The art of bathing

I was born a water baby and remain one still, albeit a 40 year old version with more hair and wrinkles in different places.

One of my earliest memories is of clinging onto the green and cream polyester straps of my mother’s 1970s swimming costume, porpoise like and blinking on her back as she pushed through the water with a hearty breast stroke. I loved it when she’d launch us from the edge of the pool, bow wave rippling around us and sending the splashing wake crashing over me. At some point I graduated to fluorescent orange arm bands. That they pinched my upper arms and rubbed the sides of my little girl chest was a small exchange for buoyancy. I was captivated by my floating and thrilled when allowed to venture into the forbidden deep end. The mass of the body of water bore me up and I kicked my legs, exalting in their dangling freedom at what seemed like miles above the bottom of the pool.

My father bought me a tiny snorkel and mask when he started learning to scuba dive in the mid-70s. I’d watch them training in the diving pit at the open air swimming baths, peering through the chlorine and trailing my hands through the stream of bubbles as their compressed air rose to the surface in search of its own freedom. My mother sat at the kitchen table throughout the endlessly long hot summer of 1976, patiently and nimbly gluing together the pieces of his wet suit ordered in kit form. I sat on my chair reading the Beano and watched her work, nose full of the heady smell of viscous neoprene gum. When my father died two years later, my mother passed his kit onto the diving club so we didn’t have to see the pale blue aqua lung he left behind in the conservatory. It was, in any event, too big for a nine year old.

Swimming lessons at school followed, full of obsession with rubber verruca socks and communal showers and the sticky feeling of scratchy uniform on not-quite-properly-dry skin. My black nylon costume gaped at the legs when on the beige tiled pool side and my long hair would never quite fit into the swimming cap the way that it did for the neater girls. But in the water I was at one, in my element, whilst they fussed with their hair clips and clung to the side.

Swimming club came next, twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I learnt how to breathe properly in front crawl, slowly perfecting the real time-and-motion that is uni-lateral or bi-lateral breathing in the heartbeat space created by your own wave rhythm. I bought a pair of black tinted goggles that made the water look like the Mediterranean does on postcards (minus the parasols) and my first Speedo costume with red white and blue stripes. My endurance grew with my body and at 13 I took on the local 10,000 metre record challenge. My mother threw me glucose sweets from the side as I ploughed up and down the lanes, abiding to the rules of not touching the sides to turn.

Around this time, a few of us started to be coached by Bill Ludgrove whose daughter had swum in the Olympics. I’d get off the school bus and run to my Gran’s house for tomato soup and crackers with cheese before returning to the pool. My already fair hair was bleached almost white by immersion in chlorine six days a week and the tips of my finger nails glowed. Bill was tough on us, made us swim a mile or more just for warm up, scold us for cruising or for resting. We became super fast and super strong, and we had a lot of fun. I was surprised, in spite of never having run before in my life or having any more exalted footwear than a pair of black plimsolls, that I came second in the cross country race at school.

My adolescence had been dawning for quite some time when I was asked if I wanted to learn how to be a lifeguard. It was a thrilling moment, a water baby’s rite of passage to the sophisticated world of rope coiling, chin towing and resuscitation techniques. I spent the three seasons from 1982 as a volunteer lifeguard on the beach at Sheerness, leaping onto my blue racing bicycle early on Saturday and Sunday mornings and peddling furiously down to the hut. We patrolled up and down the promenade, small groups of teenagers in the universal red and yellow uniform watching out for holidaymakers in trouble in the cold and dark sea. I rescued a boy once, grabbed his flailing arms where he’d been pushed in high spirits off the jetty and hauled him back up to the air.

My pale skin turned golden at being outside for all those months and had a constant salty sheen. Occasionally, the coast guards would come by for a cup of tea, drawing up on the promenade in their Land Rovers with the hugely powerful ribs towed behind. We lifeguards did a joint sea safety demonstration with them each summer. They’d scramble the bright yellow air-sea rescue helicopter for us, the pilot holding just above the water and whipping up the waves to hysteria with the down-draft from the rotors. Afterwards we’d sit on the steps outside the hut and eat burgers with fried onions and tomato sauce and listen to Relax on somebody’s radio.

But those long summer days couldn’t last and at 16 I started sixth form at a school some distance from home. Homework and records and friends and boys took the place of swimming club and I gradually drifted away like a renegade inflatable on an irresistible sea current. When my daughter was born a few years later I took her swimming at the Victoria baths in Portsmouth where I was a university student, enjoying our mother time in between lectures and nursery and library visits. The toddler would leap from the side into my arms, laughing and throwing her head back in delight as she crashed into the water.

I started learning to scuba dive about a year ago fired up with inspiration from the ‘try dives’ I’d had on my first visit to Egypt. Diving is as far removed from swimming as can be whilst still getting wet and my biggest challenge was learning how to slow down. Strapping on a pair of fins after all those years of pool training was like fixing an outboard motor to my legs and turning the throttle up to max. But diving is the art of slow personified and I try consciously to control my unconscious long-ago-learned speed. When it was time for my first open water dive in a lake last summer, my instructor was one of the founder members of the local diving club. I think he was quite lost for words when he realised that he’d also taken my father for his first open water dive more than three decades earlier.

I ran myself a bath this morning. It’s the first one I’ve had in nearly two months; I never felt quite at home enough during my stay back at the barn to do more than shower. I lay there in the perfectly hot water, eyes closed, just the tip of my nose poking up like a snorkel. The dog stuck his head over the side of the bath and snuffled up some bubbles that made him sneeze. I towelled off and readied myself for the day as the water glugged away down the plug hole. It was a very good feeling for a 40 year old water baby.