It was Saturday morning, and I’d woken early to the horrid feeling of damp bedsheets sticking to my skin. I wasn’t ill, I didn’t suppose, yet something had disturbed me. And so, by seven thirty, my pal Lena and I found ourselves wide awake, breakfasted and on our weekly trip to St Mary’s churchyard. It was where my mam was buried, and having Lena with me made the visit that little bit more bearable.
‘Imagine if Ma Blackwell was your mother, Nellie,’ Lena said. ‘You’d look like her. You’d have the hairy top lip and eyebrows that meet in the middle!’
I told her to stop it immediately, though in truth, it was our favourite game. We called it ‘Mamas and Papas’, and the rules were simple: you picked the most unlikely, unsuspecting grown-up and declared them the 33other person’s parent. It never failed to make us snigger, especially in school assemblies or church services, when sniggering was most definitely not allowed.
Yet despite our daft game – or maybe because of it – Lena understood the importance of family. Though I wasn’t the only sad person that week: King George had died a few days earlier, so the whole country was grieving.
Amongst the churchyard’s clustered Celtic crosses and lopsided angels, Mam’s headstone still looked painfully new, but it was a whole year ago now, and time had a sneaky habit of moving on. The first snowdrops were already in the hedgerows. A few early catkins, fat as caterpillars, promised spring was on its way.
That morning, though, it was still very much February. The frost lay hard on the ground, and we’d wrapped ourselves up in our thickest winter coats, woolly hats pulled low over our ears. Lena, who hated the cold, was stamping her feet against it.
‘Flowers again!’ I remarked, kneeling down to inspect the fresh bunch on Mam’s grave.
Lena peered over my shoulder. ‘Is there a card?’
There wasn’t: there never was. But once a month, since Mam died, someone left yellow roses on her grave. It was always the same: six bright flowers wrapped in paper 34from the florist in town. I’d never discovered who they were from.
‘It’s a secret admirer,’ reckoned Lena.
‘Or my long-lost sister,’ was my suggestion.
All we knew was that some nameless person placed the order each month, which the florist then brought to the churchyard. It was baffling. I was glad Mam had such cheering flowers, especially on dead-of-winter days like today, but I was itching to know who was sending them. Perhaps it was time for a new game called ‘Who Sent the Flowers’ instead.
Lena helped me to my feet.
‘As I was saying, Nellie, you and Ma Blackwell—’
‘Oh, must we?’ I groaned, trying not to smile.
‘But you’d look so similar, people would think you were sisters – no, wait, twins!’
A laugh exploded from my mouth just as Ma Blackwell herself came into the churchyard through the lychgate. She was still wearing her indoor pinny and had the flushed look of a person who’d run all the way here.
‘Hope she didn’t hear us,’ I muttered guiltily.
Really I’d a lot to thank Ma Blackwell for. At first, when Mam passed away, I kept thinking it was all a big mistake. That someone so full of life could die of a simple tooth infection didn’t make sense. Even on that last 35afternoon, when Mam told me: ‘Don’t ever be ordinary, Nell’, I had supposed it was the fever talking and she’d be better in the morning.
Her dying made me an orphan. My father – I never knew him – had been killed in the war. Mam met him at the seaside when he was on shore leave. He’d proposed with a plastic ring from the amusement arcade, so the story went, promising they’d marry when he returned. She waved him off on the train, thinking him her fiancé, and never saw him again.
When Mam died I didn’t know what was to become of me. I’d heard of orphans being sent off to school like a parcel on the understanding they’d never come home, not even in the holidays. Just as I was beginning to despair, Ma Blackwell offered me a bed at Combe Grange, where she lived with her husband, Mr Blackwell.
‘But there’s nothing wrong with my lungs,’ I’d insisted.
I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, but Combe Grange’s apple orchard was where people with tuberculosis were sent to recover. The half a dozen huts were painted cream and brown like smart garden sheds, each with a narrow bed and a wicker chair, so that the patients could sit out in the sweet country air. A pair of nurses from the new National Health Service would 36bicycle over every day to tend the sick, some of whom came from as far away as London.
