The Tuesday women-only swimming evening at my local pool is tightly enforced. The lifeguard is female; a sign at the entrance says “No men beyond this point”.
You can hear the women from the changing room: an uproarious hubbub. In one half of the pool are older women, mainly white, in swimsuits bouncing about to an aqua-aerobics class. The other half is full of Muslim women — Somali, Arab, Turkish — mothers and daughters, sisters, mates. They are larking about, chatting in large groups, splashing in the shallows: a pool party. From their floundering doggy paddle, I guess few can really swim.
And I’m puzzled by why, despite strict gender segregation, the majority are wearing “burkinis”: black, baggy pyjamas often with hoods. The water drags the fabric, the bottoms keep slipping down. Surely this is the one place, free from male eyes, they can relax about “modesty”?
I ask a fellow swimmer, a Moroccan woman, doing brisk lengths in T-shirt and Lycra shorts. “Because they fear a man could get in,” she says, pointing up to the empty public gallery. “I saw one once.” Many of these women are her friends: outside some wear burkas, the rest hijabs. She alone doesn’t cover her head, though her husband nags. Tuesday evenings, she says, aren’t just about swimming: “This is the only place they’re allowed to come, to have fun, to get out of the house. Because they can say to their husbands: there are no men here.”
So-so sleuths
I saw Spotlight with my husband, also a journalist, and throughout the film we exchanged disbelieving looks at scenes like this:
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Boston Globe Hack 1: Oh, my God, you must see this! This is amazing! It blows everything right open!
BGH 2 (rushing over): WHAT IS IT?
BGH 1: It’s a . . . cutting . . . from our own newspaper!
The film’s theme was that certain stories, in this case the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, can go under the radar until someone with insight and humanity sees fit to expose them. Comparisons have been made with the victims of Rotherham or Jimmy Savile. But neither of these had already been extensively documented in the press, but were brought to light by effortful digging.
Whereas The Boston Globe, the film notes, ran a story about 20 paedophile priests a few years before as a “news in brief”. By the time the Globe decided that clerical abuse was an issue, Boston had a voluble victim support group, lawyers representing raped children and many books written. The only investigation the Globe journalists did was to ask the paper’s cuttings library to bring up some files.
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Meanwhile the film, which won best picture Oscar this week, is drenched in the sententiousness of American journalism. At the end is a scrolling list of other national church scandals, implying the Globe’s Pulitzer nobility empowered the world. Except it was far from first.
Photographic memory
Visiting my godmother, who has dementia, my mother and I take an old photograph album. Her memory has dissolved lately. Last summer she could remember the year she was born; not now. But she still knows my mother, her oldest friend. The photos help us now that all other conversational gambits have gone. And for my godmother they provide endless wonderment.
“Who’s this?” she asks. It’s you!
“Who’s that baby?” It’s me.
“And her?” That’s my mum.
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“Who’s he?” Your husband. “I had a husband? Bugger me.”
When the album is finished, we turn back and start again. She has forgotten the pictures already. Back to gathering apples,me in my pram, my graduation photo . . . But as we go on, my mother repeating the stories patiently, my godmother suddenly remembers a name, has some momentary understanding of who she was. The circuit board of her mind sparks briefly, a few dim lights flicker, then darkness again.