This script contains information and material from the archives of Mercedes Gleitze.
With the permission of, and kindly supplied by, her family.
All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to Macnaughton Lord Representation, 44 South Molton Street, London W1K 5RT. T: 44 (0) 20 7499 1411, F: 44 (0) 20 7493 2444. No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the author’s prior written consent.
The Art of Swimming was produced by Playgroup and first performed at the Arches, Glasgow, on 26 and 27 September 2006.
Performed by Lynda Radley
Music composed and performed
by Michael John McCarthy
Directed by Tom Creed
Designed by Claire Halleran
Lighting Designed by Tom Creed
It was subsequently performed at the following venues and festivals:
Cork Midsummer Festival, Half Moon Theatre,
Cork, June 2007
Kinsale Arts Week, Municipal Hall, Kinsale, July
2007
Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Traverse Theatre,
Edinburgh, August 2007
Dublin Fringe Festival, New Theatre, Dublin,
September 2007
Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin, February 2008
Amsterdam Fringe Festival, Compagnietheater,
Amsterdam, September 2008
The English Theatre, Sculpture Museum on the Sea,
The Hague, April 2009
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, May 2009
It won the Bewley’s Cafe Theatre Little Gem Award and was nominated for the Fishamble New Writing Award at the Dublin Fringe Festival 2007, was short-listed for the Meyer-Whitworth Award in 2007, and was nominated for a Total Theatre Award for Innovation at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2007.
Stage directions are in bold.
The narrator’s voice is in plain text.
Mercedes’ voice is in italics.
Preset: A gramophone plays popular music of the 1920s and 30s. Various boxes and bric-à-brac are upstage, piled together.
I walk on stage, cross to the gramophone and switch it off.
(Thereafter music is played live on accordion, typewriter and laptop from among the boxes.)
During the following I takes stones and shells from a drawstring bag and set out a small square, big enough only for me to stand in.
Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen and welcome to my performance. In order for it to work, I will need you to sometimes imagine that I am Mercedes Gleitze: the first British woman to swim the English Channel. This I did in 1927, aged twenty-six, and it took fifteen hours and fifteen minutes.
If it helps you to have a more fulfilling theatrical experience, you can imagine that I did decide to spend the exorbitant amount of money they were asking for in the second-hand clothing shop where I found an authentic period swimming costume – you know, one of the ones that comes down to here (indicating thighs) and looks like something a wrestler might wear. It was navy blue and made out of cotton jersey.
I am wearing a black vest and black trousers. I have rolled up the trousers creating an approximation of the costume described.
I am taller than I am, obviously, and broader, with a long mane of dark hair. I am famed for my beauty as well as my talent.
I say:
I step into the small stone square.
(The sound of breathing and the sea) In the open sea you have no idea what’s coming next. You must make your peace with currents and tides. You must learn how to track them. You have to swim straight, but you cannot waste too much energy on looking up, so you learn blind how to navigate a straight, liquid line. You must learn how to swim in the dark.
You can think only miniscule thoughts – Stroke. Pull. Stroke. Pull. Stroke. Pull. – Don’t think and there’s nothing to distract you from the cold. Think too much and your mind will find a way to convince you to stop. So you focus on direction, navigation, drinking, urinating, pacing, hours, minutes, and seconds. Your inner engineer must travel internally; monitoring each temperature change, feeling each fluctuation, assessing the quality of each breath. Each stroke. Pull. Stroke. Pull. Stroke. Pull.
You speak to your lungs and you say, ‘You are bigger than this.’
You speak to your heart and you say, ‘Don’t beat faster, slow down.’
You speak to your spine and you say, ‘Keep rotating.’
You speak to your legs and you say, ‘Keep kicking.’
You speak to your arms and you say, ‘Keep pulling.’
You speak to your joints and you say, ‘Look, you can have your revenge when I’m old.’
Each time your mind wanders towards the pain you must pick it up and pluck it away from the brink like a wayward child.
Every time an image of failure comes to you, you must cast it back into the blue.
If you feel the swell of early celebration you had better check yourself because your strokes will have turned sloppy and you’re breathing too fast.
You just have to be, letting your conscious mind take care of the machine and your subconscious float to the surface like a cork.
You just have to swim.
I step out of the square and address the audience.
