I couldn’t speak for the existence of any wildlife in that water, but I could speak for me. I had survived the misery of the last few months. I had survived loss more painful than I had ever imagined. But I had survived. And I would survive the almost paralysing fear of this swim. I was here. I was fine. And as I had promised my husband on the day of our wedding, I didn’t want to just watch life flow by; I wanted to leap in.
In the event, it was perhaps less of a leap than a slow, shaky wade. I left my rucksack on a grassy clump next to where D had chosen to sit. I stripped down to my swimsuit and found my hat and goggles, sparing a special moment’s thank-you to my Greek swimming companions for the fact that I would actually be able to see where I was swimming today. I pulled on the neoprene socks I had bought for walking in and out of open water, and headed for the tarn’s edge.
At first the cold didn’t hit me. At first. Then suddenly electric shocks rocketed from my toes up to my gut as my body registered it, a beat behind. Beneath my feet was slate and pebble, and I realised that the water was so clear that the black rock beneath was much closer to the surface than it looked: the edges were very shallow. I waded in, first ankle deep, then knee, then thigh. With every step I took, I disturbed more of the water, sending ripples across the entire surface, reminding everyone and everything that I was there.
Once the water was above my waist, I looked back at D, then plunged my face beneath the surface, exhaling slowly. All I wanted to do was to breathe in, to gasp, to cling to air as if it were life. But now, at last, I knew how counterproductive that was, and how right it would ultimately feel if I forced myself to push as much air as I could out of my lungs. And lo, the magic happened. Where the terror had been gripping me, a level of calm crept in, and I could feel the longing to swim more sharply than I could feel the panic about what might happen. I looked up, turned and yelled, ‘It’s okay! It’s going to be okay!’ D’s smile suggested that it hadn’t occurred to him it wouldn’t be.
I turned back to the water, did three more deep breaths, then pushed myself up and off the rocky floor, letting my legs rise until I was lying flat, looking down. I was swimming. For a while, the floor of the tarn still seemed very close. The heaps of slate and rock were smooth, polished by the endless water, and there were no weeds, reeds or greenery. I saw the lid of a Coca Cola bottle, and little else. I swam slowly, letting my breath find a pattern as I stayed relatively close to the water’s edge. The cold started to seep into my ears, under my swim hat and beneath my suit. But I focused on my breath, in, out, in out, keeping the rhythm going.
I turned. It was time to swim across the tarn. I shouted out that that was what I was doing, and headed off again, watching the patterns made by the rock beneath me as my breath slowly dragged me into the steady state of calm I craved. Then, as suddenly as the tarn itself had appeared, its floor disappeared. Within three strokes, my view had gone from endless slate to … absolutely nothing. I could see not a thing, and I didn’t even understand if it was a change in the quality of the water itself, or simply its depth.
The tightness reappeared around my chest in an instant. Was I in very deep water now? Deeper than any I had swum in before? Or was I in … black water? What was underneath me? What was going to happen next? I had no idea. I had no idea about any of it. There was only one thing I was sure of: panicking was not an option. I had learnt the hard way that to panic was to lose control of my breathing, and to lose control of my breathing was to lose control of my swimming. And I was in the middle of a lake where the only way home was of my own making. Ship, cargo and crew.
In the absence of any other options, I kept swimming. A pull to the left, a pull to the right, a breath; a pull to the right, a pull to the left, a breath. I closed my eyes. I opened my eyes. The view was exactly the same either way. I swam. I breathed. I was. And as I crossed the tarn’s centre, a memory trickled into my mind as slowly and surely as that cold had crept its way under my swim cap. Patrick’s words on that first one-day swimming course. You don’t – you can’t – know for sure what is beneath you when you swim outdoors. But now I knew more than that: that you can never be sure of anything. Yet, as with swimming, you keep going, you keep breathing, and then, when you reach an edge, you have lived more fully than before.
