Writer and hospice scribe Tanya Shadrick on her poolside performance piece at Pells Pool — and the depths it has sounded in the lives of others
© Steve Creffield
Last season, I knelt daily beside my town’s historic lido, writing slowly on scrolls of pool-length paper while swimmers did fast laps and grabbed the lunchtime sun. The emergency, which delivered me into this strange labour, happened a decade ago. It was sudden, painless: an arterial hemorrhage after the birth of my first child. I saw the light, believed my life was ending. With a survivor’s wish to be of service, I became afterwards a lifestory scribe at my local hospice.
I noticed how each patient had a single, vivid memory of a time when they felt most free — one man spoke excitedly of a night-time storm by an Italian lake when all the fathers came out from their family tents to secure the guy ropes; a genteel-seeming woman glowed over skinny-dipping in her twenties — and it made me realise how dry and cramped my own life had become. I began daily laps of Pells Pool with its skin-tingling spring-fed water, writing in a series of tiny notebooks as I dried.
I wanted to bring those end-of-life perspectives on what matters and lasts in memory to people with more time ahead of them. But how could I make that happen? I put down the poetry book I’d carried around all season and looked around. This was the place – packed with people of all ages, shapes and conditions who’d already stepped out of their normal work and school lives for a while.
I wanted to bring those end-of-life perspectives on what matters and lasts in memory to people with more time ahead of them. But how could I make that happen?
How could I get their attention? The idea broke over me like waves. I’d kneel beside the water writing on scrolls of paper as long as the pool. Lines of 150ft, and I would write a mile of them: My inner effort matching the rhythm of the bodies in the water. Ridiculous. How could I carry a roll that large? I counted the swim lanes, did the maths. Five scrolls, seven lines a piece – not quite a mile but close. And what to call it? The Adrienne Rich poems on my lap opened in the breeze and the pages turned in answer, giving me title and purpose both: “A wild patience has taken me this far… Freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering.”
A Wild Patience: Laps of Longhand. There it was. A sort of friendly flypaper, designed to draw people close so I could make them stop, and think: When did you feel most wild and free? In body; your mind?
© Steve Creffield
© Steve Creffield
Laps/Lines
The next season, within days of kneeling to my scrolls, I was delighted to find pool-goers confiding their feelings about my work and their private experience of the water. I invited people to write posts for a Laps/Lines blog, in which they revealed what was happening while they swam:
“Your presence allowed me to consider more deeply my own process of being in the water…I lost count of the number of lengths and began to wonder what 16 laps meant to me as an identity. What would I be if I was 12 laps instead, or 18. Would I feel better or worse about myself?”
“I usually swim urgent and fast, a strong front crawl and a battle on each stroke. Always pushing, more laps, quicker lengths…In Pells now, I dawdle…As I pootle, I think about language: Pool: Fat / Lido: Strong — Pool: Competition / Lido: Community —Pool: Doing / Lido: Being…”
I was also entrusted with tales made of heavier elements. A woman came to the pool after finding my open invitation in the bookshop, but hesitated on the side, still dressed. Did I want to know why? I nodded. She’d had cancer, and hadn’t swum since, and the doctor said it was alright but… She stopped. But you are a different shape than before? I ask. Weigh more? She nods. Is serious, then brightens. You’ll just tell me to get the hell in the pool, won’t you? I nod. We laugh. She swims: first time in five years.
I admire a man’s stamina and pace: How fit he is! He points to some marks on his thigh. Injections. Has multiple sclerosis and it’s gaining on him fast. I look at the people in the pool and get a feeling akin to the bends: The pressure of so many lives in a patch of blue just 150ft by 75. Their loves and losses.
“Your presence allowed me to consider more deeply my own process of being in the water…I lost count of the number of lengths and began to wonder what 16 laps meant to me as an identity. What would I be if I was 12 laps instead, or 18. Would I feel better or worse about myself?”
© Steve Creffield
A Wild Woman Swimming
A month in to my Wild Patience, I was sighted by visionary wild swimmer and OSS press officer Lynne ‘Rivers’ Roper — or Wild Woman Swimming as she was known online. She was drawn first by a scroll extract I’d posted describing my girlhood’s glorious sense of self-sovereignty got from the wild Cornish sea:
“when we went each evening through summer to the freezing sea at Widemouth, just along the jagged black coast from Bude, I would throw myself against the waves, holding up my heavy home-made surfboard like a shield…All the best sensations got stored in my nerve-endings that ninth year.”
Soon afterwards, she read of my hospice lifestory work and revealed her terminal diagnosis for brain cancer: Would I come to the West Country and swim in her beloved Sharrah pool? And could we talk frankly as two women who’d each been drawn to water after life-threatening illness? Work together on finding a wider audience for her swim writing after her death? Yes. We made plans and began to share our writing, exchange messages:
“Why did wild swimming…suddenly become so central to my life? I think it has to do with being alive, and needing to feel alive. It’s a spiritual experience… My body is at home; free, wild, elemental. Worries dissolve, my mind is liberated; thoughts flow and glide and play like dolphins. My soul swims wild.” Lynne Roper
As is the way with cancer, we had less time than we thought. I met her only once, at her hospice, on a grey day in July, to agree on my role as editor for her incredible diaries, muscular and lyrical in turns. I still haven’t been to Sharrah, but preparing Lynne’s Wild Woman Swimming diaries for publication next year means I — like her future readers — will feel a deep sense of homecoming when I do.
“Why did wild swimming…suddenly become so central to my life? I think it has to do with being alive, and needing to feel alive. It’s a spiritual experience… My body is at home; free, wild, elemental. Worries dissolve, my mind is liberated; thoughts flow and glide and play like dolphins. My soul swims wild.” Lynne Roper
© Steve Creffield
Lake Geneva
In the way of fairytales, my mythical mile of longhand will finish this September far from where it started. I applied at the end of the swim season for a residency at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature, explaining how my life has been changed by the work: “I did not predict how – during the first three months of poolside work – my sense of town and country would be shaken so by the referendum. Many swimmers sought me out as a fixed and listening presence to share their own shock and sadness.” After such intensely local work, I crave distance, perspective. Solitude.
Barely travelled as I am, when I do set my little table up beside that vast body of water — unimaginable to me writing here and now — I expect to feel the same weepy exhilaration got by long-distance swimmers when they reach the end of their attempt: The joy got when a private effort connects one to others, and a wider world of the wild and free.
Like the artist Marina Abramovic, Tanya Shadrick uses time, presence and endurance to make her writing into a performance piece, which invites the public to take part. You can read more about her Wild Patience project at tanyashadrick.com — and gift your own story of the wild and free to her scrolls in person at Pells Pool (May to August) or by email at tanya@tanyashadrick.com