(Fairground music) Imagine that you are an audience. You are an audience at Blackpool Tower Circus in the early 1930s. World War One is a receding memory. World War Two hasn’t happened yet. You are surrounded by glint and gilding the likes of which you have never seen before. You are probably poor, but not as poor as the poorer poor who can only imagine being here.
During the following I bring out a small step-ladder. I also fetch a metal bucket and remove a circle of red satin from within it. This is spread on the floor in front of the ladder, and I place the bucket in the centre of this circle.
Tonight you have seen many exciting entertainments. Some of you may choose to imagine yourselves as children. You may feel sick with sweetness or excitement. With tears in your eyes, you may be remembering the face of a clown which terrified you earlier; the fear now solidifying into a lifelong phobia. Perhaps you just felt sexual stirrings brought on by the slitherings of an acrobat in an improper costume. Maybe you are feeling an acute pang of inadequacy caused by feats of the strong man, and now you are boring your wife and dampening your children’s imaginations by explaining to them that it is all just a sham. You may be sitting there wishing that the bear had bitten down on its tamer’s neck. You may now be craving a pony that you will surely never find under the Christmas tree. You may be bored.
Suddenly, rain pours down from overhead, and the ring fills with water as huge fountains gush downwards.
I reach into the bucket and pull out a watering can with which I pour water into the bucket.
There is a collective intake of breath as a swimming pool is formed.
The ringmaster says: And now Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls, in an exhibition of scientific swimming I present to you the first British woman to swim the English Channel, the first person to swim the Straits of Gibraltar and the world record holder for endurance swimming at forty-six straight hours: the talented, the powerful, the beautiful Miss Mercedes Gleitze. Bathing costume worn by Miss Gleitze kindly supplied by JF Orry Ladies Department, Blackpool; for all your swimming needs.
Imagine I’m the closest thing to a celebrity that you have ever seen.
Now imagine that this carries me up to a diving platform high above you. I take up position.
I climb to the top of the ladder and stand looking into the bucket.
I say:
Gegrüßet seist du, Maria, voll der Gnade,
der Herr ist mit dir.
Du bist gebenedeit unter den Frauen, und gebenedeit ist die Frucht
deines Leibes, Jesus. Heilige Maria,
Mutter Gottes,
bitte für uns Sünder jetzt und in der Stunde
unseres Todes.
Amen.
Now imagine that that bucket of water is the circus ring swimming pool and I am about to break its flickering surface.
I climb down. During this segment I bring forward a small, old-fashioned, folding table. I carry a leather-covered box to the table. When I open it I discover swimming logs, an old photograph and a folded cloth.
Still damp, she signs the many photos and scraps of paper you bring to her: mementos that will be loved and looked at for a while. Before they slowly lose their significance. Before she slips out of memory and is forgotten. She retires, marries a sheet metal engineer of Irish extraction, settles down and becomes a philanthropist, setting up a home for the poor. During the Second World War she once more lives through the eerie duality of her German parentage and British citizenship, especially when she receives a letter from the war commission telling her that The Mercedes Gleitze Home for Destitute Men and Women has been destroyed by enemy bombing. She has three children, grows older and, in 1981, she dies.
These mementos, now mori, these photographs and autographs, are occasionally excavated from behind ornaments on the mantelpieces of dying grandparents, or unearthed from the hiding places of children who have long since grown up. Someone makes a decision: to throw them away or to keep them. To look up this exotic name on the internet or to assign the found object to another box on another mantelpiece where the image of Mercedes inside patiently awaits another grieving grandchild eager to know more about the dead relative they spent the last few years ignoring. The celebrity that once filled Blackpool Tower Circus with raucous applause and indefinable wonder survives in sporting legend, the Oxford Biographical Dictionary and in the memories of her family and friends.
I found her in Cork City Library in the summer of 2005. A beautiful woman wrapped modestly in a towel smiling demurely at me. She was surrounded by civil servants and the caption underneath said that she just had swum for thirty hours in a baths which has long since disappeared from Eglington Street, Cork. That was all: her name, the date (1930) and the feat. A few nights before I had found myself constructing sentences around the idea of long distance swimming while falling asleep. And then this beautiful woman inexplicably appears in a book of old photographs. And I’m a botanist collecting samples. I’m a butterfly collector pinning down wings. I hang what I imagine on the bones of her biography. I’m a scientist trying to create a formula for this name: Mercedes Gleitze.
