RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32848, 23 February 1972, Page 20

RANDOM REMINDER

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

The famous golden ands and sparkling vaters of Kaiteriteri Beach tave been known to lure many a shy swimmer to take the waters. Such was their effect on a lady from Nelson camping nearby with her family. Not a lady of advanced years, but a lady no longer in the first flush of youth, the mother of quite a grownup family, a grand-mother in fact, whose figure had begun to show a certain amplitude. So it was that she never could be persuaded to don her bathing costume under what seemed to her to be the eyes of hundreds of other bathers just waiting to jeer. But one early morning

before a camper stirred or a bather broke the waters of the bay she crept from the tent, swim-suit freed from its moth-balls, and waded out, happy and alone. She found she could still swim quite well, but her greatest pleasure was to lie on her back and drift quietly in the still water. She did it for some time. The morning calm, and her equanimity, were rudely shattered when a strange man appeared, running down the sand towards her, shouting and waving his arms A very angry man, an almost incoherent man. He danced at the water’s edge; she attempted to converse without too immodest an

exposure of a grandmotherly figure in a bathing costume. “So you’re alive then,” he shouted, showing no pleasure at his discovery. "My wife saw you floating out there,” he spluttered. “She said you were a corpse. She made me come down to look at you. I was trying to get some sleep.” He calmed down in the end, of course, and the floating grandmother even got back to her tent without too much observation. But she’s still wondering if her angry observer would have felt better had she really been a corpse drifting towards his tent. And she certainly hasn’t risked taking another swim.