Then he came to the surface and tossed the cigar away, turned himself on his back, and with one leg raised in the air he used his hands to scull himself head first down the pool. When he got halfway he raised the other leg and, his jaw tight with the effort, began to rotate his body like a spinning top while the crowd clapped and cheered. But then, just as he was about to get out of the bath, he started to thrash around, to sink below the surface and rise up again, spluttering and crying, ‘Help!’ There was a bustle of excitement among the spectators, shouts of, ‘He’s drowning! He’s sinking! Get a rope!’ I was afraid and clutched at Tom-tom beside me, remembering the day in Margate when Father had pulled the dead girl from the sea. A woman screamed, the drummer raised his sticks and gave a roll of the drums, and at that very moment I turned my head and looked up to the gallery to see Billy. How had he got up there? I hadn’t even seen him leave the poolside. But there he was, standing balanced on the edge of the rail. What was he doing, would he fall? But then he gave me a wink and I knew with a sigh of relief that Father’s drowning was all part of the show. I saw Billy steady himself, tip forward on his toes – and then flawlessly he dived down amid shouts of ‘See the cripple boy!’ and swam rapidly to Father’s rescue. He grasped him by the shoulders and swam with him to the steps while Father waved to show the crowd that he was fine.
‘Ord-a-ar!’ cried Mr Peach as everyone began to clap and cheer, to surge forward for a better look, while Father triumphantly got out of the pool and patted Billy on the back.
‘There you have it, ladies and gentlemen!’ he cried, as Mr Peach handed him the megaphone. ‘That is how to save someone! And all of you here today…’ he pointed at the men around the pool, ‘all of you here,’ he swept his arm up to the ladies in the gallery, ‘can learn to swim if you choose. Yes! Even a child can swim if he is properly taught, as you will see. This evening, in our grand finale, I introduce to you… Professor Belle’s Family of Frogs. Behold and marvel!’
The lamps were turned up high then and the audience turned as one to look at us, standing in a row by the edge of the pool, facing the vast expanse of water. I glanced at my brothers: Charlie was squinting his eyes, Tom-tom was biting his nails, but as for me, I was bouncing up and down because I couldn’t wait to start.
‘Charlie!’ Father cried and my brother gave a bow. ‘Tom-tom! And not forgetting… little Daisy Belle, just two years old!’
I saw Charlie open his mouth to correct him, to say I wasn’t two, I was four, but Father raised his voice even louder. ‘Look at her,’ he told the audience. ‘She has only had four lessons.’
‘Four lessons?’ a man gasped and beside me Charlie muttered that this wasn’t true.
I made a curtsey then, as Father had taught me, and as I straightened up I felt a rush of blood to my head, for now it was me the people were clapping and I hadn’t yet done a thing.
Then the whistle blew and we threw ourselves in, and taking great gulps of air I began to thrash my way to the other side of the bath. The crowd could not believe it. A girl! A little girl able to swim like this. How was it possible? How could I manage it? Why didn’t I sink and drown? I heard their roars; saw the gallery ahead of me packed with people leaning down over the railings, waving their arms and hats, a vast slanting mass of heads yelling and swaying and cheering for me. I was halfway now and I’d lost any sense of a stroke, I just had to get across that bath any way I could. Then at last I grasped the rail: I had made it.
My brothers got out but I remained in the pool, treading water as Father had taught me. ‘If you please!’ he shouted, waiting until the audience had quietened down. ‘My littlest frog Daisy will now demonstrate how to float.’
‘Impossible,’ I heard a man cry.
‘Does lead not float mercury?’ Father demanded. ‘Does water not float wood? A buoy floats, a corpse floats…’
‘Ooh!’ cried a woman.
