by Wade, Calvin
“Is Jim playing?”
My Mum would say,
“I am afraid you have come to the wrong house. No-one by that name lives here.”
Jim didn’t raise his head from his Lego.
“Basically this”.
“Fancy going to Park Pool?”
“Now?”
“No, this afternoon.”
“But it’s disco swim on Saturday afternoons. I hate the disco swim”.
Jim at ten was not cool. At twenty, he was cool because he didn’t want to be, nor try to be, but at ten, Jim was square.
“Its not disco swim in the small pool though”.
“Why would we want to go in the baby pool?”
“We’re meeting someone there. Two people actually, one’s little, the other can’t swim.”
“Who?”
“Rachel Cookson and her brother, Barry”.
Jim’s shoulders started to twitch, he then started giggling and eventually he broke out into sustained laughter. Hysterical laughter. He laughed so hard the sound eventually stopped and tears rolled down his cheeks.
“The Hunchback is having a date with Esmeralda in the baby pool! Only babies and toddlers go in that pool, you’ll look ridiculous! You have to be a non-swimmer too! How are you going to get the rubber ring over your hunchback? And Esmerelda’s brother will be there too! What a date!”
“And you”, I said, almost pleading, knowing anger would not help me, “I want you to come too.”
Jim sort of grunted sarcastically.
“I’m not going! There’s no way in the world I’m going on a date with you, Rachel Cookson and her little brother! Not a chance!”
James, despite being an intellectual, had an Achilles heel. He was a money grabber.
“Jim, I’ve got ten pounds in my money box. If you come with me, it’s yours.”
“Richie, you’ve got £12-38. If I come with you, you give me a tenner, you pay for the train and our tickets into Park Pool”.
“Deal”.
“Deal”.
We shook hands and the weirdest foursome in the history of dating were now in place. The afternoon soon came around. If Rachel, Barry, Jim and I were going to be, as I have just said, “The weirdest foursome in the history of dating” then the date itself could accurately be described as “The Worst Date In The History Of The Universe”. Twenty five years on, Jim still reminds me of the infamous date with Rachel and Barry Cookson at Park Pool or in fact to be more accurate, he calls it, “The Infamous Date That Wasn’t With Barry and Rachel Cookson”. For boys, Jim and I had always been pretty sensible and Mum trusted us from about the age of eight to tell her where we were heading and then return back at a time she specified. We, therefore, were pretty much able to play at the park in Winifred Lane whenever we wanted (I did this a lot, Jim didn’t, he’d be stuck at home gluing Airfix models) or head off to friends houses or go on bike rides or whatever we wanted to do. Obviously, there were some boundaries. One Saturday afternoon, Granddad was laid low with the flu and I announced that I’d be fine going to Goodison to watch Everton on my own. Mum didn’t buy into that one, she took me, but spent the whole game saying stupid or irrelevant comments such as,
“The wind is playing havoc with my hair!”
“Did you say Everton are the blue team or the black and whites?”
“What do you mean we aren’t supposed to cheer when the black and whites score, that man with the black perm scored a nice goal! ”
She even put her hands over my ears when the Gwladys Street started chanting a song with an “f ” word included. It was our one and only joint visit to Goodison! Nevertheless, when Jim and I told her we were off on the train to Ormskirk, this was fine. She even gave us the money for the return train fare (36p each) and entrance to the baths (35p each). Jim looked unimpressed with this, as he was looking forward to making a further dent on my financial reserves.
“You pay for the hot chocolates out the machine when we get out then”, he said.
I was OK with that. They were 9p each. Mum had saved me £1-24. From midday, I was impatient to leave and at one o’clock, I literally pushed Jim out the door. We were far too early, Town Green train station was only two minutes walk away, the train came five minutes later, the train journey was less than ten minutes and the walk from Ormskirk station to Park Pool was only five minutes too, so after a quick change into our trunks, we were in the pool by half-one. The “big” pool. The “little” pool, as Jim predicted, was full of young mothers and under twos. We agreed we would change pools at five to.
