by Roger Deakin
When swimmers talk of fast or slow water, this is the sort of thing they mean. The absence of wavelets, or other bathers, means you can breathe and move in perfect rhythm, so the music takes over. Mind and body go off somewhere together in unselfconscious bliss, and the lengths seem to swim themselves. The blood sings, the water yields; you are in a state of grace, and every breath gets deeper and more satisfying. You hunker down and bury yourself in the water as though you have lived in it all your life, as though you were born to it, and thoughts come lightly and easily as you swing up and down in the blue. The sublime word ‘swimmingly’ is born of such moments: so is the Greek word ekstasis, root of ‘ecstasy’, which means simply to be outside your own body – exactly the state you achieve in a cold-water swim. If you tread on air on your way from the pool, it is because you are floating somewhere just above your corporeal self.
The beauty of a swimming pool is in its graphic simplicity, framing the contrasting, exquisite complexity of the snaking, opalescent mosaic of wave-forms projected on the bottom. What you are seeing is changing so fast your eye can never quite catch up with it. In every way you are dazzled. It is not water you perceive so much as light, and how water can play with it. We all look at pools differently since David Hockney. Where Courbet paints a wave, Hockney paints a splash, or the play of a hose on a lawn. His pools are erotic and innocent at the same time, just like real swimming pools.
There is, too, an affinity between pools and lawns. Both are simulations of nature, with the one essential ingredient – wildness – carefully filtered out. They resemble life, but they are not alive. The lawn has been reduced to a single species; the pool-water neutered. Both are great status symbols. Producers sit by ‘the pool’ in Los Angeles reading scripts. The President stands on the White House lawn. Pools and lawns make continual demands on labour for their maintenance. In California, once you have ‘the pool’, you then have to employ your pool man to fish out leaves and maintain it. Both make enormous demands on water resources and chemicals. In America, the hissing of sprinklers on summer lawns is a major environmental problem, and so is the demand for fresh pool-water. In all these respects, a lawn, or a private pool, is like a motor car.
Yet swimming pools are also deeply atavistic places. You notice it the moment you come through the turnstile. The screaming is just on the border between terror and ecstasy. You hear something like it when you let children loose with a hosepipe on the lawn. In the pool the impulse to make noise is a kind of acoustic graffiti, a response to the echoing brightness of your voice carried on the blank wall of humid air, a collective howl of relief at the casting-off of clothes, and the constraints they imply. That is why, I suppose, swimming pools are so full of arcane rules, enforced by the ear-piercing whistle of the lifeguard.
I worked as a lifeguard one summer at the Wealdstone open-air pool, just along the road from the Railway Tavern where the Who put in some of their earliest performances. The pool is still there, lying empty, as it has for the past five years since it was sold off by the council to a company called Relaxion. All the open-air pools of my youth have met the same fate. The Kingsbury pool, a few miles away, became a riding school, then a garden centre. The Mill Hill pool seemed to disappear without trace. The Finchley Road pool sank under a department store. There is no longer swimming at Ruislip Lido. At Kenilworth, where Uncle Laddie taught me to swim, there is still a small open-air pool beside the newer indoor pool, but it is a token travesty of its former glory.
The smell of bleach on damp concrete in the Parliament Hill changing cubicles took me straight back to the Wealdstone Baths. We would arrive at seven o’clock, half an hour before the early swimmers, to clean out the pool with an antique aquatic hoover, and, worst of all, scrub out the cubicles and toilets. As a low-caste lifeguard, it fell to me to spend the first hour of every day with a clanking pailful of bleach and a long-handled brush that perpetually moulted its bristles in the powerful alkali. From these dank, shadowed places, I had to remove the sputum, bubblegum, deliquescent wine-gums, and the floored wet towels and trunks. More important still to Fred, the Channel-swimming superintendent from whom I took my orders, was my additional task: with scrubbing brush and pail, I paced the rows of gloomy cubicles on graffiti patrol. The superintendent wanted his pool to be spotless in mind, too.