I carefully and meticulously unfold the cloth and spread it over the table.
I bring out an old-fashioned picnic basket and place it on the table. When opened, the lid of the basket reveals a seascape with a tiny kite made of cheese suspended from a wire at one edge of the lid.
I say to her:
From aged eighteen months to ten years you lived with your grandparents in Herzogenaurach, Germany, but at age ten your mother travelled to Germany to take you home. You returned to your birthplace of Brighton where you were reunited with your sisters, your father and the sea. (Fairground music) You lived at the gable end of a row of terraced houses and you could see it through the window of your small attic bedroom. You inhaled it on your walk to school. It clung to the clothes on the washing line. You could smell it on your skin. While your mother helped you to improve your English you learned, without learning, how to walk into a wind but stay steady on the rocks, how deep is too deep and not to tense when you float. Come summer you watched with fascination as families poured out of London trains on sultry afternoons. You wondered at the wonder that appeared on their faces with that first look at the horizon. You observed behind a wry smile as they cried over kites lost to the wind, as they reddened, as they headed out when they should have been coming in and as they were led indoors just when the air was ripe for adventures, as they sank, as they swallowed water, as they had their ears clipped and their legs smacked and their noses wiped.
And you watched with a different look on your face as the very presence of the ocean opened up to them a world of seaside indulgence that you had never known: a world of ices, lemonade and picnics, afternoon tea and high tea, pink biscuits and clotted cream scones. Your mother never spread a blanket on anything other than a bed. You ate indoors around the table, on the floral table cloth. There was no sand in your sandwiches. (Using the picnic things I have made a sandwich: when I lift it up, sand leaks out)
You do not remember the first time you felt the sea swirl around you, but you do remember the first time you swam.
You were still small and not allowed to wade in without an adult. But many of your friends had been swimming for years, had been taught by their fathers. You thought that you had seen enough to know what to do but didn’t wish to skip procedure. For weeks Heinrich had been promising to teach you but he was a busy man: a journeyman baker. So you waited – you are good at waiting – and you played with Jimmy from number one hundred and twenty-five who had toy soldiers. (A toy soldier is placed amid the landscape of the picnic)
(During the following more soldiers emerge) Together you had been employing his mother’s washing bucket in an attempt to recreate your new favourite Bible story: Moses parting the waves, over and over again. Those soldiers who were usually the goodies became the Israelites and managed to stay dry. Those soldiers who were usually the baddies became the Egyptians and were given a drenching. (I drop a soldier in my tea) Some of them were never the same again. (More soldiers are taken out and two opposing armies dot the landscape) As you watched them float down the gutter and into the hairnet Jimmy had stretched over the drain to prevent unnecessary loss of life, you wondered if this would happen to you when you swam. If Papa let go would you just be swept away? The secret was kicking, Jimmy said. He said you had to kick against the water and that’s what kept you going. He administered a kick to your backside to illustrate his point.
You practised in bed, on your stomach. It bunched up the sheets but it made you feel better.
It always made you feel better to be prepared.
When the fateful day arrived, you set your seven-year-old face into the best Moses grimace you could manage and you waded in until the water was waist high. Before your father could even put his hands out to cradle your small body in this new posture, before he could coach you to keep your head up for now, before he could again give a warning about jellyfish, you were off.
(The sound of breathing) She lifted her feet, she took a deep breath, she half dived half fell into the water, and she began moving her arms and legs the way she had practised. Rather than punishing her arrogance, rather than spitting her back out, rather than invading the little girl’s body, the sea made room for her, embraced her and allowed her travel through it. Heinrich had trouble keeping up. He jogged alongside making encouraging noises and wondering, yet again, at the ability of this child to surprise.
The picnic things have been tidied away. I close the lid of the basket and hold it like a suitcase. Only the toy soldiers remain on the landscape created by the cloth on the table.
When the war broke out in 1914, your father, like 30,000 other German nationals, was interned. Your mother returned the rest of the family to Germany but you were desperate to go back to the country you now called home. The first time you thought about swimming the English Channel was when you hatched a plan to walk and swim back to England during World War One. You simply looked at a map and resolved to walk to Holland, cross that country until you reached the sea’s edge and then follow the Dutch coastline south until you encountered that part of the French coast where the Channel is at its narrowest. Then you would simply swim home. Your teenage self had no concept of the true measure of that distance which looked so manageable on a map. You just knew which side of it you wanted to be on. Why was that? Where did that fierce, seemingly unwarranted loyalty come from? You made it as far as an island off the coast of Germany but the idea of swimming the Channel remained. A decade later, you were still trying.
