As young teenagers, my friends enjoyed a river swim in the River Chew in Compton Dando, south east of Bristol. On a hot summer’s day, we would cycle off into the countryside, arrive at the riverside, put on our trunks and swim. When I say ‘we’, I don’t include me. I would watch from the bank as the boys dive-bombed into the cooling waters, never once being tempted to join them. Safety was of no concern. I just didn’t like the idea of it. The tragic spate of deaths in British waters during the recent hot spell reminded me of those days half a century ago.
12 people have already died and now we learn that a search is underway for an eleven-year-old boy who went into the water yesterday in Mexborough. I have seen some online criticism of people going into the water and just how dangerous it can be and at first I felt the same way myself. Why are people going swimming and why are parents allowing their kids to do it, I wondered? But then again, I was young once. I was invincible. I was never going to die.
While I never went river swimming or any form of cold water swimming, I did things that were equally if not more dangerous and even more stupid, like walking through mainline railway tunnels, as trains brushed past. I once walked through a storm tunnel when a massive storm broke out. I climbed things that were not for climbing. I was an idiot. We’re all idiots sometimes.
I go back to my invincibility. Only older people died. Not me, not my friends. Not only would we live forever, we would be young forever. Schooldays would never end. Older people would work until they were old and yes, some of them would die off, but we never thought that we wouldn’t always be there.
Now, so many people, including young children, dying such awful deaths. I don’t even want to think about it because I have a habit of conjuring images in my mind, images that won’t go away and, worse still, turn up in my dreams. What I didn’t know when I was young was that young people died too.
I think of their families. The guilt parents will feel, that awful term ‘what if’. What if we hadn’t let them out? What if we had told them the dangers of, in this instance, river swimming? What if we had told them to spend their entire lives locked in their bedrooms, playing computer games? But with the latter, we are also saying to children that they should extricate themselves from their PlayStations and get out in the fresh air. Get some clean air in your lungs. So they go out cycling, river swimming, and then this happens.
It makes me glad that the hot spell is now over the time-being. And children will be back at school. Hopefully, we can use that time to educate our children and ourselves about what is safe and what isn’t. We can’t eliminate risk but we can act to minimise it. Want to go swimming? Then go to the local pool. It’s warm, it’s usually clean, there will be lifeguards. Mum and dad don’t need to be near you. Have a good time, be safe, see you later.
My generation had no clue that we weren’t indestructible. We know now and we owe to ourselves and subsequent generations that we can do so much better. Please, no more stories about 11-year-old boys drowning. It’s just too sad. And life is too precious.
