‘it mixes warmth with anger and compels and engages at the same time’ Guardian ‘thoroughly researched and informative, full of strong opinion and sound judgment, but the joy of her book is the spiky, mischievous writing that knits it together.’ The Sunday Times ‘blissful’ The Times ‘Jenny Landreth’s tale of the swimming suffragettes is a wonderful account of lost stories from the canon of women’s sports history… Landreth’s book brings these stories to the mainstream.’ Anna Kessel ‘If you love swimming you’ll love this. If you hate swimming, you’ll still love this. From over-upholstered matrons gingerly climbing down the steps of wheeled bathing huts, to young girls swimming jawdropping distances up the Thames, this captivating book bowls along with wit and charm.’ Jo Brand ‘A brilliantly funny book that made me feel part of a proud and intrepid community of amphibian women.’ Josie Long ‘If this marvellous watery odyssey charting women’s swimming history doesn’t make you want to jump in, I will eat my woollen bikini.’ Doon Mackichan ‘A wry and inspiring mix of memoir and social history’ Melissa Harrison ‘As we jump into the waves with glee, Jenny Landreth asks us to consider ‘‘swimming suffragettes’’ who kicked hard for change in the once maledominated world of swimming, less than 100 years ago. Written through the prisms of memoir and social history, it’s the quest for equality that rises to the top of a poignant narrative.’ Coast ‘Billed as being the true story of the ‘swimming suffragettes’, this book – both funny and informative – follows the fearless women who battled for access to beaches, pools and lakes, and reveals the author’s own ‘‘waterbiography’’.’ Townswoman Magazine ‘Swell has the air of one long stand-up routine, a larky dash through the modern history of female swimmers.’ New Statesman
‘Curl up with the empowering story of the heroines who made swimming possible for women. Swell by Jenny Landreth is a must-read.’ Women’s Fitness ‘A lighthearted, conversational history, with emphasis on the challenges women once faced just getting in the water, and the “swimming suffragettes” who defied genteel disapproval to claim the right to do so.’ Guardian ‘Swell interweaves Landreth’s own story with a history of female pioneers, “swimming suffragettes” who accomplished remarkable feats and paved the way for future generations … She is at her best writing about swimmers past, and has done a thorough job of interviewing other swimmers.’ Economist ‘Landreth’s writing is accessible and down to earth, with wonderful asides.’ The Times Literary Supplement ‘Whereas the idea of diving into a pool seems like a great way to escape the heat, in the 19th century swimming was exclusively the domain of men and it wasn’t until the 1930s that women were granted equal access to pools. Swell is the story of the women who made that possible, capturing the achievements and world of women’s secret swimming.’ YAWN ‘The fearless women known as “swimming suffragettes” are celebrated in this wonderful book charting feminism and social history through the 19th and early-20th centuries.’ Sunday Herald ‘With examples of swimming heroines and some truly bizarre swimming cossies plus the story of how the author learned to swim, Swell will make you want to plunge straight in.’ Red ‘Jenny Landreth is a wonderful and hilarious writer, so this is in no way a stuffy account of historic events. She includes her own history of swimming, the 2012 Olympics, the developments in swimwear and, in her own unique way, the psychology behind why we swim.’ Wanderlust ‘Swell is part personal memoir, and part social history. Even if you aren’t as wildly enthusiastic about swimming as the author, you’ll find her book written with humour and fondness.’ Lifeboat Magazine
Swell A Waterbiography
Jenny Landreth
LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
Bloomsbury Sport An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK
1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA
www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 This paperback edition first published 2018 © Jenny Landreth, 2017 Jenny Landreth has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for. ISBN: PB: 978-1-4729-3896-1 ePub: 978-1-4729-3897-8
Typeset in Minion by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
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Contents
Introduction 1 1
My Waterbiography (Part I)
5
2
The Great Outdoors
23
3
Going Indoors
43
4
Exceptional Women (Part I)
64
5
The Clubbable Woman
84
6
My Waterbiography (Part II)
