The sea is my home E-Book

Nathalie Pohl

• Herausgeber: Polyglott, ein Imprint von GRÄFE UND UNZER Verlag GmbH
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: POLYGLOTT Abenteuer und Reiseberichte
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 318

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A woman and the world's toughest swimming challenge: Ocean's Seven – alone through the most dangerous straits worldwide: from the English Channel to New Zealand's Cook Strait. After years of training, multiple world record holder Nathalie Pohl has fulfilled her big dream and became the first German woman to swim across all seven straits. She fights her way through marathon distances in the sea for up to 15 hours at a time – against strong currents and high waves, in shark waters, at night in complete darkness. It is the inspiring story of a woman who lives her passion for swimming – whether on the world's oceans or in swimming pools, where she teaches swimming lessons for socially disadvantaged children. Her motto: never give up!

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Imprint

© eBook: 2025 GRÄFE AND UNZER PUBLISHER GmbH, P.O. Box 860366, D-81630 Munich

POLYGLOTT is a registered trade mark of GRÄFE UND UNZER PUBLISHING Ltd.

All rights reserved. Reprinting, even in extracts, as well as distribution by film, radio, television and Internet, by photomechanical reproduction, audio media and data processing systems of any kind only with the written permission of the publisher.

Text: Nathalie Pohl with Jan Stremmel

Cartography: Birgit Kohlhaas

Cover design: Rose Dobmeier, Favoritbüro Munich

eBook-Herstellung: Pia Schwarzmann

ISBN 978-3-8464-1039-4

1rd edition 2025

GuU 4-1039 03_2025_02

Picture credits

Cover illustration: Lasse Schneppenheim

Photos: Anna Heupel; Marc Le Cornu; Mark Tantrum; Gerard Brown; Daniel Toni Jais; Marc Le Cornu; Kenta Onoguchi; private

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Wichtiger Hinweis

All descriptions in this book are based on subjective memories. The dialogues do not reflect past conversations word for word but according to their meaning. Some names have been changed to protect privacy. For reasons of better readability, the generic masculine is used to refer to persons. It applies equally to all genders.

“I’m alone in the open sea. The stars are brighter and closer than I‘ve ever seen them before, reflected in the pitch black water. It‘s as if I were floating in outer space, weightless and light years away from an inhabited planet.”

NATHALIE POHL

For my family

CHAPTER 1

Darkness is not the greatest problem. I was expecting it. The waves are the problem.

The waves have been unexpectedly strong since I left the coastal zone, since the easterly Channel current picked me up and slowly carried me westwards like a small unlit satellite. They come from the left, from the right, from behind. Sometimes from all directions at once. I can feel how they lift me up from below, lever my body out of the horizontal and throw me diagonally forwards off course, sometimes to one side, sometimes to the other.

Get back on course, I think between two breaths. I have to correct it far too often.

For the millionth time, I turn my head out of the water under my armpit and breathe in – and a wave crashes over my face. The taste of salt deep in my throat. I cough and splutter, convulsively draw air down my throat and turn onto my back for a few seconds to regulate my oxygen levels.

I hadn’t planned it that way.

A black, starless sky stretches above me. You cannot see anything of the mainland. Behind the crest of a wave, the top light on the mast of the Sea Satin, the fishing boat that accompanies me, flashes. Joshua, Dad and Captain Mike must be standing somewhere over there, staring into the blackness beyond the railing. I can literally see their tense faces in front of me.

But here in the water I am alone.

I take another breath, press my lips together and rotate my body back onto my stomach.

Black infinity yawns below me. A cold, indifferent universe through which my arms and legs have been ploughing their way for about three hours. My arms glow in the darkness with every stroke under water, as if they were made of wax.

To collect myself, I examine my body in my mind, from my feet to my head. My toes are numb from the cold, so far everything is normal. My legs are moving at their usual rhythm, but they’re more exhausted than they should be. The same is true about my torso and my back. The constant battle with the waves is sapping the energy my body needs to move forwards. And I feel sick.

I try to concentrate on something else. Distraction. Yes, distraction is good. Pain, for example. Do I feel any? For a few breaths, I scan the signals that my nerve endings are sending to my brain. There, in my neck, in my armpits, between my legs. Where skin has been rubbing against skin for hours, it burns. The Vaseline has long since been washed off.