‘You would float too, madam,’ said Father, to which the men by the poolside laughed, ‘when you fall into the water, but you cannot because your fears prevent you and consequently you sink. But the art of swimming teaches there is no need to feel alarm or despair. The swimmer obeys the laws of gravity. Observe and you will see…’
At this I turned myself on my back and laid my hands on my stomach. I stretched out my legs, closed my eyes, and felt that most wonderful sensation that comes when the water is dense and holds your body as if it is a cork. I sensed it around my face, rippling across my forehead and down my cheeks, heard a gentle sloshing in my ears. I could have stayed there for hours: it took no effort at all. But I heard the people cry ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ and when I opened my eyes there they were once again waving and cheering, throwing nut shells and orange peel into the pool. That was when I knew, without any doubt, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. There were no two ways about it; I must swim and I must perform.
CHAPTER FIVE
By the time I was six I was no longer a frog, I was a duck. But although Father continued to teach me it was Billy he trained even harder. My brother was making a name for himself now; he’d adopted a daredevil air and there were plenty of girls in Lambeth eager to see him perform. Every morning he walked two miles, rising at five o’clock when not a shutter in the street was open and not a bus was about. Walking was good exercise for a side swimmer, and it also strengthened Billy’s legs, and when he returned Father was waiting to vigorously rub him down. He was very strict with Billy: ‘Don’t let him have any fat, and don’t let him drink too much,’ he warned our mother at dinnertime. ‘Where are you off to?’ he’d ask if ever my brother appeared to be going out unaccompanied. ‘You’re supposed to be at the baths.’
Each night he told us stories as we sat round the fire, filling my brother’s head with tales of Greeks and Romans, of Leander who nightly crossed the Hellespont to be with his lover Hero, and of Caesar who, in the midst of battle, swam between enemy boats. But it was I, not Billy, who listened most intently to these stories, especially to the tale of Cloelia, the maiden who escaped her capturers by leading a band of girls across the Tiber to Rome, swimming through a hail of spears.
Soon Billy had beaten his nearest rival Harry Parker, a sturdy boy with legs as wide as cricket bats, and my father proclaimed him champion of south London. But then one day on his way back from the baths, Billy stopped at a market stall to buy some sweets and by the time he got home it was clear that something was very wrong. He began to sweat as if he had a fever and soon he was shaking all over and his gums turned blue. Mother was frantic. Was it catching? Was it the baths, had he caught some dreadful disease from the water? But then Father searched Billy’s pockets and found the remaining sweets, and when he saw their bright yellow colour he guessed what had happened. My brother had been poisoned by lead.
Father mixed up warm mustard to make Billy sick, but all that seemed to come out of him was bath water. By morning the vomiting had stopped, but when my brother got out of bed he couldn’t lift his right foot. Father put him on his back and carried him to the doctor, and there he was told the dreadful news: the limb must come off. But Father was having none of this. He brought Billy home and massaged his foot with oils and lotions, wrapping the leg in strips of plaster. We all watched while Billy whimpered and ground his teeth and Father told him, ‘Don’t holler, be a man.’ Then he told my brother to drink a special potion and go to bed until morning.
For a week or more Billy had to scuff his toes along the ground as he walked, but eventually his foot was back to how it had been. Father never did find the man who had sold him the sweets, though he looked for him long and hard; and while he was sympathetic when my brother was sick, he was also keen for him to get back to the baths. He needed to start training properly again.
‘On your legs!’ he urged him. ‘It’s time to swim.’ But Billy didn’t want to; he said the very smell of the baths made him sick. ‘You need to earn your keep just like the rest of us,’ said Father, ‘or where do you think your next meal’s coming fro
m?’
‘Why?’ cried Mother. ‘Where has all the money gone, Jeffery?’
‘Expenses!’ he bellowed, slamming the door and heading back to the baths.
*
That afternoon, while I was in the shallow end playing with Charlie and Tom-tom, for we were children still and wanted to have fun and not always be at our lessons, I became aware of an argument. Father was insisting on something and Billy was refusing. ‘Get in right now!’ Father ordered. ‘How will you ever build up your strength if you don’t do as you’re told?’ Then he took the towel he had draped around his neck and he whipped Billy round the head, saying he didn’t know why he’d ever bothered to make him a champion.
