A Boy in the Water

by Tom Gregory

  Wednesday night swimming now started half an hour later at 6.30. The changing rooms for the big pool were like caves that ran deep on either side of the sunken depth of the pool itself. Along the narrow and dark underground corridors ran huge water pipes, which hummed as they carried the vast amounts of water into and out of the old pool. I imagined that it felt like being in a submarine. Leaving the changing rooms I would climb the stairs to emerge on the poolside and squint in the bright lights, which contrasted so much with the dark cave below. The big pool was flanked by tall banks of tiered spectator benches on either side. The whole poolside and surrounding walls were tiled in a light brown colour, and on peering into the blue water, I could see that the surface of the pool itself consisted of thousands and thousands of small rectangular white tiles. The high roof seemed to cover an impossibly large area. It was an intimidating and noisy place.

  Groups of parents would congregate in one corner of the spectator seating nearest the diving boards and watch the night unfold. I had begun to recognize some of their faces now. Some had jobs to do, like sell orange swimming hats, or collect ‘subs’ from members. Mr Overy, the chairman, would drum up support for social events and fundraising activities. Anna had explained that some families, like the Kents, Wetherlies and Waglands, were long-time supporters and members, with successive siblings having made their mark within the ranks of the club – now celebrating its eighteenth year. All of this activity took place under the direction of one man – John Bullet. Founder, coach, controller of all things.

  The swimmers were split into three groups: Juniors, Intermediates and Seniors. To prevent chaos and collisions, the pool was segregated into three long zones by lane ropes that ran the entire length of the pool. The zones were wide – two or three lanes each, leaving room for the groups to swim up one side, and down the other.

  As we assembled in our groups on the large poolside of the shallow end, I looked across at the Seniors, now together for the first time after the summer, and recognized some of my teachers from the previous few months. I could see the cousins, Carolyn and Victoria, along with Mother Duck, Miss Piggy and Bear. All were wearing a serious and focused expression underneath their orange rubber hats. There too was John Bullet, in his grey flannel trousers, smart woollen cardigan and clean white shoes. He appeared on the poolside next to the Senior group and barked a series of instructions. On this occasion he wore a shiny metal whistle on a lanyard around his neck.

  ‘Right, shut up, you lot!’ he began loudly, boring his eyes into those who dared speak. ‘Twenty lengths crawl warm up, then straight into a 4x2 … Take your marks.’ The swimmers jostled. ‘Hurry UP!’ he added impatiently. The swimmers shuffled into a line as John barked ‘Go! … Go! … Go!’ at each swimmer in turn, setting them off at short intervals. I looked on as they dived athletically and rhythmically into the pool, one by one like on a conveyor belt, and sped away down the length. I was instantly in awe of their ability to swim so far, and so fast.

  As the noise levels in the baths rose, my own Junior group were put to work under the instructions of a woman called Tanya. I had never swum a length of the big pool before, and it looked easily to be further than two widths of the small pool – with nowhere to rest halfway. I resolved to stay close to the lane rope or the gutter channel of the pool, in case I needed to stop and hold on. I longed for Anna by my side, but she had already been moved into the Intermediate group.

  ‘OK, you lot, let’s have a look at you,’ said Tanya. Six or seven of us, mostly kids I recognized from the small pool but with a couple of new faces, put our goggles on over the top of our orange hats. ‘Let’s have two lengths of your best front crawl, please …’

  Two lengths?! I thought in a panic. I was unlikely to be able to complete one, let alone a second. I moved myself to the back of the queue to buy some time. Tanya knew most of our names already, but, as I got to the front of the queue, she asked who I was.

  ‘My name is Thomas,’ I replied.

  ‘Ah, that’s right – I was expecting you. OK, Thomas, off you go,’ she said. I wondered why I had been expected at all. Perhaps she knew of Anna and me from the cousins.

  I dived into the pool belly first and set off. My body instantly shivered. The big pool was much colder than the small pool and the sudden immersion underlined the extent of the transition between the two. After a few strokes my goggles leaked, probably as a result of the dive, so I paused to straighten them out, staying afloat, using the new breaststroke with just one arm, and keeping my head up as I did so. Underway again I watched as the pool below me deepened, and then deepened suddenly again as a steep ramp ran it down to maximum depth. I had never swum in water this deep, not knowingly at least, and with the far end of the pool still some way off there was only one thing to do – keep swimming.

