Swimming Lesson

I am sitting in an overheated aircraft-hangar of a pool room watching my granddaughter attempt to morph into a fish. Her instructor, apparently, thinks she’s doing quite well, but I’m sceptical because so far I can see no signs of scales, gills or fins.

Three other pond creatures are splish-splashing in the water alongside her. Of course, she’s the star pupil. That’s my totally objective opinion which nevertheless might be contested by the respective school-mums were they to look up for just one second.

Thankfully, the instructor certainly would notice if one of her prize froglets started to drown. But probably not the teenage pool attendant, there on his high perch. I’m sure he’s been well trained in rescue techniques but clearly he had not anticipated that his was the world’s most boring job. I can’t be sure he is actually focussing on the pool at all. His attention seems to be entirely on the shapely girl in the black, high-leg swimsuit standing on the edge of the pool who I suspect knows exactly the effect she is having on Mr Lifesaver.

The three mums sitting near me are certainly not watching their spawn, but are screen-tapping away with a fluency I can only wonder at, more especially because of their long, manicured nails, reminiscent of Cruella de Ville. 

Many years before I learned to swim in a lake by hurling myself further and further from a flimsy wooden jetty. Far from horrifying my mother, she was encouraging my sink-or-swim approach. I guess she knew she was still young enough to have more children if this one happened to drown. Within a day or two I was able to stop swallowing the brown water and keep at least one airhole above the surface. I suppose I was then expected to learn style and technique by watching my older sister, who could swim right across the lake. Fat chance.

This is not the way the four be-goggled tadpoles are expected to progress. I watch the instructor, nothing if not patient, who seems to be encouraging them to make movements in the water which owe nothing to any swimming stroke I have ever witnessed. Each in turn makes an attempt to mimic the recently demonstrated action.  “That’s better Clarissa”, one of them is told after an attempt so pathetic I am left failing to comprehend how bad it could have been before.

They all seem to like the instructor; a large woman whose shape suggests she will be more comfortable in the water rather than out of it and who wears a t-shirt over whatever is underneath. Her little troupe criss-cross the pool, one after another, with varying degrees of physical support. I just can’t see how this water exercise is a precursor to actual swimming but perhaps they are just gaining confidence. If so, they must be pretty happy in the water by now: the four of them have been learning to swim for more than a year. Half-an-hour-a-week.

I know their session is almost over for the sides of the pool fill with slightly larger tadpoles and more mother-frogs.  A buzzer sounds and the would-be amphibians climb out, three of them to be wrapped in neatly folded clean towels, produced from smart pool-bags. My own special, star-swimmer is left to dig around in a supermarket for-life carrier-bag, at the bottom of which she finds her crumpled towel. ‘Grandad!’ she exclaims, as if I was something more than a bag carrier and had responsibility for equipment.

Despite now being well-wrapped and the room’s tropical heating all four are shivering like spaniels fresh out of a winter-puddle. Perhaps they will be warmed by encouraging words from the instructor. It comes from kindness not honest assessment and I have the cynical thought that this is why parents are encouraged to pay for more lessons.

We make our way to the showers, lockers, changing cubicles, hair-driers, swim-suit-centrifuges, and of course the after-pool sweet-treat vending machines. There’s a well-established routine here which my granddaughter insists has to be followed. One particular shower cubicle. ‘Mummy lets me stay in for longer’, I am gently chided. And again, with the drying of long hair. ‘Never mind grandad, I can do it myself’, she sighs. She can.

Dried and changed, we make our way outside. The other swimmers go with their mums across the car park to tinted-window boxy-black vehicles, designed still to cope if enemy cluster bombs were to pepper the roads of suburbia. (I have the slightly smug feeling that my eleven-year-old hatchback is perfectly adequate, for peacetime at least.)

Back home my precious tadpole is telling her mother all about the swimming lesson and ‘Oh! Grandad!’ who didn’t know what to do with the wet swimming costume which “he wrapped in the towel like a sausage roll, silly”.

I smile lovingly, but despite genetic ties, a bit of me ponders the advantages of the muddy lake approach.