In England we find the summer useful as an excuse for jokes about the wintry weather, but it may be safely assumed that there is some sort of difference between winter and summer: otherwise, how should we get strawberries and cream in July and not even want them in January? Summer may be regarded as beyond a joke sometimes, but it is also more than a joke if but strawberries and cream be the happy memory it conjures up into renewed pleasure. To some people it means more even than this; maybe tramping over the green hills or loitering in sun-splashed woods. To others the summer is most pleasantly companioned by the sea, but the ways in which they respond to its briny flavour form the gravamen of these curious observations which follow.

Perhaps you remember one of Robert Browning’s lyrical ruminations that tells how he swam out a long way from the seashore on a sunny day. He was peacefully floating on his back when he saw a flittering white butterfly above him in the sunlight. The poem makes a pretty picture, but to any swimmer it appeals more than any picture. For there is a whole world of exhilarating contacts belonging to those whose love of the sea is not confined to an admiration of its appearance, or an appreciation of the salubrious properties of ozone. Therefore, swimmers in general must be distinguished from that other big group of sea-lovers, whose pleasure is rather in ‘those water-trampling ships which made me glow,’ to quote the English Laureate, who seems to owe something to Wordsworth’s ‘trampling waves.’