I'm not sure who is going to be the "star" of this story, Mary-Rose MacColl's Swimming Home. I think the impetus for buying the book was the young woman who wants to swim the English Channel, Catherine Quick, who is a mere fifteen years old at the start of the story. But now that I am a few chapters in, maybe it is actually her aunt Louisa who is really going to be the one to come into her own.
The story opens with a phone call to Louisa who is a surgeon in London in 1925, surely an amazing feat for a woman at the time. Her nurse pulls her from the examining room to take an urgent call asking her to come immediately to an address on the banks of the river Thames. She expects to find one of her patients in some form of distress but instead discovers her niece performing a perfect crawl across the frigid river.
Flash back to Australia, an island in the Torres Strait known as Thursday Island where Louisa's brother Harry had emigrated to. Harry is also a doctor and had married an American woman and the two had traveled to Australia to be missionaries, but she died not long after Catherine was born. A widower with a small daughter, Harry is happy to have Louisa come out to take care of them, but something happens and Catherine is left on her own with no one but her aunt Louisa. There are lots of details to fill in now, but I know they end up back again in London and then later will go to New York City.
For now, however, let me 'introduce' Catherine to you. My teaser is from when she was a small, precocious child living with her father on Thursday Island. This is Louisa's first impression of the girl.
"She was a beautiful child, with long chestnut hair that fell down her back in a wave, green eyes and dark skin, a handful of freckles thrown across her cheeks, and wit, if the speed at which those eyes surveyed Louisa was anything to go by. She was a Quick, Louisa could see, even in the way she she stood, toes out, ankles together, like Millicent and Louisa both."
Later in London we are introduced to the image of Catherine, the swimmer, as Louisa recalls her when she first met her as a small child.
"Catherine took to the water as if she lived there, running out alone into the sea and then diving under, terrifying Louisa. In the twilight, she watched her little niece swimming out into the sea and catching the gentle waves back in with her father. Catherine was not like a person, Louisa thought then. She was like a sea creature. That was what she smelt like. It was the sea, clean and pure and alive. Wild, that's what Alexander [Louisa and Harry's elder brother] had said before Louisa left England. That child is growing up wild."
"Watching her in the water now at fifteen, Louisa couldn't help thinking that swimming was what Catherine had been born to."
Torres Strait is a place; it lies north of the tip of Australia, between the continent and New Guinea. The nice thing about choosing Australia as a destination is stories set near water! Another favorite setting of mine. I am going to have to get a map so I can orient myself. It's just a pity there won't be any actual field trips this summer. Armchair travel via stories is always the next best thing. And I think I am going to like Louisa and Catherine equally well and am curious where their adventures will take them.