The salt water gnaws at me.

Left, right, left. Breathe. My body knows this rhythm even when asleep. Right, left, right. Breathe.

In the water, I’m running on autopilot. I’ve programmed it in millions of strokes since I was a child; during tens of thousands of hours in the pool at home in Marburg, at competitions and international championships. But now, at four o’clock in the morning in the ice-cold water, I come to a horrible realisation.

This is all but useless in the English Channel.

There are no waves in the pool. No unexpected breakers that hit you from behind and fill your throat as you catch your breath. You don’t get seasick in the pool, even after six hours. In open water, however, rules apply that I haven’t learnt as yet.

I have now understood one of them: my head is the problem. I keep it too low. It should break through the surface of the water much further when I take a breath, like a snorkel. I feverishly try to figure out how much energy it would cost me to swim to the French coast using a different technique. Just then a high wave lifts me up sideways and throws me forwards at an angle. I throw up in the sea.

I’m not superstitious, but the graves outside the hotel window should have given me pause for thought. For the past week, I’ve been staying in a room painted a light green and fitted with a mottled carpet – it looks directly onto a cemetery. The small English hotel with its narrow staircase stands next to an ancient stone church – and every morning when I open the curtains before my workout, I am greeted by a few hundred gravestones, mossy and crooked from the wet westerly wind. I wonder how many of the dead buried here had drowned in the English Channel? Cheerful thoughts to really get you into the mood in the morning. Of course, I would have loved to check out again straight away. But the Marquis of Granby was the only hotel that had rooms available in the middle of August.

The coastal town of Dover is famous for two things: its white cliffs, which in good weather can be seen as a silver stripe on the horizon even from France. And the Channel crossing. Every summer, the harbour town attracts swimmers and daredevils from all over the world. This is the shortest distance between the European mainland and the island of Great Britain, only 34 kilometres.

And that’s why this is the only place where you might attempt the most legendary and notorious challenge for swimmers at a particular time of year, between June and October: crossing the Channel. Around 300 Channel swimmers are allowed to attempt it each year. They are selected according to strict criteria and sometimes have to register years in advance for a slot. Each swimmer starts on their own at a precise time from Shakespeare Beach, the beach right next to the Port of Dover. Everyone waits for the ideal combination of small waves, the right current and no wind. And me? It’s my first time and I’d be pretty excited even without the morning view of the cemetery.

The morning after we arrived, my fellow swimmers and I get to know each other. Joshua, my coach, Dad and I drive down to the port in the fog at eight in the morning. This is where all those meet up who managed to get a slot to attempt the crossing this summer. The meeting point is in the car park next to the harbour wall, which juts 100 metres out into the water. This is where the swimmers who are preparing for the challenge gather every morning between July and September.

They wear jogging gear, comfortable shoes and drink steaming tea from thermos cups. Ten men between 30 and their mid-50s and two women. All of them are tanned and broad-shouldered like most of the swimmers I’ve spent almost all my free time with since early childhood.

But something is different. Very different.

I’m confused for a moment, then I realise: it’s their proportions. The swimmers in this car park are not sinewy and slender like most pool swimmers. Their upper bodies are broad, but not in an athletic, streamlined way. More like whisky barrels. Even their faces look round, pumped up, with red cheeks. I’ve heard about it a lot in recent months, but now I can see it with my own eyes for the first time: Channel fat. The survival trick of the Channel swimmers.

Instead of reducing water resistance in order to move faster in the pool, open water swimmers deliberately eat to increase their body fat. The fat is vital; it serves as an energy reserve and, above all, as protection against the cold. The water in the English Channel only reaches 15 degrees in midsummer. That is ice cold, and humans are not naturally designed to survive in it for more than a few minutes. Basically, Channel swimmers are human seals.

It’s quite clear: I’m too thin. That’s despite having prepared for the crossing with Joshua for months. On Mallorca, I spent weeks getting used to the cold water, doing daily laps off the coast of Palma. First in a thick wetsuit, then in a thinner one, and finally just in a swimsuit. If you want to cross the Channel, you have to prove that you can swim in the sea for six hours at 15 degrees. And that’s without a wetsuit, according to the rules and traditions applying to the English Channel.

