Approaching Bank Hole

This was actually taken yesterday heading out to the location of yesterday's blip. Today was taken up with meetings with the OT and the bank etc. before heading home. I had a bit of a 'lightbulb' moment talking to the OT this morning ... it made me realise in a rather prosaic way how words/meanings create and limit function. We were discussing our recent trials accessing the appropriate services for current needs and how interpretations of all of this takes you down different avenues. This OT is a social worker OT, the other was a 'reablement' OT (SWOT and ROT) - the differences in the 2 have led to very different interpretations of circumstances and of words, such as 'reablement' and 'palliative' and the different outcomes that can come about as a result ... and the need to see the bigger picture and the frustrations that can occur with a 'getting better' model (not that either one should necessarily preclude 'getting better', but that is also a matter of interpretation and understanding of what 'getting better' means in different contexts - there is a sense in which palliative care could begin at birth ... now there's a thought).

The tide is running out fast and the ferry is approaching a groyne and a deep part of the creek known as Bank Hole. As I was growing up I was always rather frightened of it and knew it as Dead Man's .... but only ever knew half stories about it and much was in my imagination. Strangely, in the light of the following poem, I always imagined an underwater whirlpool and being dragged down to some kind of underworld (... a sensitive child with an overactive imagination...). So,  I was fascinated to discover another of Kevin Crossley-Holland's poems, also part of his Moored Man cycle. Apparently the bodies of 2 dead soldiers were found in Bank Hole towards the end of World War 2 and there is no accurate account of who they were or how they died.

Quite - Kevin Crossley-Holland

No one knows.
 
Or, rather, everyone knows
but each tells a quite different tale.
 
Moored Man listens.
He sleeps with one eye open,
gauzy with death-mist.
He who hears the artillery
of popping bubbles, beetles tap-dancing
and the shooting scooters,
listens.
 
They were home on leave.
They were Home Guards.
Foreigners.
They were Germans.
 
Both men were wearing identical uniforms.
At Bank Hole, beside the groyne,
they stripped, or did not strip
but the sea stripped them, naked.
 
It's a day's dive to the bottom.
Diz with her webbed fingers and webbed feet
Is the only one who ever touched it,
Unless they touched it.
When the whirlpool dragged them down.
 
What of their stigmata?
Snagged, gashed on a spar's nails.
No! Drowned men split and tear.
No! They clawed each other.
 
Moored Man listens
until they are quite finished.
 
All everyone agrees
is both men were found floating,
they were lolling
side by side, moon-faces up.