I longed to swim the Channel, until an Olympic swimmer sent me off in a different direction | Gareth Roberts

In my youth, I secretly harboured a dream of swimming the Channel. When I was 20, I worked as a lifeguard and swimming teacher at the council-run swimming pool in Cambridge. There were some intriguing regulars. Prof Stephen Hawking would watch poolside as his nephews swam. There was also a smattering of ex-Olympic swimmers, including a Maltese guy who moved through the water with such precision and power that he barely made a ripple. Watching him was hypnotic.

One of the city’s swimming club coaches had competed at the Munich Olympics. I confided in her that I planned to swim the Channel. I knew it would take at least two or three years of hard training, I told her, but I was committed and time was on my side – I was only 21. She looked me up and down and told me that there were not enough geese in the world to render the fat required to insulate my skinny legs from 12 cold hours in the Channel. “Find another dream,” she said.

Her comment stung. My family had famously scrawny legs: straw-thin and devoid of any tactical muscle. They were legs destined to reside in perpetuity beneath the troglodyte darkness of an office desk, not power through the seas to cross-Channel glory.

Despite this, I’d always been a strong swimmer at school and later swam anywhere I could: freezing mountain lakes near my village in Snowdonia, rivers, pools, ponds and quarries. Bodies of water drew me towards them with magnetic power. It was the 1980s, when wild swimming was known only as “swimming” and Dryrobes wouldn’t bring warmth and derision for another three decades.

I was strong but wiry, like a steel coat hanger, a racing snake. I wasn’t built for long-distance open-water swims. To swim distances, you need a degree of body fat density, buoyancy and power. I had none of this. For years, I chomped my way through peanut butter and banana sandwiches, protein shakes and ice-cream in the hope of achieving the bulk needed to stave off the cold. I could swim three miles in cold water before I started to freeze and shut down. No matter how hard I tried, I seemingly could not get past this distance barrier. Any fat I managed to lay down was burned off instantly with my constant training. I realised the swim coach was probably right, and I let my dream sink into the abyss. But what I couldn’t have known was what would take its place – and how rewarding it would be.

Around this time, the city council decided that it would offer special closed-session swimming lessons to small groups of adults who wanted to learn but had a crushing fear of water. It was decided by the pool manager that I would run the class on Tuesday nights. I thought this was a nod to my expertise and maturity, but it just turned out that nobody else wanted to do it.

My first group consisted of six adults of varying ages; the youngest was 23, the oldest 79. During the first session, we sat on the poolside and talked about their experiences. Flora, the oldest, had a lifelong desire to learn but had never had the opportunity; work and family had consumed her life (nobody in her family apart from her grandchildren could swim). Many of them had lived through traumatic childhood incidents – one had been pushed into a river, another had been humiliated during a family seaside holiday.

It requires real courage to share your fear and shame with a stranger, and learning to swim also requires you to undress, all your vulnerabilities shrink-wrapped into a singular experience. For that reason, there were no spectators. During those evening sessions, the pool was silent and still, the lights to the spectator gallery dimmed, the building transformed into a temple of tranquillity.

By week three, everybody was standing waist-deep in the shallow end of the pool. The challenge was to walk across the 10 metres to the other side, hands clamped to a swim float that I was holding. The tiles underfoot were slippery and losing balance was easy. The last to go was a guy named Raj. He was twice my size and his desire to learn to swim was driven by a need to conquer a fear that had plagued him since childhood. He was dreading this exercise more than anyone else. By week seven, he was swimming, float held in front, legs furiously churning water.

Week after week I had assured them that one day they would jump into the deep end and swim a full length of the pool, unaided by floats. Nobody believed this was possible; most only wanted to be able to float and tread water. I loved these sessions. Watching somebody slowly overcome a long-ingrained fear was deeply gratifying.

By summer, I had migrated the class to a nearby outdoor pool, a staggeringly beautiful 100-yard lido surrounded by trees. The cold water was a shock but soon the realisation that they were away from the calm, safe privacy of the indoor pool hit them: they were out in the world doing something they could never have imagined themselves doing. It was glorious.

I taught this class for a year before leaving to enrol at college as a mature 23-year-old. I like to think the course was a success and that the council continued with it, but sadly, a year later the pool was partially demolished and a smaller pool built, run by a private contractor. It had all the charm of a shopping-centre gym and there didn’t seem to be any classes for people who had sat too long on the riverbank watching and dreaming.

At its most basic, swimming is about breathing and floating. The rest is just style. If you were lucky enough to learn as a kid, then great; lots of people didn’t get that opportunity to experience the amniotic weightlessness of being in a blue rectangle of water, or feel their toes brush along the pebbled bottom of a slow-moving river. The hard work and willpower it took my class to overcome something so debilitating for such a simple reward stayed with me for the rest of my life. None of them were ever going to swim the Channel, but of course, I never told them that.

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