Semi-Detached (11 page)

‘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 boys 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.