by Tom Gregory
Then I remembered the splash. Who was it? I realized I had been swimming with my eyes closed, so I opened them again.
I saw her legs splashing gently, out in front of me and off to the side I breathed on. I recognized flashes of her powerful front crawl stroke: Mother Duck was in the water with me. She didn’t stop and she stayed a few metres away from me. Gradually I pieced it together with what was left of my mental capacity. She was there to bring me home, and I no longer felt quite so alone.
Sometimes just the presence of another cues a surge of emotional release. A couple of years before I would be foul to Mum when she picked me up from school; upon getting in the car I would become sullen and hostile towards her just when minutes before I was content, and I didn’t understand why I did it. The only conclusion was that her very presence triggered a release of pent-up anger and emotion, the source of which was far from clear. This was the same. Mother Duck’s presence released my anger, fear and pain. I don’t know how long she spent in the water with me. It felt like quite a long time, but time had become relative; I would have traded another two hours of steady swimming from earlier in the crossing for five minutes more of this.
I wanted to share the agony with her, and for her to hear me, and console me, maybe even hug me in the water. But though I could not speak, and we could not touch, having her there ended the sense of total isolation. I needed to unload a tidal wave of anguish on someone. I began to have a conversation with her in my head to bridge the gap of human contact. Mother Duck would understand. She always did, because she was the best of all of us. The young woman who had met me on the poolside with my comedy goggles and doggy-paddle swimming four years earlier, who had seen to my welfare and everyone else’s on camp after camp in the Lakes and Dover, who had herself been pulled out of the sea at a similar moment just weeks earlier in a bid to fulfil her dream. Yet here she was, trying to help me to fulfil mine. As another surge of drowsy unconsciousness began to wash over me, I realized how much I needed her there. In fact, had she not been there, or had anyone else on the planet with the exception of Anna been substituted for her in that moment, I believe I would have broken.
As our one-way conversation progressed I finally understood deep inside, although much too late to be of use to me, that what I was doing was not normal. In the final act it had become so utterly unpleasant that I wished it all away. I decided I would never do this again, ever. Nothing could possibly be worse than this form of mental and physical torture. The thing I thought I wanted for some years now, to hold a world record and be the youngest swimmer, turned out not to be something I wanted at all. Not if it meant going through this. I felt like a little kid who had asked for the wrong Christmas present; pushing and demanding that I got my way, only to unwrap the thing and discover that it was not what I thought it was, and that I had to live with the consequences. ‘This will end. This will end,’ I began repeating to myself. The darkness slowly came back. As the lights began to dim I noticed John again. The blue and white bobble hat had not moved from his position of over-watch on the rail. The eyes set beneath the hat were boring into me, but almost in pity.
Yet on another level I had been here before. The last hour of that seven and a half hour swim on Windermere that summer, where John had taken the oars himself in the driving rain, his nose dripping with water, eyeballing me silently through the final miles … That had been a rehearsal, for now. But even that was scant preparation in the end.
I searched desperately for something else to distract me, a song, a memory or a day-dream, but I had used them all up.
Then I thought, finally, about Anna, Mum and Dad, who I then imagined to be standing on a cliff, scanning the horizon, anxiously looking for their son, of whom they would have had no news. The fact of the matter was that I was still in the water, and still swimming, and they were somewhere in front of me, waiting …
‘DO YOU WANT TO GO THROUGH THE HARBOUR?’ he shouted, as if repeating the question. I didn’t remember the conversation starting or understand what the question meant, so I just floated there for a while.
‘TEFAL!’ commanded John. ‘Would you like to swim through the harbour?’ he tried again.
This time I looked up and over my left shoulder as I bobbed, confused not to be swimming, unsure of what was occurring around me. The last thing I remembered was thinking about Mum, Dad and Anna, but that seemed a far-off memory. The total and overwhelming exhaustion had almost become analgesia. Things were shutting down. The pain was gently ebbing away, and so too was my ability to swim, to stay afloat. Anything from here would be a matter of remaining conscious and ordering my body to do something it no longer felt able to do. In the near distance to my left I saw the towering grey wall of Dover harbour. We were close enough that the western entrance was visible, but far enough away that the buildings of the promenade were clearly set out behind, unobscured by the wall. For the first time I looked on the imposing concrete barrier from the outside rather than from within. Further away to the left, and set back a few hundred metres, was the English shoreline. The towering white Shakespeare Cliff was lit up by the late afternoon sun that still hovered in the western sky. At their foot the pebbled beach shone out in a thin golden strip.
‘TEFAL …’ implored John. Dr Redbeard was on his shoulder. I looked around in the water for Clair. She was nowhere to be seen. I was on my own again.
‘No,’ I said, finally answering his question. But it sounded like ‘Oh’. My tongue was too swollen to pronounce the word.
‘OK, that’s fine,’ said John immediately. ‘Last mile, Tefal. D’ya hear me? LAST MILE!’
