I found a painting recently.

It is a watercolour, somewhat faded now, done by the Senior Cat's brother.

It hung in the sitting room of my paternal grandparents' home. G... was still young when he painted this simple picture of rowing boats pulled up on the sand.  The picture is quiet, restful. G...was a skilled artist.

We need to get the painting framed again so at the moment it is sitting on a chair in the sitting room of this house. I pass it several times a day.

 It is a reminder, a good reminder, of the stories we heard from the Senior Cat. He spent many hours on the beach with his brother. Other children did the same thing. It was a time when even eight and nine year old children wandered the streets alone and where the old men who fished from the jetty would keep watch when they entered the water.

"Oh, I think we could all swim fairly well," the Senior Cat once told me, "It is something we learned from a very early age. By the time we were old enough to go to the beach by ourselves most of us were like small fish."

I can imagine that. My brother and I didn't have quite that amount of freedom but we were taught to stay afloat in the water from the time we could crawl. One of my early memories is of the Senior Cat holding me by the cross straps of my red woollen bathing suit and getting me to "dog paddle". We did it in the "river" near our home at the time. Not much later than that I remember my grandfather doing the same thing.

When we moved to the city we lived close to my paternal grandparents. Grandpa would come each morning over the late  spring, summer and early autumn months and take us with him for "an early morning swim". He taught us to swim. I am not a good or strong swimmer but I believe I could still keep my head above water for some time. 

We were never allowed to complain that it was "too cold". Grandpa swam all year round. He had done that from childhood. The Senior Cat swam when he had time and in every school he taught in he encouraged all children to learn...not an easy task when they were sometimes a long way from the sea and swimming pools were rare.

Swimming was one of the things the Senior Cat missed as we moved around. We all did. We would have loved a posting close to the sea with a beach we could swim from. It never happened.

The Senior Cat got his exercise in the garden and, for many years, by riding his bike - often riding it to school. But the love of the sea was always there. 

And the painting reminds me of that. It is a good thing to look at right now - a reminder of a childhood he said was "good, very good".