Swimming through time
When I was on Waiheke Island last year I found my grandparents’ grave in a local cemetery: I hadn’t known they were buried on the island so that was quite a discovery. I was too young when they died to have anything but the haziest memory of either of them, but the connection feels significant to me because I love the island so much, and have such a powerful emotional attachment to it.
This year I’ve made another discovery: a photograph of my mother and her sisters in bathing costumes, in a display of old-fashioned swimming gear in the local museum. I noticed the caption with their family name before I recognised any of the people in the photo, but I think I’d have known my mother, even as a little girl, because she looks so like my sister Brenda did at the same age. Seeing the photo is like looking into another dimension; it’s a curious (and slightly spooky) experience to come across something like this.
I took a photo of the photo, and here it is. My mother’s the one at the front on the left, and her sister – my darling Aunt Thora – is on the right. I think their older sister Roma must be the one behind my mother, and one of the adult women is probably their mother although I don’t know which one. Aren’t the costumes extraordinary? Less is so much more for swimming in the twenty-first century, but back then (I’m not sure when: maybe the late 1920s?) the more you wore the better, it seems.
