Downstream

this young woman who had
only started swimming at the
age of fifteen and a few years
later covered more than
thirty-six miles from
Teddington, through London
and back to Kew? Why does
she disappear from the
sporting pages after 1916?
Was she perhaps a casualty of
war? I had given up trying to
find out more about her,
when, one evening I received
an email from someone I’d