Downstream

decade later: ‘Sooner or later
all swam. Men were stationed
at particular bathing places, to
prevent accidents (to bathe
elsewhere was a flogging),
and they taught swimming at
a guinea a head.’ But when he
wrote to his father asking for
the guinea, he ‘received an
angry answer that in his time
boys taught themselves to
swim, and I might do the
same’. It took him three days,
‘terrible work it was’, but this