Ma Blackwell’s offer, though, was for a bed inside the house. She’d be feeding me too, and clothing me, which, with some things still on the ration, was very kind of her indeed. I just hoped she wouldn’t be shocked by my appetite: for a small person I did eat rather a lot.
‘Only pack one suitcase, please. I’ve not much extra room,’ Ma Blackwell warned me.
That was the hardest part: sorting through a lifetime of things – clothes, books, favourite blankets, pictures, my first pair of shoes. Everything had a memory attached to it.
Yet I was thrilled to be sharing my room with another girl. Lena Gill was from London, sent here with tuberculosis in her left lung. She’d been living in a boarding house with her father, who was working all the hours on earth. The NHS sent her to the countryside for fresh air and rest, and she’d spent the last two months in the orchard in one of the huts. For the last stage of her recovery, she was being moved indoors.
In the short time it took us to bagsy beds and unpack our things, we were chatting like old pals. Lena wanted to know all about the famous swimmers whose pictures I’d stuck above my bed. 37
‘She’s my favourite,’ I said, pointing to the newspaper cutting of a young woman in a swimming cap. Gertrude Ederle, an American, was the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926.
Lena sighed dreamily. ‘Must be cool to have a dream like that and make it happen.’
‘Totally cool,’ I agreed.
We were still talking at bedtime. It carried on like that every night, long after lights out. Sometimes I’d listen to Lena’s breathing as she slept, terrified she might die too. Each morning we’d say our own little catchphrase.
‘What’s the story, morning glory?’ This was Lena’s line.
And mine: ‘What’s your tale, nightingale?’
Lena had come to England from India four years earlier with her father – she called him Baapu – when the government invited people from Commonwealth countries to help rebuild Britain after the war. She’d lived in the Punjab, in the countryside, so didn’t much enjoy London.
‘It’s too stinky and noisy,’ she said, wrinkling her nose.
Lena’s dad was trying to set up his own clothes-making business. When he’d done so he’d send for Lena’s mum – her mata – who was still in the Punjab.
‘Life’s quite dull, really,’ Lena admitted. ‘I go to 38school, come home, cook dhal. Poor Baapu’s so tired he barely speaks.’
‘Must be lonely,’ I said, though the dhal, when she explained it, sounded delicious.
‘Baapu’s doing his best for us. But I’m a Punjabi, not a Londoner. I miss my mata, you know?’
I did know. I felt it every day, that emptiness when the most important person in your life wasn’t there. Really, we were lucky to have Ma Blackwell, who, though not especially motherly, cared for us in her own way.
Like now, in the churchyard, when I’d clearly forgotten something important.
‘Nellie, you do realise what the time is, don’t you?’ Ma Blackwell gasped, holding her side as if she had a stitch. ‘And where you’re meant to be?’
The truth was, I didn’t.
The church clock showed it was five past eight. I’d fed the chickens, and Perry and Sage – Mr Blackwell’s pair of beautiful working Clydesdales – made my bed, and laid out my costume and towel for later, because Saturday afternoons were swimming lesson time at Minehead lido: the highlight of my week. I couldn’t think what we’d forgotten.
‘Oh!’ Lena said, suddenly. ‘Sorry, it went straight out of my head.’ 39
Hardly able to speak for grinning, she explained that a swimming coach – ‘A famous one, Nellie, a celebrity!’ – was coming to the lido to scout for ‘exceptional’ talent. Captain Farley had rounded up his best students for the special session that was happening today at nine thirty.
‘How do you know?’ I cried. ‘Who told you?’
‘Captain Farley in the post office yesterday, when I was cashing my postal order.’
Every week Lena’s dad sent what money he could spare for her keep.
‘Yesterday?’ That was almost a full day ago. It amazed me how Lena could forget something this important.
‘Captain Farley said to tell you,’ Lena went on. ‘He’s coming to pick you up in his car. He’s taking you himself!’
‘Me?’ I was thrilled, until it dawned on me that I’d be going alone. ‘Aren’t you coming too?’
Lena shook her head. ‘Oh, I might sit this one out. My chest’s a bit tight today.’
