CHILD'S PLAY IN THE SHADOW OF THE SUN IV Swimming with the Fishes of the Sea
Tweed Bay, where I learned to swim. The picture is dated 1972, but other than the people in the picture, I doubt the scene has changed much from when we were there.
Sometimes I stood on the brink of a cliff, looking out to sea, out over Stanley Bay towards the flat line that marked the horizon and was bounded on the left by a pronounced and distinctive hill, a small mountain rising sharply and wearing the dark shroud of distant vegetation. The sea fascinated my young mind with its incessant movement and its endlessly changing face.
Sometime later, after I had learned such things, I would dream of that sea, of that vision of the sea, in literary terms that echoed Homer or Virgil, I'm not sure which, in which another sea was called a "wine red sea". And in my dreams the claret sea would sparkle with sunlight glinting off a multitude of dimpled waves dancing in from the horizon. When I wakened, I would doubt the authenticity of sleeping landscapes, and saw through wakened eyes that my childhood sea had moved with a metallic gleam. When still, it had shone like a ripened grape. The epic hues came from time's gentle aging into the mellow vintage of memory.
I swam in that sea then. I began when I was two years old from a beach to which we were permitted access. The beach lay somewhere behind me from where I stood on my vantage point of the cliff. We descended to it from the camp, the pronounced hill-mountain to our right. From the beach, the horizon was the reverse of what I saw from the cliff.
I don't remember guards when we swam, though they may have been there, alert to any threat to the Emperor that mothers and their children at play might pose. I swam with my head in the water and an overhand stroke out to a rock where adults reclined and from which they dived. My mother would laugh at my insistence about keeping on my underpants, contrary to the usual naked state of small children at the water's edge. In my own mind, perhaps, I felt adult in my ability to swim out to the rock, and adults did not cavort unclothed, at least not on that beach, not that I had noticed.
Swimming was a kind of freedom, an exercise in independence in which, briefly, one escaped the land and the confinement of Stanley Camp. I'm sure that's how adults would have found it. For me it was a demonstration of my independence from my mother. Through it, I displayed my ability to conquer this alien world of water. Through it I gained a toehold, though only in my own mind, in the world of adults. No other children swam out to the rock.
We were safe swimming in the bay, jumping from the rock, basking on the sand of the beach. Our Japanese jailors tolerated us there. The waters were warm. The only other creatures that swam with us, that I knew shared the bay, were small fish that we called Rainbow fish because of the many hues that iridesced from their silvery sides. They shone beautifully in the sun, the dance of their colours mesmerizing me whenever I saw them freshly caught. And they could be caught from the dock below my lookout cliff. But we couldn't eat them. They were poisonous, I was told.
What a shame, for we were hungry. We starved.
After the war, aboard the Empress of Australia transporting us to England, while anchored off Bombay, we heard that a man had lost his leg and his life to a shark* swimming in our Hong Kong bay. The unfortunate man had been diving from my rock. Recently I learned that the shark was actually a barracuda. And more recently I learned that it had, indeed, been a shark.
The appetite of sharks (and barracuda), shaped and somewhat satisfied by war, was sharpened by peace.
Stanley Bay - Where I watched a Japanese vessel attacked and sunk by American planes.