A Boy in the Water

by Tom Gregory

  A fish! A large fish, larger than any I had seen before, lurked behind a submerged rock in midstream. He (if it was a he) must have seen me as I floated past on the current a few feet above him. He was elegant and required barely any movement of his body to hold station. He faced upstream, in the lesser flow of water that was eddying invisibly in the lee of the rock. His olive-green back was freckled with small dark dots. His beady eyes looked straight ahead.

  I knew that all animals were of a type, a breed, like Flossie who was a mongrel according to Dad, but a ‘cross-breed’ according to Anna. I wondered what type of fish he was. Probably just a ‘large spotty’ one. With my stronger right arm I turned myself into the flow and kicked down towards him, arms out in front. He was away in a flash, upstream through the current. I gave chase, swimming hard against the flow, but lost sight of him quickly. I wondered how he could get so far upstream, and so far uphill from the lake. Why would he want to? Windermere was the nicest place to swim in the world; no chlorine, and with more space than any fish or boy could need. As I floated and swam, I realized that I was back in a place that I loved.

  The rasping sound of the outer-tent zip being pulled slowly upwards broke the dawn silence. Nothing else sounded like it. It roused me from my half sleep and I glanced slowly and nervously around the boys’ tent. John’s sleeping bag was empty. It lay on the other side of another vacant sleeping bag, which belonged to Tetley. Then there was me. I was no longer at the end of the line. In fact, I slept just two places along from John, which, a promotion of sorts, brought its own sense of achievement. John was yet to enter the inner tent to select his target. I lay flat to avoid attention. I was nine and three-quarters and, despite all the improvements to my swimming in the last year, I had no desire at all to be sent on a solo attempt in the lake.

  There were two entrances to the inner tent. The one furthest away from me was gently unzipped – a different sound, like a buzzing fly on account of the smaller zip. In his sharp stage whisper John ordered Bear to get up. There was no response and so John’s chubby hand appeared through the gap and tugged hard at the foot of Bear’s sleeping bag.

  ‘Bear! Fuckin’ get up.’ Bear groaned. I exhaled as the knot in my stomach began to untie itself, the tension becoming unbridled relief. As Bear slid out to get himself changed, the heads of my fellow sleepers began to rise up, one by one, grinning in silence at one another. I had not been the only one awake after all.

  It was a beautiful day. Our swimming spot at Belle Isle was bathed in hot sunshine and towels were laid on the grass for us to sunbathe between swims. Anna had done this year’s mix tape, which played a happy sequence of songs.

  Giant and I (Lee was his real name, but he was short for his age) were searching the CB channels, calling out onto the airwaves to start a conversation with yet undiscovered fellow enthusiasts. I had decided my handle was Top Cat, in homage to my favourite cartoon character. Giant stuck with Giant, but prefaced it with ‘The’ to impart gravitas. Sound thinking, given that anyone who replied was unlikely to meet him in the flesh.

  Dennis and Cynthia sat in deckchairs under a nearby sycamore tree on the shoreline. Dennis had his transistor radio with him; partly to escape the barrage of a ninety minute repeating cycle of pop music, and partly because there was a Royal Wedding on. Prince Andrew was marrying Sarah Ferguson. People seemed less fussed about this wedding compared to his older brother’s. ‘It won’t last,’ Cynthia observed from under her tree.

  There was no answer on the CB, so Giant and I went to the water’s edge to throw stones. We sat around the bus, ate hot soup from the portable stove, and made jam sandwiches on the fat white bread. We waited for Bear’s arrival at the halfway rendezvous. We would swim out and see him on the tiny island in the normal way.

  The boat came ashore before we had a chance to react, but not at the island rendezvous. John had been calling on the CB but Giant and I had left it on the wrong channel, so the call went unheard. It was rowed in hard on two sets of oars, directly in front of where the bus was parked on the shore. Bear, wrapped up in layers of heavy clothing, had swum well but was pulled out at the 4.5 mile point with cramp. John and Tetley had rowed him quickly to Belle Isle, probably just over a mile further north. He wasn’t cold and looked cheery enough. I felt sorry for him that the swim was abandoned as I now knew that cramp could often just be a case of bad luck.

  ‘Tefal,’ ordered John from the boat, ‘get your kit on.’