  To my surprise I was at the far end of the long pool soon afterwards and felt an acute sense of pride as I hung onto the rail in the shadow of the enormous diving boards. Tanya, seeing me stop from 30 metres away, waved her arms frantically to beckon me back, which suggested I had done something wrong. Suddenly nervous again, I set off towards the shallow end, consoled by the fact that, if I became exhausted as I approached the shallow end I might at least be able to stand up. I got tired, and it became harder to swim, and my arms started to ache with the effort. My head was barely getting above the water, and I had a moment of panic as, breathing heavily, I gulped in a lung-full of pool water. Stopping to recover, I floated on my back, and caught my breath. Looking up … just a few metres to go. The other kids were already on the poolside looking on. After a final effort, I made it to the rail, exhausted, embarrassed, and breathing very hard.

  ‘Out you get,’ said Tanya. There was no praise to be had. There was no Mother Duck either, who was busy swimming laps with the other Seniors. Bewildered, I pulled myself sideways along the rail towards the steps in order to climb out. ‘No steps, Thomas – pull yourself out, please,’ instructed Tanya. I tried to jump up from the water, where I could now stand up, and to haul myself out. This proved to be nearly as hard as the swim itself, and I could hear some of the other kids sniggering as I floundered, bouncing up and down, half in, half out, trying in vain to get a grip on the smooth tiles and pull my body clear from the water. Eventually out, I went to the back of the re-formed queue of swimmers, feeling nervous. To compound my misery Tanya added, addressing the group, ‘Thomas, we don’t stop at the deep end. We touch the end of the pool, turn and swim back. OK?’ I nodded silently, wondering how things had come to this. From the back of the queue, still breathing heavily with reddened face, I looked up at the length of the pool in fear of what would come next. For the briefest moment, it struck me that I had just swum further, and in deeper water, than I had ever swum before, and having obeyed all the cartoon instructions, I hadn’t drowned.

  But then again, as with a few other things in my life at that time, I was last, again.

  Things at the pool carried on like that for a while. I dreaded Wednesday nights. The routine at home was rushed; Mum would pick me up from school at 4 o’clock, and once home, feed me a hot bacon and egg sandwich. This normally coincided with my attempts at homework, which got less than my full attention on account of my anxiety over what was to come. It was not unusual for Mr Fuller to circle large areas of my exercise book with his red biro the next day, a shorthand form of enquiry regarding the presence on the pages of crumbs, normally framed by circular butter stains, or the odd blob of ketchup. With rushed homework left incomplete, I would chase around the house looking for my swimming kit. When (frequently) I was unable to find it, Mum normally had the answer. The rush continued.

  Hearing the 6 o’clock news theme tune strike up from the TV, which, with its urgent and pushy tempo, also sounded rushed, my tummy would turn in knots – the tune marked the approaching moment to leave for the baths. Often I pleaded with Mum that I didn’t want to go, and even became upset to the point of tears. Although Anna was unlikely to tell me or show it, I se
nsed that my sister had similar reservations. Mum would always reply that ‘it would be fine’, and not to be a baby. I wondered if Anna needed similar persuasion, but in more grown-up language when I was not listening. Meanwhile, at the club itself, things were still getting harder.

  After a few weeks listening to instructions, normally from Tanya or Mother Duck, I was moved into the Intermediate lane, where Anna was also to be found and where most students were eleven years old or more, not eight like me, and happily lapping up the lengths. I didn’t see my promotion as in any way welcome, because it simply meant the swimming had become much more challenging, which in turn resulted in my still being last all the time. In an attempt to keep up, I had renewed my efforts to listen carefully to the Seniors in recent weeks, who, I had come to accept, were there to help us swim better, with their barked orders from the poolside.

