Swimming Part one

Swimming

 

My mother was ambitious for her children. Spare time was never ‘spare’, it was there to be used. Used constructively. From the tender age of nine I was despatched on the bus into town in the days after Christmas to attend drawing classes in the National Gallery, (actually the first year may have been held in the Hugh Lane Gallery (note to self, must revisit)). With the same zeal my mother brought me swimming to the public baths in Tara Street and some years later to the Iveagh Baths (which for my sins I financed the reform into a gym in the early noughties). My first memories were of my nostrils being assailed by the smells of urine and chlorine. I am not sure which was worse. And one is reminded of the story of the boy peeing from the top diving board. That was the least of it   

 

 

In the late fifties we would head in the summer to the West on holidays en famille. I have vague memories of changing into cold togs on wet Donegal beaches. It was not always terrible. We loved the breakers in Bundoran and Rosses Point. We were forbidden from swimming in Strandhill, to which I will return later. We landlocked children of Churchtown, Dublin 14 would venture once a year to the coast, to Blackrock, from memory where there was high diving board and scores of local kids who swam much better than us having spent the summer in the pool. 

 

 

There were the excursions to the Bull Wall on a Sunday in the summer. It involved packing the car with a Primus stove and a tent. Swimming occasionally happened when the tide was in. It involved walking hundreds of yards into the sea to get one’s depth. My father typically didn’t swim but spent the first hour assembling the tent. Then the primus stove was lit and water boiled for tea. Mum had prepared egg sandwiches and so we ate like Innuits in an igloo within the tent sparing our sandwiches from sand. We headed back in the afternoon just in time to see our more relaxed neighbours next door just heading off. We were able to inform them of the sea conditions.

 

 

I remember a single episode in Sandymount when the O Cofaigh’s from across the road invited us to an evening swim one Summer. While grateful, I could see no charm in Sandymount, and I'm not sure how many people ever braved it. For many years there was a disused concrete bath which may have been tidal but which I never saw used. 

 

 

I am encouraged by the fact that Dubliners are rediscovering the sea scape of Dublin, though not quite to the extent of our Victorian grandparents.

 

 

I joined the missionary order, the Legionaries of Christ in the summer of 1969 following a sentimental family trip to the west in July. The Legion for all its faults, and they were many, encouraged sports, mostly football and swimming where it made sense, i.e. not Ireland. I arrived in Salamanca a few weeks ahead of my colleagues in early September 1974. The day after I arrived, we went for a wonderful afternoon of swimming in the river Ebro, outside of Salamanca. Seminarians who had joined after primary school were good swimmers for the main part. I jumped into my togs and ran along the sand of the riverbank, scorching my feet as I did. Salamanca can be very hot in the summer. We spent eleven months in severe Salamanca, where there was no central heating and no hot water. Frying in Summer, freezing in Winter. Cold showers at five thirty in the morning were character forming. Then came the summer and the blue skies. In truth we had blue skies in winter, but cold blue skies. The college was built in the fifties when the Order had little money. It did however have the money to build a very decent swimming pool as most Legionary houses boasted. 

 

 

To earn some money for the Legion we went picking lentils in the month of July. We were joined by Portuguese who travelled over the neighbouring border. The Portuguese had the good sense to disappear about midday while we baked in the noonday sun. We experienced a thirst so profound it is difficult to describe. There we times one had to refrain from drinking, because the more one drank, the worse it became. But then redemption and resurrection. We were bused back to the seminary in the Ciudad Jardin part of the city where after a shower to remove the grime we spent an hour swimming in the pool. Oh heave!. I can scarcely remember more pleasurable times. We were allowed dine in our casual clothes and not in silence as usual.

 

 

 

August saw us travel on holidays to Santander, perhaps Ontaneda. I think it may have been a disused convent or monastery. We swam every day in the blowy Atlantic. I was reprimanded for changing too slowly and perhaps too 'provocatively'. I had spent ten years playing rugby and changing in dressing rooms. Such madness. It was my first real introduction to the insanity that lay ahead. To the small minds, To the carping voices of the useless ones.

 

 

I decided in the Spring of 1976 that I would leave the Order and took the opportunity of sharing this with the Founder, who took it very well. He suggested I finish my first-year studies in the Gregorian. Which as a good idea. Except I never used them. That summer we headed to San Agata sue due Golfe, opposite the island of Ischia, close to Capri. Every day after desultory studies we would take the hour walk down the cliffs to the sea. Blue seas and blue skies. The biggest boat that entered the bay that summer belonged to a family from Sligo. I mentioned my unhappiness again one evening to the uncharismatic rector. So the next day, before the Community awoke, I was delivered to the train station in Naples and thence to Rome where I waited for the flight home. Typical Legion I knew not the day nor the hour and so spent the week in the swimming pool cleaning it with a high grade of acid that burnt my swimming trunks. Health and safety had not been invented. On the eve of my return I was told to contact my parents to tell them to collect me from the airport in Dublin. They knew nothing of this. When the phone did not answer, I guessed correctly that they would be in Donegal on holidays. By some miracle I had the phone number of my aunt in Raheny so she collected me from a sweltering airport towards the end of July 1976. The next day my uncle and I travelled to the neighbouring Bull Wall. Coming against  me in the distance along the beach I saw a group walking towards me. I guessed immediately and correctly it was the Legion with the new intake of vocations. I was spotted and they turned on their heels and marched back in the opposite direction. Two days out from an Order where I had served for seven years to the best of my ability and I was forgotten rejected within 48 hours. I knew where I stood there and then. I guess I always did.

 

 

We welcomed our first daughter into the world in April 1984. She was not a good sleeper. I remember the first night she slept right through. She was 18 months old. I did some of the babysitting. To amuse myself at night I would watch Channel Four. It had just begun showing American Football. Long before it became popular in Europe. I also remembering Japanese wrestling. Not for the faint hearted. To recover some sense of sanity I devised a cunning plan.

 

 

I was working at the time in Ireland’s premier merchant bank, Allied Irish Investment Bank. It had taken them ten interviews to recruit me. Long story. For another day. Unbeknownst to nearly everyone in our office block there was an executive shower which theoretically was available for the managing director. To the best of my knowledge he never used it. But I did. I cycled down after very few hours’ sleep to Sandycove bathing place known as the Forty Foot. There the fresh sea water restored my drooping spirits. I cycled into Bank Centre and made my way to the executive bathroom and enjoyed a tepid shower. I don't think they reckoned on anyone using the shower. But I'm not complaining. Looking East the rising sun had a special magic. It got me through the first eighteen months until summer 1985. By that stage I think the Bank and I had tired of each other and so I took a job with the tiny merchant bank Irish Bank of Commerce. My boss, Bill Barrett and I would steal out at midday to a gym in Clonskeagh with a pool. A year later I was joined by an assistant manager who had returned from the US where he had worked with the IDA. I taught him to swim, badly. And he got me into Greystones Golf Club. Sin sceal eile. 

 

 

In the mid-nineties I started my annual trip to Tenerife where swimming was the heart of the holidays. In 2004 we bought in the swanky Parque Santiago 4, a tiny studio apartment,  with is marvellous if not very deep swimming pool. Six years later we moved our allegiance to a bigger property in Playa Paraiso just up the coast. It boasted a marvellous swimming pool with a depth of 2m. Because of my heart condition and the consequent blood thinners, swimming in Ireland is now almost impossible. I have tried health clubs with little satisfaction and less enthusiasm. My swimming future is definitely behind me.