The Tugster and Bowsprite posed a great challenge: Make July 1st Swim Day. Getting into the water isn’t going to happen so I racked my brain for dramatic accounts of near drownings. Sadly my stories of swimming are pretty dull. To be honest I don’t really like swimming very much. For me it’s where I learned and the guy who taught me.
I grew up in Central London. Chelsea to be precise. It’s now a glamorous neighborhood, but when I were a lad, it was more down-to-earth. Yes, it was ground zero for the swinging sixties and to this day Austin Powers makes me strangely nostalgic but Chelsea was actually a real neighborhood with real people, greengrocers, butchers, ironmongers (hardware stores in American), real pubs, council flats, a great local library and best of all a public baths.
Public baths were a Great British Victorian institution. They literally were, where people went to take a bath. Like many public baths, Chelsea Public Baths was a Victorian brick edifice on the King’s Road next to the Town Hall, local cinema (movie theater) and public library. That one block was the municipal nexus for 10s of 1000s of Chelsea inhabitants.
On the outside it was red brick and institutional in the sort of Victorian way that says get your arse inside and be bloody grateful. On the inside it was a mixture of lino and tile. The entrance hall was functional with a snack machine serving Bovril (a hot beef drink) and smoky bacon crisps.
Beyond that almost every surface was heavy industrial Victorian white tile – scratched, chipped, slathered in a film of disinfectant to seal in the bacteria festering in the cracks.
The changing rooms served two purposes. Changing and taking baths. It was my first encounter with how lucky I was to grow up with basic things I took for granted like a bathtub and hot running water. While I passed through the changing rooms as fast as I could, there were others who were there for their weekly baths. A moment of luxury. Taking, hot steamy baths in small private, dank looking bathrooms that would be theirs for an hour a week.
The swimming pool was something else. The smell of chlorine and wet heat were overpowering. Your eyes stung as it hit you. The pool was not quite Olympic size, probably an Imperial 50 yards long rather than an Olympic 50 meters. It was about about 10 feet deep at one end and 4 feet in the shallow end. There was a slightly rotting, algae-covered wood rail along the sides and one solid, crappy diving board about 8 inches off the floor. When you bounced off the end you got about as much spring off it as a brick wall.
If you were lucky enough to have goggles (it was Britain in the 60s after all) you were unlucky enough to see what lurked on the bottom. Used band-aids and the occasional cigarette butt, a big iron grate with evil looking slime clogging the holes.
Best of all was the warning sign with the mysterious NO PETTING. One more thing that this municipal building was apparently a destination for. I never was really too sure what petting was but it had to be pretty dangerous to be in the same league and bombing and ducking.
The No Smoking admonition was especially controversial. Frankly I can’t recall a time when I went there when there weren’t rows of people in the gallery puffing away. In the end it took a national rumor that cigarette smoke and chlorine mixed together was explosive to finally put an end to it.
The main reason I went was to learn to swim. I was 6, maybe 7. My mum signed me up and she had paid up for a full course so the threat of bacteria, bombing, cigarette smoke and chlorine mix or not, I was going dammit!
The thing that made it worth it was the guy who taught me to swim. He was a young Israeli guy called Joseph. This was pretty cool. I had never met anyone from Israel and I can remember to this day his heavy Israeli accent teaching me the strokes, lots of encouragement, never a negative word and no shouting. He loved what he did and it was infectious. I couldn’t wait for my weekly lesson. Thanks to him I learned to swim quite well and pretty young for the UK. I even went on to swim for my school.
Well to be precise, I represented my school once in the 100 meter backstroke. I am sorry but the backstroke sucks. The thing I hated most was that you could see the crowd as you were swimming. I could see the look of sympathetic but slightly embarrassed disappointment on my father’s face as he sat in the gallery watching his offspring come dead last. That was the end of my competitive swimming career.
The brick edifice is still there at the corner of King’s Road and Chelsea Manor Street. I am sure it was sold off and is now a cleverly re-branded leisure club with a weight room, spin classes, yoga and not a hint of chlorine.
I bet there’s still petting going on.
Eeeh lad. You soft southern kids from London had it easy, learning to swim in a poncy indoor pool. When I were a lad oop north in Grantham in the 50’s we had to learn to swim in an outdoor pool. No “wet heat” for us. It was frigging “wet cold”.
Still it did us no harm. Toughened us up for eating black pudding and mushy peas.
What a dreamy account! this sounds like something out of novel and it’s making me rather envious. Laughed so hard at your backstroke observation! I personally would have taken the goggles off!
No petting with the ironmonger’s daughter…you’ll sink.
I remember indoor pools in Queens…also a cold and dreary affair, with chlorine stinging the nostrils and the towels always too small to get dry. And adults fully dressed shouting “get in the pool!”