Learning to Swim in the 1980s Part 2
- The Time Chair
- Jul 17
- 8 min read
I have the utmost empathy and compassion for the one in three adults in the UK who can’t swim. What is often thought of as a natural, enjoyable past time and a symbol of holiday frivolity, is for many a living nightmare. This was certainly the case for me in1986. Back then, a typical summer school break would be a mixture of sports, street games, adventure and long humid nights when you’d leave the bedroom windows open and sleep with only the sheets covering you. But following my humiliation in the final swimming session of the school term, I wouldn’t be engaging in any of those activities. I had one goal and only one goal that summer. I had to learn how to swim.
Once the school term had ended, the very next day I went to the baths and asked about joining their swimming club. I was told that membership cost £7 per-week, which was beyond my budget, but as I was about to leave, the receptionist mentioned a monthly swimming pass I could buy for £4.30 which would permit me to swim any day I wished, but only for 45-minutes. I quickly worked out that if I put my trunks on under my trousers that I could get changed in well under 2-minutes, and drying would take about 3-minutes which would leave me about 40-minutes pool time. After speaking to my mum, she said that she would buy a pass for me on the proviso that I used it. I agreed to the terms and purchased my first monthly swimming pass.
Now school summer holidays in the 1980s were often a time when you messed your sleeping up. You’d stay up late playing Frogger or Horace Goes Skiing on your Spectrum 48k computer, and would lounge in bed in the morning until about 9:30am when the Wide Awake Club was already well underway. The swimming baths however, would open a lot earlier, but for the first couple of hours they would be populated mostly by wrinkled old people who would swim length after length, presumably in an effort to stay healthy for as long as possible to get the most out of their state pension.
With my new swimming pass at the ready, I made the decision to get up very early during the holidays. This would ensure that none of my friends who might have wanted to go swimming at say 10 or 11-o-clock would see me thrashing about and coming up with lame excuses to stay in the shallow end. It was a top secret and very personal thing for me at the time. It was a nemesis that had virtually destroyed me without any mercy whatsoever. There were three levels of swimming certificate you could get at school, and I’d seen hundreds of pupils awarded them in assemblies. I hadn’t even got my Level 1 certificate, and I wasn’t far off going to high school.
On my first early-morning visit to the baths, I was greeted with what I expected. Ten or so old people swimming countless lengths. It seemed effortless to them. There was no bombing, screaming or thrashing about, just graceful, well-timed strokes. Some of the swimmers were clearly overweight, and yet they moved through the water with considerable ease.
"It can't be anything to do with how heavy you are," I thought to myself.
After weighing up the carefully-choreographed swimmers, I entered the shallow end and decided it would be best for me to stay next to the side wall. Not only would this mean that I wouldn’t get in the way of any of the swimmers, it also meant that if I got into difficultly, then I could simply grab hold of the brass rail which ran the full perimeter of the pool.
My first task was to sort out my Doggy-paddle. I bobbed my way to the edge of the shallow end until the tip of my toes could still just about touch the bottom of the pool. Ensuring that the brass bar was easily within reach, I began my paddle back towards the shallow end wall. The technique was awkward to say the least. My arms were scooping the water in a similar way to a Polar bear I’d seen on an episode of Wildlife on One, but my legs were moving like a frog’s. I didn’t know what Breaststroke was at the time, but that didn’t matter. I was moving forward and there was no splashing or thrashing about. With the brass bar at my side which I grabbed once or twice, I reached the shallow end wall with little commotion. Encouraged by my success, I repeated the distance of about 6-metres two more times before sitting on the shallow end steps.
“I can swim,” I thought to myself. “I look ridiculous; but I can swim.” It then occurred to me that my feet hadn’t touched the floor of the pool throughout the duration of my paddle. This meant that whilst I was swimming, I was only using the top metre or so of the water, and it didn’t matter how many millions of feet were below that. I know this might seem crazy to read as an adult, but at the time it was a revelation. Water depth had always been at the core of my fear, but if you can swim in water that's only a metre deep, then everything below that doesn’t really matter.
I set my gaze a couple of metres beyond the shallow end marker. I knew that the water went from four to five feet there so I wouldn’t be able to touch the bottom with my toes with my face still above surface. After another moment sizing it up, I bobbed once more to the edge of the shallow end. I then grabbed hold of the brass bar, lifted my knees to my chest, and tentatively pulled my way along it a further two or three metres. Whilst keeping a firm grip on the bar, I stretched my legs downwards. There was no pool floor to be found. This was it. This was the moment. If I let go of the bar now and did what I'd done before, there was no reason why I couldn’t stay in the top metre of the water. Knowing that the bar was at my side and that the only other people in the pool were all old and unlikely to laugh at me, I gently pushed off, and Doggy-paddled for home.