I couldn’t know, I would never know, why that embryo didn’t stay with me. I didn’t know if the IVF would work next time, or ever. But I was still me, I was still alive, and it was my job to grasp every gulp of life that was there for me. And as I pulled my arm back again, I saw the slate on the opposite side of the tarn. I had made it.
My head jerked out of the water and I waved back to D on the hillside. As I did so, I took a huge gulp of water. I’ve never tasted anything like it: the cleanest, clearest, richest water I’d ever had. I could taste the mineral-rich rock as if I were actually licking it. I could taste life. I was alive.
As autumn progressed, I swam and I swam, feeling the strength flowing gently back. I had been utterly unprepared for the havoc that the drugs and surgery would wreak on my body. The drugs themselves, and the strength of my reaction to them, had left me with extra rolls of flesh that seemed to have sprouted within a fortnight. The belly that appeared as I grew those eggs stayed, as did the soft pouches of flesh sitting on my hips – a sort of bum bag of extra me that left so many of my clothes either ill-fitting or uncomfortable. My boobs were uncontrollably enormous – the sort of thing that teenage girls or mothers-to-be so often take delight in. For me, they did not represent an exciting new life change, merely serving as a daily reminder of what I didn’t have. As did the significant amount of internal pain that the egg collection surgery had left me in – which meant that running, and its associated jiggle, was utterly out of the question.
Swimming, though, I still had. Slowly I emerged from this body that bore no relationship to the one I had built for myself over the previous five years, and I took on more and more swims, enriched weekly by the sights, smells and sounds that each one brought me.
I swam again in the Lake District, this time with Tess panicking at the water’s edge, unable to tell that my whoops were of delight not danger. Stroke after stroke I waded through my fear of the reeds and the mysteries that I felt sure must be lurking between them. I even kept my breathing steady and swam softly forward as I looked down and saw what I later discovered was a pike gliding smoothly below me.
Soon we had a second round of IVF scheduled. Until then, I became ever more grandiose in my attempts to console myself about past disappointment and to steel myself for future pain. As well as that incessant tug, the desire to be a parent, I still felt fiercely protective towards my own body. Ours was a relatively new love, one hard won over miles run and distance now swum. It had taken years to accept that yes, my body had value, but that value lay more in where it could take me, what it could show me, than in any perceived visual pleasure it could provide for others. I tried to approach this latest quest with the spirit of adventure that had sprung so late in me but proved such a source of joy.
I would strive, seek, find – and not yield to any suggestion that my life or my body were lesser if they didn’t incorporate motherhood. No matter how much I longed for it, motherhood could not be the only goal: as with every panicked breath I had wasted when the ability to swim had been in me all along, I had to find the resources for happiness and contentment in my own skin, regardless of the outcome of the IVF.
I muttered Tennyson’s words softly to myself again as I entered the sea alone at ten o’clock on an autumn night. It was the once-in-a-generation blood moon, under which I was determined to swim. The prospect of bathing in the inky dark of a night sea beneath the looming blood red of the lunar phenomenon was a goal I couldn’t miss, even if none of the swimmers I had hoped to go with were available. A brief plunge would still inspire fresh fertility and possibilities, I told D, as I begged him to come down to the seafront for company.
A month later, I began the second round of IVF treatment. On t
he advice of my doctor, I was doing exactly as I would have done otherwise, until I felt I couldn’t. In this instance, it meant swimming around the Palace Pier in the dark with the group of friends I had now made from regular autumn sea swims. I was by this time used to swimming around the pier in daylight, having done it a couple of times on early autumn mornings, seeing the rides and the wooden slatted walkways I had run down so many times from an entirely new perspective.
That Halloween, we met long after dark, when the tide was as far out as it had been that first time I finally let myself exhale and enjoy swimming four months earlier. We had glow sticks on our heads and in our tow floats, and we swam in the shadow of the pier, whooping and laughing. I watched the fairground lights pierce the water and dance beneath its surface, a thousand candy colours fizzing between my fingertips. The sea had a strange viscosity in the dark, and as we swam, being careful to avoid lobster pots, I called to mind those Greek dolphins and wondered who else I was sharing the water with. Children waved down at us, and D, watching from the pier, heard a dad tell his children they were being ridiculous to imagine they could see anyone in the water. ‘Stop getting so spooked by everything,’ he told them, as D quietly took photos. ‘Those shrieks were coming from the rides; no one would swim in the dark!’