After all, the first person to swim across the Channel and survive did not wear a wetsuit either – such a thing had not yet been invented at the time. In 1875, the first successful Channel swimmer was an English sailor named Captain Matthew Webb. After hearing that another Englishman had unsuccessfully attempted to swim across the English Channel, he quit his job in the Merchant Navy and started training. Two years later, he greased himself from top to bottom with porpoise fat and set off from Dover, accompanied by three rowing boats. It took him almost 22 hours before crawling ashore in France because he had miscalculated the current and the swell.

His crossing instantly made him world-famous. Captain Webb is today still the hero of all open water swimmers, the Sir Edmund Hillary of the sea. And so, because of him, wetsuits are banned; you are not allowed to wear anything but a swimsuit, cap and goggles, and swimmers line their ribs in advance with pounds and pounds of Channel fat to avoid freezing to death.

By the way, Matthew Webb drowned a few years later. He had tried to swim through the rapids under Niagara Falls.

Fortunately, not everything is forbidden, which makes the ordeal a little less unpleasant. For example, short breaks with drinks and snacks are permitted. However, you are only allowed to enjoy these if you don’t touch the boat. That’s why the team leaders throw bottles attached to ropes to the swimmers so that they can be pulled back on board after the break. Even the saintly Captain Webb fortified himself during his crossing, with the food that was apparently common among sportspeople in England at the time: beer, brandy and beef broth.

Joshua and I take a more contemporary approach and buy a supply of toast, tomato soup and Coke at the local supermarket. And then we kill time, a whole week. My days are spent training, eating and waiting. In the morning, I swim with the others along the harbour wall for two hours to get used to the water temperature. Every time I come back ashore shivering and with numb, frozen hands and feet.

Then the captain’s weather update arrives around midday. Captain Mike is one of 18 captains who accompany Channel swimmers during their crazy feat. Things in the English Channel are almost like on Mount Everest – swimming has become big business.

Mike is a man with a head as round as a football, a wiry grey beard and hands like driftwood. He meticulously monitors the current and wave forecast around the clock, looking for holes in the storm fronts of the North Sea that are big enough for his charges to pass through. But we are unlucky. For seven days, the southerly wind whips the rain against the English coast so violently that swimmers would hardly be able to get out of the harbour basin. The cemetery room and I spend more time together than I would have liked.

On the other hand, I don’t mind giving my body a little more time before it really matters – before I can attempt my greatest swimming challenge. Crossing the Channel is my lifelong dream.

I almost didn’t make it at all. Just four weeks before my slot, I had tonsillitis, which I fought off with antibiotics in order to somehow get fit for Dover. And although I’m already back to full power in training, every day of rest does me the world of good. My defences are still significantly weakened.

And then the time has come. A day with noticeably less wind. On the way to the harbour, not a leaf moves in the treetops. Small white clouds seem to sit motionless in the sky, as if the weather were taking a short rest to gather new strength after seven days of storms.

At lunchtime after swimming, my mobile buzzes in my pocket: “Wind and current are looking good. Get ready.” I spend the rest of the day floating on a tingling cloud of adrenaline. As soon as my thoughts start to wander and then I remember what might be about to happen, a shiver of fear and anticipation runs through me. Dad motivates and encourages me: “You’ll easily do it! If anyone can do it, it’s you!” Dad has accompanied me to all my swims since my early childhood. In difficult moments, he is my support, my motivator and my biggest fan.

But today I think I can detect a slight nervousness in his voice that I’ve never heard before.

At seven o’clock in the evening, I sit tensely in the hotel and shake the carbon dioxide out of four two-litre cola bottles with Joshua. It’s a ritual we perform before every long swim: with its sugar content, Coke gives me a lot of energy, and it calms my stomach. But fizzy drinks are poison for swimmers, as the air in their stomach cannot escape in the water because of their horizontal position. So, shake it, unscrew the lid, close the lid, shake. Other that that, we stay quiet. Joshua knows that any conversation now would make me even more nervous.

