Swim by Lisa Brace

Author:Lisa Brace [Brace, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blue Pier Books
Published: 2024-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Two

July 1915, Blackpool

Swimming rather pales into insignificance when you’re faced with the death of men and boys you’ve known all your life. What’s the point in immersing oneself in water when people you’ve grown up with are dying in manners so grotesque? Or men who you used to buy bread from coming back from the war with a far-away look in their eye and a tendency to look forever haunted?

I stopped swimming shortly after my mile race in Liverpool, though the draw of the water was strong. How could it not be when I walked past the sea on my daily journey to work? Past the waves that crashed and broke on the shore. The suck and draw of the water over the pebbles rattling with the upset of the movement. The memory of walking into the sea and diving into the waves, exerting power over nature.

The pool was closed, the focus was on other things. I accepted swimming was unimportant – anybody I spoke to would say as much – it couldn’t help the war effort, it didn’t put food on the table and it wouldn’t bring anyone home.

Instead, I committed to helping those men fighting in any way I could. I signed up to work in the Post Office after a huge advertising campaign from the government to get women into jobs in the civil service, so men could serve on the front line. I worked in the sorting office with a jolly bunch of women, and we kept each other’s spirits up.

I tried not to look back and remember life as it had been before. Life when we could make a birthday cake with all the ingredients, could blow out candles and make ridiculous wishes, when everything was possible. I didn’t think back to a year before, when we had no idea that life would change in the way it did. When we still gaily bought dresses, traded gossip, went about our tiny lives making no impact on anyone.

It felt as though Blackpool had been invaded. It hadn’t. But with the sheer volume of troops descending on the town – the Lancashire Gazette claimed fourteen thousand, though I didn’t know if that was true – it felt like the height of summer with all the tourists who came to spread out across the promenade like a plague. But unlike the summer hordes who went home, this was unceasing. An unrelenting flow of young men coming to our town to prepare for war.

Between training sessions, the troops visited the entertainments on the seafront. I watched many of them walking past Brighton Cottage, beyond North Shore to get to the tower, which had so far remained open to ‘keep spirits up’. In the summer that had almost passed, they’d be seen sunning themselves on the beach, or spending their money in the amusements, or visiting the pubs. Not that you could hold any of this merrymaking against them. I’d rather they came here and had a few laughs and a few pints, before heading to the war where so many of them would then lose their lives.

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