I return the picnic basket to the pile of objects upstage. During the following I gather the soldiers, one by one:
In 1875 Captain Mathew Webb became the first person to swim the English Channel and he is, in a way, responsible for so many failures. The portly possessor of a fine handle-bar moustache, he swam the channel in a costume of red silk while smeared in porpoise oil. Afterwards, his presence at the London Stock Exchange brought business to a close. A triumphal arch was erected in his home of Shropshire, he embarked on a lecture tour and licensed his name for merchandising. A spendthrift who liked to show his friends a good time, he often found himself short of money and was forced to perform a number of commercial stunts, including floating for sixty hours in the whale tank at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster. Fortunately, there were no whales in there at the time. Eventually, in poor health and running seriously low on funds, he decided to swim across the top of Niagara Falls. He was rowed out to midstream wearing the same silk trunks as he had when swimming the Channel. He dived into the river and was instantly grabbed by the force of the current. He held his own for a while but was eventually dragged under. His last words to the boatman were: ‘If I die, they will do something for my wife.’
I drop the soldiers into the bucket of water.
In 1909 his elder brother unveiled a memorial. The inscription it bears reads: ‘Nothing great is easy.’
I unfold the table cloth, revealing a map of the channel which falls to the floor.
I bring out a rope knotted throughout at small equal intervals.
(The sound of breathing and the sea) There is always something unnatural about finding yourself standing on a beach at two o’clock in the morning and realising that you are about to take your clothes off and wade in, but particularly in October, on the north coast of France. I won’t put my feet down again for many hours, but putting my feet down will mean success.
I don’t survey the vista, or scan the horizon or any of that because it’s pitch black and there’s a heavy drizzle falling. From my vantage there’s no way to tell where the sky ends and the sea begins.
I feel ready. For the first time in all of my attempts I am going to allow myself to go further than is actually safe for me to go. I feel prepared to push myself to the edge of my capabilities, beyond what is reasonable.
But I don’t know how long I can keep this feeling up, and now this misty rain has swept down from nowhere… They ask me if I’m sure. I say, ‘This is the weather we’ve got. It’s neap tide. It’s calm. The currents are good. It’s already October. We need to go now because soon it’s going to be too cold again, and I can’t wait till next year.’
‘I know the way,’ I think, ‘I’ve traced it seven times before.’ And the porridge I had for supper last night tugs at my stomach and says, ‘Not quite.’
At 2.55 a.m. I begin.
I step onto the cloth and into the map.
There’s nobody to see me off: Mr Allan – the guide in charge of charting the course – and the fisherman – who will steer it – are both on board the boat. I gave the signal for Allan to start the clock and walk in; the most unnaturally natural thing I know to do.
I push the rope through my hands, a knot at a time.
The first few hours are difficult. There’s always a gnawing anxious feeling and that isn’t helped by the strong currents off the French coast. They’ve been my downfall when I’ve tried swimming in the opposite direction. Sometimes it’s like swimming but standing still. You can be five hundred yards from shore and find it impossible to make it. Or you can be swept towards Belgium, or south towards Brittany. Swimming in the opposite direction I’m trying to use these tides to my advantage, but it means I have to push hard from the beginning. I don’t like going out strong.
It’s like being back in those early days of training in the Thames. I’m not really in my body. I’m not travelling from limb to limb and from organ to organ, checking status, giving pep talks. I’m in my head, going over each of my seven previous attempts, remembering what went wrong, agonising over stupid mistakes and feeling the weight of exhausted disappointment. ‘Remember to pace yourself or you will get too tired by the end.’ ‘Don’t allow the currents to beat you, swim through the waves.’ ‘If the weather changes the weather changes, there’s nothing you can…’
Dry mouth, no hunger, can actually hear the clock ticking even though Allan’s got the stopwatch on the boat. Last year Gertrude Ederle came over from America and became The First Woman. She did it in fourteen hours and thirty-nine minutes on a second attempt, and she was only nineteen.
And I catch myself in these moments: ‘Thinking like this isn’t going to help. The more you agonise the more likely you are to make the same mistakes all over again, or different ones, and you won’t even see them coming because you’ll be too busy failing.’
