Harder

Childhood’s hopes and tears are bright and dark undertones ringing through the rest of our lives. The joys are strawberries and soft marshmallows. The pain is the metallic spike of blood streaming out of a stubbed toe or grazed knee. Beyond all of these are the spirits that flow into us of all our parents sins and insights. Some bring the beautiful lights of love that make a child feel valuable, others bring phallic monsters that torment and torture the child inside the child.

I had all of these and somehow in the naked context of swimming it seemed all the clearer, the light harsh in its goodness, the hurt too much and too soon it seemed, of a cross to bare.

With all the hopes and clear water ahead of me, what could have made the water rougher, the way tough and hard?
In a word: everything.

The strain on a rocket that is launching, is immense in those first few metres. If the hopes were not so ambitious, for space, the moon, or mars, the devils might be less frenetic in their quest to quash the rise from the ground, the ascent.
But I was ambitious.

The water attacked my ears. At the age of eight I had an operation to open up the channels in my ears and put miniature pipes in them (called grommets). A routine but painful procedure. This was a time of tears. And sleep deprivation as hot wax travelled through the night, dripping out of ears and onto the pillow. This effected school. And each day after school it was back in the pool. And the pain got worse.

I remember a few Saturday mornings, going to swimming as a matter of course, as a matter of routine. I remember being so overcome that I allowed myself to cry while swimming laps, and would hold back the tears once at the waters edge. It is easy to pull off. The tears are washed away in the pool, and the sounds, if any, lost in the gulps for air.

But sounds were made, and if you listened, in those short seconds turning underwater at the wall, you would have heard. It is a miserable noise. And there are few places worse to be crying than in a swimming pool.

The pain in the ears went away, and came back, and went away and came back.
Some of the strange condition (my ears seemed a lot more sensitive than the other swimmers) could be traced to swimming in a lagoon used by a lot of speedboats. It was called Umtimzini, on the Kwazulu Natal coast.

The lagoon was fairly small and shallow, and the oil(from outboard motors) floated in the water, and we swam (when we weren’t water-skiing) between these greasy rainbows. I probably swam the most in my family, or it was merely because I was the youngest, but my ears were never the same after that. My father had a few problems too, and still does, but none were as severe as mine.

Today I am 33 years old, I have had two holes in my left ear drum. One by the gradual chemical eating of chlorine – as a result of continuous exposure to swimming pool water. The other due to an impact while playing in the sea of the South Korean Island of Jeju, on the eve of an Ironman race. The impact was a powerful one, but one wonders if a stronger ear would have been able to stand the jet of water that spurted into it ahead of the knee.

The doctor told me yesterday: ‘There is scar tissue surrounding the rupture in your eardrum. Over the next 10 years you will gradually lose your hearing in your left ear.’

This statement is simple and possible to say, but to absorb, less so. Is it the swimming pool that is to blame, or the chlorine, or the oil in the lagoon, or are the flower whorls just to soft to stand so much sun and surf? Should I have stopped swimming altogether when the pain started?
Who knows?

What I do know is it started with the ears, and then it spread. My nose would bleed. Just the heat, or the merest nudge, and blood would stream out of it.
In spring, when the grasses began to grow out of the turgid brown earth, the buds threw blossoms and spores in the air, my whole body would swell and sneeze and redden. The hay fever was as bad as a cold. Mucous streaming out of the nose, a blocked nose at night. Swimming seemed to exacerbate the condition. It was as if the spores lay on the water and swimming across it meant they got sucked into you.
And then there was the throat. And colds and colds and colds and eventually the tonsils were sliced out. Swimming had to wait during these visits to the anaesthetist. But always swimming was there, surrounding it all, continuing in every moment of wellness, and often when I was not well.

What made it hard was that I was alone with these complications. My brother suffered none of these symptoms. Neither did other swimmers. To add insult to injury, a ENT specialist finally told me I had to wear a noseclip over my nose, and stuff prestik in my ears. If I really wanted to swim he said, that’s what I’d need to do.

But he said I should give up because my body just could not stand it. (He meant my ears).

I wore the damn noseclip. It was held in place with a lose rubber band, and after a few days I had a permanent white line from ear to nose, hold back the freckles, and betraying to the boys at school that I was swimming…that I was swimming a lot.
The prestik in my ears came after the first hole in my eardrum. That made life a lot more difficult. It is hard enough to listen to a coach when your head is in the water and you are being screamed instructions. It is harder still to do complicated workouts on a descending time frame and you were too slow to pull the plugs out when the instructions came. Also once the plugs were out, the seal wasn’t always very easy to maintain. So you tried to leave them in and listen. Not easy. A strain. Mentally a strain. Spiritually, often, demoralising.

I even managed to become allergic to beestings. And if you ask yourself what insect is most likely to fly around a swimming pool, the answer would be…bees.
When you are little you are endowed with greater power and resilience perhaps than any other time. The little man can walk tall through all the things that seem to be set to make him fail. But the heart inside is big, and powerful, and the body strong, despite the small bones, and crevices in the head, spiking with blood and wax and phlegm.

There were two girls called Bronwyn and Kerryn, and they were faster than I was, and bigger, although the same age. And I was starting to catch them. I could sense it, I could see it, I could feel it. Their hormones were slowing them down, making their waists and busts grow. I was getting faster. Faster than them, and faster than all the boys in my age group, and many of the older boys too. And this meant that the rocket and it’s interminable weight was at last shifting upward, despite all the snakes snared along its torso. Despite the weight and depression holding it down, it fired against the dull Earth towards the blue.

I continued to fire, despite the cracks, the strain, the creaking of my young limbs, and the blood and tears seeping into the chlorinated water.

I was strong, but not always strong enough to hold back tears in the water, on those days that became too much. And some of the swimmers saw or thought they saw something. A flaw. And this they would hold onto for when the time came. For the great races.