salt

on seawater

This summer, while I take a bit of a long-overdue break, I’m sharing pieces from the savour archive paywall free. Over the past few years I’ve become gradually addicted to open water swimming. In recent weeks I’ve spent most afternoons at the lido or the ponds, my hair still damp at bedtime, but it’s not really been that long since a chilly sea dunk was a novelty. I still have such vivid memories of this short break we took in Southwold four years ago, where we ended up staying in P.D James’s old house and I swam at sunrise. This week I’ll be in Pembrokeshire, and I’m hoping to do the same.

It takes a couple of days to miss the dawn. The first morning I find it seeping out around the blind, a deep and searing orange. We sleep in the eaves, with our heads pointing north. At 6am, the light paints bright squares on the right-hand side of the ceiling; at 6pm, the left. We are on the edge of the country, minutes away from where grassland becomes dunes and dunes the North Sea. The day reaches us here 10 minutes earlier than it would in London.

Around its edges, I can be found flitting around this house, taking photos. The sun paints itself on the walls, the furniture, the dried flowers. The house is several centuries old and sprawling, made of rooms that have stood without straight lines for several lifetimes. The kitchen window looks over rooftops, and has a ledge just wide enough to sit in. One of the bathrooms is papered in swans. We have deduced that a famous writer lived here, by spying on the bookshelves, and I wonder where she wrote. When I walk on the floorboards I think of the strangers who have made them creak before me. This is a house made of its own noises. They remind me of the one I grew up in. 

Once the dawn light has mellowed we leave the house. Above the sea the sun is paler, higher. Some mornings, the clouds turn it milky. Others, it catches on the water, cuts the blue with shine. At times, there are other bodies leaving as we go in, but usually we have the sea to ourselves. It laps at our ankles alone, prickles the skin of just our thighs, takes the gasp from our lungs only. Quite quickly I learn that the pinch point is the shoulders: get those under and the chill softens. I push and kick to ward it off further, away from the pebbles underfoot and into the blue beyond, where horizon and sky become one. The sheer expanse of it, pinpricked by our bobbing, salt-slicked heads, is the exhale I had been craving. 

And then out, out. The cold hardens, seeps into bones that will hold it somewhere deeper for the rest of the day. A shiver-shuffle into towels and sandals, a swift-sheepish potter along the pavement. Back in the house, I run the bath and step in with feet that leave yellow sand around the plughole. Somehow, the feeling of salt stays for the rest of the day. It curls my hair and sits crystalline and ancient on my skin til my dreaming head rubs it off on the pillow. The next morning, I’ll top it up again.  

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