Jim started annoying me from the start. We went to the deep end and were doing various jumps and dives into the pool and Jim kept saying,
“No, Richie, you do it like this…”
and would then do the crappest dive or biggest belly flop, get out and say,
“See!”
Jim thought he was ten years older than me rather than ten months younger.
My blood, at that stage, just bubbled occasionally under the surface.
Jim was relentlessly antagonising though.
“Do you know why the little pool’s so hot?” he asked, just after correcting my starjump.
“No idea. To keep the babies warm?”
“I doubt it. I reckon its something to do with boiling the water to disinfect the pool. Look at how many babies there are in there! Weeing away happily no doubt. In half an hour’s time we will be swimming in a pool of piss and shit probably!”
I was already nervous. Now I was angry too. I was going to strangle him in a minute. He continued,
”I can’t believe you have arranged a date in there!”
For a ten year old, Jim had an annoyingly smug manner. I knew he was jealous too. No girl with boobs would agree to go on a date with him. As we clung to the side of the deep end, we began to verbally joust.
“Shut up, Jim. At least I’ve got a date.”
“When I get a date, I’ll take her somewhere decent. Not the babypool!”
”Like where, Jim? Like our bedroom so she can help you glue bits on to an Airfix model?”
“At least there’d be no babies in our room, wetting themselves. Unless you were there! Does Rachel Cookson know you’re a bedwetter?”
In our teenage years, Jim learnt when it was time to back off. He would still light the fuse, but would make sure he was standing a thousand yards away by the time I exploded. At ten, he was standing right over the firework, peering down as it sizzled underneath, saying “It’s not going off! It’s not going off!”
I mentioned earlier that prior to important football matches I struggled to sleep. What I didn’t mention was that, when I did get to sleep, I would sleep very heavily, so heavily that sometimes I wouldn’t hear my bladder calling and I would wet the bed. As we shared a room, Jim knew this. Him mentioning this now, just before my first ever date, was below the belt.
“Shut it, Jim!”
He wouldn’t listen.
“Maybe you need to give me another tenner or I’ll tell Rachel Cookson why you have to go in the bottom bunk!”
This was the final straw. As soon as he finished the sentence, I let go of the side of the pool, bent my right arm straight back, clenched my fist and catapulted it straight into his smug little face. I caught him square on the nose.
“Owww!” he yelped.
He was about to hold his nose, then thought better of it and lunged at me instead. He was a rubbish fighter and not the greatest swimmer either, so we sort of thrashed around manically, trying to stay afloat whilst wrestling and throwing in a few weak punches. Halfway through our synchronised brawl, Jim’s nose started bleeding. We kept on wrestling though, oblivious to the fact that we looked like shark attack victims. A lot of kids around us got out to watch and eventually the DJ of the disco swim turned the music off. The first time we became aware that our water wrestling had become a spectator sport was when we heard the shrill sound of a whistle.
“You two! OUT!”
&nbs
p; We looked up and about fifty kids were watching us, as well as a very angry looking lifeguard.
“Out!”
We clambered out sheepishly and were then frogmarched out the pool with my left ear in the lifeguard’s right hand and Jim’s right ear in the lifeguard’s left. The lifeguard took us to the changing rooms, gave us the biggest rollocking I have ever had, about safety in the water and told us that he had worked there for fifteen years and had yet to witness anything quite like this. He also said that if he ever clapped eyes on us in the next fifteen years, he would strap us to a rock and throw us to the bottom of the deep end. Needless to say, for the rest of our childhood, we didn’t return. Twelve months later, Mum booked us in for swimming lessons and we paid Helen to phone up, pretend she was Mum and cancel them. Mum booked them and we cancelled them about four times before she told them they were “hopelessly inadequate” and booked us in Skem baths instead. Twenty years later, when I took my own kids swimming at Park Pool, the first thing I did before I got in the water, was check that lifeguard wasn’t still there!
