Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  The bus put me down in the usual place. It was the bus station! We ate Wagon Wheels outside this very newsagent, ‘Newswell’, chocolate-covered marshmallow biscuit sandwiches, waiting with sodden towels. And we flicked through Marvel and DC comics on the revolving wirework rack. Green Lantern and Captain America, Spiderman and even Superman were forbidden. My father disapproved. We never seemed to have the money to buy them anyway. We had subscriptions to improving comics like Look and Learn and The Eagle. American comics had to be taken furtively Like the noisier, bigger toy guns ‘that would only break’, like ITV, like American series, like pointed shoes and long hair and foreign holidays, they were not for us. There was a line around our family taste that must have been placed there by osmosis, since my father never paid membership fees to any social group. But it was vaguely puritanical, vaguely in favour of British things and vaguely attached to good taste: ‘nothing too garish’. In Harlow, however, there were no barriers. This was an East End overspill after all. Hereabouts, American would have been good. Bubble gum would have been very good. Colourful would have been extra good.

  The crowds did not look very colourful today Next to his van in the market with a virtuoso vertical display of raw meat, a butcher was spookily whispering into a powerful speaker system. ‘Good prices today, ladeeez.’

  This was our nearest cinema. Sometimes we came into this piazza and joined a queue stretching right the way around three sides. Well, not that often, I suppose, but definitely for Summer Holiday with Cliff Richard, and for most of the Norman Wisdom films too.

  A man stopped me in astonishment (‘What are you doing here?’), but he couldn’t tell me whether the cinema I was looking at was the original one. It felt wrong. There were surely some new buildings.

  ‘It’s all change in Harlow It changes every day They’re taking the market out,’ he told me.

  I was surprised. It seemed the only life in the town.

  In one of those corners had been the Chinese restaurant, an utter foreign novelty when it arrived, but, unlike Marvel comics, one which our family took up — because my father loved the nursery, sup-sup food, I expect.

  Perhaps it was after The Wrong Arm of the Law (Norman played a would-be copper too short to get on the force) that I shook the soy sauce over my helping of egg fried rice and the top came off, drenching the plate in salty black liquid. I can vividly recall my despair, and then my parents laughing it off and salvaging my meal, sharing everything out again. Ironically, there seems to be no Chinese restaurant in the centre of Harlow now. Now that they are everywhere.

  But, standing facing the cinema, I knew that the swimming pool was somewhere near. I turned on my heels. It was over there, wasn’t it? I set off towards an underpass. Harlow was supposed to be a bicycle city. But you couldn’t make the British into the Dutch. There was no danger walking along the cycle lanes now because no one was riding a bicycle. The cycle storage area, with a corrugated roof covering at least fifty cycle supports, was being used as a car park.

  As I passed underneath a wing of flats, towards ‘The Hides’, I was feeling increasingly like some cat, dropped miles away from home, that manages, somehow, to find its way back unaided. I ignored the fact that I had not the faintest idea where I was going and allowed little subconscious clues to press me onwards. And then I stopped.

  What was the emotion here? The French must have a word for it. It is not nostalgia. Synapses that had been dormant for decades were suddenly fizzing. Not for the little houses, with their new mock-Georgian doors, not for the street signs, though I certainly remembered ‘The Dashes’. No, I stopped dead in the underpass itself because on either side there were large lumps of flint laid into render at the top of the wall, just some black pieces of irregularly shaped stone, and, like a face spotted in a crowd, I knew this place exactly This dip under the flat bridge had had some huge significance to me as a nine-year-old. It must have done, because it affected me now so tangibly, like nothing else in Harlow.

  I wanted my sister to be with me, to feel it too. I wanted her to rack her brain and put the connecting bits in place, as if, like that set of Christmas lights that used to infuriate my father with the conical screw-in bulbs we could replace the missing dead lamp and the whole chain would light up.