Sss-Sssssss. My mobile vibrates on the bedside table. A text from Mike. “We’re ready. Meeting at the harbour at two in the morning.”

I eat two large plates of pasta with butter, my favourite power food before long swims. Carbohydrates and fat – that’s exactly what my body needs. Then Joshua and I go one last time through the order in which I will eat and drink in the breaks during the crossing. First the energy gel, then tomato soup, then tea. Toast only on request to combat seasickness. I write the entire menu onto a piece of paper, which stays with Dad and Joshua.

These are always special moments for me – sitting in my hotel room, for the last time on solid ground, and going through everything that might happen the next day. I sleep better when I know that I’ve done everything I can in advance. One at a time, I fill our large sports bags with the things that will keep me going.

Warm, non-carbonated cola.

Tomato soup without salt.

Floppy toast without crusts.

Sweetened black tea.

Sickly sweet gel from a plastic tube.

What a menu. In any other situation, it would make me gag immediately. But I know that these things will mean everything to me later in the water when I put them between my salt-encrusted lips, numb with the cold.

The moments when open water swimmers are allowed to drink or eat something – at intervals of at least 30 minutes – are called feedings. Feeding, as for the orcas in American theme parks. These moments are my only points of time reference in the water. And from the third hour at the latest, they are the only bright spots that I mentally work towards.

Hang on in there. Another 2,400 strokes and then I’ll get toast and a few sips of warm cola again!

Once everything has been discussed, Joshua loads the bags into the car. And I go to sleep. Which may sound good, but really it is a lie I tell myself. You can train as hard as you like – your body senses when a few hours later it has to complete a task that could kill it and at which four out of five people fail. The last thing it will allow you to do is sleep.

Ten hours. That’s how long I’ve been swimming now. A rough estimate only – I’m not wearing a watch. But the sun is now vertically above. The wind has picked up. Was Captain Mike wrong about the weather forecast? It’s ice cold. Captain Mike’s voice wafts over from the boat.

“Do you want to be a channel swimmer or not?”

He’s been shouting this sentence for hours now. As if it could somehow motivate me. But he sounds rather sardonic, as if to say I told you so – you, young girl, are definitely not going to become a Channel swimmer!”

My teeth are chattering. The waves are grey now. And no bigger, but more chaotic than during the night. When feeding, I barely make it to the bottle of black tea Joshua has thrown to me. I can see him trying to hide the worry on his face. I do the same and give him the thumbs up. I don’t want to scare him.

We both know that we should already be able to make out the yellow sand on the shore. But France is still a thin bluish line. It bounces around on the horizon when I briefly manage to lift my head over the crest of a wave.

My lungs feel as if I’d been inhaling burning alcohol. My rhythm is broken. I’m out of breath. It’s as if I’d just sprinted up ten flights of stairs only to do 50 pull-ups immediately afterwards. What’s more, my mouth tastes of burnt diesel. The Sea Satin’s exhaust directs the engine fumes down into the water – and I’m obviously swimming right where they bubble back up. Does the boat have to be quite so close? Never mind. Onwards.

I no longer have enough air for three breaths. Not even two.

Left, breathe. Right, breathe.

There’s no other way. I feel like I’m swimming on the spot.

Left.

Breathe.

Right.

Br-

Then a wave washes over my face. My chest gets really hot. I keep shovelling with my arms, on autopilot. But my brain is suddenly quite warm too. I think of Captain Matthew Webb, smeared in porpoise fat, in front of Niagara Falls, a glass of brandy in his hand. Then I think of mountains. Mount Everest. Sir Edmund Hillary. I see climbers who are found dead shortly before they reached the summit. Frozen to death, but in a T-shirt.

In the last moments before death, I have read, the brain suddenly perceives the hypothermic body as very warm. And so people actually take off their clothes and freeze to death at 8,000 metres above sea level, believing that they feel hot.

What a kind nudge by nature towards redemption, I think. Then I sink into a swamp of indifference. I only regain consciousness when I’ve been pulled onto the boat. Wrapped in towels and shivering all over, I lie on a sofa in the cabin below deck. The Sea Satin races back towards Dover at full speed, where the ambulance is already waiting with its blue lights flashing and its engine running.

