Southampton’s municipal swimming baths, with their verdigris roof and glass windows, were a place of public exposure and weekly torture on our school trips there. Ordered to undress, revealing chicken flesh and, on older boys, dark sprouting hair, we shivered in ill-fitting trunks as we stood on wet tiles which, I was told, could harbour all sorts of disease. Padding out into the echoing arena where weak winter sun threw mocking ripples on the ceiling, we lined up to plunge in the shallow end, ordered into the water by our PE master, a wiry-haired man with an imperious whistle on a cord around his neck.
Once in, we were told to hold the hand-rail and kick away with our feet. With my fingertips turning blue with the cold and my tenacious grip, I created enough white water to seem proportionate to my effort, although it was really an endeavour to disguise my ineptitude. Then we took a polystyrene float, crumbling at the edges like stale bread, and were instructed to launch ourselves across. The far side was as unattainable as Australia to me, and the reward for success – a piece of braid to sew on one’s trunks – was a trophy I was as likely to win as an Olympic medal.
I never did learn to swim. The barked instructions, the fear of sinking to the tiled bottom along with the old sticking-plasters and hair-balls, combined to create an unconquerable anxiety. I somehow associated swimming not with pleasure, but with institutions, hospitals, conscription and war, with being ordered to do things I didn’t want to do. At the beach I’d make my excuses when my friends ran into the sea, pretending I had a cold. Throughout my childhood and my teenage years, I lived with this disability; I even came to celebrate it, perversely, as a strength.
It was only later, living alone in London in my mid-twenties, that I decided to teach myself to swim. In the chilly East End pool, built between the wars, I discovered that the water could bear up my body. I realized what I had been missing: the buoyancy of myself. It was not a question of exercise: rather, it was the idea of going out of my depth, allowing something else to take account for my physical presence in the world; being part of it, and apart from it at the same time. In a way, it was a conscious reinvention, a means of confronting my fears.
For the poet Algernon Swinburne, the sea was a sensuous vice, one that he revealed in his only novel, Lesbia Brandon, set in his childhood home on the southern coast of the Isle of Wight, with its dramatic rocky cliffs overlooking the waters of the English Channel. In the book – not published until 1950, forty years after Swinburne’s death – its young hero, Herbert, learns to love the water: ‘all the sounds of the sea rang through him, all its airs and lights breathed and shone upon him: he felt land-sick when out of the sea’s sight, and twice alive when hard by it.’ He even dares the waves ‘like a young sea-beast … pressed up against their soft fierce bosoms and fought for their sharp embraces; grappled with them as lover with lover’.
Swinburne, the son of an admiral, had a picturesque beach from which to swim; I grew up in a suburb on the other side of the Solent – a place of working docks and cranes and shipyards, close to which my father worked in a cable factory, testing huge insulated telecommunication lines which ran along the Atlantic sea-bed, as if tethering England to America. From my box bedroom at the back of the house I could hear the ships’ horns on foggy mornings; at night, clanking dredgers gouged out a route for the huge liners and container ships that ply Southampton Water. Here, the sea represents commerce, rather than recreation. A port is a restless place, a place of transit, rather than a place in itself. Here, everything orientates itself towards the water – even the area in which I lived, Sholing, was a corruption of ‘Shore Land’ – yet at the same time the city seemed to ignore it, as if it and the element that is the reason for its existence were two entirely separate entities.
I think differently about the water now. Every day that I can, I swim in the sea. I feel claustrophobic if I am far from the water; summer and winter, I plan my time around the tides. Sitting on the shingly beach, I watch the ferries pass each other, briefly joining superstructures before they part again, caught between somewhere and nowhere. Pushing out into the same waters that so excited the red-haired poet and bore up his pale, freckled body, I lie on my back, on a level with the land, letting the waves wash over me like a quilt. Unencumbered, unobserved, in the warm waters of late August or in the icy rough seas of December, I am buoyed up, suspended, watching the world recede along with my clothes on the beach.
Sometimes something gelatinous will brush against my leg – one of the cuttlefish that are often cast up on the shore, their mottled flesh, hard parrot beaks and slimy tentacles rotting away to reveal the chalk-white bone below. Sometimes I’ll feel a sharp sting after an encounter with an unseen jellyfish. Yet I still go out of my depth, where no one can find me, where terns dive and cormorants bob, and where I have no knowledge of what lies below. I dream of bodies underwater, veiled yet animate, like the drowned woman in the lake in The Night of the Hunter, or the shark I thought I once saw in a Cornish cove from the top of a cliff. The way the water both reveals and conceals still disturbs me. It is a deceptive and heartless lover.
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.
Brit, Moby-Dick
Cities and civilizations rise and fall, but the sea is always the sea. ‘We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always,’ wrote the philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. ‘The ocean is a wilderness reaching around the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.’
The sea is the greatest unknown, the last true wilderness, reaching over three-quarters of the earth. Its smallest organisms sustain us, providing every other breath of oxygen that we take. Its tides and shores determine our movements and our borders more than any treaty or government. Yet as we fly over its expanses, we think of it – if we think of it at all – merely as a distance to be overcome. In our arrogance, we consider that we have tamed the ocean, as much as we have conquered the land.
… man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it … Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the world it yet covers.
Brit, Moby-Dick
Once you have seen it, it is impossible to forget, just as if you never saw it, it would be impossible to describe. The sea is always in my head, the means by which I orientate myself to the earth – even in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where I once queued on a hot afternoon to swim in a public pool, a big blue hole in the middle of the Great Plains. It was as far from the ocean as I have ever been, but somehow a memory of it at the same time. The utter absence of the sea made its existence all the more potent.
To the careless, the water may seem the same from one day to the next, but under observation it becomes a continuous drama, made up of a million vignettes or grand gestures, played out at the edge of the shore or on the open ocean. It is a natural spectacle capable of rising dozens of feet into the air, or lying low like a glassy pond, so mirrored that it might not be there at all, seamlessly joining earth to sky. Surging and peaking, self-renewing and self-perpetuating, it can take away as easily as it gives. It is as punitive as it is generous. Sometimes it seems to be a living creature itself, an all-engulfing organism through which all the world exists, yet we see so little of it as we go about our daily lives: a glimpse from the car or a plane, the smallest fraction, even as we are infinitesimal in turn, mere grains of sand. And as I linger