Downstream

worry for the characters of
Iris Murdoch’s 1954 novel
Under the Net, when one
drunken night Jack Donaghue
and friends decide to swim in
the Thames. They check the
time for high tide, set off
down Upper Thames Street
and find the river ‘thick with
scum and floating spars of
wood, full to over-flowing in
the bosom of London’.
Despite this and a smell like
rotten vegetables, they