Really, Lena only came to the Saturday club because I’d gushed about it, and Ma Blackwell agreed a spot of exercise might build her strength after being ill. She wasn’t a serious swimmer like me. It was my dream to be a professional one day. I was trying hard not to be ordinary and hoped my mam would be proud. 40
Mam had known the captain, working twice a week for him as a sort of housekeeper at Hadfield Hall, where he lived. I’d tag along sometimes, and while she did her chores I’d sit on the back step making daisy chains for the captain’s spaniels. Very occasionally I’d be allowed inside for tea on the understanding that I’d be quiet and not eat too much cake.
Yet the idea of going in the captain’s car, of driving the sixteen long miles to Minehead trying to think of what to say, terrified me.
‘You’d better come with me, Lena!’ I pleaded.
Lena laughed. ‘Don’t be a daftie, Nell!’
‘I mean it.’
Ma Blackwell, who’d once tried to make me swallow cod liver oil and knew better than to battle my stubborn streak head-on, made a suggestion.
‘That car of the captain’s—’ she said.
‘A Hillman Minx, newish but nothing fancy,’ Lena confirmed. Coming from the city, she knew far more about cars than I did.
‘Is it big enough to take the both of you?’ Ma Blackwell replied. ‘Because if you ask nicely the captain might take Lena along for the ride.’
Captain Farley, who ran his swimming classes with army-level discipline, believed children should know 41their place, which, in his eyes, was somewhere beneath horses and spaniels in life’s pecking order. If he’d chosen me – only me – to go to the session, then it wasn’t up for discussion. Yet that didn’t put me off.
Back at home I grabbed my swimming things, and Lena, who wore her hair in a single braid long enough to sit on, said she’d plait my hair specially for the occasion. By the time the captain’s car pulled up, I had hair as neat as a horse’s tail, and was waiting on the front step with Lena.
‘What’s all this?’ Captain Farley looked puzzled as he got out of the car. ‘It’s Nellie I’ve come for.’
‘Please, sir, Lena’s my lucky mascot,’ I said.
‘I am,’ Lena agreed. ‘She won’t swim without me.’
Which was a bit of an exaggeration, but after glancing at his watch, the captain miraculously relented. ‘Very well. Get in. No time for dawdling.’
We clambered into the back seat as giddy as a pair of foals. Driving out of the village in a car was a thrill all of its own, especially when we saw Janet and Ruthie Steggs from our school class coming out of the post office, and the surprise on their faces as we went past, waving.
Feeling braver with Lena next to me, I asked the captain about the mysterious celebrity coach. 42
‘Are they really famous, sir?’ I asked.
‘Indeed. And coming all the way from America to see us.’
I wriggled with excitement. Lena had forgotten to mention this detail, which was by far the juiciest part of it all, because my all-time swimming hero came from America.
‘It’s not …’ I gulped. ‘… Gertrude Ederle, the Channel swimmer, is it?’
The captain gave a rare chuckle. ‘Not a bad guess, but no, it’s not Miss Ederle.’
‘Oh. Who is he, then?’
‘She, Nellie,’ the captain corrected me. ‘Mrs Lamb is a she, and a champion in open-water swimming. She’s made a name for herself – and a considerable fortune – these past few years, all simply from being a swimmer.’
‘My!’ Though I’d not heard of her, she did sound impressive. ‘Will she be training us?’
Secretly, I hoped she would. It wasn’t that the captain was a bad coach, but he had a loud parade-ground voice, and when he lost his temper – which was often – his face went alarmingly red.
‘She’ll be making a selection for a very special project. She’s looking for stamina, the ability to endure distance 43and cold,’ the captain replied. ‘And those are your particular strengths, Nellie.’
I nodded. I’d regularly swim long, gruelling distances at the lido – often for hours at a time – and was getting quite a taste for it.
‘Though I should warn you,’ the captain added. ‘Mrs Lamb will be selecting only one person. You might be my top swimmer, but you’ll still have to battle it out.’
I’d already guessed who I’d be up against from our club: Maudie Jennings, Timmy Valentine, Jim Sutton, Bob Blake. I’d have my work cut out. So would Mrs Lamb: there wasn’t much to choose between us, in terms of our swimming ability.
Still, Lena and I shared a big old grin. The others hadn’t been given a ride in Captain Farley’s car or been called his top swimmer, which surely meant I was in with a fighting chance.