by Tom Gregory
After five weeks in hospital and a long silent fight to return to the world he had built, John had finally died. The doctors could not understand how he had clung on after so many strokes and haemorrhages. The indications were that he had tried desperately to do so, but, with no communication possible, the people who loved him were unable to share anything of his final journey. Two days before he died I had been to see him again, just Dad, Anna and me. Dad had told us that this was actually about saying goodbye, and that we had to be brave – as brave as we were when we got in the sea to swim – and that John would expect nothing less. He would be proud of us for being just so.
I walked into the same hospital room, alone this time. The room was filled with cards, flowers and mementos. John had changed. All colour had left his face, he had lost lots of weight and his once cannonball frame looked tiny and brittle. A bag of dark urine hung from the bed. The smell of bodily things had grown more acute. The whirring and bleeping of the machines had intensified – now they were simply keeping him alive.
‘Hi, John,’ I said, breezing in confidently. I heard the note of defiance and deception in my voice, as if masking a fib to my mother. I reminded myself he was not going to reply and a wave of sorrow reared up. I realized this was going to be, aged twelve, the hardest thing I had ever done.
I sat by his side. ‘You better wake up, JB, I’m telling you …’ I whispered, holding his still chubby hand in mine. ‘If you don’t, I’ll have to duff you up,’ I said, a smile and a half laugh breaking through the tears. My hand felt some pressure. Gentle at first, but then there it was again. He was squeezing my hand, but he couldn’t perform his half of our routine … so I did it for him.
‘It would take a whole army of Little Tefals to duff you up, John,’ I said gently, and in reply to myself, while laying my other hand on his dented bald head.
His eyes didn’t open, and the squeeze of his hand eventually lessened. The machines continued to whirr and bleep, and his chest continued to rise and fall – the thing he had taught me to look for when confronted with a casualty. I sat there with him in silence for a while. A large lump of spittle had accumulated at the side of his mouth. This would have upset him, so I wiped it away with my finger. I wondered if he was thirsty, but I could not have given him any water, even if he were able to tell me to do so. I realized it was my turn – to give him some courage, and to face what was coming. In the way he had given me mine, on the shores of Windermere, and on that beach in France.
Eventually, and wracked with pain, I spoke to him, for the last time.
‘John,
‘Thank you for teaching me to swim.
‘Thank you for teaching me all the other things too, about life. And thank you for the club, and for all my friends.
‘Thank you for my world record.
‘And, thank you for being my friend.’
Each sentence was slow, deliberate, and punctuated by the need to gasp in a breath, through the tears.
‘I will miss you, more than you can possibly know.’
A final gulp of air.
‘I love you.’
Holding down a volcano of grief, I summoned myself to let go of his hand, for the last time. Fighting every human desire and instinct, I knew I had to leave him.
‘I love you, John,’ I said once more, in despair. And then …
‘Goodbye.’
I stood there looking at him having finally said that word, our last word. John’s left arm twitched slightly. Then, slowly, it moved. He lifted it up, clear of the bed and right up into the air. He held it there for a long moment in defiance, and in acknowledgement of all I had just told him. He was saying goodbye too, and in the only way he could, to me, Tefal, a kid who had come to love him as a father, and with whom he had achieved something truly remarkable. Astonished and somehow glad, I waved my arm back at him, and because he could not see, I said one more thing, loud and clear, so he could hear me.
‘Thank you, John. Thank you for ever.’ His arm fell back.
I walked out of the hospital room in a dizzying fog of emotion and sorrow, into the grim light of the corridor outside. Dad and the nurse looked at me with pity in their eyes. Dad had tears on his cheeks. ‘John held his arm up in the air, to say goodbye, Dad,’ I blurted, pleading. The nurse shook her head gently. ‘He did!’ I protested. Then it came; the sluice gate flew open and I wailed hysterically, uncontrollably. Dad threw his arms and whole body around me, cradling me like a baby once again. We rocked gently back and forth. Of what happened next, and until the following day, I have absolutely no recollection.
Epilogue
In the years that followed John’s death I drifted slowly but inevitably away from swimming. Others, like me, gradually moved away or did the things the time of their lives demanded. Countless others were traumatized by John’s death beyond me, Anna and our parents, particularly the loyal swimming families who had stood by his side over two decades or more. John’s impact on so many was hard to truly measure, but his life, and loss, certainly affected the futures of a great many young people, for many of whom he, and his swimming club, symbolized community, ambition and hope.
Anna and many of her friends in the club continued to make things happen, and for a while the girls in particular simply grew the movement. At coaching level, a succession of Senior club members began to fill the void by teaching the things John had taught them; JC, Doug Minde (one of Jon’s four successful soloists), Big Steve, Simon ‘Tetley’ Johnson and Tanya all worked tirelessly to bring through another generation, and to honour John’s legacy. They succeeded.