  I had learned to ‘kick from the hip’ when swimming front crawl, instead of from the knee, and although it made the very top of my legs ache, I found it required fewer kicks per arm stroke once I got used to it. My arms had also improved. It had been explained to me that in any given point during front crawl, the ‘underwater arm’ needed to travel downwards and through the water in a wide, preferably vertical circle, rather than be recovered with a bent elbow towards the waist (which resembled the underwater equivalent of taking a bow). Again, this was harder to do at first, but it took fewer arm strokes to complete a length once I got the hang of it. I had also come to possess an imaginary line that split me in two vertically, and which my leading hand was not to cross at the point in the stroke when I reached out in front of me – always ‘as far as you can’. My hands, when out of the water, were to be facing outwards, in an inverted wave – which looked like an army salute, only horizontally rather than stood to attention.

  At some point in the process I found some balance between what my arms and legs were doing, which meant that breathing became easier; I no longer had to take the odd exhausted breath looking forwards (instead of to the side). I could also swim in a straight line, provided I kept an eye on the blue lane markings on the bottom of the pool, and my new goggles didn’t leak. I’d even learned a trick that prevented my goggles from misting up, which was to lick them on the inside first and then fill them with pool water for thirty seconds, before finally putting them on my head.

  But none of this new knowledge was enough to stop me from coming last in every set of lengths in the Intermediate group. The warm up alone was now ten lengths and normally enough to finish me off. Once the mixed-stroke sets started (I had been forced to learn them all quickly) things were fine during the backstroke, breaststroke and crawl sections, but the butterfly, which always came first in the list, was still a total mystery to me. I would have to get that sorted out as a priority. Meanwhile, Anna had got the whole thing sorted, and she always looked so good in the pool. Anna always knew how to make things look easy.

  Neither school nor swimming club looked likely to become easier any time soon. But relief was at hand; Christmas of 1984 was undoubtedly the best Christmas ever, and for one reason only: I now owned a Walkman. Technically speaking it was not a ‘Walkman’ – they were made by Sony, and mine was made by Saisho – but that didn’t matter. It played tapes and it came with bright orange foam-covered headphones. Mine was yellow, about the size of a half bag of flour, and heavy enough to require a shoulder strap; in other words, the very latest thing. It had a sliding volume adjuster amid some other important buttons on one side, and a radio dial at one end that could receive AM and FM. Best of all, it had a three band graphic equalizer on the front, the sliders moving up and down in their grooves. Even Anna was a little envious as I tore through the wrapping paper, though her envy almost immediately disappeared when, aged ten and three-quarters, she unwrapped her first album, to add to her nascent singles collection. Madonna’s Like a Virgin was all hers, and she wanted for little else, as a log on the fire popped with festive approval.

  ‘Don’t think you can help yourself to my mix tapes, Little Brother,’ she warned as I continued ripping open paper. I’d no intention of obeying Anna’s instruction at that point, but the need was instantly removed upon opening my other present: not just a tape from Our Price, but a double tape called Now That’s What I Call Music 3. I looked at the back of the chunky plastic cassette box and was thrilled to see that the first song on the compilation album was ‘The Reflex’ by Duran Duran. (‘Have that, Tommo …’ I thought.) Scanning down the long list there were other songs by pop stars I knew of, like Nik Kershaw, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Wham!. It even had my favourite song, ‘When You’re Young and in Love’ by the Flying Pickets. OK, so it didn’t have Band Aid’s ‘Feed the World’, which was the current number one and which everyone was talking about, but Anna had bought that on 7” anyway, so it didn’t matter. Mum, being Mum, asked if she had ‘got the right thing’. I delayed the impulse to do what I wanted to do and open the thing properly, and instead offered a gabbled reply – ‘Thanks, Mum. Thanks, Dad. It’s perfect’ – before hastily resuming my present opening.