  As soon as I walked on, all the electricity evaporated. The rest of the street meant nothing. And if I tell you that I didn’t recognize a single bit of it, you’ll have to agree that it was peculiar to turn left suddenly, as if on mere impulse, and find myself facing Harlow swimming pool.

  It was the familiar, handsome facility built in 119611 and opened by Christopher Mayhew The manager, Mr Fidget, had expected to be overwhelmed on that first day He had organized a secret entrance so that ‘local big-wigs’ could come and have a look without having to queue. When he threw open the plate-glass doors it was to a single swimmer from Royston.

  Business soon picked up. In order to get the same experience as that Royston swimmer (the huge thirty-three-metre length with its four-metre deep end, a shimmering, empty three-dimensional playground) we had had to come here very early Sometimes we left our bikes out there in the asphalt car park at the bottom of the bank at seven-thirty in the morning and waited for the pool to open and to be first in.

  If we were very lucky we had the place to ourselves. The white-trousered attendants marched across to take up their languid positions, over by the gigantic ceiling-height windows. We came through the footbath, always the first cold shock, dodging the showers and their fine spray, and took our time to pierce the surface and surrender to the glassy buoyancy.

  More usually, we arrived when it was already full. We queued to get in. The changing rooms reeked of chlorine and thundered with noise. The pool was choked with bodies. The water was a continuous maelstrom, stinging the eyes with chemicals. Everybody swam in all directions at once.

  You had to twist to avoid collisions. And the great barn roof threw back a constant, never-lessening, hollow shriek of adolescent clamour.

  It is a measure of its size that, whereas everything — forest trees, town centres, school halls, houses, streets and people —seemed smaller than I remembered, Harlow Pool still struck me as massive. I had taken a safety nappy pin with a key attached from the locker downstairs where I changed and felt rather foolish trying to poke the blunt needle through my shorts. Did they really mean me to make a hole? It seemed oddly dangerous. We had had rubber arm bands, in different colours. They were uncomfortable and rode up the arm when you dived.

  And it was diving we came for; or jumping, mainly. We swam the odd width entirely underwater to show off. Sometimes we had races. Now and again we would splash furiously off in a burst of crawl like a boy-racer gunning the engine, but mostly we jumped, plunged and bombed. There was a long springboard to the left with an adjustable roller. Not too far back, or the whole plank became vibrantly alive and unpredictable, but just right, and it got you up and sailing through the air to crash into the water. You submerged in a rush of bubbles and then kicked out towards the edge. The trick was to swim underwater as close to the steps as possible so you could bound out and skip straight to the queue to do it again.

  ‘No running!!’

  It was at the next height that all the consequences became more serious. The second springboard was some twelve feet above the ground. We usually moved the roller as far forward as possible, to avoid any unnecessary wobble. Nobody wanted to hit the water in anything other than a planned way from up there. But the surge was better. The sudden sick feeling in the stomach as you went up was excellent and it was followed by a much more satisfying horrible drop and a thunderous immersion. The first time you did it, you wondered why you bothered with the lower board at all.

  It was a big event to mount the final set of stairs and take on the highest platform. This was a wide, blank, oblong area. There was no spring at all. The whole surface was flat, the lip was wide and the back and sides were ringed with high railings. It was quite possible for five or six boy
s to gather up there. On a big day it was a club. Some just resting, enjoying the view, leaning against the railings, getting their breath, waiting until the trunks began to get cold. Some were there hanging on for life, plucking up enough courage to venture forward and approach the brink. ‘You’ll love it when you’ve done it.’ ‘Don’t look down.’ ‘Just jump.’ But it was a long drop. The soaring, sinking, sick-making descent needed extra courage because we all knew what happened if you didn’t get your feet in. You could kill yourself if you landed flat. In fact, somebody had. He had been very fat, hadn’t he? He had fallen forward from the high board, missed his footing and landed flat, front-first on the water. His stomach had split apart from neck to groin and all his guts had spilled out and he had died. They had to drain the pool, apparently.