102
7
Women of the World
120
8
In Praise of Lidos
137
9
We Are What We Wear
157
10 Olympic Flames
180
11 My Waterbiography (Part III)
201
12 The Channel
219
13 My Waterbiography (Part IV)
241
14 Exceptional Women (Part II)
254
15 Why Do Women Swim?
272
16 My Waterbiography (Part V)
297
Bibliography 319 Acknowledgements 322 Index 324 v
About the Author Jenny Landreth is a script editor and writer. She has written two guide books, on the great trees of London and on the best places to swim in the capital. Jenny has written for all sorts of publications, and was the main contributor to the Guardian’s weekly swimming blog, covering everything from pool rules, to swimming with children, and where to swim in New York. She lives in London. @jennylandreth
Introduction
The history of swimming is jam-packed with great photos of people in bizarre get-ups or extraordinary locations. But there is one photo I particularly love, of a group of ordinary-looking women leaping into an ordinary-looking lake – judging from their costumes it probably dates from the late 1920s. One of the women is star-jumping off a high board into the water; she is clearly happy and physically confident, exuding a sense of abandon. Our lives are very differently circumscribed – in every respect I have it much better than she did. We have, after all, come a long way. But still, I want to be her. This is the story of how she and women like her got to jump into that lake and how I (eventually) did too. The story of how both of us became swimmers. How we came from having no rights to (almost) full parity, and how swimming can be a barometer for women’s equality. How women had to fight for what we now take
1
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for granted and how the ‘swimming suffragettes’ – the women who did that fighting, did things first, who broke conventions and broke moulds, who achieved success against the odds – helped us. The doors for today’s swimmers did not open by accident or benevolence, and this is the story of the women who forced these doors open. The famous quote about Ginger Rogers – that she did everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in high heels – feels very appropriate here. This is the story of the swimming world’s equivalents of Ginger Rogers, and an opportunity to say thank you. Thank you for being so amazing, and for paving the way for the rest of us. But not everyone can be a Ginger Rogers, tap-dancing to Tesco in a glamorous outfit. That way social devastation lies. So this is not just a story about the famous women. This book features lots of ordinary people too. We all have our own story to tell about how we learned to swim (or not), our relationship with water, the people who encouraged us and the places we came to cherish or loathe. I’m inordinately pleased with myself for coining the word ‘waterbiography’ and I hereby grant you the right to use it freely. Because we all have a waterbiography, whether we’re ordinary or not. This book is mine. I hope it encourages you to delve into your own watery past and put your story together. There are a few themes in this book: class, equality and struggle; perhaps the most constant is the snack theme. 2
Introduction
This book might make you hungry, so keep food handy while you read. And some of the inequities might make you rage; if that’s the case, I highly recommend going for a swim. * Author’s note: I’m not a big fan of cute terms for the lady version of things. Some words have dropped from use more readily than others but it still requires constant vigilance for the eager feminist. I find it hard not to use the term ‘actress’ for instance, but happily chucked the word ‘comedienne’ in the bin. It feels like it belongs to a different era, to Marti Caine. I also disdain the practice of marketing perfectly normal things differently to women – comedian Bridget Christie has a brilliant routine about Bic biros ‘for her’, about how women’s hands are too delicate for your average man biro. I have an ironic pack of them on my desk but haven’t found the strength to rip the plastic open yet. So why have I called some women in my book ‘Miss’? I’ve called myself Ms for a good thirty years and to my knowledge it has rendered no man impotent with rage. But historical reports invariably identify women via their marital status, using ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’, and when I’m referring to those reports, I do the same. I think it’s preferable to use ‘Miss’ rather than to simply use women’s surnames, and I’ve resisted that where possible, 3
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because it sounds rude and should be the preserve of public schools and Parliament. I have found that since I started using Miss and Mrs I’ve taken to wearing a pinny and curtsying whenever a man comes into my home. It just feels right.
