You would think that as I had decided to learn to swim, and the fact that I lived right by a huge body of water, and a had my father who was such a good swimmer, that all would be easy. How wrong you would be though, I managed to learn to swim in tiny stages, nothing as straightforward as you would have expected.
So, here I note the people who actually helped me to swim…
Dorothy Sweet.
Firstly, Dorothy Sweet, a bubbly large breasted teacher in the secondary school I attended. Affectionately called ‘Dotty’ by us kids, she was one of the teachers who accompanied us on the trip to France in my first year of being in Treviglas school.
So just before the summer holidays, off we went in an old coach, caught a ferry across to France and travelled to our first port of call ‘Dinard’. It’s a coastal town on a river, that was twinned with Newquay in the early days of the UK joining the Common Market.
I believe that there may be still a sign on entering Newquay that proclaims this alliance, but I haven’t been in or out of Newquay by that road in years. I guess now that Brexit has been accomplished, that the signage will be removed, and local councillors who enjoyed their trips across the channel, will have to make do with having their public paid for holidays somewhere else.
Dinard was nice, a bit like Newquay, but better, and in France. We visited the first Olympic sized swimming pool I had ever seen. On the pool side, Dotty soon discovered that my friend ‘Codger’ and myself, couldn’t swim at all.
Clad in a one-piece low-cut swimsuit, she had me to place my head between her voluminous wet breasts, and then hanging onto her rounded figure, I got to kick my legs as she dragged me across the shallow end.
I can assure you that the rest of the trip, I was teased unmercifully by my pals for having my face in such close proximity to her cleavage. However, Dotty did get me dog paddling before we left the pool that afternoon and was responsible for starting me trusting water again.
Without Dotty’s time and tuition, I’d never have sailed, swum, snorkelled and eventually dived in the ocean. The sea has given me constant pleasure nearly all my life and was with great sadness that in the Indian Ocean, on an island in the Maldives, that I discovered I could no longer swim due to my dystrophy.
I arrived home from France, and then it was suddenly summer holidays, and my father taught me to surf out in the rollers on Whipsiderry beach. Here in the soft summer sun, salt spray and grinding sand beneath my feet, I found a rare true happiness.
Catching a wave and having the rushing, crashing glistening white water caressing my sides as I thundered up the beach was a delight almost hard to put into words. The sound of the sand as it was dragged by the fury of the wave, the sight of its yellow flakes lifting in the water, and the sting of it on my legs and chest, this made me feel almost invincible.
At twelve, there were lots of exciting things ahead for me, riding motorcycles at speed, girls, sex and travel. Surfing, swimming, sailing and being in the water generally, has always stayed with me, and I found a calmness just by sitting and watching the ocean, hearing it, smelling it. To someone who maybe hasn’t had the same upbringing as myself, it is hard to quantify the Atlantic Ocean, and the peace that this mass of water brought me.
John Dyer.
The next person who helped me to finally swim, and I think they are largely unaware of this, was John Dyer, a lad who lived two doors from me. He was older than me, not by much, but nonetheless, enough to be ahead of me in all things. I liked John immensely, some friends you are in constant competition with, but in John I had a friend who I secretly adored. It is strange to be writing about my memories and finally realising how much I loved being with him.
He and I were on a cusp, me graduating from child to young man, and he already having risen over that ridge.
This particular summer, John started snorkelling, and I wanted to go with him. I was surprised, as when I talked to my father of my want to go snorkelling with John, he agreed immediately.
Now of course I understand that my father saw John who was older than me, as a sensible steading hand for me. John agreed I could go with him, and my father bought me a mask, snorkel and as I called them, flippers.
For the rest of that summer, a good warm, still watered summer, I was in nirvana. When the tide was in the right place, I would, with John, go snorkelling in a small cove that was set into the righthand side of Porth.
The bladderwrack would hand in the water, with small fish darting amongst its fronds as I watched crabs on the bottom. Large shoals of fish passed by the entrance to the cove, hanging almost within the touch of my fingers. With the tide in, the sands were magically transformed in an undersea wonderland, one I could almost imagine a mermaid inhabiting.
We never ventured out of the cove, we didn’t need to, but when John had enough of snorkelling, and wanted to go home, I always left the water reluctantly. By the end of the summer, with the aid of the fins, and Johns pushing me, I could actually swim fairly well. Just following John around exercised my legs, and I could swim fairly well in breaststroke.
Elsie Tucker – known to me, as Mrs Tucker.
Come the end of the summer, my father who had walked out along the cliffs occasionally and watched me, broke the news that he and two others were forming the Newquay swimming club. The idea was to teach as many twelve- to fourteen-year-olds to swim.
Newquay had no swimming pool of its own, the school I attended, had a very small one. So, lessons commenced at the school pool on Thursday evenings with my two for the sports teachers and my father teaching. When the weather got colder, the lessons were moved to a large indoor pool at a tourist site just outside of Perranporth. This pool was ten miles away, and we had to get there by coach, and there was a small fee. Apart from the rental of the pool, and the fuel for the old school coach, any monies left over from a small fee levied for the nights training, went into a fun for a pool for Newquay.
My endearing memory of those evenings was the smell of chlorine, the taste of Heinz oxtail soup out of a flask on the way home in the coach, and Mrs Tucker. When my father had formed the club, he had done so with a colleague, and at the meeting at the school when they had asked locals if they would support such an idea, they had asked for a female volunteer for the girls.
Not one woman stood up, not one, and there were plenty of mothers there. I knew from what I had overheard my father saying before the meeting, that they needed at least one woman who could go into the pool with the girls. If not, one came forward, it would mean that girls would have to be excluded from the swimming lessons.
