I’ve always swum. Well, actually that’s not quite true — I’ve always liked being in the water and for someone who grew up in Margate, I learned to swim quite late.
Even when I couldn’t swim I was more than happy to play in the slipways at full tide, being dragged up and down the ramp by the crashing waves. It was competitive to see how much blood would be pouring from our scrapes and cuts by the end of the day as the sun set and the tide turned and made its way out.
I was nine when I made my first few strokes. This doesn’t seem that late to learn, not in a city sense, but in Margate it was tragic; I was so far behind. Not being able to swim was a massive social disadvantage and the reason why I hadn’t learned to swim had nothing to do with water but because I hated being touched.
Being sexually abused from a very young age made me very self-conscious and self-aware. I had no innocence, most of it had been robbed and stolen, violated and destroyed, so much so that for me to lie across an adult’s arms to learn to swim already at the age of nine gave me a sense that something was not right.
I couldn’t learn to swim because I couldn’t feel the water, all I could feel was fear and a sickening guilt, never the fear of drowning.
I learned to swim by imitating someone. I watched them glide through the water, one arm over the other. After my first few strokes there was no stopping me.
Jumping in and out of the deep end, being thrown around by the biggest waves from April till the end of September, I was part of the sea, a tiny human dropped into nature, bobbing around happily with no land beneath my feet.
That’s how it’s been for most of my life, a desire to feel free from my body, to feel released and feel nothing, a weightlessness, so much less of me.
I like to swim against the tide, it makes me feel strong, like I’m somehow invincible
I’m OK with cold green waters of the North Sea, I find it romantic and dreamlike, I feel like I’m swimming in the long-lost painting by de Chirico. I like to swim along the harbour wall watching the line of green algae disappear against the waves. I like to swim against the tide, it makes me feel strong, like I’m somehow invincible.
I swim for about 45 minutes around in circles, keeping my head above the water, scared of the s**t and sewage of the overflowing storm drains. I like to feel the stretch and the current go against my body, it makes me feel alive and fighting fit.
Last year when I contracted septicemia, I stayed out of the water for six months. Having a weakened immune system and a stoma, everything can be a million times more deadly. But since March I’ve been swimming. I started off in six degrees Celsius and now we’re up to 16.
And with the warm summer waters we have the jellyfish — lion’s mane jellyfish, giant hairy things with five foot tentacles. In the last few days my entire body has been stung to death. I’m living off antihistamine and I’m petrified to go into the water.
Since I was little I’ve had the same reoccurring nightmare that I stand by the edge of the cliff, the tide has gone out for miles, revealing the land mass below the sea, and as I look toward the horizon, a sound that’s louder than any I’ve heard before comes with the moving sky, a tidal wave, a giant tsunami towering hundreds of feet high ploughs towards me. I have no escape, I turn towards the cliff and then I turn towards the wave, it splashes over me and through me and I’m left standing.
I’ll be back in the water tomorrow.
