Take Me To The River

Back to 'the dirty river' with the wean (after we'd finished some of his homework). My main reason for coming back was not the river but my old home at number 16. I had made an arrangement with the new owner, whom I met on the previous visit, concerning a fragment of my past, a kind of cornerstone, which he was happy enough to let me take. Only problem is its size. My cousin Niall obligingly came and had a look. We decided to leave it till he can get hold of a trailer. I'll go into more details when the job is done, hopefully in a week or two.

Meanwhile the wean had sat in the car outside the gate with his iPad. When I got back to him I offered to keep my promise and take him to the river again. He was keen to cross the river, forge the brambles... explore. Niall was great with him, far less fussy and cautious than I am, being too conscious of the muddiness of the bank, the wetness of the river, etc.. The wean is not physically gregarious, even less so than I was as a child (and I was someone who hated rugby or the long walks they used to take us on at Ring College in Waterford). But Niall got down and dirty with him, encouraging him across the slippery stepping stone, and even onto the precarious looking hurly-stick-swing, which was too close to the bank to swing out very far. He managed to get both legs around the rope and sat on it, even swung out a little, but mostly just sat, dangling there for a few elongated seconds like an almost stalled pendulum.

The place is as dank, ivied and bramble-encrypted as it was when I was a boy, nearly a half century ago. But I can see why a child would find it enchanting. It's one of those lucky green strips of land no one can do anything with, being wedged between a suburban road and what's left of the old walls of John of God's asylum. We used to climb the thick ropes of ivy draped on the crumbling stones and peer into the sedate, boringly peaceful grounds. From where I lived across the road, the building loomed, Victorian and forbidding, with barred windows. I once saw a man escape through one of those windows, and (thinking about another inmate, a friend of mine, Graham) I wrote a poem about it, published in my last collection, Fade Street:

Outside, In
for Graham

Across the road, tall chestnuts framed
a taller building (white-barred windows) –

a wing of Saint John of God’s: nervous
breakdowns, schizophrenics, depressives –

the man I watched, from our front door,
slowly climb through two bent bars

in one of the lower windows, to stand
in his rumpled suit on an outhouse roof.

An interval, some breath to draw
on his makeshift patio, before

two bare-armed men in tunics made
the same entrance and carefully,

very carefully, persuaded him
to climb back in. Decades later,

a gentle, candid friend (who had done
time there more than once) told me

how it feels to discover your door
lacks a handle.

The barred windows are gone but the hospital is still there, enlarged and modernised of course, with extended new wings. After we'd gone as far as we could till brambles terminated our little adventure, before edging back along the nearer bank with Niall and the wean, I glanced up and saw the streetlights coming on in the car park on the other side, and a figure in one of the windows, presumably a nurse. If she'd glanced out and stared hard enough into the twilit, chaotic undergrowth, she'd have seen a boy and two men, one tilting a camera at that slice of orderly architecture, the apparent future.