I hadn’t thought about my reply. I just said something … anything. It was an unexpected question, and not one I ever thought I would need to answer. What an odd question. Who cares, and why on earth would you let me decide anyway? Redbeard was there, though, so better to have answered than not. The thought occupied me for a while. If I had answered ‘yes’, the boat would have aimed for the western entrance. The ferries would have been held on their giant docks. FE41 would have sought permission from the Harbour Authority to land, citing tides and a tired swimmer as the reason why it must happen. There would have been a tannoy announcement on all the ships explaining the delay. People would have gone up to the rails on a bright September afternoon to witness the moment of completion in slow motion. The promenade would be busy. Pedestrians would gather to observe the landing. Part of me suddenly wished for the attention and regretted my answer. The other part, the part that answered, wanted this ordeal to remain private, hidden, and as uncomplicated as possible.
‘One mile’ … The more I thought about the absurd question, the less would be left to swim. My mind came back into the world for a while, and floated back to a memory … Me and Bleachy swam a mile once, on Windermere. That had felt like the hardest thing I would ever do. I was eight. Just three years later and there it was again, one mile. About thirty of them lay behind us, curving an S-shaped trail, bent by the tides, all the way back to France. One mile.
FE41 had vanished. In her place was the tender, low and urgent in the water. On the tender was John, and someone else. I couldn’t recall the transition or remember witnessing the process. But it was how things were now and I knew it was real, not a hallucination. John was shouting and repeatedly waving his arm across his body towards the shore in a signal that translated as ‘get a move on’. The dull thud of the marine diesel had been replaced by the intense whirring of the outboard. Behind the tender I could now see the western outer edge of Dover harbour, making its way out to sea.
‘Four hundred yards!’ he shouted. ‘Go, Go, GO!’ The look in his eyes was frenzied, unlike any expression I had ever seen him wear. I was sprinting, swimming as fast as I knew how. I struggled to get enough air into my lungs. ‘This must end. This MUST END.’ Things went dark again.
My left hand felt them first. The smooth rounded touch of the pebbles, underwater at the depth of my extended arm. I opened my eyes and saw them.
The stones spinning like a kaleidoscope. I had seen nothing beneath me for hours but the deep and mysterious darkness. Now half of my visual world was replaced by land. I heard them too, rattling and muffled as the late summer waves stroked the shore. Every sense was awake now. I lifted my head above water for air and looked up, gasping. This was England.
I crouched in the water on one knee, placing both hands out to the front to steady me – a track sprinter at the start of a running race. My shoulders and back screamed as I stretched to reach down and avoid toppling over. Both hands touched the seabed. I was anchored now, and the contrast was stark – no longer rising and falling with the ever-turning sea. We had become separate again. My head hung down for a moment, suspended just above the lapping waves on the beach. Salt water dripped off my nose and mouth as I took my first land-supported breaths. I raised my head and looked up.
The beach. I had been here before. We had landed on Shakespeare Beach, at the foot of the cliff and about 200 metres away from the western wall of Dover harbour. This was an isolated place, only accessible via a huge staircase bolted onto the vast cliff face. There were no footpaths that led here.
Three steps. I remembered the three steps. I rose from the water and tried to stand. Instantly I fell back down onto my knees, nearly tumbling sideways into the water. The world was spinning. Three steps and clear from the water I remembered. I had to get out of the sea. I tried to stand again and take a step forwards at the same time. My foot landed, so I took another, only to collapse again.
I rose once more with every remaining ounce of energy and started to walk forwards, reminding myself what was required as I went – foot, opposite arm, other foot, other arm. Then I was clear – just pebbles under my numb feet and so I kept going just to be certain, stumbling and knowing it couldn’t last. Finally I fell for the last time, back onto my knees, and some metres up the beach. It was over.
Inside there was no euphoria. The moment of acquiring a world record as I had imagined it was, in the event, very different. In my day-dream I stepped out of the water confidently in my Speedos, waving and smiling at the cameras, exchanging hugs with the girl I had the biggest crush on at the time – normally Miss Piggy. And in the day-dream there was a soundtrack playing through the orange foam headphones of my Walkman as I lay in bed: ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ by the Human League. In the real world, there was no music. No hugs. No smiling. Just me, sitting on the pebbles. I had been through something terrible that had finally ended, and felt only a deep and extreme sense of relief.
Gradually I became aware of a commotion unfolding. I could hear people running on pebbles. I rolled over on the stones, gasping, and slowly sat up, using my arms to raise myself from the ground. I found myself facing back out to sea, to France. A man was running through the waves in his clothes. He looked to be holding a camera. There was shouting. To the left the tender had landed. I breathed out, in, out. About 100 metres offshore was FE41, bobbing silently, her job and that of her crew now done. The sea was serene. Late afternoon sun warmed my skin. I pulled off my goggles, glued to me like suction cups, and as they came away my face felt like an integral part of it had been removed. The world was in clear focus again; the sky was a deep blue and I squinted in the brightness. I felt a hand on my shoulder and Flossie appeared in front of me, yapping in excitement. I glanced up and saw Mum standing above me. She was crying. The hand on my right shoulder was Dad’s.
‘All right, Mum?’ I asked.
