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Antonia Murphy has always loved water. It can be warm or icy, wild or maintained in a municipal facility. Although “not a great swimmer”, she is a confident one. So when she moved to Edinburgh two years ago, she promptly checked out the public leisure centre. She was captivated by the alluring, deep blue of the diving pool. “I thought: ‘This is unbelievable.’ I felt seduced,” she says.
She had “larked around” as a child, but never learned to dive, so she went along to the Royal Commonwealth’s public session. “This bloke was standing there. We got chatting.” He told her about coaching sessions – and Murphy, then 66, booked a taster class.
“It was lovely. I’m diving with young women and men. Diving cuts across all the rubbish about gender and age. You’re in your bathing costume. There’s no more stripping down. You can’t wear makeup. It’s a real equaliser,” she says. “And no one gives a flying wotsit that I’m nearly 70.”
Now 68, Murphy, a semi-retired psychotherapist, has progressed to the intermediate group. She can dive off springboards. She can somersault – “not the neatest, but really good fun!” – and launch herself from the dizzy heights of the 7.5-metre platform board. “All you have to do is stay really strong and solid … It is like flying.”
Of course, sometimes, the fear comes – especially when she is waiting on the edge of the board, or about to reverse-dive. Last time, Murphy hit the board with her fingers and briefly felt the touch of disaster. But the classes teach technique; the coaching is excellent. “Everyone claps when anyone tries a new dive. Even if it’s a flop. Because they tried it, and they are better than they were before, when they weren’t trying it.”
The fourth of five children, Murphy and her siblings used to swim in their local pool in south London. They went as “a tribe”; it was “a good way of getting us out the house for sixpence”. Visiting relatives on the west coast of Ireland, whole summers were spent in the sea.
“There is something about the attraction of the water, the surface of the water, breaking the water,” she says. “When you learn to dive, one of the things you learn is entry: you pull the surface of the water back with you, and there is no splash.”
But what drives the attraction? “I feel really supported in the water,” Murphy says. She loves breaking the surface on entry and when rising again. “Sometimes I surprise myself because I’ve gone in so deep. I’m coming up, thinking: ‘Christ, where’s the surface?’”
Murphy graduated from the University of Leeds in maths and philosophy, then worked as a science education editor while living in a housing co-operative. It was after her sister Olivia died by suicide that she changed careers. “It threw me into my own therapy. It launched me into thinking about things internally.”
She set up a clinical practice and a few years later had a son. She wanted a baby, but not a partner. “I realised I could do this myself,” she says. “I’m lucky, because I’ve always loved being single. I’m not a great lover of coupledom.” She isn’t exactly solitary. “I am an independent person who likes their own space. But I’m a socialist and awareness of others is very important.”
As much as the coaching, it is the support of her diving tribe – like the co-op in her 20s – that has enabled her to transform in skill, confidence and strength.
“You can feel a bit shitty or tired, but you go and it invigorates you. Even if you are in a low mood, you have to focus – and you do. It is very relieving.”
The experience has been transformative. “The thing about being over 60 is you can start something new.” She was recently shown a photograph of a straight fall dive. “Oh my gosh, is that me?” she thought. It was only her swimsuit she recognised.
Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?