Three years after John’s death a team coached by Tetley, and including Anna, made a successful crossing, winning the John Bullet Memorial Trophy, which had been presented to the Channel Swimming Association by the club for the Youngest Relay Swim of the Year. Solo attempts were made and in 1995 Mother Duck, now in her late twenties, finally got across. The long-serving families of the club, like the Wetherlies, Kents, Overies, Waglands and Sinclairs to name but a few, who had been there from the very beginning, maintained a committee structure and funding. Perhaps their real gift was one of continuity, and the gentle stewardship that prevented committed youngsters from becoming otherwise lost. The training lanes stayed busy, and parties were well attended. In later years Tanya in particular made an even greater impact, both by coaching a series of relays and solos, and by staying close to the sport.
But for me those years were an extended wake, often punctuated by teenage misbehaviour and rule-breaking. There were demons alive and within too; at a club disco that I persuaded my school friends to come to on a promise of booze and girls, I buried deep down the shame I felt at what John’s reaction would have been to my nipping out for a secret fag.
Salvation arrived in a uniform. The Cadet Squadron at school, just like the swimming club, provided me with a framework where I could achieve new things and learn to play by the rules. Military life began to appeal to me, because, just like long distance swimming, it seemed to be all about empowering the individual and the team, through relentless training, to achieve potentially remarkable things. It also carried with it a sense of excitement, and sometimes danger. Above all, like all those camps at Dover and Windermere, it was enormous fun, spent with others who were on the same adventure. We were often in similarly wild places, in hostile conditions. Swimming, and John, had taught me to cope with such situations – to embrace (and at least try) to enjoy them, but above all to believe that, no matter what happened, I would probably succeed in the end if I tried hard enough.
‘Phase three’ occasionally came back to visit in some unexpected ways. On the night Frank Bruno won the World Heavyweight title in 1995, I found myself as a guest on the recording of the first episode of The Frank Skinner Show. It was an unlikely sofa combination, with Buzz Aldrin and Charlie Kray for company, but that made for some astonishing chats in the green room after the show. For years Dad and I dined out on the moment when Charlie asked Buzz for a signature
… for his brother. Buzz duly obliged, scribbling ‘Dear Ron … Best, Buzz’ on the back of his Apollo business card, unaware it was destined for one of London’s most notorious surviving gangsters. In these moments, John was close; he would have laughed at the facts, before reminding me not to become a ‘big’ead’. In future years, through university and my tours of Iraq and Afghanistan with the Army, my one framed photo of John remained part of a small collection of personal possessions and accompanied me on various adventures. And I thought of him often.
More than 300 people came to Falconwood Crematorium for the funeral of John Bullet – a fifty-one-year-old man without a family. The huge cortege blocked the traffic for miles around. A local policeman and father from the swimming club, Tony Parker, saluted John’s hearse with a white gloved hand and in full ceremonial uniform as he paused from diverting the traffic at the junction outside John’s house. It was a fitting tribute and a final act of respect.
Remarkably, still relatively little is known (to us at least) about John Bullet’s early life. At the time of his death, the few personal papers that emerged suggested he was of French origin and of another birth name, and so it seems likely that he was adopted to the UK at some point early in his life to become a Bullet. Anna, Clair and I all recall his being notoriously secretive – sometimes to the point of anger – about the confidentiality he placed on his passport, and so perhaps this was the reason. But between 1967 and 1988 John, a self-taught coach, had built something remarkable. In pure swimming terms, he had achieved fourteen successful Channel relay swims and coached four solos, including three world records – all with kids from the local area. But in reality, he had achieved far more than that. And so in every respect, his funeral wasn’t really about swimming at all.
The community he created came out in force to say goodbye. There were swimmers from twenty years ago, whose names were well known to me from their exploits, but whom I had never met. The wider swimming world of South London was also on parade, as were members of the Channel Swimming Association. Parents, children and all-comers jammed into the crematorium chapel. There was a queue of people trying to get into an uninviting and sad place.
Looking back on it now, it was the first time I had truly witnessed the extent of influence he had held on so many others apart from me, Anna and our immediate group of swimmers. As Alison ‘Miss Piggy’ Wetherly later told me, if you lived in the local area, ever went to Eltham Baths, had a faint interest in swimming, or just read the local papers, you knew about John Bullet.
It had not always been so. In the early years John was simply working for the council as a lifeguard at the nearby pools in Plumstead. He had begun experimenting with coaching, mostly on the sprinting scene, having become involved in various clubs and with the life-saving movement. But once appointed manager at Eltham, he set about building his own club, poaching good swimmers to start with, and earning a reputation, before straying into the open water circuit.
He learned as he went, and so the first swimmers like Stephen Wetherly and Marcus, his earliest solo attempts, had it the hardest, even passing out from the cold as John learned how to prepare a swimmer. On his first solo attempt of the Channel, John, the swimmer and crew all fell from the tender in the dark en route to the shore before the start, having come across the Channel themselves on the boat through the night. All of the grease bar one pot was lost overboard. Hours later, a tope shark was seen approaching the swimmer on the crossing before being scared off with cans of beans, used as projectiles. I was one of many beneficiaries of all those hard-earned lessons of the early years.