The moment we returned to shore was made all the more exciting when we realised we were far more frightening to both passers-by and those who’d seen us from the pier than any of the gangs in fancy dress were. I shimmered inside, exhausted, but with blood abuzz to have had swimming take me somewhere else I would not have dared to go if I were already pregnant.
Resolute about keeping my fitness up, I swam lengths twice a week in the pool and kept on swimming in the sea, even as the heat slowly started to ebb from it. There were sharp, sunny mornings when sparkles seemed to shoot from the water’s surface, and days when the sea was as flat and inscrutable as the sky, but the weather held, and so did my ability to swim. The day before my second egg collection surgery, I swam in the mouth of Shoreham Harbour, feeling my muscles read the movement of the water and warm my blood from within against the autumn chill. I had rebuilt myself. I was ready.
This time the treatment went well, and a few weeks later we had a positive pregnancy test. It was followed soon after by the heartbreak of miscarriage. The first round had been disappointment, a setback. This round was crushing grief. An ocean of tears for a life lost, and an almost total collapse in everything I had believed of my body. It had betrayed me.
Where I had found strength, I now saw inadequacy, insufficiency, weakness. Where I had found beauty, I now saw flesh that served no purpose: a nascent belly, swollen from medication but aching with emptiness, uncontainable breasts bursting with anything but sexuality. Where I had felt self-love, I now saw an unwelcome stranger in the mirror. That tiny, perfect red pearl of cells in my knickers: my body had been rejected, and in turn I rejected my body.
CHAPTER NINE
And to Spring
It takes a very long time for the ocean’s temperature to change. As winter draws in, the water holds the heat of the rays the sun shone on it weeks previously. As the spring sun warms the earth, bringing trees to blossom, the sea stays stubbornly cold, remembering the short winter days. As Christmas approached, I felt the same, stuck in the sunless sadness of six weeks ago. Wave after wave of post-pregnancy hormones and IVF drugs ran through me; I felt as if I were fighting currents stronger than any I had ever had to navigate.
The first time I felt strong enough to get back into the water was a celebration. It was December, and Fiona, a friend from my swimming group, had reached the final mile of the fifty she had decided to swim to celebrate her fiftieth birthday, as well as to raise money for Amaze, the children’s charity that had helped her and her son Dan for many years. We met beside the pier, a huge crowd of swimmers and onlookers, as well as the instructors who had taught me over a year before.
The sea was choppy; I wasn’t sure what I could manage. But as I looked around, rubbing my hands together against the cold, I knew that all of us could and would manage more than we ever imagined. Children were waving their mothers off, husbands were warming their wives up, swimmers were hugging and laughing. The celebratory mood buoyed me up as we leapt into the water, heading for the end of the pier.
The tide was going out by the time we came back in. It was a struggle to reach the shore. Each time I swam almost far enough to stand, the wash would suck me back. My head under the water, I heard the clatter of the pebbles dragging out into the sea, and wondered if I’d ever make that final stretch. After the last few weeks, it was a familiar feeling, but one I’d had on land more than at sea. I decided to fight. I would get home.
Ten minutes later, exhausted and trying to take off a swimming costume and eat a slice of cake at the same time, the idea that I had doubted myself seemed daft. The gathered throng was now even more celebratory than before the swim. There were people I had barely a thing in common with beyond a new-found passion for the water. There were people who had experienced things more gruelling, more painful than I could ever imagine. But above all there were people who knew that life can’t be spent as a spectator; we have to get in and take part.
What followed that December swim was an experience I had never dreamed I would attempt: a full winter of cold-water swimming. I never chose to do it; I just chose not to stop doing it. Where so many other plans around me had turned to dust, in one area at least I just had to keep going.
