The Clean-Up King - Part 4

The city people, though, were just too busy to pay any attention to two small children and their fanciful ideas. Theirs was a city full of enterprise, endeavour, efficiency and urgency. A city where targets were met and commitments honooured. Trains ran to time, buses traveled at twelve minute intervals precisely three miles apart, repairers and deliverers told you when they would arrive and then did so.

The city people were so sure of themselves and their effective, economic, enterprising city that they decided to become completely self sufficient. They decided to build a wall around their city. Not an ordinary wall with gates, windows and doors. No, there were to be no comings or goings through this wall. It was designed to keep the outside, outside.

Outside was what the city people feared. Outside was wildness - exuberant, lavish growth – where life went on with no apparent purpose and to no apparent order. Birds flew where they wished, wild flowers and grasses seeded and grew in every nook and cranny, and the weather – well, there was no controlling the weather!

So the city people built their wall. They built it thick and they built it high. They built it so that it cast the whole city into shadow, so that they could not feel the breath of the breeze on their faces, so that birds, animals, insects and plants were excluded. What they planned for was complete control. So they walked on concrete, worked in artificial light and mass produced their food.

The two children were saddened by the building of the wall. They asked the Clean-Up King about it but he just talked about the storm before the calm. It didn’t seem quite right and wasn’t very encouraging. They had been used to making the long journey to the edge of the great city. They had loved to lie in the long grass feeling the heat of the sun and the vibration of the crickets around them. They had climbed gnarled, knobbled trees bent with age and swum in the sparkling, bubbling, racing waters. It had helped them think about the other beautiful country.

Now all of these pleasures were denied them. All they could see were the grey tones of prefabrication and concrete. The city people, however, were proud of the independence they had created. Their pleasure came from meeting all their own needs by the creation of their own hands and they could see no drawbacks to the isolation in which they were living.