I was watching a crocodile of screeching, happy
schoolchildren the other day, being led by a harassed teacher, somewhat
reluctantly, I thought, towards the swimming-pond in the south of the
town. It took me back to my own
schooldays and my own less than remarkable experiences in the science of
swimming. I have to say right here and
now that I am not aquatic. I do not like
water. I give swimming pools a wide
berth. I hate the combined taste of
chlorine and urine. I got my length
certificate 50-odd years ago, but only because the examiner felt sorry for me
after I came up for the third time.
It’s
not attractive, being unable to swim.
Instead of gliding through the water like a streamlined shark out
looking for its next left leg, I resemble an elderly dugong ploughing through molten
tarmac. I suppose I’ve been cloistered, rarely going abroad to swim in the
pools adjacent to four-star hotels and watching Germans, who have laid down
their duschtuchs on their sunbeds at
six in the morning, gracefully streaking through the water.
I am ignorant about swimming. I do not know how to do the butterfly stroke,
the breast stroke, or the backstroke. I
could at one time manage a front crawl so laboured it was as if my feet were
tied together. It’s not that I have a
longing to be able to swim, either.
Anyone who is mad enough to plunge into the North Sea, even in the
middle of summer, invariably comes out covered in goosebumps and shivering like
an aspen, whilst declaring through gritted teeth that a cold plunge is the
finest thing since the invention of the radial tyre.
A friend of mine, a man who is magnetically
close to seventy years old, regularly goes down to the local baths and swims
for a mile, or eighty lengths of the pool.
After that, although he tells no-one, he staggers home and lies down for
two days.
One rule I never managed to apply was to keep my nose and mouth out
of the water. I would chug along for a
few yards in the manner of that old Clyde puffer, the Vital Spark, and then I would start to drown. That’s why I never
ventured out of the shallow end. A
scarecrow could make a better fist of swimming than me.
I was always succinct, though. When my school chums said ‘We’re going to the
baths, coming?’ I would tell them I had chilblains, veruccas or measles,
depending upon who I was talking to at the time. I was tongue-tied enough with the girls, but
when they suggested I was a coward for not going swimming, I would turn a
peculiar shade of vermilion and stammer that it was against my religion. They would wave airily to me as they got off
the number 13 bus with their towels and costumes under their arms en route to the baths, whilst I got off
at the next stop, the library.
All of
the other chaps in my class were of a particularly wiry build, presumably
having been brought up on National Dried Milk and Delrosa rosehip syrup, and
they were quite happy to show off their pectorals to the giggling girls as they
all splashed about in the pool. I, on
the other hand, was of a rather more portly disposition, and was reluctant to
disport myself in such a manner. This
failure to swim was a social failure too, for many more friendships were
developed in the pool than by setting up stumps in a cricket net and, quite
alone, bowling at a handkerchief strategically placed eight feet in front of
the non-existent batsman’s crease for hours on end.
Is it too late to learn? Certainly. I would need to wear an oxygen bottle on my
back these days, just like a deep-sea diver.
