A Boy in the Water

by Tom Gregory

  The coming school year was increasingly on my mind as that perfect summer drew to a close. I had Common Entrance exams to sit in January, and I would have to pass Grade Three on my cello if I wanted to join the school orchestra. Music was a very big deal at school and, with the exception of winding up Anna and going to see Orient, had become my main interest outside of swimming. But as the summer holiday came to an end, something even more important happened. With the Channel swim season now in full swing and the water temperature at its warmest, Anna, now twelve, was selected by John as the youngest member of that year’s Channel relay team. I wasn’t the only person in the family who had learned to swim properly.

  I made up my mind to swim the Channel at a club Christmas gathering for the Channel Swimming team that winter. The party ran late into the night in a small house belonging to the Vine family on the estate behind Eltham Baths. Anna was surrounded by her five successful cross-Channel team mates, who took turns recounting tales of the crossing to France: the cold sea, the dark hours, the unity and the laughter, the fatigue. According to Mum, that swim represented the biggest achievement in our family since I was born. I sat with the older swimmers wishing I was part of their team, part of Anna’s team.

  John sent for me from the kitchen. I felt a rush of excitement and apprehension; what might he want with me? I had begun to crave his company and wanted to spend time with him one-to-one. John spoke and I obeyed – as did everyone else. I reported to the kitchen, to find him with a glass of brandy in hand, surrounded by an entourage of club stalwarts.

  This was John’s world – former club swimmers, trusted connections from the Channel Swimming community, and a few parents who had shared the journey of the club he had now built into a group of nearly a hundred youngsters from the local area. He had no family of his own, Anna claimed – in fact, it was hard to get any information about John at all, especially from him. On the few occasions I had asked him anything about himself, such as where he was from, he would always find a diversion, or simply reply with ‘Never you mind, Young Tefal,’ which left a sense of enduring mystery. Just last week Anna had shown me a press cutting of John being honoured for services to life saving – but for some reason it was not on the board at the pool.

  An animated conversation continued in the small crowded kitchen as I approached, nervously. John was smiling, relaxed but in command. I waited for him to notice me as I looked up at this grown-up club. Ignored, I turned instead to the tray of food that sat on a folded half-table and eyed up some cubes of cheese. They were skewered by cocktail sticks and, sadly, combined with chunks of pineapple that would have to be removed without causing offence.

  ‘… and I’m telling you, Dennis, it’s not fuckin’ ’appening,’ demanded John, ‘No kid has ever left my swimming club and signed on the dole. Never. And it ain’t about to start either.’ It was a well-known fact that many of the lifeguards in the borough were former club swimmers. Dad often talked about unemployment, and as an issue of the time it was visible everywhere – from the news, the Job Centre on the High Street, even the lyrics of Anna’s favourite Wham! song.

  ‘… right, Marcus?’ added John, turning to face the man who stood by his side. I gasped.

  Next to John was a tall, good-looking young man. He was overtly cool, with American-style clothes that included a baseball jacket, a faded t-shirt, pale blue jeans and Converse shoes. His expensive-looking watch caught what dim light was available and glistened. The man seemed comfortable despite the fact that he was on some level a stranger in this company. He stood next to John, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the room, smiling politely at the jokes and opinions that flew between the other adults, all of whom clutched cans of lager or glasses of brandy.

  ‘Tefal!’ blurted out John in surprise, as if happy to have located a lost item. I turned to face him, concealing a mouth full of cheddar, and hiding the sticks and pineapple chunks deftly behind my back. The adults parted slightly in a way that made John and the man standing next to him seem even more important.

  ‘Tefal, I want you to meet someone.’

  I nodded obediently, unwilling to reveal a mouthful of food by saying anything.

  ‘Tefal, this is Marcus Hooper. I believe you know who he is?’

