Swimming at the gala

Text 1: The Ladies’ Race, by Florence Adair

An original diary written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

June 9th. I have swum in public, before three hundred people, and I am not yet dead of shame, though Aunt Maud assures me that I ought to be.

The gala was held at the new Corporation Baths, a great echoing hall of white tiles and iron, with a gallery all round and a glass roof through which the evening light fell green upon the water. Never have I seen a room so full of noise. Every sound, a shout, a splash, a child’s laugh, flew up to the roof and came back doubled, so that it seemed the building itself was talking. The water lay very still in the middle of it all, flat and pale and patient, like a sheet of glass waiting to be broken.

There were six of us in the ladies’ race, in costumes of navy serge that covered us from neck to knee and weighed, when wet, as much as a winter coat. We stood at the edge in a row, toes curled over the tiles, trying not to look at the gallery. I looked. It was a mistake. A sea of faces, bonnets, whiskers, opera glasses, all turned upon us, and somewhere among them, I knew, sat Aunt Maud, with her lips pressed together like the clasp of a purse.

Then the whistle, and the cold. I had forgotten how cold. It seized my chest and drove the breath out of me, and for three strokes I thought I should drown in front of the entire parish. Then something steadied. I found the rhythm Miss Pell had taught me all winter, reach and pull, reach and pull, and the noise of the hall dissolved into the rush of water past my ears, and there was nothing in the world but the far end, coming closer.

I touched second. Second! The applause rang off the tiles like rain on a tin roof. Afterwards, wrapped in a towel, I saw Aunt Maud in the lobby. She said that she had never been so mortified in her life. Then she bought me a cup of hot chocolate and, when she thought I was not looking, wiped her eyes.

Explore how Florence Adair uses language and structure to present her experience of swimming in the gala.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.