  I felt nauseous. This was it. I looked around at the others, hoping for support. The faces looked back in sympathy. Anna gave me an encouraging smile. I walked off from the group to be on my own. Perhaps John knew it was me who’d left the CB on the wrong channel and this was my punishment. I half hid behind a tree to change into my wet trunks, and tried to process what was happening. John had probably decided that I was to swim the northern section, some 4.5 miles to Ambleside. My first proper solo attempt had arrived, yet nothing else was said – no instructions, no ‘good luck’, or hint that there was even a choice to be made. A minute or two later I stood nervously in the shallows, shaking my arms, waiting. New supplies were loaded onto the boat as I adjusted my goggles. ‘OK, Tefal. When you’re ready!’ shouted John, now afloat some 20 metres offshore.

  I walked in as I always did, with purpose, my heart racing. Just before the depth where I normally launched forwards and dived into deeper water, I glanced back and paused. The group were standing in a tight huddle now, looking on with a collective air of concern. Breaking the silence they began to call out words of encouragement, and so changed the mood … ‘Go, Tefal!’ ‘You can do it, Tefal!’ ‘See you in Ambleside, Tefal!’ There had been no time to fully process the challenge that lay ahead, but as my friends cheered and waved my heart filled with something that felt like courage and so I dived for the boat in front of me. My best, fastest front crawl, powered by a surge of adrenaline, meant I was upon it within a few strokes. The boat turned gently northwards, towards the large, mountain-lined expanse of the lake that lay beyond Belle Isle, and I turned with it. Tetley, bare-chested and wearing sunglasses, was on the oars, dabbing them rhythmically to achieve a pace I could manage. The blue and white flags were raised. John sat on the back bench under the blue and white bobble hat, despite the sunshine. He studied me, and in the brief moment where I could see him on each breath I took, I studied him back. We were away.

  They had to haul me into the rowing boat without it tipping over. The boat was already unstable and at least a mile off Ambleside, in the widest, wildest part of the lake. A summer wind had blown in, accelerating through the mountains, funnelling its way through the Langdale valley, and Lake Windermere had become an entirely different place. For the first time as far as swimming was concerned, I was scared. During the momentary eye contact I had with the crew I looked for a sign of understanding as the conditions began to overwhelm me. The choppy waves were becoming too hard to swim through. My arms were hitting water when they should have been reaching forwards through the air. My stomach was full from gulping in mouthfuls of the lake when trying to breathe; I wondered if it made me less buoyant. I spluttered every few strokes and my shoulders and legs were hurting; aching from the repetition of front crawl. I was also cold, colder than I could remember. Crying into my goggles, I stopped. I tried to tell John that I couldn’t carry on. My numb lips struggled to form words. I could see my hands jolting and shaking. All the muscles in my body felt taut. I was in a slow-motion freezing state of panic. Aged nine, I was in the process of failing something, other than a maths test, for the first time: the 4.5 mile swim to Ambleside.

  ‘What’s the matter, Tefal?’ asked John after a few minutes of my being on the boat. No words had been shared up until this point. Shivering violently, I had been helped into some clothes by Tetley and narrowly avoided falling back into the lake as the boat rocked with our movements. John stayed on the oars, pulling the boat through the wind and waves while Tetley helped me get dry. I was confused, and felt very tired,
but I was no longer out of breath. A woolly hat appeared from the plastic box and was placed on my head. Tetley, true to his name, filled a plastic cup with warm sweet tea from a flask. I drank it slowly, hands shaking, and looked around the vast lake that surrounded us. The mile-wide gap between the eastern and western shores was gently narrowing and in front I could make out the masts of moored crafts, and roofs of Ambleside, set against the backdrop of the highest mountains further north. I realized there had probably been only another mile or two to go.

  A chocolate digestive came next. Then another. I drank and ate in silence, but the strong wind made enough noise for all three of us. The sun came out, warming me through the layers that now covered my body. The glistening lake was wild and beautiful and we were deep within her middle. Waves were still slapping the underside of the boat’s hull, as if trying to push us directly back in protest. From the safety of the rowing boat, they looked smaller and far less hostile. I began to feel embarrassed, as if I had made a fuss over nothing. I struggled to understand the contrast between what I had been going through and how things seemed from up here. All right for them, I thought, resenting how little empathy John and Tetley were showing, you try swimming in that lot. Tetley made his way, awkwardly, past John to the oars on the forward rowing bench to add more speed to our journey to shore, leaving me alone on the aft bench facing John, with no means of escape or diversion. John repeated the question:

  ‘I said, what’s the matter, Tefal?’ and this time I had to think of a reply.

