There’s been a bit of Dryrobe chat over on my Facebook page, because I lost mine! (Relieved to say I have one again, a proper ‘old style’ one…) but people began telling me when they got their Dryrobes. The people who told me were mostly friends who’d been swimming for a decade and more, and had got them when the garment was pretty unknown. This caused me to unearth this picture, and write this tale. The picture probably appeared in the early days of this blog, so far back it would take a while to find. The story I have never written out before – so here it is, that tale finally told, if not in full at least in some detail… I hope you enjoy it.
My Brother Gavin, And The Girl Who Had Been Colder
I first saw a Dryrobe the day I drew this picture – there’s me a newbie, signed up but not yet attended my first outdoor swimming event… And, it being the Great North Swim, there I am, trying to get on with a wetsuit. (Yes, the one with the bum, I flatter my own bum, it’s called artistic licence…)
I’d been staying in the Lake District, looking for people to swim with, and I had joined a group of people I’d never even met before, let alone swum with. Raf was one, Alexia was another. In Wast Water. It is 11 degrees. Somebody has a Dryrobe, it looks fantastic.
Anyway, to cut a long story short there we are at the far end of the swim… just me and Alexia. Me, totally out-classed as a swimmer, knackered, and the weather howling a bloody gale; Alexia colder than anyone I have – at that point – ever witnessed, and getting colder… and neither of us know how to actually get out of the lake.
We don’t know because neither of us had paid attention when Raf told us – me because I thought I knew the lake. (The others are behind us because they’d started from the far end, we had not.)
And it’s absolutely true, I do know the lake… from a walker’s perspective. I’ve known it for years. There is a road that runs the length of it, there is a car park at the end. I think: we swim up the lake and we get out. Simples. I’ve DRIVEN PAST the lake lots of times.
Not simples. The road is 3 metres away, but those three metres are a steep bank, brambles and a drystone wall. The car park is invisible. Alexia is there freezing cold, so cold she can’t remember my name and keeps addressing me a “young lady” which would be hilarious – she must be half a generation younger – only I am worried about the state of her as we paddle about in brambly shallows.
And then – honestly – this absolute vision appears. Ambling through the lake carrying a couple of fleeces and some shoes, knee deep in water but dressed, with his walking boots still on, along comes my brother.
I have sometimes been quite pleased to see Gavin, I admit, but never so much as that very moment.
“Oh”, he says, “we saw you from the road and we waited a bit in the car park, but you didn’t appear, so I thought I should go and see if you were ok, and then I thought I’d be in trouble if I didn’t bring some things, so I brought some things” – he gestures vaguely with two fleeces and a pair of plastic shoes. – “And I already put my foot in the lake jumping on the rocks with Charlie, so my feet were already wet”… he says, explaining the pulling off of a miraculous rescue in the manner of someone saying “well I was just walking along, really”.
The lake exit, by the way, involves walking up the inlet stream, a stream that is nearly invisible until you are right in it. Always know your exit strategy! Rookie error.
We are rescued! The chips in the Wasdale Head Inn are genuinely the best chips I have ever tasted.
“I’ve been colder, you know” says the warmed-up Alexia. This goes down in our personal family history in the manner of Monty Python’s “only a flesh wound, come back and finish me off”… though I am certain it is in fact true: Alexia has been colder.
On the way home the fun way over the passes and just at dusk, my brother rescues a stranded couple from Wrynose Pass. We leave their car, with its broken clutch, as far off the road as we can get it, with blocks behind it. We drop them in Ambleside to seek a bed for the night and a pick-up truck for the next morning. We carry on, and he stops to assist a couple attempting to change a wheel, in the dark, on top of Kirkstone Pass. I do not know if this is my brother’s finest day of rescuing people but it was definitely one of the most memorable. Charlie, his eldest – still very young – daughter has a tale and a half to tell that evening about how “Dad rescued everybody and saved a girl’s life”.
I draw this picture that evening. The next day, I buy myself a Dryrobe. And those were the beginnings – the picture, and the Dryrobe – of many things.
It is 26th October, 2014
