Growing up in suburbia, I never felt at home, anywhere, even when I lived there. There was no space for me it seemed. I shared this tiny house with 10 other people and none of them was like me. When autumn came around it was time to be sent off to a new school. I was 11 years old, and my brother took me there. The playground was like an internment camp, surrounded by chain-link fence. Patrolled by men in cassocks and dangling crucifixes.
Those big boys I would be forced to grow up with. It was a brutal process. Seeing them in the changing rooms of the municipal baths, sprouting dark hairs from the cracks in their bodies, a fearful image of what was to happen to me. I felt I was being forced into an unnatural world, into captivity.
I felt unnatural myself, as if my dreams were being taken away. As if there was no space for my puny body. I never wanted to fit in. I wanted to decay, away with the rest of the year, that was dying and being reborn. Even now autumn has that visceral effect on me, on my memory. The way that the turning seasons take us back to places that made us happy or unhappy.
The new school excited and terrified me, and put me in the fear of God. The smell of the rooms, the mud on the tiled floor. The sodden green football pitches where I was expected to perform. What was required of me to be a boy, no longer a child. I had to choose who I was and what I wanted to be.
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I felt I was on trial in that public pool, with its substrata of fallen sticking-plasters and dead hair floating on the bottom and its mocking turquoise blue titles. It bore no relation to the glory of Jacques Cousteau and his undersea world, his neoprene divers riding on the backs of whales on TV. Instead, I peered with terror at the clever-clever boys through the port hole observation windows, showing off, pressing their arses to the glass.
It was all the more ironic, this phobia, since I was born within the sound and smell of the sea, in a port city on the English south coast. I think that’s why the water terrified me even more. Its depth, its unknownness, so close. It haunted me, that great grey volume down there, as if it could fetch me away from my bed.
I didn’t even like taking a bath. When my mother told me about the big Victorian tub in the house in which she grew up, along the side of which her father, my grandfather, had painted a great big spouting whale, that just made the whole thing worse. As if some kraken tentacle might squirm its way up the plug hole and drag me back down.
I was an over-imaginative child, as you can see.
***
Twenty years later, I was living in London, in the darkness of the unreconstructed East End. I was on the dole, no prospects except that of writer, and that wasn’t going so well.
I was in my thirtysomething years and still I couldn’t swim. I felt inept and stupid at my fear, and to conquer it, I took to going to the local pool on a weekday afternoon.
It was down the backstreets of my Hackney exile, a place frequented by Krays and the Elephant Man, at least, in my head. The building was a temple to the healthy power of water. A terracotta entrance to the Edwardian baths, with elegant lettering over the two entrances, MEN and WOMEN, as if you had to make a choice there and then.
Inside the pool echoed with voices and chlorine. Its roof like the belly of the whale that swallowed Jonah (and did its best with Captain Ahab). It felt like the inner city turned inside out, only waiting to disgorge me, another sinner, another orphan, into its tepid waters.
As I stepped through the foot-bath and the shower, I thought of the tiled tunnels under the Thames, which might burst open with the weight of the river, and all the lost rivers running under the belly of the city, eviscerated with bombs. And I thought of the dolphinarium in a Soho cellar I’d read about, where a pair of bottlenose dolphins cavorted with “mermaids” in bikinis.
And I thought of Virginia Woolf hurrying by, in her coat and hat, describing the Underground as a tidal system, flooded with the waves of people. As if London floated on itself. Perhaps she was thinking of her lover, Vita Sackville-West, whom she nicknamed “my porpoise”.
But it was here, in this dark old pool, undeluxe and utilitarian, almost underground itself, that I found my saviour at last.
She swam in wearing a boned swimming costume, gliding easefully up and down, her body reflected on the tiles below. She was freer than those dolphins, with her boned waist, her grey hair caught in a rubber cap with daisies on it.
This Esther Williams of E8 came to my aid. She saw me struggling, my straining for aquatic grace. She took me under her water wings. She taught me to break the water’s surface, its amniotic skin – a caul, like the one David Copperfield was born with, to be kept as a charm against being drowned.
And so I was reborn, almost keelhauled in that pool. Stretch, stretch your arms, she said, arching hers over her head as her voice echoed off the tiles. She was in her 80s; as old as the pool itself. Perhaps she came first; perhaps she was already swimming here, this water spirit, waiting for me to come along, here before the Romans, the Saxons and the Celts: a river goddess, herself.
I bless that woman every day. That which had been torture and abasement, another reason to be cursed for my 8½-stone weakness, now became the mechanism of liberation. I was physically, psychically regenerated. I came out as a watery organism, as she taught my ungainly body to unfurl.
***
Ten years later I left London, with a broken heart, and I returned to the south coast, partly to look after my mother, who was now ailing, I took to the open water that had once so scared me. I began to swim every day, right through the winter. Then I took to swimming at night, as if to dare myself.
I realised that it is impossible to be sad in the sea. Everyone is beautiful in there, as the emcee from Cabaret says – for all that each swim is an intimation of mortality, a little death.
It’s not a fashion or a sport for me. The only Wilde swimmer I acknowledge is St Oscar, swimming in Dublin Bay, watching good Catholic boys wearing their rosaries round their necks as they took their dips as their own charms against disaster.
Now my diary is determined by the tides, the twice-daily seasons of the sea. Ask me for a meeting? I check the tide table first. Is it cold? people ask as they pass. A wittier one says, haven’t you got a fridge at home?
I’m only a mile or two from a huge container port, but I’m immersed in the natural world. The animals that change, too, with the season. Soon the failing light will bring back the brent geese from Siberia, a little bit of the Arctic in the sky, their own charcoal and grey constellation.
The water is at its warmest now, in these dying, reviving months. At 3am, I imagine meeting my younger self coming back from a nightclub, as the older me makes for the darkness of the sea.
But I’m not always on my own. This past weekend me and my young friends, Lilian (13) and Freddie (10), went blackberrying. We all agreed we’d never seen such a crop. I thought of Seamus Heaney’s happy-melancholy poem, “You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet/Like thickened wine...” Then, since their dad has brought them up to be water babies, we swam in the mile-high sea, made suddenly turbulent by Storm Lilian – much to her amusement.
***
This morning, the sea rose as high as the sky, a riot of stars. I felt the first real chill in the air as he arises: Orion flying over the horizon, out of the east, a great big beast of a bloke. John Berger looked in the skies and said that was where all stories began.
Even on a cloudy night, there are plenty more stars in the sea – the bioluminescent dinoflagellates that spark at my fingertips, coalescing like galaxies around me. And as I swim, I know there are boats out there, in the darkness, not far from this shore where I swim, overloaded with people who are just like you and me.
The oncoming darkness and brightness of the season represents our freedom, always returning, like every autumn: the constancy of change, the hope for restoration, the prospect of recreation. I guess we’re all treading water, all of the time. But there’s no time to waste. So I take off all my clothes and swim again, and forget about the fridge back home.
The Leviathan author Philip Hoare will give a talk on Sunday, September 15th as part of The Shaking Bog festival, Glencree Valley, Co Wicklow, September 14th-15th
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