Up The Overs

A Memory of Kempston.

Walking free through the wet grass leaving dark trails. Ahead the meadow rises to the mill bank where we stand in silence. Silent and smooth the deep mill race slides towards the wheel. Turning away we follow the bank upstream to the New Overs. Standing on the wooden sluice walk we look down the slide to the deep pool below. No water over the spillways in summer, the shutters are down and slides are dry. Later in the day the children will come to swim in the sluice pool and splash along through the shallows to the eyot. The girls will sit on the slide lip and the boys, lifting the shutters from the sluice walk, will send a wave down the slide to wash them into the pool. No-one will play on the second Over with its dark tree shaded pool. Strong swimmers drown among the tangled roots.
On along the mill steam bank, walking on the cracked dry clay, to the old Overs. The duck house opposite, they say, marks a Roman ford with paving showing at low water. We look again, but as always our imaginations fail to find the phantom stones. No sluice gates at the Old Overs, just concrete spillways with cheek walls supporting the mill bank. One early Spring flood, the race was bank full and we watched great slices of green water shoot down the slides disintegrating in the pool. We followed the rushing flood down the bank-full drain, trying to keep up, running down to the main stream at the mill bridge where it had washed the summer eyot away.
The spillways are hot and dry. The pools are almost empty, the drain stream should be dry but it flows gently, slowly speeding up, fed by springs from the clunch bed under Biddenham field.
Across the slides, hot underfoot, along the unmown water meadows, with the raised edge of Biddenham field creeping nearer the stream. Opposite the old church, stands close to the bank, seemingly only inches above bank full. No new building yet at the End, only the alms houses, the cottages, the 19th century school house and, set apart in the back field, the vicarage, with the reverend John, veteran of the Arnhem drop.
Turning back, recrossing the spillway, following the drain stream dreamily down to the foot bridge for the Bedford footpath, across the meadow, dry now, to the old wooden mill bridge with its flap gate. Water lane invites, but we cut through to the King William where the bus always waits to leave for Bedford. Along the High Street, to Up End, up the Bunyan Road and home to the old Boot Inn, that has stood two hundred and fifty years in the Statty field beside the Saxon burial ground.

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