Jumping into cold water if you are not accustomed to it can put huge pressure on your heart, send your breathing into potentially unrecoverable erratic fits and starts, and leave you woozy with hypothermia – too sleepy to swim, too cold to recover. You can’t fight thermodynamics any more than you can fight infertility. But you can adapt. You can acclimatise. You can find joy where others see pain. And this was what I chose. To acclimatise. To keep swimming, week in, week out, until what had seemed like an impossibility, a madness, became golden, a delight.
Unlike with a marathon, a half or a triathlon, this challenge was never about a distance or a time. It was unmeasurable and unwitnessed by cheering crowds or sponsored cameras. There was no medal, and never would be. The challenge was simply to keep going. Slowly, daily, weekly, to keep adapting the threshold of what I was capable of.
Once a week, at least, I headed outside and took a swim. Usually it was in the sea. I met others, armed with woollens and flasks, and headed out towards the pier, the power station or simply a boat on the horizon, for as long as we could take it. Or I walked down to the seafront with D, who would sit, cradling a coffee, watching me, watching the sky. If I needed to be in London, I would find one of my beloved lidos, now learning which among them were unheated, shifting to cold water with the season’s change. But it was enough simply to swim outside, catching snatches of the sky above me as I turned my head to breathe. A few days before Christmas, when I was feeling less than festive and needed to spur myself into believing that there were still smiles somewhere inside of me, I headed to Brockwell Lido, feeling the sub-10º temperatures sting my hands and feet as I entered beneath the sun’s low early-morning light. I arrived shivering and timid. I left feeling like a warrior queen.
On New Year’s Day, I swam with the group in Brighton: a loose collection of us arranged online, old faces and new. Most of us, including me, were in nothing but swimming costumes, shrieking and giggling as we dived in, passing families and dog-walkers not knowing whether to panic or cheer. I emerged puce into D’s arms, skin and bones fizzing with cold – and the realisation that if I could cope with this, I could cope with anything the new year threw at us.
A couple of weeks later, I attended the PHISH (Parliament Hill Ice Swim Hootenanny) cold-water swimming event at the Parliament Hill Lido on Hampstead Heath. It was a bitterly cold day in early January; after a strangely warm Christmas, the first day of the winter to properly snatch your breath away. Nevertheless, from 9 a.m. until after dusk, men and women of a
ll ages queued, raced, cheered and saunaed, while drinking positively Scandinavian quantities of coffee. The icy sub-6° temperatures didn’t put anyone off, and there were almost more contestants than could be accommodated, all after the chance to race two, four or even more lengths in that water. The competitors themselves ranged from the aggressively competitive to those who had been swimming outdoors for a lifetime, feeling the cold invigorate them year in, year out, knowing that eventually the sun always returned. And the winners were spread across the two. For every back-slapping, high-intensity-training, expensive-kit-wearing thirty-something bloke, there was a solid, unintimidated matriarch more than able to cut through the pool just as fast, with perfectly even breath and significantly less fuss.
Through January, February and on towards March, the coldest month, I carried on swimming. Though the sea temperature dropped incrementally each week, my body, as it slowly acclimatised, felt the same each time. At first we would wade into the water, feeling the tiny prickles of cold work their way up our legs. There were smiles and yelps as we teased and encouraged each other. When we reached chest depth, the instinct for a sharp inhalation would seize us, the iron band of cold and doubt slowly tightening around our chests. So we would exhale, regulate our breath, remind ourselves that we could do this, that we chose to do this. Then the chatter would die down as we started to swim. The cold would grip my face – a firm, freezing hand squeezing at my jaw. I’d feel my hands stiffen in the icy water and make sure I kept them strong, elegant, reaching. The trickle of water made its glacial progress up my back, waiting to be warmed by the heat of my blood. I’d wonder how long I would last, if I would even make it beyond the waves to where the water was calmer. I’d breathe, I’d feel myself both start to move and reach a point of stillness.
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