92. Water baby

A girl who has never swum a stroke.

Rebecca Holden

Aug 26, 2023

This post is part of my ‘Art & Treasures’ series, in which I am honouring some of my past treasures in words and pictures. I hope that in time my altered-book art journal – a homage to precious things and even more precious memories – will become something for me to treasure in its own right.

Dear Reader,

It struck me with alarm last week that I hadn’t yet been in the sea this year.

We’ve been to the seaside a lot – in fact my Art & treasures post last month even featured the stones at one of our local beaches – but until recently, in 2023 our beach walks had been restricted mostly to blustery days, or wintry woolly-hat weather.

In fact this year I hadn’t been for a dip anywhere: despite Covid restrictions having been lifted an age ago, the thought of braving a public pool hasn’t been one I’ve wanted to engage with.

As a child I used to enjoy swimming. Well, sometimes I did, like when I would splash around in the shallow end with my parents and brother, both of us wearing blow-up orange armbands. I remember a lifeguard blowing his whistle at me when I found myself out of my depth towards the middle of the pool: away from the shallow end, armbands were forbidden. Reader, I cried for the rest of the day, but it still took me a while – years – to ditch those armbands.

man with toddler girl in swimming pool — This is the style of armbands I used to wear for swimming. Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

In due course of time, aged around 8 or 9, I was enrolled for swimming lessons at our local pool. A year older than me, my brother was in the next group up, but those of us with smaller stature were confined to the separate, smaller, baby pool with our instructor. A long wall of glass separated our training ground from the reception area, and I’ll never forget seeing two classmates from school queuing to get in for a swim in the leisure pool. I hoped they wouldn’t see me, but they did. Thank you, Justin and Charles, for pointing and laughing, and for teasing me mercilessly at school the next day. 😡

Later, at secondary school, our class would travel to a neighbouring town in a minibus every third Wednesday afternoon, where we’d spend our time in a 25m pool learning not very much.

Reader, I hated it. I hated the communal changing room, the pool session itself and the fact that most of my classmates would spend their 10p returnable locker fee on smelly, noisy-to-eat tomato-flavoured Wheat Crunchies from the vending machine which would be eaten out of their even noisier packets on the minibus all the way back to school.

One day our PE teacher – an unsympathetic woman with little aptitude for teaching and an undisguised dislike for children – announced that we were to be assessed in order to attain a swimming badge.

I was put in the group to swim a hundred metres.

I gulped as I looked at one of my friends. ‘That’s four lengths!’ I whispered. ‘There and back TWICE!’

Still, I set about my task, and made slow but steady headway in my first length of the pool. I knew I couldn’t stop: touching either the side of the pool with my hand, or touching the bottom with my feet, would result in disqualification, and I wanted to win that badge.

I ploughed on, aware that I was getting slower, not faster. In other lanes of the pool, those friends of mine born with gills and scales – how come everyone else could swim? – achieved their 100m, 200m and, in one impressive case, 400m – and were in short time already levering themselves out of the pool to shake themselves off.

I was going to be last out. With any luck they would all have eaten their Wheat Crunchies by the time I’d got changed.

Out of the pool, dripping, beetroot-red and breathless, I staggered towards the teacher.

‘I did it!’ I told her with pride.
‘Nope.’
‘Pardon?’
‘You needed to swim a stroke for a hundred metres. All you did was doggy-paddle.’

Yes. For over half an hour, during which she could have told me that what I was doing wouldn’t count. Or better still, she could have spent that time teaching me how to swim.

🙄

Those embarrassing swimming lessons in the baby pool, those sessions at school in which we’d simply been left to get on with it, and then blindsided with an assessment that some of us – that I – had no hope of passing, had all left me unable to swim a stroke.

But it’s not that I can’t swim. Those who say they can’t sing a note but are perfectly able to belt out not-quite-on-it tunes along with the kitchen radio, or blasting out of the stereo speakers in the car, can sing. They are singing.

That’s like me and swimming. I’ll have a go at propelling myself through the water by whatever hapless means I have available, and Reader, I don’t sink. Heck, I even enjoy it!

Soon after I’d turned 40 I joined the local gym, and keen to build up my fitness in an effort to rebrand myself as a runner1 I found myself in the pool every weekday morning when the gym opened at 6am.

