Living in a school, we had access to luxuries that my parents’ income alone could never have provided.

We lived, it felt to me, like millionaires.

A tennis court.

A swimming pool.

And staff. My goodness! Although my mother, a brilliant and extremely influential maths teacher, proudly advertised her occupation as “Housewife” on her passport, she hardly had to lift a finger. The school provided us with a full-time cleaner six days a week, Miss Halifax (her title a great mystery to me as she had a son, Peter, my Saturday playmate); a sewing lady, Miss Cartwright, on Tuesday afternoons; our clothes sent to the laundry every week and coming back ironed and beautifully packed as if new; not one but two Danish Girls (au pairs to you and me)… though what they were for other than sunbathing, I know not.

And unlimited – but unlimited – school food. I could have friends (most of whom, by my teens, were undergraduates) round for supper every night of the week. I could invite ten home for Sunday lunch on the after-church spontaneousness of the moment. My father told of the occasion when he came down for breakfast to find a dozen people in evening dress eating bacon-and-egg round his table… and he didn’t know a single one. Given that one was my sister and another I myself, we now know whence I inherited my “writer’s licence” with anecdotes which all my family accuses me of.

(Or else he had taken the family face-blindness, which I have also inherited, to a new level.)

And oh! the swimming pool…

From April to September, every morning before breakfast, I swam with my father. Often we were joined by Ruth, mother to (still) my best friend Helen, whose father was Master to the college over the road from the school.

It was so much part of my life that when I left home to go to university, and the Hilary Term of my First Year was the hottest summer since records began (any weather announcement always being the most whatever-it-is since r b, so it must have been: see anecdotes, licence with, above) I found myself completely at a loss.

Where were we supposed to swim? Where did everyone else go? How was I to cool off? Can people actually live without being able to plunge into cold water at a moment’s notice throughout the summer months?

I felt as others might if deprived of a bathroom.

Eventually someone told me of a pool somewhere beyond Port Meadow and I bicycled there a couple of times and jumped in… but it was far too far, and I was hot again by the time I got back.

I was used to a pool in the grounds.

So as soon as Shaun had a living and became the Parson of Parson’s Green and we had our own lovely, large Victorian vicarage and garden in the centre of London, the first thing I did was scrape all our savings together (someone had generously given us a thousand pounds a few years earlier, when Shaun was between posts and couldn’t sign on for several weeks because clergy are paid monthly, and I had invested it in British Gas shares and doubled it) and I bought us a swimming pool kit.

(The most money we’d ever spent on anything. Surely not, the pool company said. Don’t you own your house? Hah, I wish! Surely you’ve bought a car? Nope: never.)

And when we moved here, to the house we’re in now, we did the same. Very dear friends invited us skiing: a once-in-a-lifetime stay with them. But we had designated the Easter holidays for pool-digging-and-building, and with considerable regret turned it down.

And I still swim in it every morning, before breakfast.

Latterly, in lockdown, along with so many others, through the winter too. I have now broken (very thin) ice to swim; and like my father, swum in the snow. (Though unlike him, I did it a second time.)

Once, based on misinformation from my sister, I dived in headfirst in my rubber ring, and spent a happy and bemused few moments watching all the legs and bubbles in the floating blue… until my father fished me out and everyone made an incomprehensible fuss and asked if I was all right

This morning, another memory came back: an afternoon when I proudly boasted to a grown-up that I’d saved at least ten lives. I had been picking out drowning beetles and other creatures, and freeing them. Something I still do most mornings. Not least because I keep bees, am allergic to their sting and if I swim into a live bee can end up in an ambulance. 

This morning, a pretty little yellow butterfly had just landed on the water and was busy drowning. I fished her out as gently as I could and laid her on the lawn amid the falling rose petals. I wasn’t at all sure she would survive.

And suddenly, like a wave crashing over me, it hit: an intense, powerful and painful longing. For my parents. For their love and protection. For them to pull me from the waters swirling so wildly about me, and hold me safely in their arms, and not let anyone hurt me any more…

The trick with life – with mental health, surely – is to anchor.

For instance: positive memories to diurnal activities.

Every morning, I swim.

And many mornings in recent years, my swim has been troubled by painful memories. Someone who once swam with me and then hurt me, very badly. Someone else who stole a lot of money from me one summer, when I was swimming a lot.

From now on I will invite my thoughts to dwell on my father instead. On his love and support sustaining me. His humour cheering me. His faith, strengthening me.

(And his yanking me out of the water by my ankle when I was head down like a duck dibbing with no thought whatsoever of saving myself.)

So that every morning, when I swim, his spirit will surely swim with me.

And when I went back, a few more petals had fallen and the butterfly had flown away.