  My eyes widened and so did my mouth, revealing my store of half-chewed cheese. Marcus Hooper, holder of the world record for the youngest person to swim the Channel, and probably the best swimmer in the club’s history, held out his hand to shake mine, but I could only offer him a fistful of soggy pineapple and cocktail sticks in return so I began to stuff them into the pockets of my jeans.

  ‘Tefal, what are you doing?’ demanded John, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘This is Marcus Hooper!’ he added in frustration before I finally swallowed the cheese.

  ‘I know … Sorry, John.’ I wiped the pineapple juice on my jeans and held out my somewhat sticky hand. Marcus was a legend; I had studied the notice board in the foyer of the pool forensically over the previous year, reading all the articles on his swim and admiring the photos. I had marvelled at the fact British Airways sent him on Concorde to mark the achievement.

  ‘Hello, Marcus. You look very different to your photos,’ I said nervously, hoping to divert attention from my clumsiness.

  ‘Very nice to meet you, Tefal. Yes, I suppose I do these days,’ he said, smiling back.

  Marcus looked nothing like the black and white photos of him as a boy. They showed him in his trunks on the shore of the Channel, greased up and making ‘V for Victory’ signs with both hands, which somehow dated the image to an even earlier era. He had been very chubby, if not fat, standing on that beach years ago. But as a grown man, he was tall, handsome and slim. He was now seven years older than he had been the day he broke the world record aged twelve – a record that no one had been able to beat and that kept him in the Guinness Book of Records year on year since 1979.

  ‘John has told me all about you,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t bloody tell him that,’ interjected John, ‘he’s got a big enough head already!’

  Marcus ignored him. ‘How’s the training going?’

  ‘OK, I think,’ I answered, starstruck, glancing at John for some kind of reassurance. ‘What do you do now? Are you still a swimmer?’ I asked.

  ‘Sort of. Well, no, not really. I work in the City.’

  I knew that people who worked in the City were often in the news. They wore red braces, drove Porsche 911s, and some even had portable telephones. Most recently, they had apparently suffered the collective misfortune of a ‘Big Bang’, which, despite sounding extremely dangerous, had by all accounts come out rather well. People from the City were known mostly for making huge amounts of money and living a fast life. Indeed, if someone at school was well off, the chances were their dad worked in the City.

  ‘Are you a Yuppie?’ I asked, recalling that the youngest and wealthiest of the City cohort had acquired a new collective noun.

  ‘Erm … I’m not sure really,’ replied Marcus. ‘I don’t have a mobile phone, so no, probably not.’ He smiled. I knew in that moment that not only did I like Marcus – even without a mobile phone he probably still drove a Porsche – but that he was my hero. So I made up my mind, in that exact moment of Christmas 1986, that I wanted to break his world record. I had recently turned ten, so if that was to happen before I was twelve, then the summer after next, 1988, would be the only time window when this was possible.

  4. Windermere

  10.15 a.m., 6 September 1988 – 5 hours, 14 miles off the French coast, English Channel

  ‘How are you feeling?’ came the question some time later, same as before. Time had passed. I did not know how much. The signal to approach the boat was new: John held up a fat stubby glass bottle. It looked like a Schweppes tonic bottle from the shape. The sort Dad would have in his drinks cabinet, maybe for ginger ale. John waved it gently from side to side until I noticed, and reacted. I had not done this before but the plan was obvious. He reached down p
recariously over the side of the boat as I approached, holding the bottle in one hand and the rail with the other. I swam gently towards him and held out an arm, with open hand in front of me. Both of us moved up and down with the sea so it took some thought. His grip on the bottle was by his fingertips, just on the neck. We had to avoid physical contact with one another at all costs. There was a fat, hand-sized glass body for me to grab, and so I grabbed it. It reminded me of the air-to-air refuelling process for war planes I had seen on the TV, where the nozzle and probe finally connect. Instantly I felt the warmth of the liquid through the glass in the palm of my hand. No mistaking the deep red content. My fuel was soup. Heinz tomato soup.