CHAPTER 2

I’m five and I’m bored. The beach in front of the hotel is divided into six long rows of sunbeds. When Nicola and I race from the water to the palm trees on the terrace, I’m usually faster. When we build castles on the muddy sand at the water’s edge, mine often has the higher towers with beautifully dribbled peaks and more solid walls. One competition follows the next – we hop on one leg, do cartwheels or draw a line in the sand to see who can jump further.

I love competitions. But with Nicola, they’re sometimes a bit boring. Not surprising – I’m a year and a half older than her. Nicola is not only my sister, but also my best friend. Nobody understands me like she does, nobody admires me more. Whenever I have an idea of what we should play next, she’s thrilled. And even when I then run faster, jump further or climb higher, she is never disappointed; she always looks at me with her huge shining eyes and claps her hands. I love my little sister. If only she were as big and fast as me!

We are on holiday in this town with a strange name. There are very tall, modern houses everywhere right by the sea. It’s a town where the men wear floor-length white dresses and chequered scarves on their heads, which I don’t understand because after all they could play on the beach all day in their swimming trunks, just like us. There are a lot of things here that I don’t understand. But I still like Dubai.

We’ve been here for three days now. I wake up by myself in the morning because I can’t wait to get back to the sea. On the third morning, while Nicola is still asleep and Mum and Dad are in bed next door, I put on my swimming costume and sneak out of the room. I’ve deliberately made a mental note of the way to the beach – along the carpeted corridor to the right, down one flight of stairs, right through the hall with the reflective black stone floor and through the glass door. I walk this way alone, without Mum and Dad, to see if our castles are all right. And then to go for a swim all by myself. I slide open the glass door and start running, across the terrace, towards the palm trees. I can already see the turquoise water ahead of me – that’s when Dad grabs my hand, he takes deep breaths and tells me that I should please never do that again.

“Only ever go to the water with Dad, do you hear?”

Yes, of course I hear it. But I’m a big girl, at least bigger than Nicola. And anyway, what am I supposed to do now that we’ve played everything and I’ve won every time?

The few other children in the hotel are older than us or stupid. On the first day, we tried to make contact with two deeply tanned brothers from Sweden. They looked at our ambitious sandcastles, then built their own next to ours, rather sloppily. They then laughingly trampled it down before it was anywhere near as big as mine. Completely idiotic. On day two, we played tag with an older German girl and her brother, who was the same age as me. But at some point he stumbled and bashed his knee on the terrace, and we haven’t seen them since. There’s also an older boy here with his parents, who spends most of his time sitting on a deckchair playing Gameboy. Every half hour he gets up, stretches, runs into the water and swims out to the line with the little yellow buoys. This yellow line, which bounces up and down, separates our hotel’s swimming area from the open sea.

Nobody in my family swims. Well, that’s not really true. Everyone can swim. But on every holiday, Mum, Dad, Nanny and Grandad prefer to lie in a deckchair and read or chat or talk on the phone. A few months ago, in a children’s pool in Marburg, Dad taught me how to stay afloat: I have to play ‘frog’ with my legs and ‘jumping jack’ with my arms. And so I can stay afloat for a few strokes, four or five metres, from the edge of the pool to Dad and back again. That’s more than Nicola can do; she still needs inflatable armbands. And to be honest, I’ve never seen anyone in my family swim more than four or five metres at a time.

As I said, we are not swimmers.

But while I’m getting bored on the beach between the deckchairs, my curiosity grows about what’s shimmering behind the palm trees on the right. A pool. But not a round children’s pool like the one where Dad showed me the frog technique. It’s a huge, rectangular pool with deep, dark blue water. Long lines with small red buoys divide the pool lengthways into narrow lanes. The pool belongs to a fitness club that shares it with the hotel. And the atmosphere there is completely different from the one here on the beach. No children are trampling castles or screaming because they have fallen on their knees. Only teenagers and adults with swimming caps and goggles. They dive headfirst into the water and then swim their lengths for hours, back and forth, without speaking, like fairytale creatures, half human, half fish. Each at their own rhythm and with elegant movements that look nothing like a frog or a jumping jack.

