How to swim

Clio and Kit had learned to swim when they were very young. Dr Kelly had stood waist deep in the water to teach them. As a young medical student he had once pulled three dead children from the Glass Lake, children who had drowned in a couple of feet of water because nobody had taught them how to swim.

It had made him very angry. There was something accepting and dumb about people who lived on the edge of a hazard and yet did nothing to cope with it. Like those fishermen over in the West of Ireland who went out in frail boats to fish in the roaring Atlantic. They all wore different kinds of jumpers so they would know whose family it was when a body was found.

Each family had its own stich. Complicated and perverse, Dr Kelly thought. Why hadn't they taught the young fishermen to swim? As soon as the young Kellys and McMahons could walk they were taken to the lake shore. Other families followed suit; the doctor was a figure of great authority.

Young Philip O´Brien from the hotel learned, and the Hanley girls. Of course, old Sullivan from the garage told the doctor to keep his hands off other people's children, so Stevie and Michael probably couldn't swim to this day.

Peter Kelly had been in other countries where lakes like this one had been tourist attractions. Scotland, for example. People came to visi places just beacause there was a lake there. And in Switzerland, where he and Lilian had spent their honeymoon, lakes were all important. But in Ireland in the early fifties, nobody seemed to see their potential.

People thought he was mad when he bought a small rowing boat jointly with his friend Martin McMahon. Together they rowed and fished for perch, bream and pike. Big ugly fish all of them, but waiting for them on the everchanging waters of their lake was a restful pastime.

The men had been friends since they were boys. They knew the beds of reeds and rushes where the moorhens sheltered and where sometimes even the swans hid from view. They occasionally had company on the lake as they went out to fish, since a few local people shared their enthusiasm; but normally the only boats saw on Lough Glass were those carrying animal foodstuff or machinery from one side to other.

Farms had been divided up so pecuilarly that often a farmer had bits of land so far apart that the journey across the water could well be the shortest route. Yet another strange thing about Ireland, Peter Kelly often said, those inconvenient things that weren't laid on us by a colonial power we managed to do for ourselves by incessant family feuds and differences.