  This sort of stuff excited the troops. Would it hurt the soles of the feet? What if I went down too far? Even when you had finally summoned the will, some stupid, slow-moving breast-stroker would drift across the pool. ‘Go on! Go now. You’ll miss her. Go to one side.’

  ‘Don’t push.’

  I must have stood up there taking counsel and advice for ten minutes before I finally went off for the first time, in a sudden fit of bravado: still talking, without anybody having the chance to advise me, I stepped straight off the edge and fell … arrrgh: my internal organs apparently losing their adhesion to my lower abdomen. -

  I bobbed up quickly and swam frantically, over-energized, to the side and went straight back up. Apart from occasional rests, I unremittingly tossed myself off a high platform into the water for much of my adolescence. After about a week I joined the others, running as hard as we could from the very back and recklessly launching ourselves, sometimes in formation, out and down into the pool.

  Today, the boards have gone. As I padded down the tiles and left my towel on the side, in that self-consciously naked state before the water covers you with a clothing of wet, it was the first thing I noticed. The second thing was that the pool was almost empty. There were some mothers and children in a new shallow pool at one end. That was different, too. It had been one long Olympic-sized facility, and now it was divided into two. Five people were splashing in the deep bit. There were several signs warning against any diving at all, and I sheepishly lowered myself into the water like a Continental invalid and swam to the other end.

  Rebuilding the gantries in my imagination, I then crept around the marks in the tiles where the boards had been, then I swam my twenty lengths and got out. With the familiar blurred chlorine vision and red popping eyeballs. I walked over to the lifeguard, who seemed to be backing away —presumably from the nutcase who had been staring intently at the floor, muttering to himself, twenty minutes before.

  He couldn’t remember when the boards had all gone. ‘Even the flumes were taken out about eight years ago.’ He pointed through the far window, where several hundred feet of intestinal tubing were going green in the drizzle. I had seen them, but not realized that they were no longer attached to any water splash.

  ‘There was a café up there.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘And there were windows here.’ I was only saying this for the sake of completeness. Shamefully, I was pulling old-hand rank.

  ‘No, no, they’ve always been murals. I’ve seen the pictures.’ (Later, I saw the pictures too, downstairs in the lobby He was quite right. They weren’t windows, but they weren’t badly executed murals of palm trees and lagoons either. They were plain, dignified slabs of tiles.) ‘But it’s quiet today,’ I said, sidling after him.

  ‘Well, it’s Friday afternoon, and there aren’t any schools in.

  ‘When I used to come here we all wore different-coloured rubber arm bands and they’d call your section out after an hour.’

  ‘Yes.’ He pointed up at a light and a phone arrangement. ‘It’s not been used for at least five years. We get a hundred and fifty on a busy Saturday, but that’s about it.’ He anticipated my next question, although he was still backing away ‘They get taught it at school, and the fitness centre has a better gym. They’ll be closing this place soon.’

  He didn’t mean it rhetorically. They were closing the place. Harlow was moving on to a new leisure facility. This impressive, clean and modern amenity was as dead as Weston’s sea pool, High Beach or my junior school swimming baths.

  The lifeguard moved away to stand vacantly somewhere else.

  But as I got my towel and went back to the footbath, he suddenly reappeared, as if he hadn’t wanted to leave it at that. ‘It will be one of those corrugated steel warehouse things,’ he said. ‘They’ll never build a lovely pool hall like this again, even though they put it up the wrong way round.’ He was momentarily passionate. ‘Did you know it was supposed to have these windows facing down over the valley and they put it up back to front?’

  But even back to front, it was a magnificent piece of sixties curvy-wurvy architecture. Presumably, it is best to get it pulled down now, fifty years after it was built, before it gets old and features on a television programme and the public clamours to save it and embarrasses the council.

  Perhaps children do get swimming at school. Perhaps they get all their thrills from computer games these days. Or is it just that they’ve taken all the jumping, running and diving excitement out of the place in the name of health and safety? With the money they save on the pool, they will pay for another couple of television adverts warning us all of the dangers of obesity.