After ten seconds of forward motion, I knew that the pool floor was there should I need it. But I didn’t. Spurred on by my first middle of the pool swim, I powered to the finish line in record time. Overwhelmed at my success, I quickly progressed to three-quarters of the way along the bar. Read that again. Three-quarters! This was basically the deep end. I followed the exact same process and achieved the same outcome. Then finally, on the very first day of using my monthly swimming pass, I proudly walked my skinny frame down those deep end steps once more, only this time, there was no bleating crowd, no yelling instructor, and no plastic hoop.
Brimming with confidence, instead of opting to stay close to the side bar, I grabbed hold of the end bar. I then raised my knees to my chest like before as if adopting some sort of foetal position, and pulled myself a full five metres towards the middle of the deep end wall. The lane in front of me was empty. I was going to swim a full length of the pool with nothing to hold on to and no side bar insurance policy. I could feel the raw power of the deep end beneath my feet, but its demeanour seemed to have changed. A week prior there was no doubt in my mind that it wanted to kill me, and it didn't seem particularly bothered at the prospect. But this time...and this is difficult to convey, it was as if it wanted to...to help me?
I only needed the top one metre of the water, and in reality, I only had to swim three-quarters of a length because I could touch the shallow end floor with my toes if I needed to. After steadying my breathing and checking where the lifeguard was positioned, I let go of the brass bar and pushed my feet hard against the deep end wall. No going back! As I launched forward my arms were already rotating, only this time the scoops were far more powerful and were shifting a lot more water. I wanted to clear the deep end as quickly as possible, but after a few seconds into the paddle, I realised I wasn't sinking and immediately calmed my scoops.
"I'm not sinking," I called out as loud as I could in my head.
At that moment, I became vividly aware that all of the pool walls were way out of reach, and I might as well had been in the middle of the ocean. But I wasn’t sinking, and I was still moving forwards. As I approached the middle of the pool, I realised I was as far away from every wall as I could possibly be, and as they retreated, they took with them all of the fear and humiliation I had endured over the years whenever I’d had to don a pair of swimming trunks.
As I approached the shallow end wall and realised that I was about to compete my first-ever swimming length, as in, "This is definitely happening," of its own accord, my mouth stretched wide. But it wasn't a smile nor a strain, it a was a primitive grimace accompanied by unquantifiable emotion. I touched the shallow end wall and immediately turned around to face what I had just accomplished. Tragedy cross-faded into comedy in an instant, and before me was no longer 1000 tons of evil wanting to devour me, but instead, a glistening playground which was laughing joyfully with me, rather than at me. No crowds and no witnesses. Just me.
In the following days and weeks I continued to visit the swimming baths early in the morning. As my confidence improved, I eventually reached the point where I could jump into the water and fully submerge. I then started attempting to dive in, off the steps at first, but eventually off the side. I can’t tell you how proud I felt not being allowed to dive in the shallow end. You were only allowed to dive in the middle or the deep end. My first few attempts were flat out belly flops, and my swimming style was still on a par with a polar bear combined with a frog. But I didn’t give a damn. I could swim. Then one sunny morning when the monthly limit of my swimming pass was nearing its end, two of the regular elderly swimmers (a man and a women) called me over and asked me what I was doing (they must have thought I was training for a circus act or something).
I explained my whole situation to them, and they both said something along the lines of, “Why didn’t you tell us this weeks ago? We would have sorted you out.” Then the women offered to teach me a proper swimming stroke, and the man said he would teach me how to dive. By the end of the final week of that summer holiday, I was proficient at both.
Upon my return to school, I completed my Levels 1, 2 and 3 in swimming in consecutive weeks. I recovered the rubber-clad brick from the bottom of the deep end whilst wearing my pyjamas with no problems at all. The laughter of my peers ceased, and I finally received my swimming certificates in assembly.
Those two elderly people will now be long gone, and I will forever be in debt to them. I am now an exceptionally strong swimmer and can cover the full length of a swimming pool... under water...with no plastic hoop. But the main message I have for any of you who can relate to this story, is that sometimes in life it is necessary to remove yourself from the crowds in order to achieve something important, and that the solution to many of our problems can often come in ways we least expect and from sources outside of our inner circle.
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