At intervals Allan allows me to catch up to the boat. He bends over the side muttering times and tides and instructions. Careful not to disqualify me by touching me, he throws me grapes and honey, or strong tea, or cocoa. Stretching out on my back, I feed like some performing seal. I struggle to push the liquids down. I feel no hunger but I know I need to eat. I don’t usually taste anything, but I feel the warmth and I feel the food, feel what it does.
The rain seems to be closing in around me. I no longer have any sense of where I’ve swum from and where swimming to. I’m in the middle of nowhere and it seems like the most ridiculous thing in the world. The rain falls heavier. An ambivalent dawn is breaking.
It’s light now and I do begin to slow and I do begin to hurt, as I knew I would. My arms have gone completely numb. The water temperature is dropping. My lungs are burning and the cold is beginning to invade my marrow. I need to sprint to bring my temperature back up. ‘Take it easy.’ ‘You can do this.’ ‘Just one last concentrated push that’s all you need.’ ‘Stroke, pull, stroke…’ I am so wrapped up in an anxious attempt to compose myself that I don’t hear the fisherman’s signal, or the shouts from the guide boat. I lift my head to breathe and from out of the rain there’s the prow of a steamer only five feet away. I stop. (I drop the rope) I barely remember to tread water and I swallow a gulp full of the Channel, but somehow it passes me by, just. Its swell knocks me backwards. I shout, ‘I’m alright!’ and start swimming again.
I begin again to pull the rope through my hands.
I’m losing a lot of fluid. The sea is salty and my sweat is salty and it’s mixed with the lard and Vaseline on my skin. In the shipping lanes it’s choppy and I begin to feel sick. I swim through what seems like a universe of jellyfish, trying not to hold my breath with fear. One of them stings me on my left calf. It doesn’t hurt, which is to say the cold hurts more. I feel like a machine. I feel out of control.
And then I am suddenly aware of the presence of something else out there besides myself. It’s a sound, or sounds. At first I think I’m hallucinating and then I realise that it’s coming from the guide boat. They must have brought a gramophone on board and now they’ve wound it up for this final stretch.
(I sing) |
Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I want to go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago And it’s gone right to my head. |
I pick up speed. I shift gears from breaststroke to over-arm and I begin the sprint towards the shore which I can just about make out in the distance.
(Singing) |
Show me the way to go home Show me the way to go home Show me the way to go Show me the way to go Show me the way Show me the way Show me Show me Show Show Show |
The last knot has passed through my hands.
When I crawl up the beach I don’t feel anything but relief. Fifteen hours and fifteen minutes. I have just become the first British woman to swim the English Channel. I collapse and can’t be woken for two hours. It’s a dreamless sleep.
I step out of the map and fold the cloth.
(The sound of a typewriter) Like a lot of us, before she finally succeeded Mercedes found it necessary to be held down by a day job. She worked as a bilingual shorthand typist in Westminster, and trained to be a long distance swimmer in the Thames. For a while now I’ve been working for a property development company in Glasgow, and staring at my laptop in my bedroom in the student district. The symptoms of such a life include: a lot of looking out the window when you should be doing something else, a lot of talking about Channel swimming to people you meet on social occasions and a lot of clock watching and becoming obsessed with time, figures, distances, feats…
I sometimes imagine us as colleagues, Mercedes and I, fellow working girls in the typing pool; sitting at opposite desks and covering for each other in front of some smarmy boss who calls her ‘Toots’ and me ‘Ginger’. When nobody else is around, I ask her how the swimming is going and tell her that I’m sure she’ll make it across eventually. At elevenses, she asks me how the writing is going and tells me that she’s sure I’ll figure her out eventually. The rest of the time we both keep our heads down and dream of the sea. She keeps herself to herself, slightly wary of my interest in her. I am afraid to ask too many questions; afraid that what I have already concocted will be ruined by the truth.
Of course once she had her first big success, Mercedes left it all behind for a life of sponsorship, touring and endorsements.
After her Channel crossing, for reasons that we will come to, Mercedes kept detailed logs of all further swims and asked locals to sign declarations and write accounts of her accomplishments. These testify that she became the first person to swim the Straits of Gibraltar twenty years before the first recorded crossing by a man took place.
During the following, I waltz around the stage referring to the swimming logs I have gathered from the table.
