Old Man River Keeps Rolling Closer

I am a child of great rivers. The mighty Mississippi and and the vast Missouri came together a few miles from my home, at a stretch of water running almost a mile wide in spring flood. I watched with awe as the building-sized floodgates blocked the streets of downtown St. Louis and water lapped up the stairs of the arch, and remember many a story of riverboats slipping their moornings and meeting their doom in the dangerous eddys and debris of the muddy water. You simply couldn't grow up with something so powerful without giving it a hell of a lot of respect.

So why, I ask myself, didn't I think about this when I invested my life savings into a house just 150 yards from the Thames?

Because for my entire acquaintance with it, the Thames at Datchet has resembled nothing so much as a river by Disney. Perhaps 50 yards wide, clear, slow flowing and relatively shallow, you'd practically swear that the picturesque canal boats were on a hidden track, sailing down river from the Windsor Castle ride. A Missourian didn't even register this as a river, frankly. It's a well-manicured creek.

Creek no longer, an ever-rising Thames is now churning past the village at threatening speeds, carrying the grim promise of the havoc it's already wreaked upstream in the Cotswolds. I'm checking the Environmental Department's flooding website several times a day to see if the "Flood Warning" status has ratcheded up to "Flood Imminent". (Without additional rainfall, the flood crest is supposed to catch us later in the week.) I walk down to the river twice a day to watch the water's progress up the bank. I've researched how to make my own sandbags and have planned what can be carried upstairs. I am trying not to think about the average £30k per home that flood damage costs, the four to six months people have to move out of their houses and the risk of disease that comes from the raw sewage that swirls through the flood tide.

Whose riverbank is lower and will flood first? Mine, or the Queen's?

I think our luck may hold. While the river's rise has been precipitous, I figure it still has a good five feet to go before it tops the crest of the hill sloping from river up to village. To my eye, the opposite bank looks a little lower, meaning that the water might flood into Windsor Castle's hay fields before the village. (Then again, considering the embankments were built in the 19th century, I wouldn't be surprised if Queen Victoria's engineers were instructed to do exactly the opposite.) In theory, we're protected by the Jubilee River extension, an artificial channel that can be raised or lowered to moderate levels in the Thames. And finally, my hopes were raised by speaking to a local whose mother remembered the last big flood in the 40s, when the my street remained a dry island while both the riverbanks and the village green flooded. (Evidently there are natural springs under the green that spew forth at saturation point.)

That lessens my fear a lot, but I'm still very wary. I'll be on tenterhooks until the flood surge rolls past us later this week. So I'll continue watching, waiting, preparing ... and praying it doesn't rain any more.