  ‘I think … I think the wind made me try and swim faster … because I was trying to fight through the waves.’

  ‘And?’ he probed.

  ‘And because I was swimming faster, I got tired quicker.’ Things started to make sense as I said them out loud. ‘And you always say that once you’re tired, the cold is harder to take. So I got cold.’

  John pulled the oars and recovered them in a smooth motion. His chubby hands needed no instructions from his brain to do this. He auto-repeated the stroke. I noticed his face had become burned, his skin and lips chapped by the sun, wind and rain. No wonder he wore a bobble hat over his thinning pate. His expression was even, not angry. As if trying to solve a puzzle, he gazed out onto the lake, and took his time replying.

  ‘Sounds about right,’ he eventually said, calmly. ‘But what about all that fuckin’ sulking in the water then? What was all that about?’

  ‘What sulking?’ I said defensively, unaware that I had communicated my feelings at all while actually swimming.

  ‘I saw you, Teeeefal,’ he said, in the gently mocking tone I recognized from times we spent alone.

  ‘… Bottom lip, tears, talking to yourself underwater and messing up your breathing …’ He could have gone on, I realized.

  ‘I think I got a bit scared.’

  ‘Scared of what, exactly?’

  ‘I’m … well, I’m not exactly sure now,’ I said honestly. John seized his moment.

  ‘Poor little Teeeeefal, boo hoo hoo!’ he teased, as if on stage in a pantomime. He would have pretended to rub his eyes with his fists like a baby had he not been rowing. Tetley joined in from the front of the boat. John continued, ‘Boo hoo, Teefal, scared of the water,’ baiting me for a reaction. His smiling face portrayed mockery rather than spite and my initial anger at the humiliation was replaced by an unexpected feeling: I wanted to laugh – at myself. This annoyed me as I desperately didn’t want to give in to the teasing. It was the same trick I used on Anna all the time, I realized. I gradually broke into a smile I couldn’t control and chuckled back at them both. The tension was gone, carried away on the wind towards the fells. Perhaps I had been scared of failing John, rather than the swim, and of being in trouble. Perhaps it was possible to simply laugh in the face of failure, and move on.

  ‘Can you row, Tefal?’ asked John after the moment had died.

  ‘Sort of. I tried it last year but didn’t get very far.’

  ‘Well, you need to be able to row if you want to crew a swim boat, with me.’ The last two words meant the most. ‘Tetley, take over, and teach Tefal to row. I’m having a nap.’

  Moments later I was sitting on the main oars bench, feeling important. John was behind me, lying down in the prow of the boat, snuggled around a few bags of kit, bobble hat over his eyes, asleep. Tetley was now on the aft bench, instructing me on how best to row against the wind, which had strengthened again as we headed north. Eventually I got the hang of it and so Tetley sat back, content to let me do things with no direction. I could not be sure, given he was wearing mirrored dog-eared sunglasses, but the motion of his head suggested that he too was falling asleep. It was my job to get us safely to shore now.

  The wind was determined and relentless. Blisters started to form on the palms of my water-softened hands but I didn’t mind. A large sailing boat came past the stern, leaning heavily over on its side, with just the smallest of sails hoisted on the mast to deflect the wind. I marvelled at its speed and the fact that, unlike speed-boats, it made no noise to go so fast. It looked likely to tip over and capsize at any moment. Two crew members sat on the top rail to help balance the boat and maybe prevent this. They waved at me, and although I couldn’t wave back because I was holding the oars, I nodded vigorously in acknowledgement. I felt like we were in the same small club of people who understood something. These elements, this place, and Lake Windermere, were hard to tame even when the sun was out. But if I couldn’t swim it, clearly I had to row it instead.