(Fairground music)
She also swam:
– The Wash: a square-mouthed estuary on the northwest margin of the east coast of England.
– Lough Neagh: the largest freshwater lake in Ireland, fifteen miles wide, known for its extremely rough and windy conditions and formed, according to legend, when Fionn Mac Cumhaill scooped up a portion of land to fling at a Scottish rival.
‘There was a dense fog which made conditions very difficult… During the route selections were played by a gramophone kindly provided by Mr McCully the jeweller of Antrim and the people who came by boat to witness what is Miss Gleitze’s crowning triumph discoursed a lot of popular songs and otherwise encouraged her. She swam absolutely unprotected and unaided…and landed without any assistance.’
– From Port Stewart in Northern Ireland to Moville in the Republic, across the mouth of Lough Foyle: the only place in the world where The South is north and The North is south.
– Between the Aran Islands where:
‘the night was one of the most beautiful which has been witnessed on the Bay this year… She commenced with the trudgeon stroke and having got well clear of the land, changed to the breast stroke which is the most favoured by her for long swims… Miss Gleitze suffered very much in the early hours from the cold and occasionally complained of pains, and at one point her husband considered the advisability of taking her out of the water. However, she would not hear of this, the suggestion seeming to act as a spur, and she increased her pace… About 10 a.m. the crew of the pilot boat, rowing boat and Miss Gleitze herself, joined in a decade of the Rosary, the effect being most impressive.’
Around the Isle of Man in stages: a distance of over 100 miles. Legend has it that the Isle of Man is in fact the lump of earth Fionn Mac Cumhaill threw at his Scottish rival.
The Hellespont from Europe to Asia Minor, famously swum by that other champion of sea swimming, Lord Byron.
‘A chilly dawn, with the north wind chasing the smoke-like clouds across a grey-blue sky, a ruffled sea, that wonderful crispness in the air which put fresh life into our veins, this was the morning that greeted us as we assembled to act as witnesses to Miss Gletize’s swim.’
– Wellington Harbour in New Zealand.
– from Cape Town to Robben Island both ways; becoming the first person to complete the double.
And The Firth of Forth where:
‘At 11.53 she entered the water…wearing a rosary round her neck… She wore no goggles or bathing cap but had a veil over her face to keep back her long hair and to protect her eyes from the salt spray… The local police did splendid work but were hopelessly outnumbered by the frenzied crowd numbering some 12,000. Thus ended the greatest of all Forth swims, accomplished by a mere girl of twenty-seven years… She came, she saw, she conquered.’
During the following I gather all the objects still left downstage – the table, the rope, the stones etc – and return them to the pile. Only the ladder and bundled up cloth remain.
The first few days after you finally make it pass quickly. You sleep a lot. Your limbs ache and you are hungry almost all of the time, but in between are these moments of absolute elation, absolute joy and a feeling of proving yourself. That you have been right to keep trying; that all that time training and trying and failing and training harder and trying and failing again haven’t been wasted. You are already looking for the next challenge and have your eye on the Gibraltar Straits, principally because it hasn’t been done, not by anybody. At this moment you feel you could accomplish anything.
There are newspaper men knocking on your digs’ door in London and offers coming in for sponsorship and endorsements. You have the wonderful realisation that you might never need to be a typist again. If you keep a smart head on your shoulders, you can probably be a professional swimmer for as long as your body holds up, but that might only be a decade at most, so you will have to take your opportunities where you find them.
But then, just a few days after your swim, the newspapers print that a woman named Dorothy Logan has made a successful Channel crossing too. She claims to have broken Ederle’s record, and for some reason that you can’t quite fathom, this news makes you feel sick to your stomach. (I go to the ladder as if about to lift it but instead take the cloth from where it lies folded on the top rung and hold it to me.) You’ve never met Logan, though you have heard her name mentioned a few times, but never in connection with a Channel attempt. You didn’t think anybody else would try making a crossing this late in the year. None of the fishermen at Folkestone spoke of another swimmer wanting to rent a boat or a guide…
Sure enough, a few days later she reveals herself a hoax. And then doubts are cast on the truth of your swim, made worse by the fact that the only witnesses are Mr Allan and the fisherman who, it is argued, could both be seen to have a vested interest. Or might have been paid off.
