Text 1: One length, by Imogen Price

An original contemporary magazine column.

At thirty-six, I could drive a van, assemble flat-pack furniture and cook a respectable curry for twelve people. I could not swim. For years, I concealed this fact behind a collection of useful phrases: “I’ve just eaten,” “I’ll watch the bags,” and, on one memorable holiday, “I don’t really trust hotel pools.”

Eventually, my seven-year-old niece asked why I always sat on the side while everybody else went into the water. I told her I preferred reading. She looked at the unopened book beside me and raised one eyebrow. The following Tuesday, I enrolled in an adult beginners’ class at the local leisure centre.

At 6.30 in the morning, the pool seemed enormous. Every cough returned from the roof twice as loud, and the blue water shivered under the lights as if it knew exactly why I was there. Six of us stood in the shallow end, gripping the rail. Our instructor, Sam, asked us to put our faces in the water and blow bubbles. It sounded absurdly easy. My hands tightened until my knuckles paled.

“The water isn’t testing you,” Sam said. “Take your time.”

On my fourth attempt, I lowered my face, breathed out and heard the small underwater roar of my own bubbles. When I stood up, Sam nodded as if I had done something ordinary. To me, it felt like kicking down a door.

Progress was untidy. One week I floated; the next I sank with great determination. I swallowed enough pool water to qualify as part of the filtration system. Yet each lesson added something: a push from the wall, three kicks, five strokes. Sam moved the bright lane rope farther away, a little at a time, until it stopped being a barrier and became a route.

Three months later, I swam one length without putting my feet down. There was no music and no cheering. An elderly man in the next lane gave me a thumbs-up before returning to his steady breaststroke. I sat on the edge, breathless, staring back at the twenty-five metres of water behind me.

Last weekend, my niece challenged me to a race. I accepted, on condition that I was given a head start. I lost by half a pool. It was the most satisfying defeat of my life.

Text 2: The cove at daybreak, by Edwin Vale

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this extract from his autobiography, published in 1894, a retired boatbuilder recalls learning to swim in a coastal village during the 1850s.

In our village it was said that a child learned the sea before he learned his letters. I did not. I feared deep water and guarded the secret carefully, for the other boys would dive from the harbour wall as easily as sparrows dropping from a roof.

My uncle discovered my cowardice when I was ten. Declaring that fear could be knocked out of a boy, he carried me to the end of the lower jetty and threw me in. I remember the green darkness, the weight of my boots and a patch of bright sky that appeared to be travelling away from me. A fisherman pulled me out with a boat-hook. My uncle called the affair a lesson. For four years, I would not step into a rowing boat.

Shame is a patient gaoler. It kept me on shore while boys younger than I found work on the fishing boats, and it taught me to laugh whenever they laughed, so that none might guess the reason. At fourteen I grew tired of arranging my life around one moment of terror. I went before sunrise to Mr Venn, the harbour watchman, and asked for his help.

He did not laugh, nor did he push me. He tied cork floats around my chest and walked beside me in water no deeper than his waist. For the first week he required only that I lie back and feel the sea carry me. “You have been fighting it these four years,” he said. “Let it hold you for half a minute.”

We practised in the quiet cove each morning. The water was bitterly cold, and sometimes the tide tugged at my legs like an impatient child, but Mr Venn never allowed me to hurry. The corks were removed one by one. First I crossed the space between two mooring posts; later I swam from the beach to the black rock and back.

My uncle happened to be standing on the quay on the morning I first crossed the cove. “About time,” he called. I made no answer. The victory did not belong to him.

I spent fifty years building boats and testing them in the same harbour. My own sons could swim before they were seven, but I taught them from the shore, one steady step after another. I never mistook terror for a teacher.

Both of these texts are about learning to swim.

Compare:

• what the writers say about their experiences of learning to swim
• how the writers present their thoughts and feelings about these experiences

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