For longer than I can remember, I’ve been a swimmer. Not to any great competition standard, but a strong and confident swimmer, as at home in the water as on dry land. Legend has it that at 2 years old with bright orange armbands, likely as big as my (not insignificant) head, I paddled my way towards the deep end of the local swimming pool, terrifying my parents in the process, and giving the lifeguard some cause for concern. My parents, then in their mid-thirties, couldn’t swim, I can only hope the same cannot be said for the lifeguard.
From that day, we began our aquatic journey together as a family.
I began formal lessons which comprised I imagine, of little more than supervised play in very shallow water, whilst my parents, hugely disadvantaged by 30 plus years of not-swimming, learned to master the art of floating in water not much deeper.
I don’t remember too much more about the specifics of learning to swim, but I do remember it always being a part of my life. Lessons, distance challenges, some races as a child. On one occasion I even won a book as a prize, The Wombles at Work, by Elisabeth Beresford. I was 6 or 7 years old, and until recently, I was reading that very same book to my own children.
At around about the same time, I was developing a reckless streak to my personality. Whilst on holiday somewhere in Spain, I managed to persuade my dad (who could now swim) to allow me to leap from the top of a cliff into the sea. In the interests of ‘not passing his own fears on to me’, he considered the proposition, watched a few, significantly older children and adults jumping (and then resurfacing) before dutifully pedalling me across the bay to the foot of a rough, narrow scar pretending to be a path up the 50-foot (or so my father tells me) cliff. I do have a memory of the people at the top being very courteous and allowing me to jump the queue, which was probably for the best. The sooner I jumped off the cliff, the less likely I was to change my mind. The fear of the fall was now competing with the fear of disappointing the audience queuing behind me.
I watched as a girl mounted the shoulders of a boy in front of me before they leapt into the void, separating in mid-air, entering the water gracefully and swimming back to the cliff to climb once more for another go.
A pallet, cemented in place and slightly overhanging, served as a diving platform. As my parents watched from the beach, my mother incredulous at my father’s acquiescence to her 6-year-old-baby boy’s completely unreasonable wish, I approached the edge, somehow composed my myself and stepped out into thin air.
My stomach rushed up to meet my pounding heart, chasing the breath from my lungs as the wind in my ears roared its approval of the adventure. I like to think that I too entered the water gracefully, perhaps like a sea bird fishing, or a dolphin returning to the depths after turning a somersault in the air for the sheer joy of it. I probably more closely resembled a pink and somewhat gelatinous rock hurled blindly and without ceremony into the unknown, to land with a larger than average splash, and a noise to frighten all but the most immobile of sea creatures within a 100m radius. I don’t remember if I screamed or not.
However it looked, I emerged unscathed and swam proudly to the beach, a big man, having left the boy behind on top of the cliff. At least that’s how it must have felt.
Now I’m the father, and I can’t imagine (yet) allowing either of my children to jump off a cliff at 6 years old. That was a brave decision my own father took, and I’m sure it played a big role in my development, and not only as a swimmer. I hope that when the time comes, I’ll be able to ‘let go’ (following a comprehensive risk-assessment of course) of my ‘babies’ and watch them fly (perhaps more gracefully than I did) from a great height into deep blue water.
As I write this, they’re only 3 and 5 years old, and for now we’ve enjoyed a summer in the ‘pee-pee pool’ as we’ve affectionately named it. With no formal teaching, it’s been great to watch them develop their own confidence through play. As with learning languages, they’ve learned to float, dive and submerge themselves without realising it. My 5-year-old son is also addicted to the springboard and jumping off the harbour wall even with a 2 or 3 metre drop to the water.
I can feel that cliff looming larger by the day…
Stuart Westwood 