4
Chapter 1
My Waterbiography (Part I)
I can’t remember not being able to read, though as I was not some kind of infant genius, there was definitely a time. Once you know how to read, it’s almost impossible to put yourself back in your own tiny shoes to when words were incomprehensible. You can recreate some of the feeling by visiting a country where their letters don’t look like your letters and you’ve forgotten that phones can translate or that guidebooks are still a thing. But even then it’s fleeting, and you know you can always point at pictures, that your thoughts continue to appear in recognisable forms and that sentences end with full stops. Once it’s there, it’s there. But I can remember not being able to swim. I can recall the gush of panic at being out of my depth with no ability 5
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to save myself and, more prosaically, standing by the side of a pool staring at the water thinking ‘That’s not for me’. And while I now can swim, it’s a skill that doesn’t have quite the same sticking power as reading. Some years and lots of swimming miles later, I can still get to that same place of panic. Like one minute the skill was there, the next … gone. And then the particular wave will break, the moment will pass, I’ll shove that feeling away and carry on. I can do it, after all. I can remember not being able to swim, and I can remember learning, and who taught me. It was a two-step process, and the first step was taken at Sparkhill Baths in Birmingham in about 1969 when I was eight. The teacher was my Aunty Mary, my father’s sister, a woman of indeterminate old age whose chin wobbled when she tried to suppress a laugh. Nobody thought we ‘should’ learn to swim, there was no compunction, sports were not a thing our family did. We were more arts ’n’ crafts. My mum certainly couldn’t swim and it remains a terrifying thought to her, though occasionally I’ve seen her try to get into the spirit and puff vertically across a pool in the hop-jump style of a nervous bird. Apparently my dad could swim, but he’s not around to ask and none of his four daughters have any memories of him either taking us to the pool or joining us in the bitter sea on holidays (though there is one photo of him in shorts). I asked my mum once if Dad could swim and she said, ‘Yes, your father was an amazing swimmer, he swam for the school.’ But the information went no deeper 6
My Wat erbiography (Part I)
than that, she had nothing else to add; my parents are of that generation that didn’t divulge, and he’d have put ‘being a good swimmer’ in the same category as ‘rescuing prisoners of war in Burma’ – personal information one shouldn’t discuss. I think my father never took us swimming because he just didn’t get involved, a parenting technique I applaud. I am from the days before parental input was invented. We weren’t hoiked around from lesson to lesson all weekend; if you wanted to learn a language, you borrowed a book in that language from the library and read it; if you wanted to go horse riding, you’d go and catch a horse and ride it yourself. (Given that I’m talking about the urban Midlands, that should have been really hard but actually I did do that, and so can ride.) An adult wouldn’t have done something because a child was interested in it; a child would have done something because an adult was interested in it. Fortunately for us, Aunty Mary liked to swim so we were taken along. She did us in batches, the older two first – I’m second in line – then the Little Ones, at her local pool. Aunty Mary was a spinster from the days when that was a word; she was that family essential from all good 1950s domestic novels: the quirky aunt. She took us girls off in pairs to her tiny terraced house for funny sleepovers in funny beds. She had interesting collections in old boxes, little dolls that could break (oops), pyjama cases in the shape of dogs that she’d named (Pongo and Patch) and a funny sliding plastic door to her spare room that concertinaed back on 7
