Kath Mckay was born in Liverpool, studied in Belfast and London and lives in Leeds. She has published one novel (Waiting for the Morning , The Women's Press 1991) and one poetry collection (Anyone Left Standing, The Poetry Business 1998), and her stories and poems have been broadcast and anthologised. She began teaching adults creative writing in 1987, but has cut back on her teaching this year in order to utlise a recent Arts Council of England grant to work on a short story collection. She is also working on a second poetry collection and pursuing freelance projects. She is an online mentor for students in Africa on the British Council funded Crossing Borders scheme.
I lived in a small village called Portaferry in the North of Ireland, at the mouth of Strangford Lough, and I remember the joy of waking up for the first time and having the sea directly outside. Kids dived off the harbourside at Strangford over the other side of the lough, at Portaferry it was too dangerous.
Occasionally someone would drown in Portaferry, and sometimes you’d hear the lifeboat at night, mournful out at sea, and people would wait. Many of the fisher men couldn’t swim, and they wouldn’t let you whistle, or let women on the boats, or talk of rabbits. Bad luck. We’d cycle three miles to Ballywater, on the County Down sea side, and swim from a long sandy beach, next to a donkey sanctuary, where an eccentric woman from England saved the donkeys. We’d pass Portavogie on the way, with its red white and blue Loyalist paving stones. In the north of Ireland even the seaside was political. Portavogie had no pubs, and everything was shut on Sundays. From there Plymouth Bretheren went to America.
When I moved to London I gravitated towards the Thames. I dreamt of the canal, the nearest bit of water. Swam in the green weeds of Hampstead Heath pond. In Hackney we had a 1930s Lido, unheated, where we would go for early morning swims before work. There was one in Victoria Park in East London as well, and once the lifeguard tried to throw me out for breastfeeding. England 1978.
Landing in Leeds it seemed so inland, so far from the sea. The canal seemed smelly and tiny. The people felt inland, solid, stoic, none of the up and down of the sea coast in their voices.
In 1999 we threw my mother’s ashes in the River Mersey. My sister had them in a plastic bag, and when she threw the ashes, the bag went in as well, and the whole thing got stuck in mud flats. Phil, my partner , shouted that it wasn’t ecologically sound, and that when he died he wanted to be thrown into a fast flowing river.
I go swimming a lot after Phil dies. That, yoga, the kids and going the pictures keep me getting up in the morning. Swimming underwater you can cry and no one sees you. And sometimes I think if I swim hard enough, if I look hard enough and concentrate, I might see Phil , still swimming towards me , smiling.‘G’day’, he’d say. ‘How ya doing?’ And I’d tell him.
And now Interland.
Recently I met a woman who was swimming round Greek islands and then down the Thames, and taking underwater photographs, and we decide to work together. Leeds Art Gallery ask me to do a talk and I call it ‘ Aiming for Still Water’ and the Yorkshire Post pick up on it, and now I’m gathering the poems and stories together –the poems from the swimming project, and the poems from Australia, and there’s a pattern emerging. Plash and weave and sough and …..In , out, in, out.