Now the knocks on your digs’ door are getting louder and more insistent: ‘Miss Gleitze would you care to comment on the truth of the rumours?’ ‘Miss Gleitze how do you intend to answer your critics?’ ‘Miss Gleitze are you going to do it again?’
I turn up the music and keep the curtains closed. I already know what I have to do, but I want to delay the inevitable for a few more hours. My body knows I am about to sell it out, and my muscles seem to ache more on purpose. I have a sweet cup of tea and a frustrated cry, pull myself together, pick up one of the cards that has been shoved under the front door, telephone the number on it and say, ‘All right, I’ll do it again.’
I pick up the ladder and move it centre stage. I address Mercedes as if she is at the top of the ladder.
A date is set for what they are calling your Vindication Swim. It will take place on October 21st 1927. There are things I need to ask. You were stubborn and you felt slighted and wanted to be vindicated. But you weren’t stupid. You must have realised that already the temperatures had significantly dropped to the low fifties. Surely you knew that the risk of hypothermia was greatly increased? Were you spurred on by your success and did that cloud your judgement, making you feel invincible? Or was it what I want to believe: that you knew there was a significant chance you wouldn’t make it but you still wanted to at least try?
(The sound of the sea, building) We set out at 4.21 a.m., later than I would have liked, but it’s not just my decision anymore. There are hundreds of people here; officials and journalists and spectators. People who are willing me to succeed and people who are sure I will give up. It makes me nervous. I am grateful for the interest and the enthusiasm and for all the good luck wishes I receive, but as I stand here about to go in again, I wish for the quiet and the solitude of that previous morning.
It’s cold. It must be some of the coldest water I have ever swum in. The pain is almost unbearable at times and then it gets to a point where I can’t really feel much of anything at all. Far from welcoming this, I know that it’s a bad sign. ‘Sprint girl, sprint to get your temperature back up.’ And I do for a while, but as soon as I return to a regular pace my stroke rate drops until sometimes it is as low as ten strokes per minute. And of course the slower I get the colder I get, and the colder I get the slower I get, and the colder I am the more my mind is affected.
Is being an athlete like being a performer? Did you have your little routines, your mantras and superstitions; a way you liked to do things? Were they an attempt to maintain the illusion of control?
I try praying. ‘Gregusest seist du Maria…’ I vary my strokes – breast stroke to over arm – but then I can’t stand putting my face in water this cold because it makes me want to gasp, so I change back again.
Did you look up and catch the worried looks on the faces of your family and supporters? You were an experienced long distance swimmer who had failed to make this crossing many times before. Did you know somewhere inside that you had set yourself an impossible task, or is it really true that people like you possess some sort of strange ability to ignore reality and persuade your body into compliance? Were you afraid?
There are well wishers travelling in boats alongside me, playing music and singing songs. At first I listen to them and it’s a welcome distraction, but then it gets to a point where I just want them to be quiet. I just want it to be me and the sea. I want to be able to be inside my own head and to be inside my body and to swim and be left alone. I have been swimming for over ten hours now and I can feel myself slipping away. Great waves of tiredness are passing over me and it feels like the music is lulling me to sleep. So I muster up as much strength as I can and I shout to the guide boat, ‘For Pete’s sake, tell them to play something lively.’
Not that it makes any difference. At various times it is suggested that I should get out of the water, but I won’t let them persuade me. ‘No, I am not going to give up willingly.’ I have made a deal with Mr Allan that he is only allowed to pull me out if he feels that it’s no longer safe. I know that he will keep his word.
‘Stop thinking about failure. You’ve gone this far and now you know what success feels like. Think about that.’ I push and my body tries to respond. My legs want to keep kicking, and my arms want to keep pulling, but my heart is beating much, much too slowly.
I begin to slip into unconsciousness and I feel myself being hoisted on board the boat.
At 2.45 p.m. you were reluctantly pulled out of the water, seven miles short of your goal. You failed. The reporters, doctors and experts on hand were amazed at your ability to withstand the cold, at your endurance and at your fitness and decreed that you must have been telling the truth first time around. According to all, it was a victory in defeat. What was it to you? Were you crushed by your collapse and did you have to muster up courage to get back into the water? Or had you perhaps thought this might happen? Were you angry that it was only now, only when you had put your life at risk, that you were believed? Maybe you were heartened by the public’s willingness to take your word for your previous swim?
I let go of the cloth, placing it with the other objects.
