Swing, Swing Together

CHAPTER 3

What happened next need never have occurred if our three bathers had kept their heads. The boat, gliding serenely across the moonlit strip of water, was some forty yards away, its occupants oblivious of the presence of anything remarkable. Its course would bring it, at worst, within fifteen yards of Harriet and her companions. Had they remained where they were and turned modestly towards the Buckinghamshire bank, the chance was high that they would not have been noticed.

Instead, they obeyed their first impulse and struck out for the place where they had left their clothes. Jane slipped her hand from Harriet’s and glided away with a rapid side stroke. Harriet, unable to swim and practically out of her depth, might still have been able to follow on tiptoe, and was beginning to, when she was confronted first by the pale, surfacing shape of Molly’s rump and, an instant later, the soles of her feet, drawn up in the first position of the breast stroke. As the legs straightened, the feet made contact with Harriet and pushed her firmly towards the centre of the river.

The current of the Thames is not reckoned to be powerful in the summer months, but it can still be inconvenient to boats or bathers that slip their moorings. Harriet first sank in the deeper water, swallowing enough of it to make her doubt whether she could find the strength to struggle upwards again. Her feet came into contact with something slimy to the touch, possibly waterweed, and she jerked her legs away instinctively, giving herself the impetus to come spluttering to the surface. A gulp of air, and she was under again, but by agitating her arms and legs, she avoided touching the bottom. She broke the surface for a second time and succeeded in staying afloat, thanks mainly to the steady pull of the current, which she found she could ride by spreading her arms wide.

It was an extraordinary sensation, strongly reminiscent of dreams she had experienced from time to time which she had always supposed had something to do with being introduced early to Alice in Wonderland. Now that she was reasonably confident she could keep her head above the water and would not drown, there was even something pleasurable in being carried along by the river, submitting to its firm, unending pressure. She understood why people said swimming was simply a question of confidence. Being carried by the current, she suspected, was more enjoyable than swimming, which she had always regarded as ungraceful. Like this, she could assume attitudes more natural than ever one could with the breast stroke or side stroke. The more relaxed she became, the more buoyant was her body. It was a discovery she was sure Molly and Jane had not made. It brought a new dimension to the night’s adventure.

The moment had to arrive when sanity reasserted itself, for whatever agreeable sensations Harriet derived from her predicament, Hurley Weir was only a mile downriver. In the darkness, and at so low an elevation, she was unable to tell how far she had already travelled. She estimated that she must be approaching Medmenham. Near the Abbey the river snaked sharply, before the broad reach leading to Hurley. If she was carried into that reach, there was no way of escaping destruction on the weir’s gargantuan teeth.

She had one chance, and the wit to conserve her strength for it.

It was not long in coming. On her left, the sky had been obscured for perhaps a minute by thick foliage along the Buckinghamshire bank. Now there was a break. She knew where she was. One memorable afternoon the Plum had conducted a geography lesson in two rowing boats manned by the gardener and his son. They had rowed the girls half a mile downriver to study the effects of erosion and deposition. From the lawn in front of Medmenham Abbey a party of young men with a banjo had serenaded them with “Paddle Your Own Canoe.” She was quite sure this was the place. Around the next bend, where the river turned almost upon itself, the action of the water had formed three eyots. The smallest and narrowest islet was to the left. The mainstream of the current passed between it and the two on the right. If Harriet had understood the geography lesson correctly-and concentration had been difficult that afternoon-water flowing on the inside of a curve is shallower and flows less quickly than on the outside. If she could possibly steer herself leftwards towards the smallest island, there was a chance of getting a foothold on the silt that must have accumulated around its base.

With a determined thrashing of arms and legs she started across the current towards the eyot. She was immediately turned over like a log, but righted herself and tried again at a less ambitious angle to the flow. Several times she started to sink but managed to rear up, and when her strength was all but spent and she submerged again, she felt her knees touch firm mud. She was in three feet of water.

How long she remained kneeling in the shallows waiting for the pumping of her heart to return to normal Harriet was in no state to estimate. She was not surprised that by the time she remembered the existence of the three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog) and turned to look for them, they were nowhere in sight. If they had noticed her in the water they had not demonstrated much concern for her plight. Two, she remembered, had been rowing and would have had their backs to her. The third had sunk downwards somewhat in the cushions at the other end and may well have been asleep. If that was so, then the panic in the water must have been unnecessary. Jane and Molly, for all their experience of the world at large, had plunged like porpoises at the first sight of the opposite sex.

Pleasing as that recollection was, it did not alter the fact that Harriet was marooned without her clothes, wet and shivering on a small island in the Thames.

Well, she would look upon it as a test of character. “A teacher must be equal to each situation, however unpredictable,” Miss Plummer frequently reminded her students, although the Plum’s wildest vision of the unpredictable was walking into a classroom and finding no chalk there. Resolutely, Harriet heaved herself onto the island, a narrow strip entirely covered by reeds, waist-high. Some small creature scuttled into the water, putting her nerves to the test at once. Harriet crossed the spine of the eyot with the high, fastidious steps of a wading bird, and entered the water on the other side.

A channel no more than fifteen feet in width separated her from the riverbank. Feeling no excessive pressure from the current, she ventured to the level of her thighs and found she could reach the bough of an overhanging willow. She twisted it round her wrist, took a deep breath and set off for the opposite bank with all the strength she had left. At its deepest point the water reached her chin, but she gripped the willow tightly and kept moving until she was clear and safely up the bank.

There, another test of character awaited her. She found as she stood upright that her way was obstructed by an uncountable number of thin metal struts radiating from a common center. It was like looking into an ornamental bird cage large enough to house a peacock, but the creature on the other side was not feathered or exotic: it was a policeman, shining his bull’s-eye lantern through the fore-wheel of a penny-farthing bicycle.