's Land Army and a regiment of Canadian soldiers had come together on a ruined estate. The setting is extraordinary and the book has resonance (I think of it fondly still today), despite the fact that many of its passages seem truncated, almost deliberately awkward: No one ever likes me. I’m not good with people. I’ve been too isolated most of my life. I don’t know how to get on with others.

As a river writer myself (though I chose, in my book Flow, to write from the inside of a river's mind, through autobiography), I couldn't help but be drawn to Humphreys' newest book. It's such a wonderful concept, it's so convincingly researched, it's so beautifully produced—squarish in format, colorfully illustrated. If my desire to lean into the text was often prohibited by a rush of declarative noun-verb constructs (e.g., The three boys have come down to skate on the river. The water above the bridge has set fast and smooth. There is no snow on the surface and the ice glistens black and there is no one else moving on the Thames.), I often found myself getting lost inside the circumstances Humphreys has collected.

Here, for example, is a scene one might spend an afternoon imagining:

The river has been frozen for almost two months and a town of tents has been erected upon it. There is a cook's tent where gentlemen come to dine every evening. There are tents that sell ale and tents that sell gingerbread. There are two printing presses and people can have their names printed on a card for posterity. An ox has been roasted near the Hungerford Stairs by a descendant of the man who roasted an ox on the ice at the last Frost Fair in 1684.