We stayed there a little longer, splashing together and enjoying the gentle swell. From the shore it had seemed as if the sea were made of individual waves, but now I could feel it was the same water rising and falling, rolling sleepily forward and then tumbling back again. There we were, part of this vast changing motion, each wave perishing only to be succeeded by the next.
Then Billy said it was time to get out, and we came back onto the sand and he rubbed me dry with his shirt. We put on our clothes and hand in hand we set off to the jetty to watch the herring boats. The jetty was crowded with people that day, waiting for a steamboat from London, and while we had come to meet Father, Mother had been at the harbour and she was there as well.
‘What on earth?’ she cried, looking me up and down. ‘Why is your hair wet?’
Billy told our parents what I had done, the way I had paddled in the sea on my own.
‘Did she really?’ asked Father. ‘Then I’ve half a mind to train her too,’ and he looked at me then as if seeing me for the first time.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Mother picked me up and clutched me in her arms. ‘She’s my little doll. How can you even think of such a thing?’ Then she cuffed Billy round the head and asked him what he thought he was playing at. Did he want to kill me? Couldn’t he see there was a storm coming?
I was very close to Mother, she liked it like that and so did I. As a small child I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, with her soft round cheeks and her dreamy, serene way of smiling. But her softness was all on the outside; inside she wasn’t serene at all. Mother was always anxious about the sea, as she was about so many things, forever seeing danger in the most ordinary situations. If she heard a dog howl, an owl hoot or a bird flutter in the chimney then something bad was certain to happen. She came from Wiltshire; she was a farmer’s daughter and had never even seen the sea until she was eighteen. She was terrified of water and nothing could persuade her to bathe in the ocean. In that, and in many other ways, she was the wrong type of woman for my father.
But she was right about the storm. When we had come down to the beach the sea and the sky were both calm. Everything had looked so clean and new that it had been impossible to believe anything dreadful in the world could ever happen. Yet now the air was beginning to darken and the sand on the beach was turning from yellow to brown. Then came the wind, whistling around the jetty, pulling seagulls up into the sky. Out on the horizon we could see the storm heading our way, coming into Margate, and when that happens there is nothing a person can do.
We heard the hoot of a steamer and the boat came into view, piled high with holidaymakers from London. How lucky they were to be there on top of the water, how envious I was as I watched the steamer speed ever nearer. Soon I could see the people’s faces, and the bright red hat of a little girl being held aloft by a man.
‘They are standing too close to the rail,’ muttered Father, as the passengers laughed and waved to those on shore.
Above us thunder rumbled in the air and I felt the first fat drops of rain on my head. The sea was turning rougher now and the steamer began to lurch from side to side as lightning flashed from behind the clouds. Then a wave as big as a house came crashing against the jetty and the rain started to pour from the sky. The boat had almost reached us, it had nearly made dry land, when all of a sudden it gave a terrible lurch, the gentleman at the rail stumbled and the little girl in the red hat dashed headlong into the water.
A gasp came up from the people on the jetty and ladies began to scream, but as for Father, he did not hesitate. With one rapid movement he lifted his arms, off flew his hat, and he dived fully clothed into the sea.
‘Jeffery!’ called Mother, her face turned as white as a sheet. ‘No!’ But it was too late; Father was in the ocean. At once the waves began buffeting him around the head, as he swam towards the girl who had fallen in. ‘Hurry up!’ cried the people on the jetty, pointing to where the sea had swallowed her up. ‘Look, there she is!’ ‘No, she’s over there!’ ‘Oh goodness, they’ll both drown themselves!’
‘The hat, the hat!’ shouted a man as a flash of red appeared on the water. But Father had seen something else, the flaxen head of a little girl just two yards away, and he was battling through the water to reach her. A second later a huge cheer went up; he had caught her by the hair. She was saved.
*
I don’t remember walking back to the beach, but there we were on the shore when Father staggered out from the ocean. People were running from every direction to come and take a look: men throwing down their nets, girls rushing from out of the oyster shop, children dropping their buckets of crabs. For against all the odds Father had snatched a girl from the jaws of death and here he was, holding her in his arms, bringing her safely to land.
I remember she looked strangely relaxed as he laid her down on the sand, curled on her side with her head tilted forward. She was sleeping, I thought, she must be very tired. Gently Father rolled the girl onto her back, and that was when I saw her face. Her skin had turned a dull blue and there was a fine white foam around her mouth. One eye was open but the other was covered with a rock. What had happened to her eye? Then legs appeared on either side of the rock and the ladies screamed as it turned into a crab and scuttled across the girl’s face. Still she didn’t move.
There was an awful hush then as the terrible truth dawned. She wasn’t saved at all. Father had pulled a dead girl from the ocean.
The crowd on the beach drew back. They were a superstitious lot and no one would touch a drowned person, it was the work of the Devil and would bring bad luck. But Father kneeled down and opened the girl’s mouth, pulling out her tongue. He pinched her nose, slapped her face with the back of his hand. But still she didn’t move. He grasped her arms and began to lift them up and down as if working a stubborn water pump. Up and down, up and down, he went, grunting with the effort. Then he stopped and listened to the girl’s heart, hoping for the spark of life.
