The Wednesday Swimmers

The rule is Wednesday and the rule is 07:15 and the rule is that you do not have to get in.

That last one is the important one and it took about a year to arrive at.

In the first year, in 2009, when it was three of them and a thermos, there was an unspoken expectation that if you turned up you swam. It was not stated. Nobody would have dreamed of stating it. But it was there, and it meant that on the mornings when you woke up and could not face the water you also did not come, and so on the mornings when you most needed to be somewhere with people, you were at home.

It was Nkechi who said it, in about the March of 2010, standing on the bank in a coat.

"I'm not getting in. I'm just here."

And Bernadette said, "Fine," and got in, and that was the whole conversation, and it has held for fifteen years.

The lake

It is not a lake. It is a flooded quarry about four miles out of town with a bad car park and no facilities and a sign, put up by the water company in 1998, forbidding swimming.

The sign has been photographed for the group's Christmas card twice.

The water is between four and six degrees in February and about sixteen in a good August. Six degrees is the number people react to. Four is the number that actually matters, and the difference between four and six, as any cold-water swimmer will tell you at length, is not two degrees but a different substance entirely.

The six

Bernadette, sixty-eight, who started it, and who swam competitively in her twenties and does not talk about it.

Nkechi, fifty-four, who cannot swim in any meaningful sense and gets in to her shoulders and stands there, and who has done this every Wednesday for fifteen years and has never once wanted to learn.

Marta, forty-one, who joined in 2016 after a bad year and who is the only one who does distance.

Su-Jin, seventy-two, who is the fastest to get in and the fastest out and who describes the entire practice as "stupid" approximately weekly.

Hannah, thirty-three, the newest, four years in, who found them through a post on a community page and who arrived so nervous that Bernadette made her sit in the car for ten minutes first.

And Fee.

Fee

Fee is eighty-one and has not been in the water since 2019.

She comes every Wednesday. She parks badly. She brings the flask, which is her job and which nobody has ever suggested reassigning, and she stands on the bank in a coat that Nkechi has offered to replace four times.

She was, from 2011 to 2019, the strongest of them. There is a photograph of her in 2015 in the middle of the quarry, a long way out, with the light on the water, that all six of them have a copy of.

In 2019 she had a stroke.

She was in the water when it happened. Su-Jin got to her and Marta got to her and between them they got her to the bank, and Bernadette ran to the road because there is no signal in the quarry, and Nkechi — who cannot swim, who was standing in the shallows as she has stood every Wednesday for a decade — held Fee's head out of the water for the four minutes that mattered.

Nobody talks about this. Not out of trauma; they have talked about it plenty, in the first year, properly. They do not talk about it now because it has been absorbed.

Fee came back the following March, in a coat, with the flask.

What the Wednesdays are

An outsider would describe it as friendship, and would be wrong, or at least imprecise.

They are not, most of them, friends in the ordinary sense. They do not socialise. Marta and Su-Jin have never once met outside a Wednesday in nine years. Hannah could not tell you Bernadette's surname.

What they are is six people who have stood on the same bank at 07:15 in the dark for fifteen years, and there is a kind of relationship that produces which does not have a word in English and which is not friendship and is possibly more durable.

You know how a person is by how they take their coat off.

Marta, in October 2022, took her coat off in a way that made Bernadette say, "Right, what's happened," and it turned out to be a diagnosis, and the six of them knew before Marta's brother did.

This Wednesday

Four degrees. Rain.

Su-Jin declared it stupid. Marta did four hundred metres. Hannah got in and got out within ninety seconds and was extremely pleased with herself, correctly. Bernadette swam her usual and complained about her shoulder.

Nkechi stood in the shallows to her shoulders and did not move for six minutes.

Fee stood on the bank with the flask and shouted something at Marta that the wind took, and Marta shouted something back that was probably rude.

Afterwards there was tea, in the car park, in the rain, standing up, which is how it is always done, because the year they tried going to a café afterwards was 2014 and it was a disaster and is never mentioned.

Hannah asked, this Wednesday, standing there with wet hair and a cup, why nobody had ever suggested moving it to a warmer day.

There was a pause.

"It's Wednesday," said Bernadette.

And all five of the others nodded, and that was, apparently, an answer.