But notwithstanding the risk taking, for John swimming was about participation as much as record breaking. He set up a ‘B League’ of competitive galas for those clubs (which notably included Eltham) whose swimmers were not quick enough to compete at club or county level as sprinters – for how else would they learn or develop?
Despite the mishaps there was an ever-present value: trust. The swimmers and parents alike trusted John implicitly. In speaking to others who fell under his spell, many say the same thing – that he was like a second father; that, as Alison put it, ‘he was just always, always there for me’. She was with him on the day he had the stroke, working as a lifeguard, and angry that he had made her leave the hydropool at the point where he needed to use chemicals to clean the pool – anxious to protect her from the fumes.
Among the girls, Alison, Clair, Anna and my cousins all offer the same testimony – of his instilling a sense of confidence during some difficult teenage years, and of establishing ‘the base’, which was wholesome, disciplined, and from which all other things came within reach. A diary entry of Anna’s from February 1989 mourns the passing of John, ‘the man who gave me my confidence, and so changed my life’.
While the boys were just as devoted to John, the experience they shared was possibly different to the girls’. In every respect John was something of a ‘lad’, revelling in boyish humour in one moment, but a hard disciplinarian the next. He undoubtedly had his favourites, but overall he was forward thinking for his generation. Most importantly, even now, most of us kids from Eltham would still count on our time with him as the most influential of our formative years, teaching us self-reliance, teamwork and aspiration.
As a coach he was undoubtedly clever – a taker of calculated and controlled risks, and a master of patient psychological persuasion. He was tenacious, fought for his people, and for the things he believed in. In John’s self-constructed community all arrived equal; swimming, being part of a team and sharing unity of purpose mattered more than money, the car your dad drove or qualifications. In the days before lottery funding in sport, what you did for yourselves counted; jumble sales, paper runs and discos in the church hall gently shored up the lessons of group-reliance and of ‘making things happen’ regardless. John had many faults too, impatience, stubbornness and irascibility among them, but they were outweighed by kindness, humour and, in his own unique way, love.
John never received a penny for his services (other than for his job running Eltham Baths) – nor did he expect to. In the modern era he could have been a contender for the Sports Personality Unsung Hero award, provided he didn’t upset too many people along the way. But when I think about John and his legacy thirty years on, the question for us today might be whether our risk-aware era would even tolerate an amateur organization pushing the boundaries of youth endeavour in the way he did. I wonder if he would have been celebrated or censured, and, suspecting the latter, I can’t help feel that we have lost something. Maybe we need to relearn the maxim that reward and achievement requires risk, and that in encouraging our children to fulfil their dreams, we need to trust in others. We cannot do it alone.
No memorial exists to the extraordinary achievements and legacy of John Edward Bullet. But for generations of Eltham children, he was simply unique. He taught us that anything is possible, but especially when you have some tomato soup, a pot of grease and an 80s mixtape to hand.
Acknowledgements
This book is largely a tribute to John Bullet and his many accomplishments. But the book, like the events it describes, would never have been possible without the help of others, to all of whom I am deeply indebted both then and now. Many of the families, friends and characters of those times are not referenced as much as perhaps I would have liked. I hope this is to no one’s lasting distress, not least since I have tried to represent faithfully the events of those years as they appeared to me at the time, and to include those who were there as much as possible. To all who made a contribution to Eltham Training and Swimming Club, The Channel Swimming Association, and surrounding organisations in whatever form, especially the loyal swimming families and friends from ‘back in the day’, please accept collective thanks for the roles that you played in our real-life script, and please also accept my own apologies for not having been able to include you all personally. Without you there would be no events to describe, and no history to salvage.
&nbs
p; In writing the book I have found the support and counsel of Alison and Stephen Wetherly, Clair Kent and Marcus Hooper invaluable. Our experiences were shared yet different, and I hope that your perspectives and contributions are faithfully represented.
As a first-time author I am also indebted to some of the wonderful people one meets on the journey. To an old pal, Sarah Maclay (nee Ritherdon), for knowing what to do and who to call in the first place; to Jim Gill for hearing it out, sharing cricket yarns and making it happen; and especially to Helen Conford, my editor, for being wise, kind and patient – I have learned so much. Thanks also to my copy-editor Tamsin Shelton and to the wider Penguin team; in particular to Margaret Stead and Annabel Huxley for the final months, and also to Ingrid Matts, Rebecca Lee and Shoaib Rokadiya for their contribution.
To Hugo and Cat Morris at Deloitte for supporting this venture in a heartbeat, and to Chris Recchia for the same – I am very lucky to work for genuinely good people. To Tom Hollander and Hannah Pescod at Bandstand for dusting me down and offering a bit of encouragement when I needed it. And to Owen Amos for writing an article, out of nowhere, for BBC online which triggered the whole thing. As a book drafted entirely on the daily commute to Waterloo over a twelve-month period, a nod also to South West Trains for all the delays which kept the project broadly on track.
To Mum and Dad. You are true role models. Your love, wisdom, humour and tolerance have never faltered, and those are the foundations which make everything possible.
To my lovely Helen; for backing me when I doubted myself, and for the unflinching support, love and understanding that makes our family.