Each cubicle was a cave, in whose unaccustomed privacy the occupant could give way to the same primitive urges that had caused them to scream in the pool, and regress to the cave-man inside them, inscribing the dark mahogany walls with depictions of their objects of desire just as their ancestors did at Lascaux. Where the Lascaux artists drew their animal quarry, Wealdstone Man or Boy scratched primitive versions of genitalia, both male and female. They were never whole people or bodies, always disembodied parts, like scalps or hunting trophies: the fox’s tail, the otter’s pad, the stag’s antler. Wealdstone Woman or Girl was, if anything, more active inside her damp confessional. Many of these naive works of art were impossible for me to erase completely, so that an interesting layered effect, like a collage, had built up over the years; each cubicle a chronicle of desire, a Lonely Parts club.
Fred, the superintendent, used to train Channel swimmers, and they would arrive for an early session each day, covering miles each week, goaded on by his gruff exhortations from a kneeling position at the shallow end. He was responsible for another open pool, on the hill at Harrow, and sometimes my colleague Roy and I would be sent to work some shifts up there. It, too, is now extinct, but it was a beautiful pool, with a lawn, a candyfloss stall and high boards. Early mornings were best, when the pool was perfectly still and each click of the iron turnstile echoed across to the diving boards, while the sun made small rainbows in the fine spray as we hosed down the paving. Schoolmasters from Harrow used to come regularly for an early swim, well away from the boys, and one always paced round and round the pool reading the Telegraph. Fred remained in the office by the turnstile or was away at Wealdstone, and we lifeguards had our own shed, with a sunny bench outside, on which I read the whole of Middlemarch and most of Dombey and Son. I dreaded having to save somebody in case I failed, and although I think I helped a few people out of mild difficulties, I certainly didn’t save any lives. But I noticed that if anyone was ever in trouble, Roy would suddenly find some grit in his eye, or just disappear into the hut. Once oiled up for sunbathing, he didn’t like to get wet.
I soon discovered that our hut was the headquarters of the local underworld, where the candyfloss concessionaire and his league of gentlemen would plan crimes at the level of nocturnal cigarette robberies from the local cinema. Roy and I would be invited politely to vacate the hut on such occasions, and never grassed on our affable underworld chums. I always thought they would have been wiser to hold their discussions in the pool. They would never have been overheard above the general din.
Visits to the swimming pool in the fifties and sixties were always accompanied by anxiety about diseases, especially polio whenever there was an outbreak, and verrucas. There were steel baskets for your clothes, a Brylcreem machine on the way out, and Wagon Wheels, Penguins and Bovril at the café. And always, everywhere, boys shivering. On swimming days at school the smell of wet togs pervaded the classroom, the dampness seeping through to smudge the ink in the exercise books in our satchels.
At least we had togs. At a friend’s school, non-swimmers had to bathe in a state of nature, graduating to trunks only when they learned to swim. At Dunhurst, the Bedales prep school, it used to be compulsory for boys and girls to swim naked together up to the age of twelve, when they graduated to the upper school. Many of the girls were by that age highly nubile, and male friends who were there during the late forties and early fifties remember suffering agonies of embarrassment when the swimming lesson came to an end and it was time to climb out. To the apparent puzzlement of the PE teacher, whole rows of tumescent boys would hide in the pool while these young women, no longer girls at all, slipped back into their clothes. Daniel Defoe docu
mented the essentially erotic nature of the swimming bath in this description of mixed bathing in the ‘Cross-Bath’ at Bath in 1724:
Here the ladies and gentlemen pretend to keep some distance, and each to their proper side, but frequently mingle here too, as in the King and Queens Bath, though not so often; and the place being but narrow, they converse freely, and talk, rally, make vows, and sometimes love; and having thus amused themselves an hour, or two, they call their chairs and return to their lodgings.
I went straight from the people’s pool at Parliament Hill Fields to the top people’s pool in Pall Mall. The suave, silken waters I was to encounter that evening were several degrees above the lido in every sense. There is a fine pool in the orangery at Buckingham Palace, frequented mostly by Princess Margaret and members of the royal household, but my request to swim there had been politely refused. I biked down from Chalk Farm to the Royal Automobile Club at 97 Pall Mall carrying my swimming gear in my usual grey canvas rucksack. The porter lifted it slightly at arm’s length when I left it at the cloakroom, and deposited it alongside rows of neat black attaché cases. The building is large and stately, and leaves no one in any doubt that the motor car stands squarely at the centre of power and influence in the land. I hiked across the palatial lobby and met my host, Michael, a lawyer with whom I had spent a chaotic few days in Brittany helping press cider a couple of years earlier. He uses the club several times a week, stopping off on his way home to Mayfair. He also plays a regular Saturday morning game of squash here.
