After our first cold water swim our teeth chatter and hands ache – and I imagine the spirit of Mum not far away

‘It was 10C in the water, and not much warmer in the air. The three of us started slow, until a stranger told us to drop our shoulders under because that was the hardest part.’ Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

When my mum died in 2012, I found a box of her old life-saving medals that she’d been awarded as a teenager. She grew up in public housing in Williamstown, with a full-time working mother and a father who never really returned postwar. She used to say swimming saved her. It gave her a purpose, a sense of place, somewhere to belong when life at home was hard. Later she taught my brother and me to swim, and then my children, instilling in each of us a love of the water that has never gone.

My grandmother stayed in her one-bedroom high-rise tower flat facing the Williamstown beach until she had to move into an aged care home. For her, the smell of the salty sea drifting across land to her window on the fifth floor made her feel home. Gran wasn’t a swimmer, but she was a great supporter of the life saving club, earning lifetime membership in 1961. And when I checked, her name is still on the honour roll.