The next thing I remember about the pool, was learning how to swim: doggy paddle, breaststroke, freestyle, backstroke, and then learning how to dive, too. My father would help me practice the latter. He didn’t even like swimming that much, but he was the only one of us who knew how to dive. I progressed from a seated dive, at the edge of the pool, to a kneeling dive and was finally ready to tackle a standing dive, a scary prospect, since the water looked so much further away. However, I wanted to learn, and soon became accustomed to plunging headfirst into the deep end. Of course, my early dives were hardly graceful, with my legs splayed, my knees bent, and my feet and toes not at all pointed, let alone together. My father helped me improve, using an ingenious method, which I can still, in my mind’s eye, almost feel against my legs today. He made me a “tightrope” over which I had to get my legs. He would enlist someone else to hold one end of a towel, rolled up tightly along its longer side, whilst he held the other end, thus making a taut, but soft rope in front of my ankles. The trick with the towel was meant to encourage me to get my feet up, up, up, as I went head-first into the water. As I improved, he and my mother, or whoever could help, would hold the towel higher, until eventually it was just under my knees. It was a great incentive to get my feet and legs up high enough to get over that rolled towel. The ploy was very successful, too. To this day, I can dive into a pool from a standing start, gracefully rising into the air, before bending, then straightening myself to enter that water cleanly, like an arrow, with the very minimum of splash.
I then remember attending school swimming galas, which I found very exciting. The pool side and the bleachers were decorated in bunting. Parents, teachers, residents poured in to watch. The atmosphere was electric with excitement. The swimming lanes were cordoned off. Supervisors, armed with stopwatches and whistles, would stand at each end of the pool, to ensure that swimmers were obeying the rules, and to note which swimmer or team touched the end wall first.
I loved watching the competitors, who, literally, swam like fish, slicing through the water so gracefully, so fast and so sleekly. They sure could swim, and I could hardly get over the fact that some were much younger than John and me. I was determined to improve. John was never that keen on swimming, but I persevered, loving the feeling of being in the water, gliding effortlessly through it. I learned to swim freestyle, and my diving was beautiful, or so I have been told many times over the years. Maybe I wasn’t fast enough, nor sufficiently elegant for participating in competitions, but I enjoyed swimming and diving, nevertheless.
I still do, to this day. It is now more than six and a half decades later, and, here in Ottawa, Canada, where I now live, I often go to my local sports complex, so that I can swim lengths. I continue to enjoy that feeling of gliding through the water, of emerging energized, refreshed, and ready for the rest of my day. I still find it hard to believe, though, that my love of swimming began with cleaning the tiles of a dirty public swimming pool, in a small village in the Southern Rhodesian bush.
