to gain the attention of the older native boys, they "turned their eyes back toward the water" and continue what they are doing. "Through his hot shame," Jerry tries clowning as though he does not care about their reaction.

Throughout the narrative, Jerry's feelings are described. In another example, "he was trembling with horror" at the sight of the long tunnel which he wants to swim through. Throughout his attempt to pass through the tunnel, the omniscient narrator provides a description of his mother's and Jerry's varied feelings and thoughts.

• Perception of a Character by Other Characters

As mentioned earlier, the older native boys are uninterested in Jerry, who cannot perform the feat that they can. 
Jerry, who goes through a rite of passage by swimming through the tunnel, undergoes psychological change, and his mother wrestles mentally with her changing perceptions of Jerry, also. At the end of the narrative, for instance, after Jerry rushes to the bathroom to clean his head from the bang against the tunnel. His mother examines him when he comes to greet her. "He was strained; his eyes were glazed-looking." As she talks with Jerry, she is

...ready for a battle of wills, but he gave in at once. It was no longer of the least importance to go to the bay.

• Literary Devices

In the opening paragraph, Jerry follows his mother, who walks before him. Lessing uses imagery to describe her:

....Her other arm, swinging loose, was very white in the sun. The boy watched that white, naked arm, and turned his eyes....

Later, as Jerry swims over to the rocks that are distant from the beach where his mother is, "that bare arm, now slighty reddened from yesterday's sun...

In one character description of Jerry's mother, Lessing employs a metaphor [bold], followed by a simile [italics]:

There she was, aspeck of yellow under an umbrella that looked like a slice of orange peel.

Another simile describes the older boys:

...the water beyond the rock was full of boys blowing like brown whales.

Jerry is an eleven-year old English boy on vacation with his mother on a beach they have neen to before. Jerry's mother is a widow and is somewhat overprotective, yet sometimes not protective enough, of her son. Jerry attempts to make friends with some older boys on the beach, but they ignore him after discovering he is quite childish. Jerry is jealous of them.  In an attempt to emulate them, he begins to persistently practice holding his breath so that he too may swim through the rockthe older boys do.

The mother is an anxious widow who takes her son, Jerry, on vacation. Her pale arms indicate that she is unused to outdoor activity, and she seems uncomfortable throughout the entire story. She worries about being too possessive, or not protective enough. She buys her son goggles and lets him play where he wants, until he comes back with a bleeding nose. She and Jerry are at times distant and sometimes extremely close, and the tension between her parenting and her son's freedom cuts through the entire story.

On the first occasion that Jerry finds the tunnel, the narrator describes it as "an irregular, dark gap" into which Jerry really could not see.  When he tried to push himself into the tunnel, he found that he had to turn to the side in order to fit his shoulders in, and he got "inside as far as his waist.  He could see nothing ahead."  Just then, something "soft and clammy touched his mouth" and he panicked, thinking about octopuses and weeds that might entangle him.  Jerry backed out of the tunnel then and saw "a harmless tentacle of seaweed drifting in the mouth of the tunnel."  At this point, he called it a day.

When Jerry eventually does swim through the tunnel, it is described as a "small rock-bound hole filled with yellowish-grey water."  The water pushed his body up to the roof of the tunnel, and the roof was "sharp and pained his back."  As he swims along, the roof begins to feel "slimy as well as sharp."  He continued, and the tunnel seemed to widen, and the water became a "clear jewel-green" due to a crack in the rock above him.  It became dark again and then there was "an explosion of green light" as he reached the tunnel's end.

I remember once studying this story in high school and being given the assignment of having to draw a map of the tunnel! You might actually find this a helpful exercise to do in order to familiarise yourself with the tunnel and its various dangers. We know that there is a rockface in the middle of which the tunnel begins. When Jerry finally enters the tunnel, he finds himself "in a small rock-bound hole filled with yellowish-grey water." The roof of this tunnel is sharp. The width is obviously not that big, as Jerry has to pull himself along with his hands. His lack of vision reveals the darkness inside the tunnel.

After a while, we are told that the hole widens out, and he comes across crack running through the roof of the tunnel which allows sunlight in so that he can see the "clear jewel-green" colour of the water and the darkness of the tunnel ahead. The way that he is running out of breath in the final section means that we are not given an accurate account of the final stretch of the tunnel, but we know that the tunnel carries on in darkness until Jerry finally leaves it and is in the open sea.