I had heard about the magnificent swimming bath and steam rooms, and had once seen the pool on film in Paul Watson’s classic documentary about the new morality under Margaret Thatcher, The Fishing Party. When we met the head waiter on the stairs, he insisted on taking us down into the basement to show us the club’s avant-garde purification plant. The water is treated in the French way, with ozone instead of chlorine, so the pool is a far more benign environment. The system does away with the ravages of chlorine, producing water that is non-corrosive of the eyes, sinuses, hair or skin. I was impatient for the swim, but first we popped our heads round the doors of the Turkish baths. Towelled male figures, observing a rule of silence, lay reading on reclining chairs or gently perspiring on beds in mahogany-panelled cubicles.
The long, green pool was a magnificent high-ceilinged Byzantine affair, all turquoise mosaic pillars and wide terrazzo floors. The pool was edged with marble and a fine spray of tepid water played on the surface at the shallow end. The pillars sparkled with a serpentine brilliance and there was a Roman opulence about the place. We could have been in Herculaneum or one of Diocletian’s spas. There were two paths of decking around the pool; green if you were in shoes, and blue for bare feet. As in the Turkish baths, the atmosphere was quiet and contemplative, and there were swimmers of both genders. There was plenty of room to swim up and down and converse. Michael and I discussed the cooking of eels, sea swims in Cornwall, mud baths in Pyrenean spas, and his early attempts to swim in the Bolton public baths. It made all the difference that the pool was brimful, overflowing at the gunwales into subtle gratings in the pool surround. This created a feeling of freedom, and a pleasing architectural unity. You felt less like a goldfish in a bowl.
The interesting thing was how quiet it was; we could talk in quite normal tones. Besides the welcome absence of chlorine, the princely water was just the right temperature. One or two of the older members sat in deckchairs by the pool watching the swimmers and nodding off. On the way out, we tossed our trunks into a miniature spin-dryer, passed through the Long Room round a huge table spread with newspapers, and made for the comfort of the Long Bar, where, on a leather sofa before an open fire, we sipped beer. I can think of worse ways to follow up a swim.
Next morning I took the Northern Line from Chalk Farm to Tooting Bec, and walked across Tooting Common to ‘the Bec’, the Tooting Bec Lido. Its sheer size amazed me. It is a hundred yards long and a hundred feet wide, so you only need swim seventeen lengths to cover a mile. No wonder the Channel swimmers and triathletes come here for long-distance training. This is easily the biggest pool in London. The next thing I noticed was the brightly-coloured rows of Rastafarian cubicle doors. Red, yellow, green they went, all along the poolside, and the colours danced on the water. A fountain glistened like ice at the far end in front of the pool café. I was welcomed with a cup of tea by some of the South London Swimming Club members who run the lido. The friendly, almost family feeling of the place, and everyone’s dedication to it, were immediately apparent.
The club dates back to 1906, when the original pool was dug and built by 400 unemployed men. With over 500 members, including the 200 women of the Bec Mermaids, it must be one of the strongest and most enterprising bands of swimmers in the country. In 1991, when the pool was threatened with closure over the winter months, they asserted themselves passionately, and negotiated with Wandsworth Council to take over the running of the lido off-season. The South Londoners are enthusiastic cold-water swimmers, even breaking the ice if necessary to swim a width, and always racing on New Year’s Day and Christmas Day. (The 1995 ladies’ event was won by Yvonne Wood at the age of seventy-three.) If the pool temperature is four degrees centigrade or more, they swim two widths. If it is under four, they swim one. About 50 people a day swim all through winter, and on hot summer days there can be as many as 6,000 here.
The pool was about thirty degrees colder than at the Royal Automobile Club, and I was much impressed by the hardiness of the other swimmers, some of them obviously long-distance freestylers in training, who seemed hardly to notice the chill. I never worry too much about being outnumbered by crawl swimmers when I’m breaststroking up and down the lanes, but in Australia, as Ken Worpole relates in his book Staying Close to the River, it is apparently not the done thing for men to swim breaststroke. On a first visit to Australia and its swimming pools, he began to notice that he was invariably the only man doing the breaststroke, and asked why. His host, a sociologist, said, ‘You should understand, Ken, that in Australia, swimming strokes are deeply gendered.’