‘It’s no good,’ said a fisherman. ‘It is too late.’
But Father refused to listen; his jaw was clenched, his face shone with sweat, as up and down he worked her arms. The people told him to stop; they shouted that his efforts were useless. Yet on he went, stubbornly believing that he alone could bring a dead girl back to life. I was not even four years old and I had just learned the power of the sea.
*
The girl had not known how to swim of course, and nor had anyone on the boat. It was no wonder so many people died in the sea at Margate. Some drowned in the harbour, others fell from boats or were crushed in a collision. Even fishermen filled their pockets with stones so if they fell overboard they would have a quicker death than trying to reach the shore.
That evening at home there was a terrible row. ‘What if you had died?’ I heard Mother sob. ‘Then what would we have done? What would have become of us, Jeffery?’
I didn’t know why she wasn’t more proud of him; I couldn’t understand her reaction. Father didn’t stop to think when there was something to be done; he wasn’t troubled by self-doubt. He was a doer, not a dreamer.
*
At the inquest the coroner praised my father, and the jury did as well, but his failure troubled him badly. He railed against the inability of people to swim, and the lack of life buoy or anything else with which to rescue people. ‘We are a nation of sailors,’ he cried, ‘and by the honour of God, we don’t know how to swim!’
That very summer we left Margate. Father had applied for a job as a swimming instructor at the Lambeth Baths in London. He saw a chance to pursue a swimming career and to teach others too, so that never again would a poor innocent child drown in the raging sea. ‘The ability to save a life,’ he said, ‘is the glorious privilege of a swimmer.’ Those were words that I would never forget.
CHAPTER TWO
We arrived in Lambeth on a Saturday night. I’d fallen asleep on the train and bus and when I woke up in Mother’s arms my first sight of our new home
was a light so bright I thought the street was on fire. The gutters were crowded with hundreds of stalls and each had a light, whether candles in turnips or white globes that hung like full moons. Everything was bright on the New-cut market, everything sparkled, and you couldn’t move a few yards without a seller calling out, ‘Buy, buy, buy bu-u-uy!’ ‘Over here!’ ‘Walk inside!’ Father stopped to buy a baked chestnut and I held it steaming in my hand, marvelling at the confusion and uproar. I was a Margate child and now I was in London, where the pavements were made of gold and any moment I would see a lion. I could not believe there was anything in the country beyond London; to me, it was the entire centre of life.
Father elbowed his way through the crowds, not at all alarmed, only looking for the correct address, while Mother kept her shawl tightly bound around the two of us. We had rented lodgings above a chemist shop belonging to a Mr Hallway: there were just the two small rooms and they smelled of boiled whelks.
*
The next morning Father took my brothers and me out exploring, past the public houses with their frosted windows, down lanes that curved into darkness as if a river had worn down the cobbles and turned the alley from one direction to the next. Happily for Father there were plenty of public houses in the neighbourhood and many a street where sporting men gathered to wager on every race or fight imaginable, whether it was between men, dogs, cockerels or rats. Our father loved to bet; it was the thrill of the thing that appealed to him, the split-second chance of a fortune made or lost. He liked nothing better than to arrange a wager, but when he did win he very often spent the money all at once.
Billy nudged me and pointed down a passageway where a group of boys were gathered in a ring. I saw one toss a coin in the air and heard shouts, then from round the corner came a man with a dog, its legs trembling and its head covered with a bloody handkerchief.
‘What has happened to the dog?’ I asked.
‘It hurt itself,’ said Billy, giving me a sweet. My brother always had something nice to eat in his pockets and often produced a little lump of peppermint rock to keep me quiet.
As we continued down the road with Father there didn’t seem to be many other people about, just a woman at a doorway and two men leaning on the handle of a barrow, watching. The houses here had broken windows and dirty curtains, the doors were all open and mattresses lay in the muddy road. But when we reached Westminster Bridge Road the homes were grander, and as we passed along an alleyway between two rows of houses we came to the Lambeth Baths. It was a vast building, a little like a railway station, built of sand-coloured stone, with a row of black doors flanked with marble pillars and at the top a chimney as tall as a spire. I heard my boots tapping as we climbed up the steps. It was early, the baths were not yet open and Father was going to show us around. He had been appointed swimming instructor and soon he would become coach and organiser of entertainments. For it was here at Lambeth that we would make a new life for ourselves.
We came in through one of the doors and I was cowed for a moment, the building was so big and I so small. The walls were glazed green and there seemed to be corridors leading in all directions. I sniffed at the air; it smelled of newly scrubbed wood and damp towels and the unfamiliar scent of bleaching powder.
We passed through a turnstile, I slid myself easily underneath, and then we stopped at a little room that was the pay office. Father waited by a glass window and I stood on tiptoe next to him, barely tall enough to see in.
‘Can I have one of those?’ I asked, pointing at a pile of cakes on the counter.