At the main doors into the school assembly hall, where the meeting was being held, there was a bit of a commotion. I remember the woman who stepped through the crowd apologising that she was a little late that evening.
She had dark curling hair, and wore dark rimmed glasses, she looked a determined to me as a very young man.
My father invited her up on to the stage where my father, his colleague and some teachers were seated, and then heroically said she would be happy to fill the position. Her name Mrs Tucker, I only ever knew her as Mrs Tucker as young people were much more respectful of their elders back then, and to start with I was even a little scared of her.
I laugh now looking back, but I soon found her to be a really good laugh, and in the water at the pool, she taught me to swim the crawl, one of the more valuable styles, especially in the sea when it’s rough.
Mrs Tucker was always up for a bit of a laugh, and she never told us off too harshly for mucking around and left me with a very endearing memory of her in her black one-piece alongside the pool shouting encouragement to myself and others as we attempted to swim stronger under her tuition.
And so, summer came around, and my skill in swimming was much better, I’m thirteen now, and John and I venture into the cove once more. As the school holidays progressed, I noticed John’s attention wasn’t on snorkelling so much, and he had a hankering for a malibu board.
As the weeks slipped by, he got a board, and with another friend, started surfing. For me, the summer adventures in snorkelling didn’t stop, but now I ventured out of the cove.
Firstly, I turned to the right, and slowly over a few days made my way to the entrance of Porth. Here by the side of the low cliffs I encountered right red spider crabs, clinging to the rocks by the long spiny legs.
I spent a lot of time hanging in those deeper clear waters, lifting with the swell and falling back, watching large fish hanging in the entrance to the cove. The sea was maybe twenty feet deep out here, and I’d catch glimpses of sparkling flickers near the surface, eventually realising that these were fast-moving hunting mackerel.
One such afternoon, as I was just enjoying the feeling of almost flying above the sandy bottom, I saw a massive shadow on the sand that appeared to be approaching me. Looking across the water, instead of down, I had the shock of seeing a very large shark heading towards me lazily.
Here at the entrance to Porth, I encountered a massive basking shark as it flicked its tail, turned and then drifted past with his enormous mouth wide open trawling the sea for its plankton dinner.
As it passed, its eye rolled in its head to get a better view of me, and I swear that it looked quite friendly. I now wonder that I didn’t poop my swimming shorts that day, but I was so intense on watching the shark, that I never thought that its bulky body and powerful tail might harm me.
I’ve swum with shark since, in other oceans, but I never felt fear as they were well fed, and I stayed away from them. But that day, the feeling of flight, and on meeting what to me was a giant of the deep, I felt ecstatic, more alive than when I had entered the water.
And that is one of the things the sea did for me later in life, I felt it healed me, made me less stressed, and more at ease with my life.
Another week later, I slid through under the bridge across to the island on the righthand side of Porth. There’s a small island here, ‘Gull Rock’. A solid bit of volcanic rock, topped with sedimentary rock, and then a topping of soil.
It stands only a hundred yards from Porth island, but it is the last land until ‘Lion Rock’ halfway to Watergate. At high tide, the water is twenty to thirty feet deep, and it’s unprotected from Newquay bay. Around the island I saw different species of deeper water fish, rays, monkfish, large plaice, huss, red coloured pollack, hake, gurnard and wrasse.
Here in those waters, over a few years, I experienced a sunfish, a massive, short torpedo shaped fish, which I never saw again until I was in the Indian Ocean. I also, with a close friend, encountered a massive jellyfish as on its side it slowly pulsed its way back out to deeper waters.
I’m six feet six inches tall, and as I swam across its front, my fellow snorkeller told me it was wider than I was tall, a truly amazing sight. It was a plain white, no excitement of colour, and none believed us when we returned home, and yet recently, one has drawn the attention of the local news, and which was as big, if not bigger than the one we swam with.
Even today the ocean has amazing sights still hidden from us, and I remember my father explaining how he had seen huge black and white flying shapes as the ship he was in arrived in the Southern Ocean off South Africa.
Many years later, I swam and watched manta rays feeding and being groomed on a tiny coral atoll in the Indian Ocean, on returning to the land, I saw them jumping, and arcing in the sun, drops of silvered water flying behind as they left the water. It was then I realised what my father had seen in the early 30’s, and his tale, it was then I realised that his encouragement to go into the water, and to explore the world around me, had brought me full circle back to his tale.
Walking by the sea, or indeed a river, has been a constant in my life until I became too ill, and even now I like to trundle alongside the little stream in the gardens at Trenance.
I have climbed the cliffs of Cornwall with, and without rope, climbed the UK mountains in bright sunlight and in freezing snow, but nothing has given me such pleasure of being underwater. Snorkelling was my main source of interacting with the undersea world.
Not needing or relying on much equipment, just fins, mask and snorkel in the bright sunlight of a nice summer day, was my preferred way of enjoying the ocean.
I was therefore sad to have to give up snorkelling in 2007, when I found that I no longer had the muscularity to hold myself in the water due to my speedily progressing condition.
When Sharon had helped me stumbling from the warm waters of Biyadhoo, I knew that I would never go back to the island to slip beneath those crystal waters, and that broke my heart.
It was especially hard because Sharon had only just grown to appreciate being under the water with me, and she now revelled in my lifetime hobby.
There can be no more of a cruel fate, than to have my passion at long last accepted by my beloved wife, and then have given it up forever, such is life though.
From beneath the Duvet 