A piece written at Gardoussel

This is my piece from that week. Perhaps my favourite of all the things I wrote.

In summer when they opened the swimming pool early three of us would go together. Tall beautiful Sue, Annie, cheerful and competent at sixteen, and me. The open-air pool was painted an unlikely Mediterranean blue, an illusion complemented rather than spoiled by glimpses of green English trees above the white-painted changing rooms and cafe. At that hour it was usually just us swimming, all angular hips and ribs in the bracing water. Afterwards we would cycle through the park to school along an avenue of flowering chestnuts.
That hour of sun-drenched freedom was the more precious because of the coming day of classrooms and lessons. One morning with time to spare we wheeled our bikes beneath the trees. Huge graceful branches arched down towards the grass, and Sue reached up to a flowering candle, her bike held upright in her free hand. Annie with her own bike stood beside her, blonde to her dark, both barelegged in flowered cotton skirts. I can see them now, poised for a moment in the sunshine, the road curving away from them.