  5. What We Did on Our Holidays

  We fussed about presents in our family. As a child I resented the palaver. Pocket money was two shillings a week, but we were expected to save it up and buy proper things for each other; not like my friend Fred down the bottom of the avenue who got away with a Crunchie Bar and a motto. It wasn’t just the money, it was a reflection of our acquisitiveness. Autumn came and I felt permanently on my uppers. Mother in September, my brother in October, a respite for fireworks perhaps, but then the festive season gift budget imposed its demanding burden, and I never had anything spare for my poor, demanding self.

  Elwyn was childish about it all. He would lobby for opening on Christmas Eve. He routinely bought presents for himself, wrapped them, with casual Sellotaping, exposing the underside of the paper and the inside of the gift, and stuck them under the Christmas tree labelled ‘To Daddy from Father Christmas’. This ensured that he got the right drill or the correct shackle or the brass light fitting he craved.

  My mother had to make do. Her ‘big present’, one year, was a paraffin heater for the boat. But she never complained. All the cupidity in my family was left to the boys. Aged nine or so, I bought her something that I thought was strikingly beautiful from a sweet shop. It was a single-stemmed, plastic yellow rose in a conical black metal holder with a wrought-iron bracket to fix it to the wall. And Mummy loved it. If she was only pretending to love it, then she didn’t blink. She even had my father attach it to the wall in the dining room.

  The only crack in the façade came when I went out and bought her an identical one a year later.

  For her eightieth birthday I decided to get at the old films. I guessed they would be in a cardboard box above the garage, where I’d put the rest of the junk she gave me. When my father died in 11989 my mother had hung on in their house until my sister persuaded her it was too big and got her to move to a cottage near by Then she started dumping things on us: wonky bits of navigation equipment, an old telescope and a slightly overbearing Welsh dresser, which the man in the antique shop in Woodbridge said had been made out of twentieth-century packing cases. Since she couldn’t sell it, I had to ‘inherit’ it. But there were other boxes of stuff, like my father’s squiggly cartoons: hundreds of the things. The subject matter was invariably some vaguely misogynist sailing incident, with my squiggly mother failing to pick up a buoy and my squiggly father making some comment in a squiggly speech balloon. Did he have fantasies of publication? In another box there was a detailed breakdown of the plots and cas
ts of a long-cherished project: the sailing club sit-coin. (‘It’s got all the characters, just like Dad’s Army.’) He had grown bored with his work. He told me so. His retirement was full of his self-absorbed private projects, but only for a year or two. He barely made seventy-two.

  Birds had got up into the garage attic because it wasn’t a closed room, just a large shelf open at the eaves to the roof, and there were trails of half-built martin’s nests and a bundle of feathers and spatterings in the darker corner. Two other boxes had photographs and documents; ration books and swimming certificates. One held my mother’s own clipping service, an incomplete and sometimes wholly unflattering selection of articles or reviews about ‘the Suffolk comedian’ (East Anglian Daily Times).A mouse had got in and had begun to make a nest out of them; geometrically cut as if by a miniature shredder. I saw no reason to prevent this creditable recycling. And finally I found the films: some small reels in original Kodak yellow boxes (the yellow of road warnings) and another, in a grey-and-black, specially purchased, plastic box. It must be the long version. My father had spent hours editing these things together.

  I was once close to an old actor. He had been very successful, a leading player in American movies as well as British ones, with an astrakhan-collared coat and a fifties Rolls Royce in the garage. I was talking about old photos with his wife. She looked away ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘we can’t look at old photos … no … it’s too upsetting.’

  Upsetting? I changed the subject. Frightened of intimacy, I assumed something externally disturbing about them. I had read the biography I had seen a picture of them in California by the pool: him, tanned and debonair and dashingly handsome, leaning into the camera with his arms around his boys and a confident smile on his face. Had there been a scandal, some deep rift that photographs would revive?