With my adrenalin pumping from the fight and the rollocking, my thoughts did not return to Rachel Cookson until we were turfed out the front entrance. Just as we hit the pavement, Ormskirk Parish Church bells tolled for two o’clock and Jim could not help himself saying,
“The Bells! The Bells!”
I administered a quick kick between Jim’s legs but did not stay around long enough to see whether he shouted “The Balls! The Balls!”, as I was running around Park Pool, into Coronation Park, to the glass window round the back, where you could see into the swimming baths. When I peered in, all I could see were a load of happy teenagers in the “big pool” and a lifeguard who was blowing his whistle more than a referee in a Merseyside derby. My date had finished before it had begun. I went back round to the front, picked a tearful Jim up off the pavement and headed home.
Halfway to Ormskirk train station, we started scrapping again. Once again, it was Jim’s fault. Nursing a sore nose and aching testicles, you would have thought he would think before he spoke, but he just kept opening that smug gob! I was walking to the station distraught, I knew I probably wouldn’t ever get a chance for a date with Rachel Cookson again and for all I knew, maybe no girl would ever touch me with a bargepole if they thought I had deliberately stood Rachel up. I decided I would try to repair the damage at school on Monday with a grovelling apology, but just as I was deciding what to say, Jim still dabbing his nose with a tissue, piped up with a,
“I still want that tenner, Richie”.
Jim’s nose bled worse second time around!
Patience was not a virtue I possessed. I couldn’t wait until Monday as Rachel would have had to spend forty eight hours trying to figure out what had happened to me, which just wasn’t right. I woke up on Sunday morning, full of remorse, not for my three separate attacks on Jim, he deserved more than he got. He knew it too, because when we got home, Mum spotted that his nose was bloodied and he said he had been looking for his train ticket in his pocket and had walked into a lamppost! My remorse was for letting Rachel down.
The tenner I had refused to give Jim was now put to use (part of it, anyway). I took that crisp, brown and pink note out my moneybox and headed down to Mitchells Mace, the local convenience store and bought Rachel a box of orange Matchmakers. I then trudged the two miles to her house, in the pouring rain, only to find that she wasn’t in. I had forgotten her family were churchgoers, so would no doubt be out until lunchtime. I managed to find a pencil in my jeans pocket, scribbled, “Sorry Rachel” on the Matchmakers box, left them in the porch and headed home. At least on the way home, the clouds parted and the sun came out, so I was able to dry off in the sunshine and started to feel good about myself again.
On the Monday at school, Rachel and I kept an embarrassed distance apart. I discovered from third party sources that Barry and Rachel had witnessed the concluding scenes of the ear grabbing incident from the safety of the little pool. Rachel had also arrived home from church on Sunday, to find a box of melted Matchmakers in their sunny porch! Apparently, she still thought I was “nice” but had decided I was probably “too immature” for her. No doubt she was right!
It took me another three years to arrange another date, again it was a group event, this time with Emilia Laudrup. Her father was Danish and the boys nicknamed her “Danish Dynamite”, she was a real sweetheart, fair haired, blue eyed and had the boys wrapped around her little finger. It, therefore, appeared to be a major triumph when she agreed to go to the Astra cinema in Maghull with me to see “Mask”. When I arrived at the bus stop to meet her though, she had invited half the girls in our class and Katie Robertson sat in between us during the film. The gap between Emilia and I turned out to be a blessing as I cried my eyes out when Rocky Dennis died at the end! We didn’t date again, although I did phone her up a few times to ask, but it was in that uncomfortable phase when my voice was breaking, resulting in my tones varying between Olive Oil and Barry White, so I had lost my nerve well before popping the “date” question. I soon gave up on Emilia Laudrup and two further unsuccessful years followed. All in all, it can safely be said that before I reached sixteen, my love life was either non-existent or a complete disaster! I remember thinking on my sixteenth birthday, though, that the tide was turning. For some bizarre reason, the image of King Canute sitting on his throne, on the beach, as the incoming tide splashed around him, now springs to mind!