A short, wiry man with a white polo shirt and thick black hair strides along the edge of the pool, casual but focused. Occasionally he blows into a red whistle dangling around his neck. Then he squats down next to the pool and exchanges a few words with one of the swimmers. The swimmers nod and then continue their laps, usually a little more elegantly than before. When the swimmers get out of the water, they nod to the man in the polo shirt as if to thank him. In the afternoon, when the last person has left the pool, the man in the polo shirt calmly clears the white plastic loungers into a neat pile and brushes the splashed water back into the pool with a squeegee.

I’m fascinated. And I think I’ve just found the antidote to my boredom.

Dad is there straight away, as always. Holding his hand, I walk towards the pool. The man in the polo shirt greets him and winks at me with a smile. The two of them speak a language I don’t understand. The man nods, beams and gives me the thumbs up. Dad then squats down and explains: “The man’s name is Ramesh and he’s really nice. He wants to show you how to swim in the big pool.”

It starts with Ramesh giving me a swimming cap and goggles. I almost feel like one of the hybrid fish-human creatures. Then we go to the shallow end of the pool, where Ramesh gets into the water with me – he can stand here. He gives me a polystyrene board to hold my upper body above the water. I show him how good I am at the frog movement. Supported by the board, I whizz across the shallow pool. Ramesh nods contentedly and smiles. Then he takes the board and lets me climb out of the pool. He shows me that I should do something I’ve never dared to do without my Dad – dive off the edge. And not into his arms, but simply into the water. I look over to Dad, who is sitting on a lounger and looks interested. Then back to Ramesh. There’s something about the matter-of-fact way he gives me his instructions that takes away all my fear. I dive in and, my head under water, I see the sky-blue surface clearly through my goggles. I do the frog and the jumping jack and break through the surface. Like Ramesh said: I can do this. I have to laugh.

Again. And again. Ramesh shows me that I don’t have to hold my nose to avoid breathing in the burning chlorinated water. It suffices to slowly exhale air under water through my nose to keep it clear. And he’s right! Then he has me lie on my back in the water, without moving, without a swimming board. First he supports me with his hands – then he takes them away. And indeed, the air in my lungs acts like one of the yellow buoys over in the sea. When I breathe deeply and calmly stretch my arms and legs, I float on top.

Water is my friend. It carries me when I trust it. When I don’t try to control it. Water is something against which I can’t win, against which I don’t have to win, unlike against my little sister. But it helps me if I just accept it.

I’ve always had more energy than everyone else. At home in Marburg, I’m always outside. I run through the garden, jump on one leg, build dens in the forest and climb trees. My parents do their best to channel my energy. They sign me up for children’s ballet classes. For tennis. For piano lessons. I join in, dance a few pirouettes, hit a few balls, play the first few bars of the Flea Waltz – but then I lose interest.

What I enjoy are challenges that I seek out for myself. Which have not yet been set by someone else and written down. And I find them almost everywhere I look.

An Easter brunch in Marburg. My parents take us to a restaurant with a huge garden. The restaurant is decorated for Easter, there are little nests with painted decorative eggs on the windowsills and little carved wooden bunnies adorn every table. The waitresses have hidden Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies in the garden for the young guests. Before the meal, Nicola and I are each given a basket, then we dash off, past the other children, who still carefully scrutinise the garden. We know without saying it – we’re on a mission.

Twenty minutes later, we return to the adults’ table, out of breath and with leaves in our tousled hair. The other children have long since returned to their tables; they’re eating their chocolate eggs and look at us as if we were two aliens.

“Look, Dad, what we’ve found!”

“Great, you’ve been busy!”

But Dad looks a bit … hesitant. Isn’t he happy for us? We let him count our finds, because of course we need to know who has won. I found 32 eggs and nine rabbits, Nicola has 24 eggs and seven rabbits. What a haul! The Easter bunny must be proud of us. We jump around the table with joy and hug each other. Only then do I follow Dad’s embarrassed gaze to the neighbouring table and the other children’s baskets.

There are three or four eggs in each one.

Meanwhile, piled up on our table are not only mountains of chocolate, but also the entire range of decorative eggs and wooden bunnies.