There are things I don’t know, but there are things that have been recorded. Just as news of your vindication swim hit the papers, a chap by the name of Hans Wildorf, co-founder of Rolex, had just patented the first waterproof wristwatch and he wrote asking if you would wear it on your person as you swam. It was a good deal and you agreed. The Rolex Oyster was marketed as The Wonder Watch that defies the elements, with your endorsement of course:
‘You will like to hear that the Rolex Oyster watch I carried on my Channel swim proved itself a reliable and accurate timekeeping companion even though it was subjected to complete immersion in hours of sea water at a temperature of not more than fifty-eight and often as low as fifty-one degrees. The newspaper man was astonished and I of course am delighted with it.’
It kept going, though you could not.
You proved yourself well and truly by swimming the Straits of Gibraltar the following year, with a detailed log and over fifteen signatories who all testified that you did it unaided. You were vindicated. You did go down in history as the first British woman to swim the English Channel.
I sit on the ladder.
For me a long distance swimmer is someone remote; detached from everyday life. I’m a terrible swimmer. I didn’t properly learn until adulthood. Chlorine makes me sneeze. Years of playing a wind instrument made my lungs big enough to swim a width without taking a breath, and so I never learned how. I will never swim the English Channel. But it was the solitude and the faded limelight that attracted me to your story. And since I began trying to track you down, it is that same solitude that has presented the biggest challenge.
Having lived a life of endurance, fame and remoteness you became a recluse. You had travelled the world, swimming in many of its oceans and lakes. You had performed endurance feats in swimming pools and exhibitions of scientific swimming in the circus, but when your body finally did have its revenge, you chose to retreat inwards once more. You portioned up this part of your life and packed it away within yourself. And when you died, you took most of your memories with you.
All that remains are the logs of your swims, programmes and photographs found boxed up in your attic. They have shown me a glimpse of the space around a person who can never really be known or recreated.
I found her in Cork City Library in the summer of 2005, but when I returned in 2006, the book of old photographs from which she smiled demurely at me could not be found. It felt like Mercedes was courting celebrity all over again.
Imagine that I’m the closest thing to a celebrity that you have ever seen.
Now imagine that this carries me to a diving platform high above you.
I climb to the top of the ladder.
I take up position.
I say:
(The sounds of breathing and the sea, building and then retreating) Imagine smearing your body in a mixture of lard and Vaseline to keep out the cold.
Imagine the exhilarating bite of the sea on a winter’s morning.
Imagine cold, relentless sheets of rain pounding down while the sea churns around you.
Imagine fighting a rising tide.
Imagine being dragged off course and having to swim harder, and faster, for longer.
Imagine maintaining your resolve through repeated failures.
Imagine not seeing them as failures.
Imagine wading in from empty beach on a moonless night, and knowing that you will swim through that night, and all of the following day.
Imagine the clock which never has bad days, which never gets tired, constantly ticking.
Imagine your aching muscles which you must ignore and control.
Speak to your lungs and say, ‘You are bigger than this.’
Speak to your heart and say, ‘Don’t beat faster, slow down.’
Speak to your spine and say, ‘Keep rotating.’
Speak to your legs and say, ‘Keep kicking.’
Speak to your arms and say, ‘Keep pulling.’
Speak to your joints and say, ‘Look, you can have your revenge when I’m old.’
Imagine crawling up a beach so completely spent that your body shuts down into unconsciousness.
Imagine the release of realising that you have succeeded at last.
Imagine accomplishing your greatest ambition and then having it doubted because of the actions of a charlatan.
Imagine having to do it all over again.
Imagine what it’s like to go from being a shorthand typist to a world record breaker.
Imagine knowing you could hold fifteen hours of swimming in your lungs.
Imagine holding fifteen hours of swimming in your lungs.
Imagine travelling around the world, making your money through elaborate performances of feats of endurance.
Imagine what it is like to go from being a vaudeville star to a mother and a wife.
Imagine turning your back on a talent that inspired awe in others.
Imagine sinking into solitude.
Imagine slipping into old age and obscurity.
Imagine watching your fame fade away, as you keep the curtain closed and the music turned up.
Imagine the deep sleep of satisfaction as you remember it all.
I climb down.
Imagine finding this life in a library on an ordinary Thursday afternoon. And saying to yourself: ‘Remember to breathe.’