Jemma
3.25 p.m. The bell rang. The weekend had arrived! One thousand one hundred excited pupils made a dash for the exits and spilt out onto Mill Street and Ruff Lane. One thousand and ninety nine did anyway. The solitary other one trudged up the stairs in “A” block and once again knocked on CC’s office door.
“Enter!” Déjà vu.
CC’s office was bleak. It had a very high ceiling and the windows were high up too, so you couldn’t see anything when you looked out of them other than sky. I noticed it was raining. Apt.
CC sat me down, lectured me about irresponsible behaviour, told me it had no place in modern society and then gave me a line that she wanted me to write out five hundred times. It was, “Chewing The Cud Is An Activity Best Left to Cows In The Field.”
I looked at her, confused.
“Miss, why do I have to write this, miss? I wasn’t chewing gum!”
“No, you weren’t, were you! That was Julie Loughlin, wasn’t it?
That was lunchtime detention. You were carving your name on to a desk, weren’t you?”
“Off, miss. Carving my name off, miss!”
Small point but it needed re-iterating.
“OK, Watkinson, you can write this…Acts of wanton vandalism are
unacceptable at Ormskirk Grammar School and all methods should be
used to prevent their escalation”. CC said it slow enough for me to write
it down, but she looked very proud of herself after she dictated it.
“How many times, miss?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She obviously misunderstood me. Perhaps she thought I was asking her how many times she’d had sex. I didn’t need to ask that, the answer was obvious.
“How many times do I need to write that line, miss?”
“Five hundred.”
“That’s not fair, miss! “Chewing the cud is an activity best left to cows in the field” only has, (I counted them on my fingers), thirteen words, miss and they’re short words.
“Acts of wanton vandalism are unacceptable at Ormskirk Grammar School and all methods should be used to prevent their escalation has (again I counted) twenty words and they’re long words, most of them.”
CC was not one for turning. No doubt Mrs. Thatcher was her hero. She gave a political answer.
“Miss Watkinson, punishments must fit the crime. Chewers get thirteen words, those who vandalise desks get twenty words. That seems fine to me, does it not seem fine to you?”
I should have shut up and jus
t got on with it, but I couldn’t help myself.
“I think chewers are worse, miss. You can get chewing gum all over your skirt when they stick it under the desk, miss. If someone carves something on the desk, miss, it can’t ruin your skirt.”
“Watkinson, do you think we live in a democracy?”
“Yes, miss.”
“And in a democracy can people give their opinions without fear of repercussions?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Well you’re wrong, Watkinson! You only live in a democracy outside of school hours! Society may well be democratic, but this school is not! Pupils should not be spouting their views off to teachers in this school, they should just accept whatever punishment comes their way. To prove to you that this isn’t a democracy, you can now do six hundred lines. Only once you have completed this task, can you go home and I don’t care if that means we are here until midnight!”
I kept my mouth shut after that. Half of me knew CC was right. I was a gobby little know-all who had got what was coming to her. I needed to knuckle down, do my lines, then get out of there.
It took me three hours, my hand ached, but by half past six, I was done.
“Finished miss!”
“All six hundred, Watkinson?”
I don’t think she wanted to be left on her own. A spinster’s life is, I would imagine, a lonely one.
“Yes, miss”.
“Off you go then. Enjoy your party, but be careful, boys these days cannot be trusted”.
Never a truer word spoken.
“Ok miss. Have a nice weekend, miss!”
Off I ran. Why I was exchanging pleasantries with CC, I have no idea. She had just given me the longest detention in history. As I was going down the stairs, I was half-expecting Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter to spring out on me and tell me I was a “Record Breaker”!
When I got to the exit by “B” block, it was absolutely pouring down. Amy lived in Calder Avenue, which was at least a mile from school, it was dark and I had no coat and no umbrella. I knew I was going to get soaked but I ran like Mary Decker (except I didn’t fall over a barefooted South African), all the way to her house. I reckon it took me less than four minutes, I had visions of Roger Bannister, in his prime, trying but failing to keep up with me and shouting as he toiled behind me,
