Everyone has a waterbiography; this is the first part of mine. It seems emblematic of the state of our swimming nation.
I was first dandled about in the waters of the old Sparkhill Baths in Birmingham by my auntie Mary. My mum couldn’t swim, though she can now puff vertically across a pool in the hop-jump style of a nervous bird, and my dad, apparently a good swimmer, didn’t get involved in teaching us, a technique I applaud. I am from the days before parental input was invented. We weren’t hoiked around from lesson to lesson all weekend: if you wanted to learn a language, you read a book in that language; if you wanted to go horse riding, you’d go and catch a horse and ride it yourself which, given this was the urban Midlands, was about as hard as it sounds. We weren’t just left to drown by ourselves, though; fortunately, Auntie Mary was at hand.
Auntie Mary was a “spinster”, from the days when that was a word. She made excellent hot chocolate and miniature gardens in biscuit tins, with foil milk-bottle tops for ponds and bits of gravel for rockeries. She was inventive and inquisitive, but mostly she was available. The thing Auntie Mary did was simple: she took us to the pool. With her we got the first key tip: don’t be frightened to get in the water – and that’s what I remember most clearly, being in the water, under an echoing high ceiling in the gloom. It would have definitely been gloomy; lights were only switched on if absolutely necessary, as if seeing what we were doing might have spoiled us. “Can you see your feet on the bottom? Then you don’t need the light on, you brat.” Economy was king. These were times when to eat a whole Mars bar would have been a crazy dream; when we got one, which was extremely rarely, we had to cut it into four.
At Sparkhill, I remember big brick-shape tiles, white ones and black ones in lines, and the water being cold. I remember shivering afterwards, dressing in wooden cubicles, trying to roll thick dry socks up thick damp legs. I remember playing. I don’t remember there being a “lesson”, but I do remember bobbing about doing that pretend-swimming that’s a precursor to actually getting your feet off the bottom for longer than five seconds.
The second part of the waterbiography was school swimming lessons at Wyndley Leisure Centre, Sutton Coldfield – and this is where I can remember groping across my first width, aged 12 (though if that was doggy paddle, the doggy would have drowned). By today’s standards, 12 is too late. These days, if you don’t have your children entered for their Masters degrees by the time they’re seven, really, what has your au-pair been doing? Wyndley was a shiny, brightly lit new pool that sang to us about the future. We must have taken messages of extravagance from all that light: we could have all the electricity we wanted, when we wanted, whether we needed it or not. The pool’s filter system constantly pushed water down gutters that were pleasingly round-edged but a major source of temptation and worry. The fear was being trapped, or losing something down there – a thin friend, maybe.
It was a huge distance, a width. We set off, a mill of spindly uncoordinated arms hitting the water so hard it stung, backs arched, heads and bums up, a series of little U-shaped bodies bobbling across. A stretched hand, fingers feeling for the cold tiles of the other side. Done it! Swum a width! First badge!
Then, in a twist of irony that would only become apparent when I got completely obsessed with outdoor cold-water swimming, I got a summer job running the cafe at a lido in Sutton Park called Keeper’s Pool. I didn’t realise how much I should have treasured this place. It was a purpose-built pool beside a tree-enclosed lake with a diving platform, used almost exclusively by the kind of boys who spin the cars on fairground rides. The prime feature of the lido was a grassy bank for sunbathing, with no sun cream (which hadn’t been invented). I think I did get in the water there a couple of times; I remember picking at a skin infection during my O levels. But mostly I slouched about in overalls serving the kind of unhealthy crap I moan massively about in lido cafes now. I’d lean out the hatch of my glorified shed, a teen constructed almost entirely from sarcasm, watch young people have fun in the pool and think: “God. How shallow. You won’t catch me doing that shit.”
My first three pools are a broad illustration of the history of public swimming in this country. Sparkhill Baths was Edwardian, built in the 1930s, when the first swimming boom hit. Wyndley marked the next phase of major pool building in the 70s. Keeper’s was a lido in a time when they were plentiful. And today – when the lido is completely landscaped over (you wouldn’t know it had ever been there) and Sparkhill is closed (I don’t like people taking the piss out of the Brummie accent, but “asbestos incident” really lends itself), due to be demolished and rebuilt privately – it’s also emblematic, a picture repeated all over the country. It’s no coincidence that my waterbiography reflects widely; yours may feel the same.
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