by Libby Page
It was a day for splurging the rations: pork faggots with onion gravy and mash, homity pie, and dripping sandwiches. There was silent competition for the best eggless fruitcake. Of course, they all had the same ingredients so they tasted exactly the same. But perhaps Mrs. Mason’s was slightly moister (or less dry)? Or was Mrs. Booth’s sweeter?
Rosemary has a photograph from that day and all the children look clean and tucked in and buttoned up. The photo shows her crouching down with her arms around her neighbors’ children. She had just turned sixteen and so was roped in to help the mothers with the little ones. The boys’ socks were pulled up, knobbly knees peeking out of their shorts. Bows clung to little girls’ curls. Toddlers toddled in their playsuits with puffed sleeves. In the photo she sees smiles and dainty teacups on the table behind them, and the pretty ginger cat from number twenty-one feasting on corned beef dropped on the pavement.
But she remembers it differently. She remembers the bonfire.
The tables were eventually cleared away, with only a few crusts left in the street for the foxes. The little ones went to bed, not quite understanding the importance of the day they had just experienced and instead feeling tired from the noise and the flag waving. When they were older they would look back and pretend to remember.
For the older children it was their chance to escape—brief, urgent freedom until the ten-thirty curfew would have them back to their beds. They headed to the park. Rosemary didn’t know who set out there first, but after a while you just had to follow the smoke and the sparks falling from the sky to know where you were going. She remembers the heat of the fire hitting her in the stomach and reddening her cheeks. It was like a heart pumping blood; it looked alive and it made her feel alive. People were gathered in a messy circle, some throwing branches into the flames. Several girls had flags draped over their shoulders and danced the conga.
The smell of the smoke filled her throat. She felt buoyed up with it, like it could take the knees out from underneath her or lift her up and carry her away. In the darkness behind the fire she could see the shape of her lido. She wondered if the pool water would taste like smoke.
Her friends held her hands and they spun one another around on the grass. Their lips were stained with beetroot juice stolen from the pantry and their cheeks were pinched pink by the heat. As she danced she saw the scene in flashes: a flag waving above the flames, a couple kissing, the swish of gingham skirts. The fire sang inside her.
She was spinning and spinning when she noticed a boy who was still. As she became aware of him she couldn’t stop seeing him standing there, like the spot a ballet dancer focuses on to ground her pirouette. When her friends let her go she wobbled dizzily in the grass. He was watching her with all the confidence of a sixteen-year-old who knows he will now not have to go to war.
He waved. She didn’t turn to look for the prettier girl standing just behind her, because somehow she knew he was waving only at her. He moved toward her around the fire and she waited for him to reach her. He was a scruffy shadow with untidy hair, long legs, a straight nose, and a pink-and-white mouth smiling in the dark. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his wide brown trousers.
“I’m George,” he said, and there he was.
They talked all night. Rosemary learned that he lived three streets down from her but had only just moved back from Devon where he had been evacuated at the start of the war.
He talked about his parents who ran the greengrocer on the station road and said that his father had escaped the front line because he worked as an air-raid warden, handing control of the shop over to George’s mother. He told her about receiving a letter from his mother telling him the house across the road had been hit and their neighbors were dead. He knew the boys who had lived there—they were still in Dorset with a relative and he wondered if they would ever go back, if he would ever see them again.
He had no brothers and sisters, and they both confessed that they had never met another only child before. The house he was sent to in Devon had five boys living in it. Every room you went into had at least one person in it, he said, and the only place where he could be on his own was the air raid shelter. Unless one of the younger boys was using it as a hiding place during a game of hide-and-seek, which they often were.
He told her about helping in the gardens in Devon and all the things that they grew. He told her about the night that the families in the village came out of their houses to watch the sky turn red as Exeter burned.
Rosemary told George that she had never left Brixton. Her mother hadn’t wanted her to go.
“I’m your mother, how would you manage without your mother?” she had said, although Rosemary wondered whether maybe she just didn’t want to be left on her own.
Her mother used to work in the laundry, but during the war she spent most of her time looking after the handful of children who also hadn’t been sent away. When the school was taken over as a temporary fire station, Rosemary helped her set up a makeshift classroom in their kitchen. Instead of washing, they hung maps of the world by pegs to the line that ran above their stove. Rosemary loved the sound of chalk crunching under her nails, she said, and the smell of the books that belonged to her father.
She told George what it had been like to stay in the city. She described the air raids and huddling with her mother and neighbors in the Anderson shelter in the shared back garden. She told him about the whistling of the bombs and the terrible sound as the explosions that followed came nearer and nearer, but then the relief as they grew farther away again. They hit all across Brixton, ripping down homes and demolishing the theater. The bombs and the deaths became a new and terrifying kind of normal.
But she also spoke about the sense of freedom that came once the Blitz was over; walking alone into buildings that had their fronts blown off but still had furniture inside, not having to go to school because there weren’t enough children or teachers left to keep one open, and going to the lido whenever she could, diving into the water and forgetting for a while that there even was a war on. Sometimes, she told him, if she lay on her back in the pool and looked at the empty sky, she could imagine that her neighborhood was exactly the same as it had been before the fighting started.