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itself. We wished we had concertinaed plastic doors instead of the boring wooden ones. She had time to make excellent hot chocolate. She also made miniature gardens in biscuit tins, using shiny foil milk-bottle tops for ponds and bits of gravel for vast rockeries. She was inventive, available and inquisitive. Mostly, with her wobbly chin and spinster status she seemed a bit odd, which in turn fascinated and slightly scared us. What Aunty Mary did was simple: she stepped into the space outside my mum’s comfort zone, and took us to the pool. I was marched to Sparkhill with a costume rolled in a towel under my arm. No fancy swimming bag for me, no shower gel, goggles, nothing other than the absolute necessities. We had what we needed and no more. The clothes I wore as a child were usually function over form and managed to be simultaneously too tight and shapeless. For swimming we had what were essentially thick cotton bags with small elasticated holes for our legs that left harsh red rings on our thighs. A fanciful band of shirring at the top may have looked decorative but that too left its mark – a stinging indented pattern across my chest. There was no similarity between adult and children’s costumes; bikinis were certainly not an option, they were for remote, glamorous people in magazines. New things were rare – I’d have one new dress a year, from the Ladybird shop, with wooden ladybirds for buttons. They were treasured dresses; expensive. But at least, as second and largest child in a line of four, I was in the top tier so I got things first-hand. We 8
My Wat erbiography (Part I)
had a lot of stuff handmade by my mum’s friend – dresses all in the same pattern but different colours. Drip-dry nylon was exciting; I favoured this early nylon heavily, along with the colour orange, and tried to combine the two as much as possible. Orange nylon hot pants. An orange nylon bellsleeved flared-leg pyjama suit with a long zip right down the front, which left a thick pinch mark on my skin when I lay on it. Sliding electrically between my orange nylon sheets in my orange nylon pyjama suit at night, I sparked like a distant fire. At Sparkhill, the only real instruction we got from Aunty Mary was ‘get in the water’. This wasn’t delivered in a nurturing way, we got no gentle handling, there was no notion we might be frightened – and neither would we have thought to express that aloud to an adult. We were just expected to get in with no fuss. I remember being in the chilly water, under an echoing high ceiling. It would have definitely been gloomy; light bulbs were much dimmer then and only switched on if absolutely necessary. If you could see your feet on the bottom of the pool you didn’t need the light on, it would have been extravagance when you had serviceable eyes. This was a time when economy was king, when to eat a whole Mars bar would have been a crazy dream; when we got one, which was extremely rare, we had to cut it into four. I remember big brick-shaped tiles, white ones and black ones in lines. I remember playing with Aunty Mary and her bobbing round us, making fun games out of nothing. 9
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Trying to run in the water, how it made your legs heavy and slow like a film at the wrong speed so you’d slow your voice down too, make it round and boomy. I remember shivering like a loon afterwards, dressing in wooden cubicles, trying to roll thick dry socks up thick damp legs. I remember talc. I remember Aunty Mary’s swimming costume, so faded the lines of stitching looked bright; it had a skirt that floated out, and independent conical breast moulds that would dent if you pushed them (I never pushed them). I remember that we didn’t get our hair wet, just the stringy ends. I don’t remember it being a ‘lesson’, having structure. I don’t know what I learned beyond ‘get in the water’; probably not a thing. The second part of the process was school swimming lessons in Wyndley Baths, Sutton Coldfield, in the early seventies, and this is where I can remember staggering across my first width, though God knows what stroke you’d call it. If that was doggy-paddle, the doggy would have drowned well before it reached its stick. My primary school was a convent and we were too busy singing charmingly at funerals to be taken swimming by the nuns; the only thing I can positively remember being taught there is that you shouldn’t wear lipstick because it makes your own lip colour fade. Pale-lipped Sister Godrick told me that. Swimming at a convent would have necessitated stripping off at least a top layer which would have caused major problems for the nuns. (There would have been hysterical clutching of rosary beads if they’d known about other games we played. Girls 10
My Wat erbiography (Part I)