In not too much time at all I found that ten lengths of a 20m pool in a session had become twenty, and one morning months later I couldn’t believe it when I’d swum fifty.

‘Swum’ is perhaps a little strong. I’d got into a little routine: I’d doggy-paddle northbound, and then do a form of backstroke of my own invention southbound. I’d glide away from the pool end with a big push, kick my legs from the knees, my body lying very flat in the water, eyes looking straight up, and with my arms by my sides I’d flutter my hands in a kind of sculling motion.

Over time I’d got to know my fellow pool users. One would use an abacus to count her lengths, pausing momentarily at the end of every other length to slide her next bead along. Another was a chap I knew only as ‘Splashy’, who would hog the centre lane as he powered strongly up and down, his wash threatening to engulf me as I paddled doggedly in one of the outside lanes, his waves bouncing off the pool wall and sideways into my face.

Then there was the very friendly lady with a beautiful freestyle stroke, who outside of the pool would eschew the use – or even presence – of either swimming costume or towel between the shower and the changing room, and would always stop for a chat if she passed anyone on her way between the two. I admired her self-confidence, but found it hard to know where (not) to look. 🫣

Reader, it takes all sorts.

One day at the end of one of my northbound lengths I spotted a chap I’d never seen before looking down at me from the end of the pool and laughing. As I briefly repositioned myself for my length of bespoke backstroke I noticed that he was actually pointing at me. Pushing off the end of the pool with my feet I gave him my smiliest smile.

Ha, that shut him up. I’m sad to say that I never saw him again. I can only think that he’d perhaps thought I was someone he knew who was having a laugh by swimming deliberately badly in his presence in order to get his attention? It bothered me rather less than it might have, but I was a little shaken by his behaviour nevertheless.

I’d told my parents about my new gym habit, and, years since I’d last been in a pool with either of them, one day they joined me for a swim. In a short break from ploughing up and down I swam over to Dad, who was leaning against the side. He was smiling that very fond Dad-like smile which to those with a Dad as lovely as mine will no doubt sound familiar.

‘What?’ I asked him. ‘What are you smiling like that for?’
The smile remained, and was accompanied by a shake of his head, and then a giggle. ‘Well’, he said, ‘I was just thinking about how you always used to swim when you were little.’
‘And?’
‘You still swim exactly the same way.’
He paused.
‘And it’s lovely.’

I’ve always lived just a short drive away from the sea, and with relations living a stone’s throw from salty Sussex shingle we would generally find ourselves on the beach for part of every visit.

I have early memories of taking my shoes and socks off to paddle my feet in the surf, and if certain conditions were met – that it was either before lunch or at least an hour after; the tide was coming in, not going out, and that we didn’t go beyond the point where Dad was standing in the waves – we’d swim.

Well, my brother would swim: he could do front crawl2, back crawl3 and breaststroke. I’d just doggy-paddle, clawing my hands downwards in turn in front of me as I kicked my legs behind.

And that’s exactly what I did last Sunday and Monday, during my first dips in the sea for 2023.

Mixed media artwork of a swimmer's eye view of Seaford beach by Rebecca

Nobody pointed or laughed. If they had, I’d’ve offered them that smiliest smile of mine.

Because Reader, I can swim. I proved it to myself – and to anyone else who might have been looking – on Wednesday evening, when we took the van down to Seaford beach for a dip before an onboard supper watching the sunset.

The tide was high but on its way out, and the beach was full of people. Families sat around on the shingle enjoying a last opportunity to spend lazy time together now that back-to-school September is in their sights. Two were angling from a steep part of the beach, those around them taking care not to get tangled up in lines and hooks. Paddleboarders were enjoying the calm, and with the water as still as a cup of tea nobody even fell in. There were other swimmers, too: as I briefly bobbed around in my clumsy transition from doggy-paddle to backstroke a man in a wetsuit – a seal in human form – sleeked past me, his splashless and understated freestyle compellingly effective as he powered through the water.

I watched him with interest rather than envy. Because I’m a water baby too, even though I can’t swim a stroke.

Dad was right. The water’s lovely.

Love,

Rebecca