I’d never seen Father lose his temper like this, and so I thought the best thing to do was to pretend it had never happened. I returned to playing with Tom-tom: he had a wooden ark that Auntie Jessie had sent for Christmas and I wanted it for myself. When he wouldn’t give it to me I began to fuss and then to cry, so everyone would know I was being wronged. A moment later Father was in the shallow end beside me, hauling me out by the arm.
‘What’s going on?’ he roared.
‘I want the ark…’
‘By the honour of God! Cry if you’re badly hurt but never, ever just to get something you want.’ Still he held me by the arm, and the next thing I knew he was slapping me with the towel as well, once, twice, three times round my head. I stopped crying then, even though the towel was wet and its sting was as sharp as a cat’s claw, and as I stood there on the poolside, my ears burning, Father’s scowling face looming over me, for the first time in my life I saw him as an adversary. He was angry with Mother for asking about money, and he was angry with Billy for refusing to train, but why was he angry with me? I might have been afraid then, but the real reason I stopped crying was because I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing the slaps had hurt.
The moment he let go of my arm I ran, out of the bath and down the corridors, dripping water as I went. I was so intent on getting away that I didn’t even notice Mr Peach until I ran straight into him.
‘What’s going on, Daisy Belle?’ he asked. ‘Professor on the warpath? You wouldn’t be running away, would you now?’
I shook my head, trying not to cry. We were in the hallway where people were waiting for their slipper baths and I was embarrassed because they were looking at me.
‘Come along,’ said Mr Peach, ‘you can wait for the Professor at the pay office.’
When we reached the office a lady was standing by the glass window. She seemed very richly dressed to be at the Lambeth Baths, with shiny ringlet hair and a smart hat on her head. Her dress was a golden colour, she had a parasol to match, and her lips were the reddest I had ever seen. I was surprised when she bade Mr Peach good afternoon and asked where she could find Professor Belle. What did she want with my father? Was she a swimmer – could this lady be a swimmer like me?
Mr Peach gave her a quick look up and down and said, ‘The Professor is not here today,’ and this was odder still because I knew exactly where my father was, at the second-class bath.
‘Is she a swimmer?’ I asked after the lady had walked away.
‘I wouldn’t call her that, no,’ said Mr Peach.
I was about to ask more when Billy came rushing up carrying my clothes, and I remembered that Father had hit me and I was running away. ‘Here, little tadpole,’ he said, ‘put them on and let’s go.’ I didn’t know where we were going or why, as we made our way down Westminster Bridge Road, under the railway line and along unfamiliar roads, until we came down an alleyway and I stopped in delight at the river.
I’d never seen the Thames up close before. Mother didn’t like us going anywhere near it, she said the very smell of the place would make us sick. But as we came onto the foreshore there it was, rolling heavily through the city as grey as iron. It was a windy, fluttery day and there was a smell of dried fish in the air as I stood at the river’s edge, watching it lap at the sand in frothy waves. A man in a rowing boat came past, his oars like an insect’s legs dwarfed by the great flat bulks of the barges on the opposite bank.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked Billy as I followed him, stumbling on the pebbles and stones and broken timber, stopping to look at a group of children in tattered clothes huddled under a boat builder’s sign. But my brother wouldn’t answer and I had to trot as fast as I could to keep up. The smell grew worse, a dreadful mixture of manure and rotting vegetables, and once I looked down at a patch of mud and saw it swarming with bright red worms. Billy rushed me on, between dirty boats and big brick potteries, past the backs of tenement houses and a boat builder’s yard, then at last he stopped. We were at the stairs to Westminster Bridge and there on the other side of the river was the golden tower of Big Ben.
There is a grace about Westminster Bridge when the river was high, as it was that day, and we walked up the stairs, joining a mob of people standing in the middle. Below us the river was alive with tugs and steamers, paddle wheels churning up the water, decks piled high with people going down-river.