in their final year, to mark a burgeoning independence, got their own cloakroom with a door that shut. We used the privacy mostly for mock séances, kneeling on the cold concrete under a huddle of gaberdine coats, a group of earnest eleven-year-olds in a Catholic school trying to contact the dead. The privacy of the cloakroom was also important for the keen monitoring of everyone’s budding breast development. Well, I wasn’t monitoring, I was in a vest till I was fifteen, but other more bosomy girls were. For this purpose, they invented a game – where ‘game’ means minor psychological bullying – where you had to hoik your shirt up, put your hands behind your head and walk towards the wall. If your nipples hit first, that was good. If your nose hit first, that was bad. Having a big nose and not a sign of breast, I always lost. I haven’t tried it lately so can’t offer a progress report.) My secondary school was still Catholic but not a nunnery, and they did take us swimming; I remember the vicious whistle-pipping of our PE teacher, Mrs Hassle, the kind of nominative determinism a writer would shy from making up – too obvious. I was always the child ‘least likely to’ for Mrs Hassle, the child whose whole body sagged at the mention of doing any kind of exercise. I must have been a depressing prospect for her, but she was a depressing prospect for me too, so in that sense at least we were equal. I was twelve by the time I swam that first width. By today’s standards, that is too late. Not just very late, positively 11
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too late. These days, if you don’t have your children entered for their Masters in swimming by the time they’re seven, really, what has your nanny been doing? Some of the madeyed dangerous boys in my class – Jerry and Eamonn, I’m looking at you – could already swim so they went to the deep end, something I looked at with a mix of envy and fear. I was still at the stage of having to put my face in and blow bubbles. Still dry-haired. I just wasn’t sporty, had no sense of my physical self. I suspect I knew even at twelve that I’d spend the next thirty years reading and smoking so there wasn’t much point being good at something like this. We were taken to Wyndley, a shiny new pool, a homage to glass and dark wood that sang modernity to us, sang about the future, was brightly lit! We must have taken messages of profligacy and extravagance from all that light: the sense that it would never run out; we could have all the electricity we wanted, when we wanted, whether we needed it or not. Fritter it away, we did. The pool’s design included a filter system (I didn’t know it was this at the time) which constantly pushed water down gutters that were pleasingly round-edged and white-tiled. The water slopped down in a continuous cycle to somewhere far far away in the building’s mysterious bowels. The gutters were a major source of temptation and worry. The fear was being trapped, or losing something down there – a thin friend, maybe. Boys would shove their arms in as far as they could to see if they’d get dragged down until Mrs Hassle pipped her whistle to get their attention. I was in the rubbish group, 12
My Wat erbiography (Part I)
and our challenge: a width. It was a huge distance, a width. We set off, a thrash of spindly uncoordinated arms hitting the water so hard it stung, backs arched, heads and bums up, a series of little U-shaped bodies bobbling across. Halfway, that desperate feeling that you’re going to put your legs down despite yourself – overcome. Then a stretched hand, fingers feeling the cold tiles of the other side. Done it! Swum a width! First badge! I didn’t progress much further than that for years. I got more competent at swimming distances, I could maybe manage two or three widths, but I still swum in a U-shape and I still didn’t get my hair wet. As a teenager, my exposure to the pool increased massively when I got a Saturday job in the cafe at Wyndley. I’d worked as soon as I was legally able in school holidays, we never had money and I liked having money, just a bit of it for sweets (I probably mean cigarettes) and cheesecloth shirts from Tammy’s. The cafe was a great environment even for a sulky teenage girl: lifeguards made handsome by dint of their potential to actually guard life (one of them drove a budgie-yellow Porsche, which only now makes me think, how the hell did he afford that on his wages? And why did he choose such a dreadful colour?), and rough rude kids you could be difficult to. Swimming? Don’t be ridiculous. I was sixteen, and, having been educated at a Catholic school, certainly didn’t have the physical confidence to get my body out and put it in public in a costume. I was much happier in my cafe overalls. When I look at my body now, how little I care 13
