Thirteen, and all the fat was on the outside. Slavered in it she was, thick and
gray like the gunk from a Morris Minor long overdue for a service. The sand between
her toes was gritty with still unpulverized seashells, and the seaweed wreathed
its silage reek into the saturated misty air.
The dawn bit down hard. It wasn’t the hour that bothered her – she was used
to that. After six months of catching the first tube train of the morning on
the way to training, full of staring, chewing shiftworkers, she'd grown accustomed
to the pace. It was the otherworldly fogginess, the stretch without horizon,
the length without a grab-bar at the end of it that perturbed her. And it was
the cold.
She wore a black school swimming costume, scoop back, medium leg, nylon, and
a bright yellow rubber hat with dimples in it. Three other girls shivered with
her. One stood coated and scarved, ready to wave them off, wishing with all
her heart that she were shivering too.
He stood there in his duffle coat, blue eyes crinkled beneath an off-white
bobble hat, drinking in their heady need to please him.
The boat had a single bench across the middle, and a double bench wide enough
for triple pairs of slim and exercised buttocks. The outboard motor sputtered
like a recalcitrant lawnmower, resisting the pull of the wire, wanting to go
back to bed and not be asked to work on this inhospitable morning.
She was the first swimmer, drawn as the strongest, fittest, least likely to
fail at the start and let the team down, before there was any shared investment
of energy and pride. She had the worst of it, the coldest air, the beach tides
with their unimaginable floating objects, and the longest time sitting wet
in the boat when her turn was over.
At first it was exciting, fulfilling. All those morning practices in Hove
had been worthwhile. She knew what to expect; she welcomed the wall of practised
pain. After the first hour it changed. The grease between her legs began to
freeze and harden, to chafe and bleed with every kick, salt-salved. Her arms
grew leaden and her breathing pained and strained. Her sternum was a cross
with nails upon it and her neck cricked. Still she struggled, watching with
each alternate gasping stroke for the chugging boat and its guiding torchlight
beam, hoping to glimpse the ghost of a blue-eyed smile of approbation.
Poetry ran through her head, rhythmic British smokestacks, de la Mare parodies,
basic school Shakespeare turning its feet to the rolling of her arms. And still
she swam on, no finishing rope dangling before her nose. She counted, unthinking,
brain-frozen, waiting for the next swimmer to lower herself in beside her,
longing for the pain as the skin of her legs would be scraped off against the
rim of the boat, desperate for a blanket to plaster its fluff onto her greasy
shoulders.
Seventy years on, she can still taste the brine. Her arms are leaden and her
breathing pains and strains. Her fat is on the inside now, chafing her legs
when she walks, narrowing the fuel-feed to a heart that sputters with a recalcitrant
pacemaker.
She remembers that day in the channel, her pride at the finish, the intimacy
of shared survival that did not endure into adulthood. She remembers being
in the record books for all of two months as a member of the youngest female
relay team, before the victors' wreath of bladder-wrack was snatched by a French
quartet.
Most of all, she remembers the coach, and how they all adored him. He told
them they would have to try again the following year and swim the there-and-back.
And they all said that they would, for just one crinkled ripple of his blue
eyes.