  ‘Not too bad,’ I said in reply. I had been in the water for some time now, maybe five hours, and my body knew it. My shoulder muscles were beginning to ache. My legs, at the join with the hip, the bit that always hurt on a long swim, were sore. My mind had wandered off into many different corners in the time since our last encounter. Suddenly I couldn’t recall what I had been thinking about. Time had vanished.

  It took me a moment to come round. It can become hard to really feel the surface world when swimming for a long time. The motions of the body and the water itself combine to shut off other senses; the relentless noise of the splashing around the ears, the constant turning of the head, rolling of the body and the oscillating view of light and dark cast their own spell. You have to stop swimming to notice how things really are. I held the bottle out of the water and swigged. ‘Slowly, Tefal,’ I thought I heard from a voice other than John’s. The conditions seemed benign; the water was pretty flat – rolling rather than choppy. There was swell, and occasional big waves from the passing tankers and ferries somewhere in the vicinity, but things were calm. I had swum through much worse in the lake and on the coast. The sun was out. In fact, there was not a cloud in the sky. The lack of chop suggested barely any wind. It was hard to imagine better conditions.

  The sweetness of the soup was sublime. My mouth had become accustomed to the saline flavours of the sea, but my tongue had already started to protest and was swollen. The boat and I moved up and down on the swell as if on opposite ends of a see-saw, while I savoured the taste and the warmth running through me. My faculties began to return.

  ‘How are we doing?’ I asked back. John and I had found our own drill of question and answer already. We were good at this.

  ‘Really well, Tefal.’ He took a deep breath before he continued. He looked away from me to prepare himself, then looked back. ‘You are halfway,’ he went on, forcing a smile.

  Halfway. Two bewildering emotions arrived immediately and were at once in conflict. The first was panic. I already felt like I had given my best and swum further, and probably faster, than I had ever swum before. Only halfway. Crushing. How would I ever finish? This had to be impossible.

  I looked over my left shoulder with the intent of harnessing the other thought. If we were halfway then I should be able to see …

  There it was. A clear thin white line was just visible where the grey-brown water met the blue sky. There were black smudges on the line too. England … and then the second emotion; hope.

  John was reading my thoughts. He would know how this would feel, and that it was crucial to manage my reaction.

  ‘Tefal, listen to me, lad.’ He leaned over the rail once more and extended his hand in a chopping motion to stress the point he wanted to make. ‘We are five hours in. Just five hours,’ he emphasized. ‘And we are halfway. You are on for a sub ten hour swim here.’ With those words, part of me wanted to cry, but confusingly the other part felt an early sense of euphoria. If John thought I could do it, clearly implied with ‘sub ten hours’, then it was true. I just had to swim the other half. At ten hours it would be two and a half hours more than my longest ever swim, but so what? ‘Over halfway already!’ I said to myself.

  I clung onto the soup in its fat stubby bottle and took another swig. I would need all of it, so I kept swigging. I looked up again, in search of England. I had to confirm I had actually seen what I thought I had seen. This time the light had changed – the sun was now gleaming off the white cliffs. Perhaps there had been some broken cloud on the coastline masking the brightness of the reflected light. The thin dark smudges either side came into focus; the shoreline of Kent ran away on either side of the cliffs, before disappearing and becoming sky again. I looked over my right shoulder. France was no longer visible. I kept looking to confirm this. On the rise of the swell, I just saw a faint dark mark on the horizon. I had left France well and truly behind. I just had to swim home.

  Just six months after meeting Marcus Hooper at the Christmas party, and after some punishing sessions in the pool, John decided it was time for me to attempt Windermere on my own, aged ten. The two events were linked; little by little John had succeeded, through suggestion and innuendo, in planting the idea in my own mind that I could be a world record holder. He had never explicitly said it, but everyone, including me, knew that this was his plan. And so in order to make an attempt on the Channel I needed to prove myself. I needed to become more than just a student of the sport, and the baby of the gang. I needed to become a serious open water swimmer – certainly the best in the club, and one of the few people in the world who was currently capable of getting across. If I was to have any chance, Windermere must be conquered in 1987, and before my eleventh birthday, thus paving the way for a possible Channel attempt the following summer. But in truth, no one – not me, Mum, Dad or Anna, nor John himself – knew how possible this was. To our knowledge, no one had ever swum Windermere aged ten – not even Marcus.