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what people see or think, I wish I’d known then how lovely young people are. I did own a bikini from when I went on holiday for a week with Rosemary Lowe to the Scilly Isles. Just the one bikini – we would never have had choice. A photo exists of me in this bikini, and my arms are so tightly crossed you can palpably feel the tension; my gritted teeth are the giveaway. I loved this bikini – cotton, blue-andwhite thin stripes, a little cord halter neck – but I wasn’t happy in it. God no, embarrassing. Then, in a twist of irony (synchronicity?) that would only become apparent years later when I got completely obsessed with outdoor cold-water swimming, I got a summer job running the cafe at Wyndley’s sister pool, a lido beside Keeper’s Pool in Sutton Park. Like I didn’t appreciate how lovely the young are simply by dint of their youth, neither did I realise how much I should treasure this place. It was a purpose-built pool and it sat beside a murky lake with a diving platform which was almost exclusively used by the kind of boys (Jerry and Eamonn) who would spin the cars on fairground rides. The lido was small and shallow and splashy; the key feature of the place, for the youth of Sutton at least, was a grassy bank for sunbathing which we did with great alacrity and absolutely no sun cream, which hadn’t been invented. Did anyone swim seriously in those days? I can’t remember, or I wasn’t looking. My youth rendered real swimmers invisible, in the way that age renders me invisible from real swimmers now. 14
My Wat erbiography (Part I)
I did get in the lido a couple of times, or at least sat on the edge and splashed my feet. And I braved the lake once, because I remember picking at the skin infection it gave me, in bored moments during my O-level exams. But mostly I slouched in a glorified shed, serving the kind of unhealthy crap I moan massively about in lido cafes now. Burgers with fried onions bought in pre-chopped. Hot dogs in brine, left on a slow-rolling heat all day, which I dragged out of the water with tongs and plopped onto cotton-wool bread. The little broken bits of hot dog, the knobbies floating at the bottom of the pan, I sold off cheap to the scamps and scoundrels of Sutton who were many and various. Crisps, sweets, hot Ribena, hot chocolate. A jug of filter coffee bubbled thickly away for the sophisticated kind of guy who drove round in, say, a budgie-yellow Porsche. Hot Bovril doled out one spoon per cup, except for the biker I quite liked who wanted it strong, Two Spoons Gary. And me, leaning out the hatch in my overalls, a teen constructed almost entirely from sarcasm, watching young people have fun in the pool and thinking, ‘God. How shallow. You won’t catch me doing that shit.’ Hundreds of years pass in a flash, and now you would certainly catch me doing that shit. Now I love swimming, love it so much that I go on swimming holidays. I prefer outdoor cold water, but anything will do, I’m really not fussy. I’m still not exactly a good swimmer but I will get my hair wet. And call it the spirit of nostalgia, or call it a peculiar kind of genealogy, but when I started to think 15
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about how I learned to swim, I wanted to return to the sites of my formative experiences. Where other people trace their family trees, or write their autobiographies in the vague hope that their children might be interested one day, I decided to revisit these three first pools. I started to write my waterbiography. Or, at least, I tried to, only Sparkhill Baths was closed in 2009 following an ‘asbestos incident’. I don’t like people taking the piss out of the Brummie accent, but ‘asbestos incident’ really lends itself. There was a campaign and plenty of local newspaper headlines calling for the council to restore the pool for this bit of the inner city. But costs only ever go up, and the private sector waits eagerly at the door. The council decided to demolish the historic 1930s building and replace it with a shiny new facility built with some private investment. I hate the phrase ‘private investment’. I looked at pictures of the building online and it’s a box and it could be anywhere. I wasn’t even sure it was in the same place. It’s a bit of history, totally gone. I knew I’d have more luck at Wyndley, though, because my mum still lives just round the corner. It was a rainy day when I headed up there, and externally, nothing had changed. Wyndley was opened in 1970, and if I say it’s the largest centre of its kind in Birmingham, we already hit a problem. People in Sutton Coldfield do not say they are in Birmingham, even though they are. They are in a Royal Town which is separate, meaning better; this was decreed by a king, and you can do what you like to postcodes, 16
My Wat erbiography (Part I)
