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The following day, after breakfast, the whole group convenes for a briefing. John gives us an overview of the week, which basically seems to consist of upping our time and distance each day. He also gives us a safety briefing. Hypothermia and jellyfish are both mentioned. He then suggests we go round in turn and say what our ambitions for the week are. Since arriving and seeing all the other people here I have felt myself growing increasingly anxious about the whole thing. I am starting to realise that open-water swimming is a whole different ball game to doing a few laps in the pool. Not that there’s a ball involved, but you know what I mean – breaststroke legs just aren’t going to cut it. These people know what they’re doing. I don’t. So when it’s my turn, the only answer I feel I can give is that I hope I’m not going to hold everyone back.
Afterwards John takes me to one side and asks if I’m OK and I confess my nervousness. ‘Could I just do breaststroke?’ I ask. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready to tackle too much crawl along with everything else you seem to have to deal with out there.’
‘Of course,’ he replies, ‘take it slowly.’ And then in his best booming voice, he shouts: ‘Right chaps, ready to go in fifteen minutes! Get changed and don’t forget to put suncream on and get vased up.’
‘Vased up?’ I mouth to Teresa, baffled.
‘Vaseline,’ she says. ‘Under your straps so your costume doesn’t rub.’
I nod, a whole new world opening up to me, and then head upstairs to get changed.
One by one everyone congregates on the terrace. Costumes, hats and goggles on. Suncream and Vaseline applied. Someone kindly gives me some earplugs and says it helps with the cold. I take them gratefully. We file down to the water’s edge. It’s a beautiful day and the sea is blue and sparkling but the beach is deserted and we have it to ourselves.
John calls us into a group: ‘Right chaps, as this is our first swim, we’re just going to take it easy. Twenty minutes maximum. Jessica, you start by swimming over to the rock and back. Let’s take a look at your breaststroke.’
I tell myself I’ll be fine. Twenty minutes of breaststroke, surely that’s doable. We all start to wade into the water. The first touch on my toes is cold yet almost inviting. But as I walk further in, the sharpness of the water strikes full force and I know that this is the moment when you have to commit or lose your nerve. I fall forwards into the waves and a rush of ice surrounds me. The sky may be blue but there’s a reason no one is on this beautiful beach: it’s the beginning of April and the water’s fucking freezing. (Apologies for the ‘f’ word. I did think of using the word ‘flipping’, it would still have made for nice alliteration, but I’m afraid it just doesn’t cover it.) I start to swim, breaststroke arms and legs but with my head above the water while I acclimatise. After a few strokes I force myself to duck under and the cold envelops me further.
‘Good job, Hepburn,’ I hear John shout. ‘Over to the rock and back.’
I’m not aware of the others; they have disappeared from view. All I am conscious of is me and the cold. I plough on, knowing that the only way to get used to it is to keep swimming. The rock is only a little way off but it seems to take me ages to reach it; as I get closer the water shallows around the coral and it’s difficult to avoid scraping my knees. I turn round and head back to the shore, where John is standing at the water’s edge.
‘Well done,’ he says. ‘That’s a nice breaststroke you’ve got there. Now let’s have a look at your crawl.’
‘What?’ I splutter. This isn’t what we agreed.
‘How are you finding the cold?’ John asks.
‘Agony.’
‘Well, you better get to France quickly then. Crawl’s the only way to do that.’
‘OK, I’ll give it a go. How much longer have we got?’
‘You’ve done ten minutes. Just swim to the end of the beach and back and then you can get out.’
‘Ten minutes? Is that all?’
‘Off you go. Keep swimming, otherwise you’ll get cold. This is Can Rolls, remember, not Can’t Hepburn.’
I set off with only one thought in my mind. I don’t think I can manage fifteen minutes in water this cold, let alone fifteen hours. This Channel thing is big. It’s bigger than I ever imagined.
Her Darling Child
It was a Wednesday evening when the email popped into my inbox. At 18:04, to be precise. It read:
Dear Jessica,
We will never know what Jane Austen thought about not marrying and not having a family of her own, because we have no evidence that she ever told anybody. She was certainly acutely aware of the pitfalls of an ‘unequal’ marriage and portrayed them in her novels, as well as the happier ones.
However, since she had endless nieces and nephews, some of whom stayed with her, some of them recorded how they loved her, and she recorded how she played with some of them, I am sure being an aunt was the next best thing to being a mother (especially when you can give them back to their parents!). She was, nevertheless, never blinded to their true natures.
She did have an offer of marriage but, despite the man having an estate and good fortune and being the brother of her friends, she turned it down because she realised that she didn’t love the man. She told her favourite niece that, whilst it was good to respect a man, one should not marry without love (or the possibility of respect turning into love). She also said that it was a good thing not to marry too soon because the woman would not then be subject to so many pregnancies. She was always concerned about one of her nieces, in that respect, calling her ‘a poor animal’.
It was certainly not through the lack of society, like the Brontës, that she never married – the number of people she knew, met, and wrote about is staggering; perhaps she was too picky (like some of us today!) or some men might have found her too shrewd! Who knows?
It is true that, had Jane Austen married, she would not have had the time and energy, or perhaps the inclination, to write and we would not have had all those wonderful novels. In fact she called Pride and Prejudice ‘her darling child’. Whether or not the novels were sublimation, we will never know.
Regards,
Maureen Stiller,
Hon. Secretary, Jane Austen Society
AGONY!
I’ve had a few catchphrases in my time, ‘Is eleven too early for lunch?’ being one of my particular favourites. But over the course of nearly a week in Formentera I develop a new catchphrase. Whenever I get out of the sea and am asked how I’d found it, my response is always the same: ‘It was AGONY!’
Each day the time and distance in the water would rise in small increments, but there was nothing about it that was getting any easier. It only takes a few days before I resort to begging. During our afternoon swim I stand up in the shallows and shout to John that I can’t go on.
‘Yes you can,’ he bellows back. ‘Off you go, Hepburn.’
I fall forwards into the water and try to lift one arm over the other but my body is screaming. I let my feet touch the sand again.
‘I can’t,’ I say, my voice sounding pathetically weak and whiny.
‘Get back in the water,’ John shouts from the shore.
‘I don’t think I can do it,’ I moan.
‘Get back in the water,’ he shouts again. ‘Another ten minutes and then you can get out.’
From somewhere