The Bridge Master

Ham looks upwards to where the smoke of the early morning fires now kindled high above on Potter’s span is starting to curl away into the river mist. The market men call it the Great Bridge and the taxi men known it with affection as Widow Standing and then there are those who, to Ham’s great fury, call it \emph{the} Tyne bridge. To him it is Potter’s span, and so, despite its age and its beauty, Ham finds he must hate it.

Filth, falling from on high splashes into the river. Ham has it from a good source, namely Elkin the butcher’s boy from Towerfoot that Potter has an order that all refuse is thrown on the upriver side – Ham’s side – to no purpose other than it is Ham’s side and Potter can comfort himself with the thought of the steady stream of ordure raining on his rival-to-no purpose, the bridge master Ham.

He consoles himself on warm afternoons by taking his treasured monocular from its heavy case and studying the Widow for failing paint and the ever creeping mottle of rust. The old lady is falling. Slowly, elegantly, piece by tiny piece into the thick flowing river. On the high summer days, when the heavy rain showers blow through and the rain falls so heavy on your head it is like someone had tipped bearings from the high span instead of shit, and all business stops as friend and foe alike cram together beneath any porch or stanchion they can find to cower from the beating laid on by heaven – on days such as these he has seen whole girders swept clean of the last of their paint, lain bare for the first time in three halves of a century to the eating air, iron and oxygen resuming their deferred congress, the Widow slowly burning in the sky.

There is no help for it. She will fall away in time, and long before the final collapse there will be no more commerce on the bridge, no feet falling there after the first supports buckle and splay. It may not happen in Potter’s time, but the day will not be long in coming and there is nothing that Potter, or anyone else can do about it.

Ham patches. His bridge is a gaudy tatter of ironwork and timbers, caulking and ropes, chain and tarmac, cement and epoxy. Not a pretty thing, but she endures because the Swing Bridge is a living thing, or at least it is a thing that can be animated by one such as Ham. The Widow is nothing more than a skeleton, waiting to fall like her dead husband, as the taxi men will tell you, Stephenson’s bridge long fallen and dredged from the river, all beams and girders and all so much scrap when it comes right down to it.

Potter does what he can, but he cannot hold back the tide. To paint a whole bridge such as the Widow cannot be conceived of. The old men laugh at anyone voicing such nonsense, sitting as they do in the alehouses on the river front in the spider skeleton shadow of the Widow. ‘Where do’m get the paint? Where the men?’ Like so much else, she is a relic of the past age, held suspended from the Great Cycle for a time, by the paint and the men, but the big wheel has turned for her, as it must for all things and her end is in the river, ten winters or a hundred from now.

Ham frets a little, that the fall of the Widow might hurt his own span. Not directly, he decides. Just as the offal and night soil thrown towards him from the height falls far short, so would any tumbling girders or beam or any of the mishmashed spackling of shops and tenements that Potter has let grow up there, like martins nests glued and lashed to the fragile road deck. But what a mess it would make of the river. Stephenson’s bridge fell when he was a boy and he was grown to manhood by the time the first ship reached the higher quay, and there was still a gang or two made a living from crane dredging that stretch of the old Tyne.