He laughed. ‘You want to eat some soap, Daisy?’ Then he knocked on the glass and a man sleeping in an armchair got up and stretched himself.
‘Ticket?’ he growled as he lifted the window.
‘Sorry to have disturbed you in your sleep,’ said Father, introducing himself. The man waved that he could go where he pleased, shut the window and returned to his armchair.
Then my brothers and I set off down a passageway with iron doors on either side, each with a shiny brass knob. I stopped, putting my hand out, but Billy slapped it away.
‘Don’t you dare,’ said Father. ‘Those are the hot water taps for the slipper baths and you are never to touch them.’ He didn’t think much of slipper baths: why soak yourself for half an hour like a vegetable in your own mucky water? But he was overjoyed with the baths, marvelling at the cost it had required to build them. ‘These,’ he told us as we carried on with our tour, ‘are the largest in Europe. In fact,’ he said, for Father was never one for understatement, ‘they are the largest in the world.’
We went into the first-class waiting room, with panelled walls and handsome armchairs for the gentlemen, and along another corridor where Father pulled open a heavy wooden door. And there it was; never had I seen anything so beautiful as the first-class pool. It was hard not to gasp at the sight; I felt as if I had entered a cathedral. The walls were smooth with white porcelain tiles and a lattice-like roof rose high above our heads. In the middle of the pool was a terracotta fountain, while at one end was a lofty springboard that I couldn’t wait to climb. At the far end, the morning sun flooded in through three arched windows set with coloured glass, sending rippling waves of light across the water. The sense of peace was overwhelming; I almost expected to hear a choir sing. I was a worshipper at my very own church.
‘I want to get in,’ I said, struggling with my coat, unable to contain my excitement.
‘Daisy!’ my father reprimanded. ‘Behave.’
‘But I want to —’ I protested.
‘Well, you can’t. You’re a girl.’
‘So where can I swim?’
‘You can’t. It’s men and boys only.’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘Life,’ said Father, ‘is not fair. And anyway, you don’t know how to swim.’
‘I do, I do!’
‘No you don’t,’ said Charlie and he stuck out his tongue. For although I had bobbed on my own in the sea that day with Billy, Father had not begun to teach me the way he had with my brothers, and somehow I knew that this was my opportunity to show him what I could do.
I was still protesting as Billy popped a sweet in my mouth and took me by the hand. ‘Let’s go up there,’ he said, pointing to two elegant staircases that led up to the private slipper baths and a gallery where spectators could sit on wooden pews. I didn’t want to be up there, I wanted to be in the water, but I followed him up the steps, watched as he opened a grey slate door to see a bath coloured a pretty pink inside.
‘Come on!’ called Father, just as I was about to reach for the handsome chain and bell hanging on the wall. ‘Get back down, we haven’t got all day.’
He led us into a room with mirrors on the wall and brushes and clean combs all laid out ready for use on the sideboard. Father said it was the ladies’ waiting room.
‘What do they wait for?’ I asked. ‘A swim?’
He laughed. ‘For their slipper baths, silly.’
Next we entered the room where the stoker men worked, shovelling coal into the boilers to keep the water hot, and then into the steam-filled washhouses where women cleaned their families’ clothes. Then at last we came to another set of wooden doors and the second-class bath. It was smaller and darker than the first pool, with a stage at one end on which sat a glass tank. There were spittoons along the poolside here, the smell of bleaching powder stung my nose and the water didn’t look as clean, but still I would have liked to get in.
Then we heard a cough and turned to see a man in a peaked cap and a coat with brass buttons all the way down the front. ‘Ah, Mr Belle,’ he said in a rumbling voice, as if he had hot potatoes in his mouth.
Father gave a bow, and the two men shook hands. ‘Children,’ he said, ‘this is Mr Peach, the baths’ superintendent. From now on, you will do as he says. There is to be no horseplay. Remember that this is a swimming bath, not a romping playground.’
Mr Peach laughed and the two of them strolled off to talk
at the side of the pool. It was then that I sensed my chance. Quickly, before anyone could notice, I left the second-class bath and I ran along hallways and past waiting rooms, instinct telling me the right way to go, until I was back at the first-class pool. Luckily for me the door stood open, for I never would have managed it myself. It was empty and silent inside, but for the gentle sound of water cascading from the fountain and my footsteps echoing off the porcelain walls. I knew I didn’t have much time, that soon I would be caught, and so I tore at my coat and threw it on the floor, wrestled with the buttons on my boots and removed my clothes. I felt my heart racing, I knew for certain I would get in trouble, but I just couldn’t help myself. Then I stood there for a second before walking to the side and jumping straight in. Down I went and then whoosh! I was up again.
The water was warm and that surprised me; I had expected it to be as cold as the sea. The bath didn’t move like the ocean, there were no crested waves, no seaweed or sand or rocks, just little Daisy Belle, a half-naked little girl bobbing in the men’s first-class bath. I don’t know how I knew what do to, I just did, and it must have been a funny sight for I had my feet hopping up and down and my hands in the air, making my way along the pool like a seahorse.
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