Instinctively we go to the beach when it is hot - Joe Bennett

The sea is no good for swimming. In its limitlessness, it offers nowhere to aim for, to hold on to. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

Lyttelton isn’t Nice. Nor yet is it Acapulco. We get so few days that are truly hot. But when the heat does come, as it did today, when you just know that all you need is shorts and jandals, it drives us by some ancient impulse, just as it does in Nice or Acapulco, to the beach.

It isn’t much of a beach, Corsair Bay, just a scrap of gravelly sand and the same again of grassy foreshore with a derelict jetty and a moored raft and all enclosed by steep slopes and pine trees. Three hundred people and the place is chocka.

And the council tells us that the calm grey water often harbours more faecal matter than is deemed healthy, but when it’s hot no one seems to care. The point is that, like every beach, the place is liminal, a threshold between land and sea, where the laws of neither quite apply. It’s the place of our remote amphibian ancestors, a place of reversion, a place of primordial appeal.

A man and his grandson toddle through the shallows, hand in hand, one too old and one too young for deeper water. The little one kicks at a wavelet, topples, but is saved from the salt by the old man’s grip that swings him high. The child hangs like a monkey from a branch and squeals with the pleasure.

Two girls giggle past me, perhaps six or seven years old. I worry for their feet on the gravel. But they weigh nothing, nothing. Their mothers, sitting heavily on low chairs by a picnic rug, watch them all the way to the water’s edge.

A couple oil each other against the sun, their hands roaming with the licence of familiarity. Then she slumps on her front, gives herself utterly to the heat, as some women do, spread like a starfish, drinking the photons, not needing to do a thing, only to be. Her costume is the least possible. Her man, in trunks, stays propped on his elbows, watching the scene, assessing the game.

An old man sits upright on a towel, in shorts, a sailor’s cap and a rumpled slump of a belly. Behind his dark glasses his eyes roam the foreshore of flesh.

It is a year, maybe two, since I swam. Despite the hot air the water still has the power to surprise the skin. I go on tiptoe to delay the wetting of the crotch, but when it comes I force myself to plunge, to dive among the coliforms, into that strange, ear-rushing womb of the underwater world for which our senses are no longer suited.

I swim a few strokes of crawl, get a mouthful of salt, swim another few of breast-stroke, roll over on my back and float for a bit with eyes full of sky, then stand up again. The sea is no good for swimming. In its limitlessness it offers nowhere to aim for, to hold on to. I could swim out to the moored raft, but I would be out of place. That’s the young’s domain. Indeed the whole beach is the young’s domain. For the beach is a place of the body.

The boys, delighted by their new-grown muscle, seek to impress the girls. They jump off the jetty, bombing the water, all mock-violent audacity. The girls, delighted by their new-grown curves and their power to bewitch, ignore them. They lie on towels with other girls, heads close together. The boys push and maul at each other, more at ease with their own kind. They swim splashily out to the raft, slither on to it like seals, then play king of the castle, pushing each other off, pulling each other in. The girls watch while pretending not to.

If the boys and girls only looked around they could see their whole lives, the infancy from which they’ve just emerged, their imminent pairings and thickening flesh, and almost inconceivably the children they will have and then the invisibility of age. All of it there on the beach, unclothed, exposed and unmistakable. But the boys and the girls don’t look and rightly so. ‘In its glory, in its power, this is their hour.’

I pick my way back up the little beach, grit between my toes, the sun rapidly drying my shoulders and my old bald skull.