SM 101

Memory

One day, when I was young, and my grandmother and I were standing on the edge of the Isis River in Oxfordshire, she told me a story about how, in her youth, she had fallen into this very river, at some deeper point.  In her summer dress she had plummeted straight down into the cold green depths.  And not being able to swim, she had surfaced and gone down again three times before anyone had been able to pull her out.

I remember, during the telling, looking in doubt into that river where we stood, all reeds and weeds, green and slimy, but most certainly not deep enough for even a child to submerge.  But at the same time, something hot and giddy cut into me with unreasoning urgency.  For while I looked at her shoes on the river's edge, I felt she was telling my own story.  The falling.  The gulped water.  The cold sting of fear and downward pulling slow motion panic of drowning.  The breathless struggle for the surface.  Each image struck somewhere deep and hot and turbulent inside.  It made me so dizzy I nearly fell in.

It was perhaps 30 years later, long after my grandmother's death that my older sister told me another, related story.  She said when we were young, she and I, on holiday in the Isle of Wight, we were walking around the blue swimming pool of the holiday camp – when I fell in.  "I thought you would drown" she said "you went down three times before anyone could pull you out".