Downstream

Somewhere downstream, in another very different world, this same river runs just as smoothly under Wordsworth's Westminster Bridge. It could hardly be called one of the great rivers of the World but it has moved a great many men's hearts since long before it was first bridged.
The storyteller smiled to himself as he sat thinking only about the river; how long it takes to wind across a valley floor, to shape the rolling hills, and how swiftly in comparison any given volume of water, albeit sedate by human reckoning, reaches the grey estuary between flat Essex and the expanse of Kent.
On the other bank, no more than fifty paces away, a black cat leaped in the long grass. It bounced once, twice and then three times, came close to falling into the river but then accepted defeat and stalked away in search of easier prey.
Once the cat's escapade had shaken him from one line of thought, the storyteller threw down his baggy hat and took off his boots and socks. Now for some real thinking he decided, and moved on to the shabby wooden quay from where the old ferry used to cross the water to the northern bank.
He lowered his long bare feet into the cool water and let them hang amongst the tiny fish that took comfort in the shelter of weeds and green wooden stilts. The fry scattered and then, almost immediately at ease with the pale gently swaying objects, returned to their usual rounds.
For some reason the storyteller could not fathom, the bravest of the fish came close enough to rasp their mouths against his flesh; it was not unpleasant, relaxing in fact. He thought for a fleeting moment about the great fish of tropical reefs cleaned by their diminutive little neighbours but then turned his attention once again to the task at hand; how onerous sometimes this thing called work.
The cottage at the ferry crossing gave the impression of permanence even as the permanent river gave the appearance of transience. One day soon, he guessed, it would become a casualty of rising river levels or freakish floods but for now it looked as it had for generations. And for many of those generations the storyteller's family had known this place. The cottage, the river crossing and the lives of the villages on either bank had changed with his folk, until the age had come when that relationship so long established was broken, as were so many such affinities in the rush or the need to move, to be gone, to die and to be buried elsewhere.
He had stories that had grown out of this valley just as each distinctive oak had twisted its quirky way up out of the hedgerows. He was a walking and too-much-talking storehouse of tales, and that cottage, along with the distant ancestors of the lucky mouse and of the vexed black cat had parts in many of them.
From the distance came man-made thunder. A train hammered across the arched brick bridge, just visible in the hazy distance. It was as much now a part of another age as the ghosts from audiences once held entranced hereabouts by stories retold in firelight. By turns they would be transported, not by rail but by words, to distant lands and then back to reassuring reminders of daily certainties; to lessons well learned and caringly shared.
As if to catregorically answer the rushing of the train the sky gave rise to an anvil-headed thunder cloud. The storyteller knew the weather of this little valley bowl; he knew its moods from a dozen old tales and from a dozen years here as a boy, but now he knew that it was time to move on.
He would take the stories with him and pass them on as truly as they had been given to him, but there were no more stories here for him to find, and no-one left to listen to them. That time had gone.
Cold feet were pulled from the water for the last time and soon he was on his way. From across the river only a black cat watched the colourfully dressed man go. Once there were people here, in the fields and on the riverbank, but now only the cat watched until great fat raindrops fell from the darkening sky and her too dashing on her way.