It was one thing I was determined to do in Nice, even more than to see the Dufy collection at the Musée des Beaux-Arts.  For weeks, I pictured myself slipping off my sandals and standing in the sea up to my ankles.

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I grew up near the sea: in Rome, in Athens and, of course, in Nice.  Summers went hand-in-hand with frequent days at the beach spent swimming, sleeping in the sun or under a wide parasol, and strolling by the water’s edge, picking up shells or unusual stones.  At night, I would fall asleep with the sound of the waves swashing back and forth in my head, and, more often than not, sea water in my ears, which would then be drained with the help of a warm hair dryer the following day.

For all that, I never used to care much for the sea.  I found it too noisy, overwhelming, exhausting.  Too big.  Instead, I have always been drawn to rivers.  Calmer, less in your face, more soothing.

As a small child in Rome, I was terrified of deep water.  I was sent to swimming school for a month.  The instructor grabbed the other children one by one and tossed them in at the deep end, commanding them to move their limbs.  I watched in chilling horror, imagining myself drowning.  I pushed my way to the back of the line all morning and, somehow, the instructor didn’t notice me.  I managed to stay below the radar for the duration of the course.  On the final day, all the parents were invited to cheer their offspring’s acquatic prowess.  To my mother’s disappointment and embarrassment, while my peers dived, raced down the lanes and made cartwheels in the water, I just clung to the corner at the shallow end of the pool. 

When I was nine and we moved to Athens, it was my grandmother who finally taught me to swim, using her customary softly, softly, catchee monkey pedagogy.  

“Don’t be scared, solnyshko, I’m holding you,” she would say, propping me up with the palm of her hand under my stomach as I lay flat on the water.

I started to paddle, then swim, safe in the knowledge that she was supporting me.  Until the day I realised she was standing a few feet away from me.  I panicked.  “What are you frightened of?” she said calmly.  “I haven’t had my hand under you for a few days now.  You see? You can swim.”

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I hadn’t stepped into the sea since circa 2000.  I was spending the weekend at a friend’s house in Sussex and she took me to the beach.  I walked into the water up to my shins and it unnerved me not to see my toes.  The water was murky and very, very cold.  Something coarse slithered around my legs, I shrieked and ran back to the beach, brown algae clinging to my calves.  I didn’t try the English sea again.

Howard and I sometimes go walking along the much-admired Norfolk coast.  I come home with my pockets filled with shells, hagstones or flint with quartz inclusions.  Of the little coast I have seen that is accessible to non-drivers, the three-banded Hunstanton cliffs have filled me with awe.  There is something powerfully elemental and forbidding about them. 

Other than that, I’m afraid I don’t like it much.  I guess the Norfolk coast does have its charm… if you appreciate bleakness.  People can be touchy when I say that.  There is always someone who stands up in its defence and even provides photographic evidence of blue waters.  All I know is that whenever I’ve been to the Norfolk coast, the briny has always been a grey or a grey-brown.

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“Look! Look!” I said to Howard, showing him his first glimpse of the Baie des Anges through the window of our train as it followed the coastline.  “Look! It’s blue! Blue! Can you understand now why the Norfolk coast leaves me cold?”

During our six days in Nice, in early October, my eyes drank the blue of its sea greedily.  The more I stared at it, the more I craved it.  I hadn’t seen such a blue sea for decades and only now did I realise how much I had missed it.  Or perhaps I hadn’t really missed it.  Perhaps I hadn’t needed it all these years and needed it now.  People change.

Few people know that the anges of the Baie des Anges don’t actually refer to heavenly angels, but to the angelsharks that used to populate the bay.  But when I was growing up in Nice, from the age of nine to fifteen, I liked to believe, like so many, that angels were drawn to this bay because it was so blue, even bluer than the sky above it.  The Côte d’Azur, where I swam every summer for six years.

“I’m doing it this morning,” I informed Howard, a couple of days after we arrived in Nice.

I had forgotten how challenging it is to walk on a shingle beach, especially as you reach the foreshore.  I smiled, remembering the time it would take me to arrange all the shingles under my beach towel, when I was a girl, so they would lie flat, only finally to lie down and feel one rogue stone standing up, poking me under the shoulder blade.

Summoning all my Qi Gong training, I stood balancing on one leg, then the other, while slipping the leather strap from my heels and removing the sandals.  I had also forgotten how uncomfortable it is to walk barefoot on the shingle beach and at the same time there was no denying that it felt like deep-tissue massage to the soles.  I stood for a few moments watching the waves rush to the shore, frothing, then pulling back.  Like breathing out and breathing in.  Between me and the horizon, this expanse of blue, deep blue, shimmering blue.  The kind of blue you want to feast your eyes on, breathe into every corner of your imagination, cleanse your heart with, and store for ever in a corner of your soul.  Swathes of blue apatite and aquamarine, with flecks of silver glistening in the sunlight.  A warm blue, I suddenly realised, is possible.

I took another couple of steps and the pebbles gave under my weight slowly and I landed on the cool, wet shingles.  The water, the warm water, rushed to embrace my feet, the foam burbling around my ankles.  Another couple of steps.  The wave retreated, sucking up the shingles from under my soles, with a sound like rain, defying my sense of balance, teasing me.  I was standing in the sea up to my shins looking at my toes, their every detail crystal clear in the limpid water.  The next wave, more daring, flung itself at me, engulfing me and my skirt up to my knees.  I laughed.  I didn’t care who saw me or heard me.  So I would walk back across town with half my skirt soaked in sea water.  So what? I was having more fun, feeling more exhilarated than I had in a long time.  And the feeling of freedom, the feeling of freedom was inebriating.

I have stored that blue in a corner of my soul.  In these weeks of constant rain, greyness and morning fog, back in Norwich, I often need to summon it from my memory.  I can see it, my eyes closed.  That blue, deep blue, swathes of apatite, aquamarine and shimmering silver.  A blue like no other blue.

Scribe Doll