Here's my Pieces of You entry. I haven't done a lot of them. In fact, I have only done one other, I think. The topic is Childhood Fears. Do you remember what you were afraid of when you were a little child? What brought it on? How did you deal with it?

When I was a child, I had a recurring nightmare, which I remember having several times. I slept in a bunk bed (2 beds, one on top of the other), and I was usually slept on top, although I was the only one in my bedroom as a child. My brother had his own bedroom. Now, I don't know why I just slept on the bottom, but on the ceiling above my bed were two small holes in the plasterwork, one bigger than the other, both practically above my head. When I had these nightmares, I dreamt that whenever someone flushed the toilet in the bathroom (which was adjacent to my bedroom), the water would come pouring out of those holes in the ceiling, and flood my bedroom.

I was quite scared of water as a child. Not all water. I was fine in the bath. Fine in a paddling pool, but in water that was higher than my waist, I was petrified. It took me until I was ten years old to learn to swim. Most of my fellow classmates could already swim by the time we started doing swimming lessons at school. I was in the bottom group. I HATED swimming lessons. I would be there, in that segregated shallow end (which was still deeper than I was comfortable with), and I was made to use foam pads to aid me to swim across the pool. Which meant lifting my feet off the bottom of the pool. Which meant putting my trust in the deep water below me. I could not do it. I would sort of hop along the bottom of the pool, my stomach flat to the water, but one foot still on the ground. My teacher knew just how hard I found these lessons.

One time, she placed a large hoop under the water, and everyone was instructed to swim through it. The hoop was completely submurged in the water. All of my other classmates (even those who were in the lowest group) were excelling above me, and they all swam through the hoop underwater. My teacher, Mrs. Long, told me that if I went through the hoop (I didn't have to swim through it, just step through it), she would give me 5 House Points. House Points were an incentive for people to do good work. Each child in the school was given a house: Blue (St. Thomas Moore), Green (St. Margaret Clitherow), Yellow (St. Edmund Campion) and Red (St. John Fisher). I was in the blue house, also with Natalie, my best friend throughout school. House points were given very rarely, and 5 hp for one thing was a lot. I did it, but didn't like it very much. I remember at one point, we were being made to swim across the pool with the foam pads, and I had two under each arm. Yes, I was that scared. After some time, Stephen took me to the local swimming pool, and in the training pool (a pool that was went from 30cm deep to 1m deep), he started to teach me how to swim. We started at the very shallowest end, where I learnt to trust the water, floating on my back with only a small amount of water below me. We went deeper and deeper, until I felt comfortable using my arms to make me move in the water. I learnt the backstroke first. Because I was floating on my back, it was the first progression. I felt so proud the time after a school swimming lesson, when I showed my teacher I could swim a width without the pads. And then the day I went into the deep end, and swam all the way down to the shallow end. I was going to be left out of the swimming races at the end of the year, but when they saw I had finally learnt to swim, they placed me in a freestyle race, and I came second, which was soooo wonderful!

I'm not sure exactly why I was so frightened of the water, but my mum told me of a time when I was a toddler, and she, Stephen and I were in a swimming pool. The three of us went down a flume, and when we landed in the water, she and Stephen got into trouble in the water, and the lifeguards got them out. I swam to the edge by myself. I don't actually remember seeing Mum and Stephen in trouble, but maybe I did, and it started my fear. But either way, it took me ten years to get over my fear, and finally, I taught myself how to dive.