Little Fishes

I made a huge chore of learning to swim when I was young on account of being a 7 year old coward. 

Actually, like all human babies, I could always swim. My body understood the rudiments of breath holding and doggy-splash even though I didn't know it did. No one told me it was one of the purposes of survival and that God was smart enough to give us this basic survival tool - our lungs being well attuned to watery breath due to the whole getting born thing and I guess there always existed the possibility that you’d clamber from your soaked prison and be expected to do a bit of inelegant skinny dipping straight off. 

It’s a bit like the giraffe thing, they’re all born as walkers: shaky and uncertain, but solid enough to wobble into a safe area once they've slid into the world, instead of lying down and glistening with stickiness waiting to be eaten alive by any lions lounging in the neigbourhood. But having unlearnt it over the next 6 years or so, I had to find my fins all over again if I was ever to swim properly in the junior school swimming pool and receive the coveted width distance certificate. 

But as time progressed, and certificates and praises were received, I was one of the last ones still flapping about unable to swim without the aid of enough buoyancy assistance to keep a blacksmith's anvil afloat. Water wings pumped up so tight you could almost hear them squealing in agony, and floats shaped like little tombstones made of polystyrene that squeaked in your hands as you squeezed them between your meagre thighs to keep your bum poking upright out of the water. 

These floats had minds of their own, and lines of them could be seen making little bids for freedom all round the pool, leaping out of the swimmers thigh-grips and jumping into the air like shoals of passing river salmon. As time progressed the last little group, which included me, were told to dispense with the floats and make do with the arm bands. Reluctantly we did, which left us swimming about with crazy arm movements, scrunched eyes and legs that felt as if medicine balls were tied to our feet. But a momentum had been established and today the Z group were going from concrete lumps to slick mermaids. 

It was time for the great con called the 'graduated confidence process' (though they never told us it was called that). Each time we managed to shimmy-splash our way clumsily to one end of the width, Mrs Spangler would release a little air from our taut arm bands. Even with the smell of chlorine rinsing through my nostrils I could smell that rubbery wind as it hissed out of the valves that bubbled, and I heard them blow mini-raspberries at Mrs Spangler as she fumbled the caps back on. I envied them. Then more widths. Then more air releases before being told to give up the floats. A pile of them was collected by the benches and ended up looking like discarded teeth pulled from a giant's mouth. A pile of white flotsam. 

Up and down we swam, splashily; eyes tight and sore. Mouths, chemically dried, throats raw, noses numbed, lungs on fire; hearts flicking through our skinny chests like little gasping fish. 

By this stage I was happy, I'd made enough bragging progress to get out. One arm band looking sad and deflated, the other no longer in full bloom; the old pumped up look now consigned to the shrieking dwarves in the shallow end. I had achieved enough; the certificate would wait another week. I looked forward to getting out and enjoying the sublime comfort of dryness. But no, I wasn't allowed out. Miss Spangler was on a roll and no-one was getting out yet; no drownings to report - the great Health and Safety push was a long way away in the future, germinating in the back of someone’s mind - perhaps one of these little would-be eels struggling along with me. It would have taken a drowning to call the session to an end. Even Stuart Stickler’s tears weren't helping him: 

‘Stop being a baby!’ I heard Mrs Spangler shout as Stuart wiped a bubble of snot from one of his nostrils. I made a mental note: tears aren't working today.

More deflation visits to the side of the pool. I couldn't work out why they bothered as by now it didn't make any difference. I'd rest my elbows on the cold slippery surface, shaking and making spluttering comments that made no sense, and listening to the trebling echoes and shouts of encouragement all around me which blended with the stuttering snuffling and mad splashing coming from Stuart who was going the opposite way with a face that was part terror, part grim determination; then with another gurgled hiss from one of my arm bands I was tapped on the head and ordered back across again. I was swimming. I was a winner in everyone’s eyes, except my own as nobody had told me I’d been swimming for 10 minutes and attributing my success to two flat pieces of plastic and rubber that hung limp and breathlessly from my arms.