‘I need a good steam-up,’ says one of the characters in Nell Dunn’s play Steaming. Feeling the same way after the Tooting Bec dip, I emerged from the Underground at Old Street and walked over to the Ironmonger Row Turkish Baths, Dunn’s original inspiration for the play. Unlike the Trappist steam rooms at the RAC Clubhouse, Ironmonger Row was a proper talking shop. We all trailed big white towels about with us, courtesy of the management, like Romans. As I entered the steam room, an invisible Irishman was holding the floor with a series of jokes. We must have looked like a strikingly cosmopolitan version of David Hockney’s picture of the nude Oz trial defendants, Richard Neville & Co., as we sat side by side in the humid fug. There is room in the steam room for about eight people to sit, perhaps ten at a squeeze. We sat facing each other in rows, like labourers being driven to work in the back of a transit van, or nude commuters in the tube. Steam rises up from beneath, through the wooden slats. Every so often, invisible bellows puff fresh clouds of vapour into the dripping obscurity, and conversation begins, or somebody tells a joke. Then there is silence, punctuated by spontaneous utterances from out of the mists, whose precise origin is sometimes hard to determine. All you can make out are dim pink or black shapes.
The anonymity and equality of nakedness in blind steam appears to be a liberating influence. It is like a Quaker meeting, but freely hedonistic. Everyone is busy soaping themselves, or applying unguents. John, the Irishman with all the jokes, says to his neighbour, ‘Try some of this; it’s an exfoliant. Smoothes your skin.’ A young bike-courier opposite has the kind of corrugated-iron stomach muscles you rarely see outside a jeans advertisement. John asks him, ‘Is it true you can never get a six-pack if you drink, even if it’s only on Saturday nights?’ There follows a detailed discussion of the techniques and conditions for the acquisition of a six-pack, while in the hottest corner at the end opposite the door, a tall Tunisian soaps himself repeatedly fr
om head to foot, muttering incantations. Nobody can tell whether it’s religious or obsessive, and nobody minds.
People come and go, moving ritually between the steam, the shower, the cold plunge and the caldarium, enjoying the quite wild feelings that come with such extremes. At the RAC pool there had been giant chrome sunflower showerheads. Here, there were marble massage tables by the showers, where a group of black garage-workers stood and lounged, gossiping loudly about their friends over the hiss and splash of the hot water: ‘He’s got a good woman and plenty of cars, but he’s still on his way to blow it all up, and he knows it, says it’s his destiny. You can see it in his eyes; he’s not got himself under control.’
The plunge pool is monumentally, outrageously, cold, down stone steps into a deep cauldron of pain that will turn to the sweetest pleasure in the imminent caldarium. A huge brass cold tap is turned full on, gushing an icy waterfall of mains water straight from under the cold streets of Shoreditch and Hackney over your head and shoulders. You are in one of the hidden rivers of London.
In the past, a great many people in Islington and Hackney used to rely on the public baths for their ablutions and laundry. Now, the emphasis is more on pleasure and fitness, although a fair proportion of the men in the baths were busy shaving, shampooing their hair, or getting super-clean. I have no doubt that this sort of experience should be much more widely available, simply because it is so very good for you. Water treatment in spas or health farms can be enormously beneficial as curative medicine, but surely its richest potential lies in preventative medicine. Hot-water bathing is a central part of Japanese culture, and the Sento, the bath house, used to be found in most neighbourhoods. There aren’t so many left these days, but they are still highly popular, especially with working people, and, more recently, younger people. Visitors to Japan often imagine that the excessive heat of a Japanese bath – sometimes as high as fifty centigrade – is proof that the Japanese are genetically predisposed to bearing high temperatures. In fact, it is a matter of acclimatisation, and I am told it can be an exhilarating experience as you move freely between very hot and very cold baths. The culture of the bath house is about getting used to an extreme so that it becomes the norm. Whether it is worthwhile depends on whether you believe hot water can deliver a higher mental and physical pleasure. The cleansing is just as useful as the soothing and the stimulation for the renewal of the urban soul.
