Summary
An eleven-year-old English boy and his mother are walking toward a beach. As they walk toward the populated sandy beach, the boy glances at a rocky bay on the other side, and secretly wishes to explore it. When his mother asks if he would rather do something else, he says no, and accompanies her to the sandy beach anyway.
The next day, the boy, named Jerry, asks his mother if he can go to the rocky bay alone. She agrees, despite inwardly worrying about his safety. She is a widow and is unsure if she is making the right choices when it comes to her son's independence. Jerry goes to the bay and starts to swim, but is careful to keep searching for his mother as she sits on the sandy beach.
While swimming, Jerry notices a group of older boys over by a collection of rocks. They run naked toward the rocks and begin diving off of them and resurfacing in the water. Jerry swims over to them. They initially include Jerry, but once they realize he is an English boy on vacation, they start to ignore him. The boys are brown-skinned and live in the unspecified country that Jerry and his mother are visiting.
Jerry watches as the boys submerge themselves in the water and come up on the other side of a giant rock. Jerry, realizing they must have swim through a hole in the rock, attempts to find it, but cannot see anything. When he emerges, he foolishly attempts to get the boys' attention. They frown at him and continue their diving game.
Analysis
The beginning of the story is characterized by themes and images of childhood and childishness as Jerry embarks on his first trial of independence from his mother. In the very first paragraph, the narrator describes Jerry's clandestine desire to explore the rocky bay, but not wanting to upset his mother, he spends the day with her on the safe, sandy beach. This opening suggests that Jerry, at eleven years old, is being pulled in two directions: first, he feels comforted by his mother's presence and the safety she provides. The beach, like his mother, is familiar and predictable; it is "the crowded beach he knew so well from other years," which suggests that he has frequented this beach many times throughout his childhood (1). Second, however, Jerry is also drawn to the rocky bay area, which the narrator describes as "wild" (1). This word choice exoticizes the rocky beach as unfamiliar and dangerous territory, and even Jerry in unsure why he feels so drawn to the bay in the first place. The story thus begins by dramatizing a metaphorical fork in the road: Jerry must choose between childhood (embodied by the close proximity of his mother) and the uncharted territory of the rocky bay, or adult independence.
Once Jerry does decide to go off on his own, his first foray into that independence is itself marked by uncertainty and childishness. He sees the older boys diving off the rocks and immediately aspires to be exactly like them. Here, the story suggests that Jerry still maintains his childish instinct to mimic what he sees, but at the same time, this mimicry is precisely what pulls him forward to the independence that the older boys enjoy. As Jerry travels further and further into the rocky bay area (and further away from his mother), he must reckon with the persistence of his childlike self. Jerry attempts, after failing to find the hole, to get the boys' attention by acting out. The narrator says he splashed around in the water "like a foolish dog," underscoring Jerry's own awareness of his immature behavior (3). When this behavior is met with frowns from the boys, Jerry confronts and dispels with his own childishness, choosing instead to swim through the hole like the other boys. Thus, the beginning of the story showcases how Jerry slowly begins to shed the protections and indulgences of childhood, inspired by the community of older boys whose behavior seems natural and confident in comparison to his own nervous antics.