George talked about Devon; she had never seen the sea and she listened with admiration to his stories of storms and the feeling of having sand permanently under his nails and salt in his ears.
“And if you’re out walking and you lick your lips, they taste like fish and chips.”
The air was full of bonfire smoke but Rosemary could taste the sea.
“Rosemary, why aren’t you dancing?” shouted her friend Betty, tumbling toward her, pigtails unraveling and her feet bare, her sensible shoes discarded in the grass in a pile of near identical pairs. She stopped in front of Rosemary and George and flashed Rosemary a look.
“Who’s this then?” said Betty, hands on the waist of her collared knee-length dress, reminding Rosemary of her mother.
“This is George.”
“Well, why doesn’t George ask you to dance?”
But if they had been dancing, they wouldn’t have been able to hear each other talk. Betty sighed and drifted back to the fire.
When they were alone again George turned to Rosemary and said, “I haven’t been to the lido since I got back, let’s go together—next Saturday?”
It took Rosemary a moment to realize she was being asked on a date and that she had never been on a date before. She felt nerves lacing her insides like a sweet kind of poison. But she was sixteen and the war had just ended; there was no way she was saying no.
CHAPTER 9
Everyone is equal when they are nearly naked. Dentists, lawyers, stay-at-home mothers, and an off-duty police officer enter at reception, but in the water they are all just bodies in varying amounts of Lycra. The men are full of surprises: Who wears briefs and who wears trunks? You might think you could guess from seeing them in their dry-land clothes, but you can’t.
> Sometimes the most unlikely people are the fastest swimmers. Like the fat man with the hairy back and the too-tight swimming trunks who is a bullet in the water. The opposite is true, too: there is a man who confidently says hello to everyone and stretches like a professional on the side but swims like a butterfly with a crushed wing.
The cold water wakes up a young doctor who has just finished a night shift. Her body is exhausted but she needs this. The morning sun shines on her face. Later, she will go home and shut her curtains on the day. She swims a fast front crawl, tumbling at each end before beginning another length. When she swims she lets it go. Everything is water.
Next to her a bus driver is on his ninetieth length; his muscular arms scoop up water and throw droplets like stars behind him as he swims. He listens to Mozart on an underwater MP3 player.
Jermaine from the bookshop is here too. His partner, Frank, is running the shop today so he has the morning to himself. Last night they argued about their finances and his body aches with tiredness. They were up late but he still woke early. In his dressing gown and bare feet he came down from their flat upstairs to drink an espresso among the books and the life they had made for themselves.
It was Frank who persuaded Jermaine to leave his job at his family’s accountancy firm and start the shop together. Frank had worked in bookshops most of his life, first as a Saturday job in an antique bookshop in York, where he grew up, and then on the weekends when he moved to London to study philosophy. His classmates had thought of him as a party animal—and it was true that he enjoyed the freedom of London, particularly the gay clubs that his friends took him to where he felt he could openly be himself for the first time. But weekends were sacred because that’s when he worked at the Waterstones on Piccadilly. When he graduated a full-time job at Waterstones was the only thing that made sense.
Jermaine thinks about Frank while he swims—about his untamable optimism that Jermaine calls naïveté in their tensest moments (like during their argument last night) but that he loves all the same. He had fallen in love with Frank with a fierceness that surprised him; he had always been quiet, as if living in a circle that no one entered. When he met Frank it was as though he stepped over the line he had drawn around himself. Once he realized there was room inside for someone else he never wanted to let go.
Jermaine’s parents had been distraught; they were religious, traditional, and had no idea that Jermaine was gay. His mother cried and told him he had broken her heart.
“I won’t tell your father,” she had said. “You know he has a weak heart. This would kill him.”
Jermaine didn’t want to argue. Instead he went home to his boyfriend who held him and said he should leave his job and they should start a business together. Frank’s conviction about the idea, and about him, moved Jermaine. Coming from a family of religion, Jermaine knew something about faith. He had just been putting it in the wrong people. For once he didn’t feel cautious: he said yes immediately.
Jermaine twists onto his back so that he can see the sky as he swims. He lets the water flow over him, hoping it will wash away some of his worries and clean him of the angry words he shouted last night to the person he loves more than anyone in the world. An airplane rips a tear through a cloud, dragging strips of white behind it into the blue.
CHAPTER 10
There are no cubicles free in the communal changing room so Kate peels her clothes off behind her towel. Fear of being seen naked brings out flexibility she didn’t know she had. The Panic sits on her shoulders as she changes. She focuses all her energy on staying calm and holding her towel tightly around her as she wriggles out of her clothes.
Other swimmers are better acquainted with nudity, it seems. An older woman walks from the shower to the changing area naked except for a towel crowning her head. Her locker is next to Kate’s. She stands by the open locker door, reaching for her swimming bag. Unraveling her towel crown, she starts brushing her short gray hair. She doesn’t seem in any rush to get changed.
But it is not just the older women. Two women Kate’s age chat as they change, their skin shining with the moisturizer they share, throwing it back and forth between them. Kate finds herself looking at their wonderful, heavy breasts. It’s not attraction; it’s something simpler—curiosity. She realizes she hasn’t seen another naked woman since she was a child.