it’s still not Birmingham. Wyndley is a big brick square on a sloping site, the huge walls of glass are the defining feature inside and out. The building was refurbished after another ‘asbestos incident’ (it was obviously a popular Midlands building material) and the first tragic thing I noticed inside – no cafe. Where it once was, there’s now a space with two large vending machines. Christ, that depressed me. In a country where obesity is rife and where generic shit is inescapable, this little cafe, home to delicious home-fried mass-produced burgers and hand-boiled frankfurters, gone. The fact that somebody might have talked to you, even just to say ‘Sugar?’ – gone. Of course, it is much more ‘cost-effective’ to get a bag of crisps out of a machine and train the managers to fill the shelves when they run out. I hate the phrase ‘costeffective’ almost as much as ‘private investment’. I was left wondering if Sutton was trying to delete my history. I made a bet with myself that if I went to the shopping precinct, the duvet shop where I had my other casual job will have gone too. I checked. It had. (A historic note about the duvet shop. It’s hard to imagine a time before duvets, but it exists. We used to have sheets and blankets on our beds, before duvets arrived in Britain in the late seventies. This was a time when the word ‘tog’ meant nothing to us, nothing at all. Duvets were terribly exotic and extremely desirable to the more forwardthinking Sutton Coldfielder, like me. I longed for one. The shop also sold towels, so even now, not only do I know the difference between a bath sheet and a bath towel, I can still 17
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do a complex sales pitch explaining the virtues of different togs for different seasons.) In Wyndley, I changed and put my clothes in a plastic basket which I handed in through a big hatch to a lifeguard, who put it on a shelf and handed me a rubber wristband. I remember timed entry on busy days, the constant fuzzy announcements – ‘All green wristbands get out of the water. ALL. GREEN ...’ Today it’s still the same funny old system it ever was, and I like it – it’s more personal than lockers, an opportunity for eye contact with someone. I wonder when they’ll get something more cost-effective. I went through to the pool, which existed in my memory as an Olympian field of water, stretching as far as the eye can see … … to find it’s not that at all. The pool is the standard 25m with a deep diving area to one side, but still it’s a great space. So much glass means that there are no walls to clutter up with posters and signs and warnings and adverts. It’s clean and light, the view of trees a welcome untidy touch in a highly regulated environment. The seventies design features – the dark colour of the wood, the concrete diving boards – have accidentally remained contemporary, it looks almost fashionably Scandinavian. Today there’s a boom across the pool so you can’t swim a long length. Instead I swim across into the diving area which used to feel so terrifying I could get palpitations just looking at it as a child. It’s rather glorious; a view opens up underwater of legs and space and deepening blue that’s very pleasing. Swimming 18
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across that deep section, I get an image in my mind, an aerial shot, a hard-working body ploughing across a vast blue ocean. As the camera pulls back, the body becomes smaller and smaller until all you can see is sea. After my swim, I collect my basket and ask the lifeguard if the boom is ever lowered so you can swim right down, like in the old days. ‘No,’ he says, ‘but it would be great. Why do you ask?’ I tell him I love swimming long lengths and he sighs ‘me too’. We discuss how it’s a disgrace that Birmingham has no fifty-metre pool and he tells me a bit about his own swimming life: swimming for the county, training all over the place. And I tell him about my local pool, the ninetymetre Tooting Lido, so we chat about outdoor swimming, how he did his first open-water swim last summer and how much he loved it. It’s just a moment, just a conversation. It simply feels good, two swimmers coming to this mutual passion from entirely different directions – he young and competitive, me slow but sure. The hare and the tortoise, if either could swim. My final pool of the trio is at Keeper’s, in Sutton Park, which begins just behind the Wyndley complex. I love Sutton Park, it’s the best park in the country, but I don’t live there. I wouldn’t fit in Sutton Coldfield, not least because of the Royal Town mentality. My mum’s friend once said that she’d like to vote Lib Dem, but the Sutton candidate had a beard, and ‘if he knew Sutton people, he’d know we would never vote for someone with a beard’. I neither have a beard nor am I standing for election, but that’s a fairly 19