‘He says he wants me to race Harry Parker in there,’ said Billy. ‘As soon as I’m better, that’s what he wants. I’m to swim the Thames.’
I was astounded; Father wanted my brother to swim in here? The river was a swarm of barges and lighters, ship masts and billowing sails: wherever would someone go amid all the boats? I was also old enough to feel left out. Was this what they had been arguing about, and why hadn’t Father told me the plan?
‘He says it’s the only way to get a bigger crowd. I don’t want to do it. I don’t feel right.’
I looked at Billy, his face turned away from me as he peered over the bridge. I thought he loved swimming as much as me. I thought he had recovered from the poisoning and soon he was going to be champion of England.
‘Do you know what?’ he asked. ‘All I thought about when Father took me to the doctor was, how would I look with a wooden leg?’
‘But you don’t have a wooden leg.’
‘I know, Daisy,’ he sighed, ‘but I think I’ve lost my nerve.’
‘I can do it,’ I said.
Billy laughed.
‘I could!’ I stretched up to look over the railings of Westminster Bridge. I thought how exciting it would be to swim in a river as wide as the sea; I wanted to know what it would feel like to pass under this bridge and to have people standing up here looking down on me.
‘No you can’t.’
‘I can.’
‘You’re only six years old!’
‘Then when I’m seven I can.’
‘You can’t.’
‘I can!’
‘You can’t race a boy!’
‘Why not? I want to swim in the river.’
‘No!’ Billy grabbed my hand and I laughed – I wasn’t going to do it right there and then.
As we stood there still arguing Big Ben chimed six o’clock, we heard a sudden cry from below and the mob of people rushed to the other side of the bridge. Down on the river two lightermen were standing on the bow of their boat, one with a rope in his hands, watching as a bundle come floating by. I thought it was the body of a dog lying on its back, but then I saw the limbs were too long for a dog’s and there wasn’t a tail. As the lightermen threw the rope I glimpsed an upturned neck and the glint of a button on the chest and I knew, with a tightening of my stomach, that it was a person and they were dead.
‘Is it a man?’ asked a gentleman on the bridge as the lightermen hauled the lifeless body, limbs flopping, onto the boat. ‘Or a woman?’
‘It’s a child,’ a lady replied, ‘the poor little mite.’
I looked down at the water and I wondered how the child had come to be in the Thames. Had they fallen from a boat or paddled out from shore? Had they been running by the river and tumbled in? Could it have been one of the children we had seen near the foreshore huddled under the boat builder’s sign? Was it a girl like me or a boy like Billy and had they known how to
swim?
‘Let’s go,’ said my brother, still holding onto my hand.
But I was rooted to the spot; I could sense the water rippling beneath me and I felt such a mix of emotions, fear of seeing the body and excitement at the possibility of swimming the Thames. Then as I looked up a great curtain of fog came sweeping up the river, the air grew dark and people began hurrying off the bridge. The buildings on the opposite bank seemed to sway as if I had dreamed them, the boat masts turning as indistinct as the lines of a spider’s web. A minute later all the solid landmarks, the chimneys and Big Ben, the barges and boats, were lost to sight.
‘Keep your mouth closed,’ said Billy, as we started to walk slowly back across the bridge. We could see nothing ahead of us in the orange-coloured air; our future was blank until we reached it, and then when we looked back the way we had come the world had closed around us and everything had disappeared. The sounds were muffled at first, behind us the soft whistle of a boat, ahead the murmur of pedestrians, a polite cough answered by another. Then there was a smash, the sound of breaking glass and running footsteps, a cry of ‘What’s happened?’ and another one of ‘Help!’
‘Quickly!’ said Billy. ‘This way.’
Still we stumbled along, more afraid with every step, not knowing what we were treading in, whether we would hit a lamp post or fall down a cellar hole.
We felt our way along grimy walls and shuttered doors, stopping at the sound of wheels on the cobbles, waiting until the wagon had passed. Then at last my brother said he knew where we were; he’d found the lamp-lit window of Mr Hallway’s chemist shop.
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