In the summer of 1965, our family went on holiday to Greystones, Co Wicklow. I would join them at weekends, taking the No 84 bus from outside Trinity College after my summer job in the fruit shed of the Lamb’s jam factory on the Naas Road.
My uncle Bertie used to give swimming lessons in the Iveagh and Tara Street baths. He taught in Greystones harbour that summer on Saturday afternoons, and it was amusing to hear his predominantly middle-class Protestant students ask him where he learnt to swim, and to see their surprise when he replied: “In the canal.”
As he instructed his students, I was splashing around in the harbour. I dived off the wall and swam out to lie in the sun on a makeshift raft anchored some way from the pier. My uncle was using white swimming boards of durable foam to teach his students how to kick correctly.
Although I was some distance away, I distinctly heard a plump teenage girl ask if she could use her board to swim to the raft, and I heard him advise against as she was too inexperienced. I was surprised, therefore, when I saw her rounded form heading my way as my uncle focused on the younger students. She was holding the board ahead of her as she swam out ponderously, her head back, her face flushed. When she reached a point about halfway between the beach and the raft, she became tired and started to panic.
For some inexplicable reason she let go of the board and began to flounder in the water, screaming and waving her arms. I was amazed at the insensitive reaction of a young mother on the pier who, rather than raise the alarm, just said to her child: “Now, love, look at that girl drowning in the water over there. You see she wasn’t a bit careful. She went out too far. You be very careful when you’re swimming, pet, or you could drown like her.”
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I knew the girl would probably pull me down in her panic, so I stayed on the raft, reached out and called: “Don’t panic, just grab the board and try to swim over here.” Despite the fact she was coughing and spluttering, she heard and inched towards the raft. Another local youth, for some reason nicknamed Jagger, reached out too and we pulled her onto the raft, where she almost passed out. My uncle, now alerted to her predicament, swam to the raft and, using his life-saving skills, got her back to the beach. The girl was too traumatised to thank Jagger or me.
It was the summer of the Beatles album Help, and the film of the same name was showing nationwide. Often, while in Greystones in the evenings, after fishing from the pier, I’d visit a snack bar in the harbour area where the jukebox played the Beatles, the Hollies and the distant moon of my adolescent longings, Marianne Faithfull singing This Little Bird or, more appropriately, Summer Nights.
I often wonder today if that girl ever learnt to swim, and what became of the youth nicknamed Jagger. Since the days of the Celtic tiger, the quaint old-world harbour in Greystones has been turned into a sprawling, dull, concrete structure and the fishing tackle shop, near the Beach House, has been consigned to history, like the elegant La Touche hotel.
Whenever I read Stevie Smith’s poem Not Waving But Drowning and look at its related sketch of a girl peering through her long wet hair, I conjure up a picture of that Saturday in Greystones harbour 50 years ago, and of my late uncle Bertie, who passed away at the age of 95 in 2009.