The weir lies a scant half-mile below the bridge where the
road crosses into the village. Nobody swims there now, though when my father
was a young man, many years ago, he and his friends spent their summers there,
much as my friends and I spent the long hot summers of the mid-seventies in or
beside the river from dawn to dusk. We were strong swimmers all, by the time we
reached thirteen or fourteen. Many times over the years on my walks to the
lock, I envied him the cool, green overhung pool just below the weir, where he
told me they swam and dived. There is nothing like the caress of cool, dark river
water on sun-scorched freckled skin. The silent relief of plunging under the
smooth surface, then the kick and push back to break through again to the
sunlit blue sky overhead. I never got to swim in that spot, which seemed to me
the essence all riverside summers. Stilly greeny, an eternal homage to Kavanagh's words.
Nobody swims there, because in the still of a long, hot
summer’s afternoon long ago, somebody died. He didn't drown at the weir, but in
the shallow, safe stretch of canal that runs a short distance from the weir to
the lock, full of lily-pads and dragon-flies on the days of high summer, with
cool, oozy mud between the toes when you touch bottom. He died in a sluice just
above the lock gates, a small opening where the overflow from the canal surges
into the river below.
I quizzed my reluctant father repeatedly about it in my
teens: for a strong swimmer, nothing terrifies or inflames the imagination more
than the prospect of drowning, the horror of being stuck, thrashing, far below,
the silent, unheard screams for help. The boy was a younger brother of a chap
my father’s age, probably trying to impress with his daredevilry. His brother
and another older boy went in to look for him when he failed to surface. I
couldn't tell you if my father was there or not. Like many a wise swimmer, at a
guess I would say he avoided swimming in spots where there was an obvious
danger. One of the saddest things about drownings is that they always and
inevitably seem to find the weaker, the less experienced. Good swimmers, you
see, evaluate, assess, and ask questions before they venture in, out of healthy
respect for water and its power. There may have been a dare; my father always
seemed unaccountably angry about the whole thing, as if it should never have
happened. Nobody swims through a sluice gate and lives to tell the tale.
They must have laid him out on the rough concrete of the
sluice, cold from the river in the sun’s heat, ferried him back across the canal,
and carried him up the endless half-mile to the bridge. In those days, the early
days of the Second World War, there were few if any phones. Perhaps someone ran
for the doctor, from the dispensary in the village, just over the bridge. It
was to no avail.
Nobody swims at the weir, ever, though two generations have
passed. We swam as children above the bridge, at a shallow spot where my father
and his long-grown friends made steps for us out of concrete-filled sacks,
where there was a life-ring and finally life-saving classes in the hot summers
of my teens. Now that spot has fallen into disuse too, the river dredged for the
convenience of visiting barges and cabin cruisers.
Nobody swims at the weir, except my friend Seamus, now in
his seventies, perhaps too young to have first-hand memory of the tragedy. I
try to make my annual swimmer’s pilgrimage to the Barrow, though I head upriver
and swim down to the bridge. Of late I’ve grown too busy, and maybe too
cautious. This summer, the river was in spate most of the time, too dangerous
for any swimmer. When Seamus swims, it is in the slow deep, black river water
on the upper side of the weir, once or twice a summer even now, under the
watchful guardian eye of his wife. But never the canal.
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