“Mother, may I go to swim?”
“Yes, my darling daughter,”
Fold your clothes upon the shore
And don’t go near the water.”
It’s June – and technically, summer. Despite an overcast sky it’s warm enough to unbutton my cardigan. I’m in a traffic tailback with ample opportunity to observe Saturday carloads of happy families heading into Donegal or the causeway coast for a day by the sea.
What possesses people to rush like lemmings to ‘the beach’, which, in Norn Iron is a treacherous stretch of damp sand pocked with stones, broken seashells, slimy seaweed, sand flies, nameless hazards left behind by pets and careless public – all washed by ice-cold waves and dried by a grit-laden wind? Scenically stunning I grant you, but best appreciated at a distance from the interior of a car. “Open the window! Inhale the ozone!” encourage enthusiasts. Nonsense. The sea smells of wet knickers.
I recognised young the pointlessness of building sandcastles and collecting shells which stank all the way home. I recall the hollow terror as a receding wave sucked the sand from under my feet and pulled me outwards, as if the sea was trying to steal me and the teeth-chattering towelling like a rubdown with sandpaper. As a child I enjoyed none of it, not even the picnic. I’ve had an aversion to fig rolls ever since.
However unsavoury the beach, every bit as grim was the swimming pool. Our school in its wisdom deemed we fourth-formers could be spared the academic grind for the ‘fun’ of learning to swim at the city baths. Nine weekly lessons, attendance non-negotiable, in the depths of winter. Imagine a gaggle of teen girls screeching like wet hens in mock modesty in dilapidated rank-smelling cubicles, stuffing our hair into unflattering swim caps, running through a trough of disinfectant to the 3’6” end and lowering ourselves gingerly into the freezing, heavily-chlorinated water. I clung like a limpet to the rail while a bored attendant distributed floats.
My superior reasoning reckoned a polystyrene square the size of a biscuit tin lid was not sufficiently buoyant to keep me afloat, so, while others confidently pushed off, dog-paddling furiously, I kept one toe glued to the bottom as an insurance policy. Over nine lessons of undiluted misery I failed even to put my head underwater, let alone make any headway. The aftermath was even worse. We sat shivering all day in class reeking of chlorine with wet hair. What a relief to grow up and never dip a toe in anything deeper than a bath.
Water – salt or chemically treated, played no further part in my life until we had the baby and joined (by default) a group of contemporaries with young children, who not only believed in away days to the beach, but hired houses by the sea for whole summers. Rather than deprive Daughter Dear of infant companionship, we concurred. “Has she ever been in the water?” asked one friend. “No,” I said. She carried her to the water’s edge where curly wavelets lapped. As she lowered her towards the water, Daughter Dear smartly retracted her undercarriage, screaming “Dirty! Dirty!”
“That’s my girl!” I thought.
By seven, the Loving Spouse thought it his duty to teach her how to swim. Sunday afternoons saw us in a new pool complex with a wave machine. The smell though was exactly the same. Father and daughter took to the water. I sat behind the spread pages of the Sunday Times trying not to inhale. When the wave machine came on, the water rose in stomach-churning breakers, I had to shut my eyes and try to forget the Larne/Stranraer ferry on a November night when I wrote a rough copy of my will on the back of an envelope.
Oh – I neglected to mention – a new survey reveals that one in three of us stay out of the water.
I am not alone…