‘I’m all right, Tom-Tom,’ she said through an incredulous smile, wiping away a tear. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m all right, Mum,’ I said, and looked back out to sea.
John held both of my hands in his. ‘Under twelve hours,’ he said, looking me in the eye. ‘You did it, Tefal.’ He was crouching down on the beach to be at eye level as I sat on the stones. He was checking me over, bobble hat still resting on his head. His eyes, though … they were smiling and blinking, slightly creased at the outer edges. There was a flicker of emotion, and his voice trembled a little. John held my gaze and we looked at one another in silence. The anger I had felt for him over the previous hours vanished. I had trusted him with my life and together, somehow, we had made it.
I stood on the beach unsteadily, still holding both of John’s hands in the way I was used to after a long swim – him the puppeteer, me the giant puppet; Geppetto and a chubby Pinocchio. First lifting me from the ground, onto my feet and into life, and then controlling and guiding me step by step, as a parent does with a toddler. We made our way slowly to the water’s edge and onto the tender. FE41 would have to take us to Folkestone harbour in order to land the crew and the boat itself. There would be formalities, and probably a Customs officer. The moment was passing, the adrenaline ebbing, just like the tide. Dr Ian (now my anger had subsided my acceptance of his role had returned) would be curious as to my wellbeing, but that was no longer a problem. I wanted to be with the crew now – with John, Clair, JC and Spike. Slowly the reality dawned on me, like a joke I had only just understood. I had swum from France to England. There would be a fuss, because on that day, 6 September 1988, I was eleven years and 333 days old. It had taken me eleven hours and fifty-four minutes. I had swum 32 miles because of the tides.
I stopped and looked down the ramp of the launch jetty of Folkestone harbour. Spike held my hand to keep me steady. I didn’t remember arriving or what happened on the way – other than Clair’s arm around my shoulder as I recovered. They were all there now looking back up towards me, my friends, family and fellow swimmers. Uncle John had held out a loyal hand as the tender landed on the jetty and I stepped ashore. At some point I had been dressed in the tracksuit I was wearing the night before when I left the house. A TV camera crew had arrived and I acted up with an exaggerated look of surprise, which was intended as modesty. The club van was at the top of the slipway, where John was already standing by the open driver’s door, waiting. I turned and faced back down the ramp.
‘Bye! Thanks for comin’, all you lot!’ I called out. Anna later told me that my parting line closed the 10 o’clock news.
The campsite outside Dover was quiet, despite the balmy late summer weather. Everyone had gone back to school. Nothing was said, but I understood that this was now a retreat – a rallying point. My family, the club swimmers and the press would be driving back to London. I was to stay in John’s care overnight, along with JC – away from all the fuss. I sat in John’s own caravan for the first time, and felt safe.
This was John’s private place, and despite all the times we camped here, he had always only ever stayed with us in the tents. There were long brown cushions underneath the windows, which I presumed would become my bed. Only I was not allowed to sleep, of course – not yet. I told JC, for John was now attending to other things, that I didn’t really feel tired, even though I had not slept since getting up to go to school the day before. He said I was still adjusting to having been in the water for such a long time and so I needed company, but that my body would soon catch up. Then he reached into his pocket.
‘Here now, Tom.’ He passed me a smart red Swiss Army penknife. It had the logo of the QEII, the smartest passenger ship in the world, stencilled beneath the badge. It was a very good penknife indeed. I studied it.
‘I went on the QEII once – a special trip. Today was a special trip too, and so I want you to have this … To say, well done, Tom.’ His gravelly voice cracked a little as he spoke.
‘Thanks, JC.’ I paused, giving him the chance to keep the prized knife, in case he changed his mind.
‘You’ve earned it. That really was one hell of a swim, kid.’
It was a kind gift, of something he treasured. JC rolled out a sleeping bag under the window and found some pillows. The pain, I knew, would come tomorrow. I put the penknife under the cushions of my makeshift bed – the last act I remember from 6 September 1988.
7. A Whole Army of Little Tefals …
I blushed when Caron Keating and Yvette Fiel
ding, the Blue Peter presenters, kissed me for a photo as I sat in between them on the couch. The cameras had stopped rolling but the producer wanted a shot for the 1988 Annual. It was hot under the lights and I was already flushed, half boiled in the blue club sweatshirt John made me wear. I felt myself turning a deep red. I had been given a gold Blue Peter badge, the highest award, and asked about my swim. Yvette had pointed out the tan line from my swimming cap, and asked me to re-enact feeding myself tomato soup in the water with the aid of a tonic bottle prop. Behind the cameras John and Anna smirked and made jokes to each other at my expense – safely out of shot and enjoying me going through the terror of live television. The interviews had become easier, though. This was the fifth in three days.
The house was busy. The postman’s bag was full every day, mostly with congratulations cards, and the phone rang constantly as I tried to sleep. The occasional reporter appeared outside.
A crate of Heinz tomato soup arrived, with a note from the marketing department to say thanks; I had accidentally mentioned the brand on the news. A random agent from the States called to ask if we would fly out to do some promotional work, like open shopping malls. Dad said no, and I refused the offer of a billboard poster from the soup people on the phone myself.