Swimming pools. Now
there’s a subject that brings a few tales floating to the surface like an
unaccounted-for turd.
The qualifications required for being a female swimming
instructor in the 1970s appears to have been a venomous hatred of children,
calves like a rhino and a voice so gruff you’d imagine she gargled with cat
litter and road salt each morning. The
old dragon who was charged with teaching us to swim during our weekly visits to
Arnos Grove pool when I was in Junior 3 had only one coaching tactic: Jump in and get to the other side! No guidance on how, just 1-2-3-Go! The kids who could
swim (most of them) got no better and those who couldn’t (me, Dalboy and the overweight,
thick and somewhat smelly kid of the class) were given floats and told to hold
them in front of us and kick our legs.
We too made fuck all progress the whole year. Which meant nearly drowning on the occasion
that we all had to swim lengths. I was
absolutely terrified of the deep end, as you would be if you were equally inept
in the water, and yet we were made to kick and claw our way (without floats) along
the side to get there and then turn back, but out of reach of the side. That meant swimming back when you couldn’t
swim. I kicked off and immediately and
somewhat expectedly sunk under the water.
Our own class teacher – not the butch sadist responsible for putting my
life in peril – reached down to grab my arm and saved me. I can’t say I have any fond memories of Arnos
Grove pool (other than once seeing a brown stain on a friend’s bum – I’ll keep
this anonymous – which he claimed was a birthmark, but then failed to explain
its absence the following week.)
Fortunately, the following year we switched to Southgate
pool, where I did learn to swim and speedily accumulated a range of
awards. I say ‘range’. I got my yellow and green ribbons (widths and
lengths) but failed my red as that meant deep end (still scared) and retrieving
a brick from the bottom of the pool (if someone’s stupid enough to throw a
brick in a pool they can fucking well get it themselves).
Then I had a two-year gap of failing to build on my
new-found skills, before moving to St Ignatius Upper School in my 3rd
year and having weekly swimming lessons once more in the school’s own pool this
time. Our teacher was Mr Dover (unoriginally
nicknamed Ben), who also managed to teach me nothing, not quite surpassing the
achievements of Arnos Grove Pool’s dragon insofar as taking 3 years to teach me
nothing while she managed to teach me nothing in just one. Mr Dover will be remembered for making Dave
Bollon swim in the nude once, when he forgot he trunks. (Dave Bollon forgot his trunks, not Mr
Dover. It would have been even harsher
for the teacher to demand that a pupil swims nude because that teacher forgot his
own trunks. Anyway, that’s the 1980s for
you.)
Everything Ben Dover failed to teach me between the 3rd
and 5th year, I taught myself in the 6th form after
finding out that we were allowed to use the pool at lunchtimes. I jumped in the deep end, taught myself to
tread water and no one tried to drown me or make me take my trunks off.
I’m not sure I swam regularly again until my 30s, that age
where you think, shit, I’m getting fat, I need to exercise, but you won’t condescend
to going to a gym (I never have, never will) because the prospect bores me to death. Not that swimming lengths for 45 minutes in
an effort to erase a beer gut holds much excitement. For years I went weekly, and in all that time
I have only two moderately-less-than-dull tales to tell.
Firstly, is the fact that I sometimes worried that I looked like
a bit of a nonce. I went on the way home
from work, but unfortunately this meant coinciding with kids swimming lessons
when I did Tuesday nights in Borehamwood leisure centre. When you’re one of only 2 or 3 adults in the
pool at the same time as loads of kids and all their (rightly protective)
parents are sat watching, you know full well that the question on their minds
is the same as what would be on mine: Why
does that bloke choose to come swimming now?
When all the kids are here?
BECAUSE I JUST FINISHED WORK AND IT’S ON MY WAY HOME AND I
CAN’T AVOID COMING NOW!!!!
At about this time I grew a beard. Then I really did look like I was the man who
took the S’s out of Speedos. I gave up
for a while after a month or so of feeling very self-conscious.
Secondly, the smelliest human being I have encountered in my
whole life was a Chinese bloke sharing a lane with me in Hatfield. The smell was indescribable. Without smelling like shit or piss or BO or
bad breath, it managed to smell ten times worse than a combination of all four. Bear in mind that I prefer breast stroke with
my head out of water, each time we crossed paths I did a little vomit in my
throat. Even changing lanes didn’t help
as that fucking PONG carried. (If that was
his name.) In the end, I’d do a few strokes
under water whenever he came near me, hoping that whatever stinky substance
surrounded him would float on the surface.
Now that I think about it, I did take my kids swimming a good
number of times as well. My daughter –
who would have been about 3 at the time – managed to further incriminate me as
some kind of wrong ‘un. Sharing a
cubicle was unavoidable due to her age, but after getting her dried and dressed
and making her turn her back, while I turned mine to dry and dress myself, she
shouted out loudly, ‘I can see your willy Daddy!’ She couldn’t.
But walking out of that cubicle afterwards certainly drew some glances.
Especially with the beard.
(‘Doesn’t he come here Tuesday nights?’)
