Daisy Belle
09th October, 2018
Anna Morell reviews Daisy Belle, by Caitlin Davies
It begins with a splash. The salt tang of a seaside town, a tragedy and the catalyst for a move to London which begins a 21-year journey from one side of the Atlantic to the other, where Caitlin Davies’ fictional swimming champion, Daisy Belle, will discover love, loss and hope.
Daisy Belle is as much a light romance as a love letter to a forgotten golden age of swimming. A hybrid heroine, Daisy inhabits a completely fictionalised personal life, hung on the real-life achievements of Agnes Beckwith, Thames swimmer, and Annie Luker, diver, both Victorian aquatic stars, long since faded from the public’s memory.
There are some knowing fun details – her training diet consists of eggs, haddock and prunes at one point, a more pungent precursor to the equally dull eggs, chicken and greens of today’s tri-focused athletes.
The story fair clips over Daisy’s lifetime from childhood to young adulthood, from authoritarian upbringing, and a pattern of abusive relationships, presented as a put up and shut up norm. Davies doesn’t dwell on the emotional impacts of these, but there is a clear feminist undercurrent to the book, echoed in the middle section, when Daisy is an ‘ornamental’ swimmer, confined to tanks, a performing seal, lining the pockets of others, longing to break free and swim in the rivers and seas with which she feels a natural affinity. Despite her fame and skill, she is still effectively a chattel. Still just a pretty girl in a knitted, puritanical bathing suit. Still a curiosity to be objectified. A reporter, at the peak of her fame, asks her: ‘Your hair, Miss Belle. However do you curl it like that?’ There is a flatness to this whole section, tone mirroring the waters in which she is forced to swim.
There are some knowing fun details – her training diet consists of eggs, haddock and prunes at one point, a more pungent precursor to the equally dull eggs, chicken and greens of today’s tri-focused athletes.
When it comes to sketching environments, Davies has a beautiful turn of phrase. To read her descriptions of water and its locations is transportive – here, you can smell the piping, hear the echo over shiny tiles and feel the warmth of the Lambeth baths; there, feel the clag of fog and breathe the scent of fish in dank Thames-side streets; there, taste the salt and feel the grit in the swell at Margate and Rockaway beaches. She has clearly done her homework on her chosen periods, and her best phrases are on a par with Sarah Waters for creating a very present past. ‘There is something about water that makes you feel yourself,’ remarks Daisy. A truth present in these lovely passages.