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Closing walls and ticking clocks
Gonna come back and take you home
I could not stop that you now know
Singin’ come out upon my seas (Coldplay, 2002)
In the summer of 1936, a young Dylan Thomas, was invited to visit Cornwall and to stay with a friend in Penzance. He enjoyed his time there so much that he returned a year later with his girlfriend, Caitlin Macnamara. Dylan and Caitlin began their visit, in June 1937, staying in a cottage in Lamorna Cove. Soon afterwards, on July 11th, they were married, by special licence, in Penzance Registry Office and spent their honeymoon in a small hotel overlooking Mousehole Harbour, somewhere, Thomas is quoted as calling ‘the loveliest village in England’ (Dylan Thomas, 1936). Following their honeymoon, they moved to ‘a studio above a fish-market‘ in Newlyn (Thomas, 1937a) where they stayed until the end of the summer.
“And I was green and carefree …
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means …” (Dylan Thomas, 1945)
By unplanned coincidence, on the 86th anniversary of Dylan and Caitlin’s nuptials, I was also staying in Penzance and swimming in Lamorna Cove, Mousehole Harbour and Newlyn. The locations for our swims, that week, were carefully chosen by the team from Sea Swim Cornwall with whom I enjoyed a mid-week sea swimming holiday. We didn’t know in advance where we would be swimming because all successful and safe sea swimming is very much determined by the weather and tidal conditions. Joining a locally experienced team of swimming guides meant that the locations for our swims would be chosen on the day, or shortly before. And so, it was a bit like a magical mystery tour! And all the more exciting and interesting for that.
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The swim guides were severely challenged, that week, by strong westerly winds, threats of thunder storms and heavy rain (such is the nature of an English summer!), but they succeeded in offering a range of sheltered, safe and scenic group swims, that I would never have had the confidence to undertake alone. We swam with seals, we swam through a narrow, working harbour entrance and we swam over beautiful sunken kelp forests and ancient rock formations. We did 2 swims each day and each swim was different and in a different location. I was left feeling that there was so much more to explore along this little stretch of coastline – both on land and in the sea.
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Dylan and Caitlin
I can find no reference to Dylan or Caitlin enjoying swimming in the sea while they were there in Cornwall, but I find it hard to imagine that they didn’t. They enjoyed being outdoors and walking along the coast while they were there (Williams, 2020), so I am sure that they would have also gone into the sea. Thomas’s poetry is full of powerful references to and metaphors about the sea. He spent his life, after they were married living in The Boathouse at Laugharne, on the beach, overlooking Pendine Sands and he clearly loved the ‘tusked, ramshackling sea‘ (Thomas, 1952). I have found reference to Caitlin, as a teenager ‘running wild across the moors, swimming in the river and riding bareback’ (Gorman, 2014) and so I cannot imagine that she would not have been drawn to swim in the sea, in Cornwall, in July and August, in what in 1937 would have been quiet fishing coves.
Time Passes
One of the recurring themes in Thomas’s poetry and stories is the passage of time, and so a further coincidence is, that, in recent weeks, as I approach one of those ‘landmark’ birthdays, I had also been reflecting on the time that has passed since I started writing this blog. When I began this swimming journey in 2015 (see It Started There), it was my intention to ‘swim the South Coast before my 70th Birthday’ and to write about my encounters with historical, geographical, community and emotional discoveries along the way, rather in the manner of Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999).
A couple of years ago, I came to realise how overly ambitious that objective was (see Little By Little) and now, 8 years into the ‘journey’ I find that I have not covered more than a fraction of the wonderful coastal beaches and coves along the English South Coast. Of course, I hadn’t foreseen the almost 2 years of travel restrictions that curtailed my ambitions. However, as I read back through some of my earlier posts I recognise that my ‘swimming journey’ has been, in may ways, more metaphorical and emotional, than geographical. It is interesting, to me, to read about my growth in confidence as an outdoor swimmer, my developing love of cold water and my progress towards becoming an all year round ‘skins’ swimmer. In many ways that has been the ‘journey’ with the geographical, historical and literary discoveries along the way being an unexpected and interesting ‘sideline’ that has kept ‘the academic’ in me active.
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion (Dylan Thomas, 1933)
And, of course, there has also been the journey of grief, and the ways in which swimming and the sea have held me, comforted me and grown around me, and my family, as we have journeyed forward without our precious daughter and sister. And as I described in an earlier post (see I’m On My Way) , this swimming journey has enabled me to find a way to re-embrace and re-discover Cornwall (see Somewhere Over The Rainbow). This summer’s little swimming holiday, with my daughters, was a wonderful birthday gift, in a special part of Cornwall. And to have experienced that, with love and laughter, and new acquaintances, new memories and new hopes and plans for the future is, to me, much more of an achievement than completing any challenge or geographical swimming goal.
After all, I have (hopefully) many years ahead to do that! I don’t need to specify any particular end goal or date. All I need to do is Just Keep Swimming! And so I will!
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light (Dylan Thomas, 1947)
Our Sea Swim Cornwall Holiday
We stayed in Penzance and swam at Newlyn (1k), Lamorna Cove (1k), and Mousehole Harbour (1k). We also swam at Carbis Bay (1.5k) and Marazion (1.5k).
We ate in lots of lovely places but of particular note was Makerel Sky Seafood Bar, in Newlyn
Sea Swim Cornwall lead a range of guided swimming events, day trips and holidays
References
Coldplay (2002) Clocks , from the album A Rush of Blood to the Head, Parlaphone.
Deakin, R. (1999) Waterlog, Chatto & Windus
Gorman, R. (2014) Caitlin and life with the Johns, in Galway Advertiser, November 20th 2014
Oliver, B. (2017) It Started There, justkeepswimmingbillie.wordpress.com
Oliver, B (2020) Little By Little, justkeepswimmingbillie.wordpress.com
Oliver, B. (2020) Somewhere Over The Rainbow, justkeepswimmingbillie.wordpress.com
Oliver, B. (2021) I’m On My Way, justkeepswimmingbillie.wordpress.com
Thomas, D. (1936) Letter to Vernon Watkins, April 1936 Discoverdylanthomas.com
Thomas, D. (1937) Letter to Vernon Watkins, 15th July 1937, Discoverdylanthomas.com
Thomas, D. (1933) And Death Shall Have No Dominion, first printed in New English Weekly, 1933
Thomas, D. (1945) Fern Hill, first published in Horizon magazine in 1945
Thomas, D. (1947) Do not go gentle into that good night, first published in 1951 in Botteghe Oscure
Thomas, D. (1952) Poem On His Birthday, first published in Poetry in 1955
Williams, C. (2020) Dylan and Caitlin in Penzance, Mousehole and Newlyn, The Dylan Thomas Centre,
Just Keep Swimming 