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unambiguous message. Sutton people are proud of the park and rightly so, it’s nearly two and a half thousand acres, plenty big enough to get lost in, and I’ve managed to do that more times than not. It’s a great place for running, wildlife, trees, ponds, walking, and at one point in my life, not swimming. The council website describes it as ‘delivering a sense of wilderness within an urban environment’ which is a good attempt to destroy the magic of the place. I went off, through this cherished spot in a landlocked city, in search of Keeper’s Pool. I found Keeper’s Pool – it’s one of seven lakes in the park. But of the lido that used to be beside it, there was not a trace. It is gone, completely. My little cafe shack, gone. Even the lake’s diving platform has gone. The bank we used to sunbathe on is still a bank but without the context. In a park that prides itself on being ‘untouched’, one particular bit of history has been utterly erased. First opened in 1887, the lido was a victim of arson in 2003 and 2004, and so demolished and the site re-landscaped. Here for over a hundred years, then done and dusted, like it never happened. I felt personally affronted. Every time I visit the park now with my children, we walk past the spot where the lido used to be and they say, ‘Do tell us Mum, did something else used to be here?’ So sarcastic. If I lived in Sutton, I’d campaign for a lido in the park, but given the animosity towards people with beards, I can barely bring myself to think how people who like to swim outdoors would fare. 20
My Wat erbiography (Part I)
My waterbiography has not had an auspicious start. Two out of three places, gone, even if in one of them I barely got in the water. I certainly hadn’t learned to swim in any meaningful way in any of them, hadn’t progressed beyond the anxious scrabbling and bobbing. And here I am, a keen swimmer with a waterbiography that moves way beyond that hopeless beginning. Because now, I’ve swum all over the place. Hot, cold, outdoor, indoor, new, old, beautiful, ugly. I’ve swum in glacial lakes, and pools with CCTV in the changing rooms and signs in the showers that shout ‘NO SHAVING NO SPITTING’. My life of swimming has mostly happened in public pools, as they are what I prefer. ‘Wild’ swimming has its attractions, but seems to have an inbuilt conundrum. Here’s a lovely unspoilt place, says Person A. YOU’VE ATTRACTED ATTENTION TO OUR LOVELY UNSPOILT PLACE, yells Person B. Well, I’m Person C – I like a nice splash-about in a river as much as the next person, but I don’t always want to pull up my camper van beside a freezing tarn and call out ‘hurry up with your oatcake, Jonty, there’s a super spot here’. Sometimes, I can’t be bothered getting wet and weedy. Mostly, I want showers and I want lifeguards. I think most of us are Person C, the fearful ninnies who feel better when there’s someone watching over us (not staring, that’s weird). Or at least, we’re ninnies most of the time, we may go a little ‘wild’ on our holidays, in the sea (and probably call it just plain swimming), but mostly, when it’s scary we stay within our depth, and quite often don’t want to get our hair wet. 21
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This was my start, and I owe a debt of gratitude to Aunty Mary for getting me in in the first place. But who got her in? When she was a child, in the second decade of the twentieth century, most women didn’t swim, particularly not those from her lower-middle-class background. Even by the 1960s she was unusual. But something must have drawn her to it, told her it was possible. As I stand at the edge of a thriving London lido, dressed in a relatively meagre scrap of Lycra in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, there’s a whole line of women behind me who kept going, kept getting in, kept breaking the taboos of what women could and couldn’t do. Made it possible for me to be here. If it wasn’t for this bunch of formidable women, my swimming foremothers, I wouldn’t have been in any pool. I’d like to know who they are; I’d like to thank them. But to be able to tell the full story of how I am allowed to be a swimmer at all, we need to go much further back.
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A funny and bold account of how women fought their way into the water, and of what they did once they got there.
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