Day two with Ramesh. Because I didn’t talk about anything else for the entire afternoon before, Dad decided to reschedule my swimming lesson for the morning. He’s probably hoping that at least I won’t sneak off to the beach alone again in the morning. Today he’s leaving us alone.

My new coach makes me dive into the water, then he again gives me the board to hold on to. But today it’s all over with the frog movements. He shows me something new we will try out. The legs stay together and alternately go up and down. The feet move like a diver’s fins. Only much faster. Almost as fast as the grown-up swimmers in the pool. I already like the new leg technique simply because it makes the water splash everywhere. But I notice something else too. The swimming board, on which half of my upper body lies, moves forwards surprisingly fast. And not intermittently, as with the frog technique, but constantly, as if I had activated a small motor on my feet. Grinning broadly, I steer the board with this motor to the centre of the pool, then to the other side. I laugh with joy.

It was me! Without any help!

Ramesh gives me a high five.

When the lesson is over and Dad comes to pick me up, I just stay in the water. Nobody is going to get me out. Ramesh makes no effort to chase me away, he stays perched on the edge and watches me as I plough through the water, back and forth, back and forth. Only when Dad mentions lunch do I agree to leave my new element, at least briefly. After lunch, I fall into the deepest sleep I’ve had in a long time.

The beach hardly sees me any more. I practise with Ramesh for several hours every day. Sometimes he is taken aback when, after two hours in the pool, with shrivelled fingers and blue frozen lips, I shout that I want to carry on, learn more, practise more.

And then he continues.

After the legs, it’s time for the arm movements. This is no longer children’s swimming fun, it’s proper training. I’m learning crawl. And this in fast motion. I’ve never been so enthusiastic about anything before. There are no notes in the water that I have to play. No music that I have to dance to. No wooden bunnies that I’m not allowed to collect for some reason or other.

Only the rules of nature apply here. You stay on top or you go under. You make yourself long on the surface of the water, flap your legs like fins while your hands scoop the water backwards – and your body shoots forwards. It’s my choice, Ramesh just shows me what’s possible. My learning curve is vertical.

On day three, we’re doing a move that I find particularly elegant when an adult swimmer does it at the end of the pool – the flip turn. A somersault under water from which the swimmer shoots out again in the opposite direction! I feel like a mermaid.

In the evening, I show everything to Mum and Dad. They applaud, even though, I realise, they look at each other in disbelief. They probably wonder whether it was a good idea to put their child in the hands of a lifeguard who has obviously got it into his head to qualify a five-year-old for the Olympics …

On the other hand, they haven’t had so much time to themselves for a while. The swimming lessons take up so much of my energy that I voluntarily take a full hour’s nap every day and go to bed before Nicola in the evening. And aside from that, I beam with happiness as I perform the flip turn over and over again. Ramesh stands a little to one side and silently puts his hands on his hips. He seems proud.

The swimming pool is mine now. Every lifeguard, every waitress, every hotel employee knows me, the little blond thing in a swimming costume, always wet, with shrivelled hands, who only takes off her swimming cap and goggles to eat. Even the older swimmers nod at me, which makes me particularly proud. Dad moves from his deckchair on the beach to a bar stool at the pool bar so that he can have at least some time with his older daughter.

The days run into each other. For one week, I have the best time of my life.

And then it gets even better.

One morning there is a blackboard in the hotel lobby with colourful writing. Mum reads it to me.

“This Sunday: swimming competition for our young guests! Prize: a large ice cream cup. Or a beach toy from the hotel shop. “

When I arrive at my class an hour later and Dad translates the news into English, Ramesh doesn’t seem a bit surprised. He knew even before me that his youngest pupil would take part.

Sunday afternoon. The poolside shouting and laughter echoes off the hotel’s glass front. A few parents and other curious guests sit on the plastic loungers. Ramesh and two colleagues have set up a buffet under a palm tree. There are cocktails for the adults and ice cream in plastic cups for the children. A string of bunting flutters above the pool. Nicola, Mum, Dad and I arrive on time. For the last two days, Ramesh had practised with me swimming the entire length of the pool. Getting started is no problem. But halfway along I run out of breath because I’ve exhausted myself. “Slowly”, Ramesh had told me in English. The word sounds funny to me, so I remember it.