Despite growing up in Orkney off the north coast of Scotland, 74-year-old Ron Goddard never set foot in a body of water until he was 73 years old. “I’ve lived by the sea most of my life, but I never thought about swimming, nor did anybody else,” he says. “Even the fisherman in our community couldn’t swim. As young men, we used to go out in the boats and thought nothing of it and none of us could swim. But we didn’t care – it was exciting. Every time they got a new lifeboat, they put us on it and we sailed up to the Shetlands. We were scared, but we didn’t show it,” he recalls.
Growing up in Stromness, a “wet and absolutely freezing” place, the ocean was a fierce and omnipresent part of Goddard’s life. “Sometimes, the waves would be twice as high as the defence wall and they would come right over the top,” he remembers. “If anybody was walking too near to it, they were gone. You couldn’t outrun it – no chance. You could be the best swimmer in the world and it wouldn’t have made any difference – it would just take you. And it wasn’t warm water, with the Atlantic Sea and North Sea converging. You didn’t go paddling in that lot, believe me – you didn’t go anywhere near it.”
Fishing was the major industry when he was a boy, meaning the town’s population was inextricably connected to the sea for their livelihood. “It was a hard life for them, but it’s all they ever knew,” he says. “The boats they went out on didn’t look safe. But they did it to survive – that’s how they made their living.”