  The sun hadn’t yet risen above the mountains but in the east the sky was already pale blue, its pink and red border framed by the dark ridges of the fells above us. The lake was cast in shadow along its entire length and flat calm. A mist rolled across the water’s surface, thicker and fatter further offshore as the water temperature fell. From out of the mist flew a squadron of ducks. They flapped and quacked towards the shoreline breaking the silence, splashing down in loose formation and waddling ashore alongside the rowing boats, which were tied to the old jetty like wonky keys on a piano. As they landed the water lost its perfect flat gloss and a complex pattern of interlocking ripples rolled in all directions, into the mist and towards the shore. The hamlet of Lakeside on the southern tip of Windermere was being gradually woken by our presence, but it felt as if the rest of the Lake District was still fast asleep in the room next door, so we whispered.

  Being greased up for the first time was an odd thing. The wax was lumpy and hard, and I felt embarrassed. John said little, but instructed me when needed. ‘Tefal, you need to apply some grease to your crotch. Not my job, yours. Wear this glove, lad, take a scoop, and apply some in between your legs. Freshwater, so you don’t need much.’ I did as I was told, and before long the process was complete. One last ritual to observe – John used the grease to draw the number 1 on the back of my trunks – it was a visual symbol that this was my first attempt at a serious open water swim. The first of how many, I wondered.

  Dennis helped load the rowing boat with the normal provisions: CB radio and car battery, a sturdy plastic box of food, hot flasks, medical supplies, a small bag for each of the crew with their waterproofs and warm layers, and my bag, with just a towel, my spare goggles and spare orange swimming hat. If things went well, I wouldn’t be needing my clothes before I returned to the campsite. I was not in on the plan, though. Only John had that, somewhere in his bald and dented head.

  The boat had taken on two new members. John Callaway was also a swimming coach and an old friend of John’s. I knew from the brief time I had spent with him that, firstly, I liked him and, secondly, that they were very different people. ‘JC’ was calm and reflective while John could be volatile and irascible; JC smiled and cajoled, where John growled and instructed. I felt that JCs presence on the boat was significant – it was as if, for the first time, John had drafted in some form of help in the purs
uit of his aims for the coming months. The third member of the crew was Spike, so named on account of his unusually curly hair. He was a fit and friendly teenager and a very good competitive sprint swimmer. It was not entirely clear how he had become involved here – it was often that way with people John liked – but John got on with him very well so he had become a fixture, despite a limited enthusiasm for open water swimming. He would be doing most of the rowing, I thought.

  The jaw-dropping beauty of the setting made the importance of the moment more acute. The lake temperature in the middle was 57–58 degrees Fahrenheit (13–14 degrees Celsius) – another cold year following a bitter winter and a poor start to the summer. Colder than the Channel itself, and with no salt to aid buoyancy, this was a serious challenge.

  John looked me in the eye. For the second time I could remember, he took both of my hands in his before he spoke, and I felt reassured. John increasingly had that effect on me. The first such occasion had occurred only recently when he took Mother Duck and me to the Netherlands for an international swimming gala, along with a coachload of swimmers from the sprint clubs in Greenwich. I had cried with homesickness, terrified at being bunked down with older kids I didn’t know. As it had all come flooding out he had simply knelt down and looked me in the eye.

  ‘Tefal. It’s easy to forget sometimes that you are still a little Tefal. Just remember one thing. I will always, ALWAYS look after you.’ And so it had proved to be. The reassuring aspect of his personality made a timely reappearance on the shoreline that morning.