Downstream

Mercedes swam here?’ ‘The
Thames won’t have changed,
or most of the bridges,’ she
says, ‘but the London Eye,’
she lifts an arm to point
across the river, ‘that’s new.
And the water in the Thames
in the 1920s would have been
much more polluted, there
would have been dead
animals and other obnoxious
deposits for a swimmer to
contend with.’ But this didn’t
deter Mercedes. ‘Most