“Does anyone have a fifty-pence piece I can swap for change?” a woman asks. There is something about addressing a room so directly while naked that Kate finds incredibly impressive. She wants to be that woman. But she doesn’t have 50p, or that confidence, so instead she pulls on her swimsuit, wraps her towel back around her, shoves her clothes in the locker, and buckles the key to her wrist.
Stepping out onto the deck she holds her towel around her self-consciously. She looks around her, checking to see if anyone is looking at her. No one is looking, but she feels their eyes on her just the same. She remembers swimming at school as a teenager and how much she hated her body—and still does. She walks quickly to the poolside. At least in the water no one can look at her.
As she approaches the ladder and prepares for her first swim at the lido she worries whether Rosemary was wrong. What if she has forgotten how to do it?
It was her sister, Erin, who taught her how to swim. Kate was six and Erin was twelve. When she was young Kate never thought the six-year age difference between her and her sister was unusual; she thought big sisters only came in the glamorous and incredible variety. As she grew up Kate came to realize that she had been a failed attempt at saving her parents’ marriage.
Erin could ride a bike with no stabilizers and no hands, was friends with math and knew her periodic table, understood clothes and makeup, and she had the longest hair that bounced in perfect auburn curls. And she could swim like a seal.
It was a Saturday during the school holidays and Erin had (reluctantly) agreed to take her outside so their mother could work. The living room was plastered with A3 sheets of photos and words that Kate couldn’t read.
“But I don’t know how to swim,” said Kate when Erin suggested the swimming pool. She had started lessons at school but hadn’t yet been able to create the necessary magic to swim unaided across a width of the pool.
“It’s easy,” said Erin. “It’s just like the splashing we do at the beach only you’re splashing on top of the water and with your arms as well as your feet. I’ll show you.”
It was too late for Kate to object; Erin was already packing their swimsuits into a bag and heading out of the back door, checking to see if any school friends were nearby before taking Kate’s hand.
“I won’t let go, I promise,” said Erin in the pool, holding her arms under Kate’s stomach as she kicked vigorously. Chin in the water, Kate looked up at her older sister in her big girl’s bikini, smiling down as only a big sister can smile at you.
“Promise?” said Kate.
Erin promised—and then removed her hands. For a moment the world and Kate’s belief in it slipped away as she sank beneath the surface, water in her eyes and in her mouth and rushing up her nose. But then she climbed back up again, clawing at the water until she was floating, then moving forward.
The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes and blinked away the chlorine tears was Erin, smiling proudly.
Their mother was furious when the two girls arrived home with wet hair.
“You took her to the pool?” she shouted. “She can’t swim!”
“Don’t pretend you care where we are as long as we’re not here!” shouted Erin.
“I can swim!” shouted Kate.
Everyone is right of course: once you know how to swim you don’t forget. As Kate slips into the shock of the water she remembers her sister’s reassuring smile and that first feeling of flying. The cold makes her heart jump. She feels it in her blood, in her toes, in her nipples. She yelps and ducks under the surface. Water rushes around her and then there is silence. Her hands look pale stretched out in front of her, se
arching into the blue. Another kick and then her arms pull her up for air. There is splashing and the sound of children shrieking with unashamed joy and then the relief of quiet as she sinks underwater again.
Her heart slows slightly as she gets used to the temperature and finds a rhythm. The cold is painful but it wakes her up. It prickles her skin. It’s delicious to feel after so much time feeling numb. As she swims Kate takes deep breaths.
Her lengths are slow. Her right leg kicks upward when she swims breaststroke as though there is a string attached to her right foot and a puppeteer is tugging it as she swims. Despite her teacher’s instructions at school, she has never managed to correct her corkscrew kick.
She knows she is not elegant or graceful or strong. But she is swimming. And in the water she feels calm.
When she climbs out, shivering, she reaches immediately for her towel that she left on the side and pulls it around her body. In the changing room one of the cubicles is free and she rushes for it, locking the door behind her with relief. She sits for a moment on top of her towel on the bench catching her breath. She feels a sense of accomplishment but is also exhausted with emotion. She remembers the classmates at university who seemed to think the world was for them, and she thinks about her sister and how much she misses being a child with her—being taught to swim in a time when worries were small and her big sister was always there to catch her. The Panic that she left on the poolside creeps back until it overwhelms her. She puts her head between her knees and cries, holding her hand over her mouth so no one in the changing room hears her.
CHAPTER 11
The pool was theirs at night, and they were each other’s.
“Meet me by the park gates tonight when it gets dark,” said George into Rosemary’s hair as he kissed her on the cheek one hot afternoon. Since meeting several months ago they had seen each other most days. They snuck out on their lunch breaks—George from working in the fruit and vegetable shop and Rosemary from working in the local library—and cycled to Brockwell Park. If they cycled quickly, they usually had as many as twenty minutes together. Their bicycles lay against the tree, his basket filled with newspaper that carried their lunches—jam sandwiches and a rare apple that they would share and savor.