Source A and Source B: Into the Water

Source A and Source B were written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free). Source A is a modern first-person magazine article about open water swimming. Source B is a fictional Victorian-style diary entry dated 1878, invented for this resource; it is an original composition and not adapted or copied from any real historical document, published text or named author.

SOURCE A: 'Into the Blue' (a magazine article, written in the present day)

01 Six years ago, I would not have believed you if you had told

02 me that I would spend January mornings wading into the North Sea in

03 a swimming costume, whooping like a delighted child while my breath turned

04 to smoke in the freezing air. Back then, my idea of exercise was

05 a brisk walk to the coffee machine at work and my idea of

06 adventure was trying oat milk instead of semi-skimmed. Cold water swimming, as

07 far as I was concerned, was something reserved for lunatics, triathletes and

08 Scandinavians with unusually thick skin.

09 Then came the year that changed everything. I will not bore you with

10 the details of exactly why my life fell apart that spring, except to

11 say that it involved a hospital corridor, a phone call I had been

12 dreading, and several months of feeling as though I were watching my own

13 life through frosted glass. A friend, tired of watching me disappear into myself,

14 bundled me into her car one grey Tuesday morning and drove me to

15 a reservoir outside town. 'Just put your feet in,' she said. 'You do

16 not have to swim.'

17 I put my feet in. Then my knees. Then, because the cold was

18 so total and so absolute that it left no room in my head

19 for anything else, I put the rest of me in too. For perhaps

20 forty seconds I could not breathe properly at all, and every nerve in

21 my body screamed at me to get out immediately. And then, quite suddenly,

22 something extraordinary happened: the noise in my head stopped.

23 I am aware of how this sounds. I am aware that there is

24 a certain type of newly converted enthusiast, dripping and pink-cheeked on a

25 riverbank, who cannot stop talking about how cold water saved her life,

26 and I am aware that I have become exactly that person. I make

27 no apology for it. Doctors will tell you, with admirable caution, that the

28 evidence for the mental health benefits of cold water immersion is still

29 'emerging' and that nobody should swim alone, or in unfamiliar water, or

30 without first checking for currents, weirs and submerged branches. They are right

31 to say so, and I would never encourage a stranger to march unprepared

32 into a swollen river.

33 But six years on, I swim three mornings a week, all year round,

34 with a small and slightly feral group of women I met at that

35 same reservoir. We have seen each other through divorces, redundancies and one

36 truly spectacular bout of shingles. None of us can explain, in language a

37 doctor would accept, exactly what the water does. We only know that

38 we come out of it lighter than we went in, and that on

39 the mornings we do not swim, the day feels somehow unfinished.

SOURCE B: The Journal of Eleanor Hartley (a fictional diary entry, dated 3rd August 1878)

01 3rd August, 1878

02 I have this morning witnessed a spectacle which I confess has quite

03 disordered my composure, and I set it down here so that I

04 may, upon some future and calmer reading, persuade myself that I did

05 not imagine it. Mrs Fenwick-Alderton, whom I had until this week considered

06 a woman of unimpeachable sense, has taken to bathing in the sea

07 before breakfast, in the company of no fewer than eleven other ladies,

08 all of them shrieking with a delight I can only describe as

09 unbecoming.

10 The bathing machines stand upon the shore like so many wooden sentry-boxes,

11 and into these the ladies climb, fully dressed, to emerge some minutes

12 later in costumes of flannel that cling most immodestly to the figure

13 once wetted. A stout woman is engaged, at considerable expense I am

14 told, to conduct each bather into the waves and to duck her,

15 without ceremony or warning, beneath the surface. This, apparently, is accounted a

16 pleasure.

17 I said as much to my brother, who has lately returned from his

18 physician with a great deal of nonsense about the restorative properties of

19 cold sea water upon the nerves, the digestion, and I do believe

20 the moral character besides. He assures me that the Prince of Wales

21 himself has been known to bathe, and that half the fashionable world

22 now considers a dip before breakfast as necessary to health as a

23 turn about the room after dinner. I told him that half the

24 fashionable world has also taken to keeping monkeys as pets, and that

25 I did not intend to follow it into the water on that

26 account either.

27 And yet I own that I watched rather longer than modesty required.

28 There was, in the laughter that carried across the sand, something I

29 had almost forgotten how to recognise: a kind of freedom. Mrs Fenwick-Alderton,

30 emerging pink and breathless and utterly without dignity, looked, I am ashamed

31 to record, some ten years younger than she had looked at supper

32 the previous evening. I have resolved, for the sake of my own

33 health and no other reason whatsoever, to make some enquiry tomorrow as

34 to the cost of a bathing machine.