  The following day the outer zip made the familiar unzipping noise. No one moved. Quiet footsteps padded over to the right-hand entrance to the inner tent, which meant that either me or Tetley, who had done two straight days on the boat, were going for a long swim. I sat up in my sleeping bag. Giant, who remained motionless, looked up at me with ‘are you mad?’ eyes. I unzipped the inner tent myself to see John’s shoes, and so I poked my head out and looked up at him. He smiled, nodded, and walked out of the tent in silence. Five minutes later I was in the food tent eating porridge. An hour later we were on the water’s edge at Ambleside. Two and a half hours after that I had completed my first long distance open water swim, having covered nearly 5 miles to Belle Isle. I was by far the youngest swimmer on the camp, so I knew this might be quite a big deal. That night, for the first time, I sat in one of the two chairs reserved for swimmers, although I had long since recovered. The last mile was the hardest thing I could remember in my lifetime, but the fear of the previous day’s attempt had gone, along with the aggressive wind that fuelled it. Conditions mattered, and today, though grey and full of drizzle, had been benign in swimming terms. John took the oars himself to row me in, which was itself a form of encouragement. Above all, I realized I desperately wanted to get there myself.

  Making the distance felt better than Orient winning 3–0 at home. In fact, it surpassed everything I could think of, even completing a sticker album. As I drifted off to sleep that night I realized something else. It was much better to make the distance, no matter how unpleasant the journey.

  This year, while wandering Bowness with Anna after the one-mile width event at the end of the week, I used my remaining money for just one souvenir: a navigation chart of Windermere that I had seen displayed on the Pier heads where the ferries came and went. It came rolled up, because it was very long from top to bottom and the width of a newspaper from side to side. It showed all the markers I now recognized – headlands, islands, shore marks and surrounding peaks. I studied it for hours in the months that followed; if I ever got to make an attempt of the full length of Windermere, I wanted to know where I was. And in the months before I was here again, I could remember the place, and my friends, just by looking at the map.

  The rest of the summer seemed to last a very long time. Anna and I were old enough to do things on our own, so we did. John had arranged for us to have free access to the open air lido in Eltham Park. It was a beautiful old place. There were wooden cubicles on both sides and at one end was a turnst
ile-guarded entrance house, which also housed a basket system where we handed in our clothes in exchange for a big rubber band with a number on it. At the other end a broken fountain sat at the top of some concrete steps, with lots of space to roll out towels and lie in the sun. What we liked best was the small kiosk that sold tea, chocolate bars and penny sweets. We went to the lido every day, almost without fail, and even when it rained, but on a hot summer’s day, in fact on any day, the clean cold water was the best thing to swim in by far. The only mystery was why we had the place almost completely to ourselves.

  Most new swimming pools came with giant plastic slides and wave machines, and were shaped in a way that made proper swimming impossible. They were also located miles away from anywhere because they needed more space. Even the big pool at Eltham was to have a large flume fitted in an attempt to keep up with the competition. Dad said that lidos were no longer fashionable, and that he feared ours would also close one day. Apparently, lidos had been very popular in the old days but, like most old things, they were neglected now, in a state of disrepair and generally undervalued.

  The endless summer days melted into one another. Anna and I began to feel protective about the lido, which we considered our own. We could last a whole day on 50 pence between us since, thanks to John’s standing orders to the pool staff, we didn’t have to pay to get in. I would buy strawberry shoelaces and cola bottle penny sweets with my share. Anna liked Wham fizzy chew bars. Often we were joined by others. Cousin Vicky would let our phone ring twice to notify us that she’d be round in five minutes to walk to the lido. Sometimes Palfrey would come and I wondered if he had any brothers or sisters of his own because he seemed to like the company of Anna and me. Best of all, on some summer evenings, and having already spent the whole day swimming, I would go back to the lido with Dad once he got home from work. His shirt would be soaked in sweat from a hot drive through the rush hour. His face was sometimes anxious and weary, and I loved seeing it change to one of joy once he sploshed messily into the deep end and the cold water rushed his senses. He looked funny in his old faded trunks – his big hairy body reminded me of a cartoon bear. Dad knew how to swim – a slow and very deliberate style – but that summer I realized that I had become better at something than my father. These were easily the happiest days on record. I had to think about exactly what day of the week it was because they all felt the same. But it couldn’t last forever.