  Later we sat as a family around the Christmas fireplace, which was roaring with a combination of logs and hot coals. As Mum and Dad looked on I hurriedly fumbled the batteries into the compartment and loaded the tape: cassette 1, side 1. I pushed the heavy plastic yellow play button on the side of the unit and the mechanism whirred magically into life. The spindles were visible through the window on the front of the yellow box. I sat wide-eyed on the floor, holding the box in front of me, the big orange headphones smothering my ears. The background fuzz kicked in and added to the sense of anticipation, but was suddenly interrupted by a computerish rising arpeggio, which was obviously the start of the tape formally announcing itself to me, the listener. Then, after a short pause … ‘Ta-na Na-na … Ta-na Na-na … The Reflex … The Reflex’, louder and clearer than anything I had ever heard. The bass, rhythm and keyboards kicked in, followed quickly by Simon Le Bon’s voice, and my head was suddenly full of the sound. It felt like the band were actually playing between my ears. I looked at Anna, at first open-mouthed and then laughing with joy. She smiled back at me, with a knowing look.

  After a couple of months of heavy use, the only drawback I could see to my Walkman was the absence of a rewind button. It only had a fast forward button, marked FFD. I’d worked out that if I wanted to listen to the same song again, I had to flip the tape, fast forward the other side and guess when to stop, before flipping it back again. Apart from being annoying, the process was also an inexact science. Meanwhile, all the other aspects of my life seemed to be going the same way. Everything was on fast forward, and was also quite often annoying, and as with the tape, I was unable to rewind any of it.

  School was getting harder by the week, and I continued to struggle to keep up. Not even Roger, who was now a major character in our class, could help me. The maths teacher, Miss Rowling, had asked Mum and Dad to come to school especially to discuss my progress, and particularly my homework. In the meeting, Mum reacted calmly when Miss Rowling asked if anything was ‘amiss at home’, but was later quite angry at the question. Feeling rather guilty, I resolved to try harder with maths. The long dark nights did nothing to cheer the mood hanging over January and February.

  At a swimming club night around this time, something else new happened. John Bullet, who had never really spoken to me or Anna personally, or even had any cause to, decided that we were both to join the older kids for extra training on a Sunday morning. After our Wednesday night training session, Anna and I were summoned to John’s office at Eltham Baths, where, as the cousins had repeatedly told me, he was also the general manager. I’d never been to John Bullet’s office and we were both nervous. John was visibly in control of all things at the baths and within the club. He had a personal presence that commanded people’s respect, and it was already clear to me that he was treated with a degree of deference by swimmers and parents alike. According to the cousins, he also had a reputation for having a
short temper, and could sometimes be volatile. Since joining the club I had been torn between wanting him to notice me, in thrall to the respect he was held in, and keeping a low profile lest I make things any harder on myself.

  We tentatively ventured through the large wooden door, on which was fixed a sign declaring him to be the ‘Baths Manager’. We found John seated behind a big old wooden desk in the middle of the room. He was facing away from us and looking around the walls as if trying to locate something. The office was about the same size as Dad’s, but instead of being surrounded by hundreds of dusty old legal books that all looked the same, John was surrounded by all things related to swimming, and to the running of a large public pool. There were trophies lined up on shelves, photographs of staff in bright orange t-shirts arranged on a board (lifeguards, I assumed), a wall planner of events, and reams of paperwork that sat on one side of his desk – smothered by a heavy glass paperweight. I noticed that the small windows were high up and had strong steel bars on the inside, which, along with the magnolia walls, gave the place the look of a prison cell. We waited for him to turn and speak to us. From up close I noticed the very clear dent in the back of his head, which ran from the top of his skull down towards his neck. It looked severe – as if caused by some great accident or adventure. To my shame, I couldn’t help thinking that, were he a teacher at school, this would almost certainly have caused him to be nicknamed ‘Mr Bum Head’, but I kept this thought to myself.

  ‘Anna, Thomas – you are to come to extra training on Sunday mornings from now on. Meet time is 9.30. You will be free by 11.30. Any questions?’

  ‘No, John,’ said Anna. I shook my head to indicate the same thing.

  ‘Make sure you tell your parents,’ he added.

  ‘OK, John,’ replied Anna.

  ‘That’s all.’

  We walked out of the office. Dad was waiting in the pool foyer, having just finished a pint with Uncle John and some of the other parents from the club in the White Harte pub opposite the baths. ‘Dad, we’ve been told to report for extra training on Sunday,’ I said excitedly as I ran up to him.