Lewis Pobjoy

My karate journey started when I was five years old, a pale ginger boy whose mother wanted to be sure he could handle himself. She enrolled me at Sensei Steve Bell’s Sankukai karate dojo at Brooksward School in Neath Hill. The club later moved across to the stables at Downs Barn.

Sankukai is quite different to traditional Shotokan: grabs and takedowns throughout, an enormous amount of kata, and movement full of spins, jumps and changes of level.

I remember Sensei Bell as a really tall man with a beard and a really cool motorbike. Once I was old enough I would cycle to the dojo at Downs Barn and watch him practise, or train with the other Dan grades, working with bo staff and katana before my lesson started. Among the kata he taught me was Bassai Dai.

I graded steadily and reached 1st kyu. I was keen to take my black belt. Then I became a teenager, and other interests took over.

I always meant to go back. The time was never right, I never quite knew where to go, and thirty years passed. When I found out Sensei Bell had died I was filled with sadness and something like regret. I had unfinished business with karate.

When my eldest son turned five, the age I had been when I started, the timing finally made itself obvious. I did not look for the nearest club. Instead I looked for the people who had trained with Steve, found a post by Renshi Kidby, emailed him, and started the following week. I came back as a beginner, which was the right way to do it: a different style, and three decades since I had last worn a gi. What surprised me was how much of it was still in there. I trained through Covid, and when my sons were old enough they joined me. We train together now.

I graded to Shodan in October 2025. I dedicate it to my late Sensei Steve Bell, and to Sensei Pam and Sensei Simon McMahon.

Karateka often talk about the fear of missing a single session. My experience points the other way. Life interferes with training — mine for three decades — and what matters is not perfect attendance but the willingness to practice and come back. Sensei Bell took me to 1st kyu; Renshi Kidby and the McMahons took me over the line thirty years later.

Which brings me back to Bassai Dai. I would have told you I had forgotten it completely, and I hadn’t. It is my kata now, and I won a kata competition performing it. The name means to storm a fortress, and the kata is built that way. When I perform it I am the warrior working his way through the castle. It still gives me goosebumps.

I am better at karate now than I was as a teenager, and not because my body is better. It is because I care about what I am doing — I think about why a movement is shaped the way it is, and where it came from. Practise, or lose it. I have lost it once already, and I do not intend to again.