Gatekeepers — a poem with audio

As we eliminate risk, we risk eliminating joy.

In 1968, a week before I was to leave home for university, our house was devastated by a flood. The river at the end of our garden, where I’d spent so much time and had so much fun as a kid, had burst its banks. Our ground floor was under three feet of water.

Forty years later, I revisited. Much had changed, not least me.

I wrote this poem a decade ago. Today, in lockdown, I fear more than ever the growing grip of the gatekeepers.

GATEKEEPERS

The river, we called it, but now I’m grown and travelled maybe we exaggerated; wide enough for paddles not for oars, green and languid summer-shaded drifter, hobo, friend of swans, dragonflies, rats, the big old pike and fearless urchin-adventurers, Rich and me.

Over the garden fence, tackle and bait, nets and knowledge — fathers’ hand-me-downs to the bank where we balanced floats, maggotted hooks, assessed the current, searched for hidden depth and weed and silent darting shadows, cast in the role of real serious fisher men.

Not all we caught was treasure: a shoe, a root, the opposite bank, sometimes ourselves — but then a quiver, tension, repetitive bob, and the line jerked away upstream, our wit and strength tested by the silver-scaled rose-tipped beauty, the largest landed in our small history.

Boys will be men, and nature will be tamed. The gatekeepers move in, divert the flow. ‘The threat of flooding needs to be contained. Your child can’t drown now that the water’s low.’

The pike’s long gone, and where we caught the rudd, A supermarket trolley’s stuck in mud.

There’s an old recording I made of this on YouTube too. The sound quality isn’t wonderful, and you should ignore the links to my old website, but you’ll get the … er … drift.