I didn’t think I’d heard properly. I’ve never surfed, nor thought I could ever do it. I’ve always been a reasonably good swimmer, but never very strong. I’m small (ish – five feet four, actually, which is around average so I am told), suffer from asthma (controlled well), have one leg ever so slightly shorter than the other (a legacy from being born with club foot) and I am not blonde. Nor do I have straight hair. Oh, all right, I might as well say it. Mouse brown and the definition of unruliness. Neither am I particularly slim. (I used to be quite thin, but that is another story.) And the clincher: so short-sighted I don’t even dare walk to the corner shop without my glasses – I’d never get there.
Stereotypes, of course. Not all surfers have to be blonde, slim, long-haired, lissom teenagers, but you still have to fit the mould somehow. Questions jumbled through my mind as I struggled to control the jeering answers. How would I fit into a wetsuit? (With difficulty.) How would I find my way up and down the beach? (He’d have to hold your hand? Hmm, that might not be so bad after all.) Surely I’m too old? (No one is too old to make a fool of themselves.) And, the worst of all: Just how terrible WILL I look with soaking wet hair? (Worse than you can imagine.)
The embarrassment factors seemed overwhelming, the questions relentless.
It’s all right for men. Yes, I’ve lived through the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties and the rest, equal rights for women and all that… but there is still a lot of ‘in-crowd’ snobbery when it comes to surfing and, anyway, I was born in the fifties. It’s sad, but right at my core, (formed when I was a toddler and my mother stayed at home to run the house and bring up the children) is a belief that all my education hasn’t completely shifted. The belief that, when it comes to ‘men’s sports’, girls just can’t do it as well.
The real truth is that I’m not sporty, never have been.
Remember the game of ‘ladders’ at school? Where you sat down in two rows facing each other, legs stretched out so that feet met in the middle, and then you had to race your partner by running ‘up the ladder’ over all those outstretched legs. I was SO popular with the boys for that game – I was always first to be picked, usually by the most athletic (and good-looking) ones.
Those boys weren’t the best sportmen, in the real sense of the word. I’ll never forget how I felt the day I understood why they picked me first. I’d loved that game until then.
It made me realize that not everyone was ‘nice’. And that I was a good sport, even though they weren’t.
So, back to the question. Did I want to go surfing with him? Old experiences always stay with you. I eyed him suspiciously as I wondered why he was asking me. He smiled.
“Come on, it’s good fun. You’re a good sport – you’ll have a ball.”
Well, it’s all right for him, isn’t it? Tall, athletic. Impossibly good-looking.
“I don’t know how,” I replied, finally.
“I’ll teach you. It’s easy to get the hang of it. I’d really like you to come.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. It’s fun. And it’ll be more fun with you. Remember how I taught you to waterski? It was the only way I could think of to get close to you.”
I blushed. “That was a long time ago.”
“So what? I know we’ve been married for 25 years, but I still think you’re the most gorgeous thing on the beach.”
What could I say? Struggling into my daughter’s wetsuit, with my husband’s help, was, surprisingly, the most romantic thing I’d done for a long time.
Getting out of it, with my husband’s help, after an exhilarating time in the sea, was even more so.
This was first runner-up in the last quarterly 2009 Writelink competition. How exciting!!
No comments:
Post a Comment