Swimming and Things

It is nearly a week since I have written anything and I believe I was talking about London Zoo. It was often a destination for birthday outings as I got older, when some long-suffering parent took their courage in both hands and marched half a dozen of us round the zoo. If they managed to return with the same number of kids that they started out with, the outing was deemed a success.
I remember once I 'fell' into the penguin enclosure, and another time an obliging relative of a friend of mine took us round the back of the aquarium where we could put our hands into the tanks and actually feed the fish. I think it was from that experience as well as seeing every Hans and Lotte Hass film that they ever made, that awakened my interest in Scuba diving, much, much later in life.
It certainly wasn't my early experiences of swimming that mustered any enthusiasm. Why was the open-air Lido in Gospel Oak always so cold? Even the sanitized footbath that you had to go through was toe-curling freezing. The pool itself was huge and blue. All that was missing were the ice-bergs floating in the water and getting in, going down the steps one at a time used to take every ounce of my will-power. The changing cubicles were even colder and more cheerless than the actual pool, and waiting at the counter to exchange a metal disc on a pin for your clothes and towel, was the coldest of all. Chattering teeth, blue arms and legs, and lifeless, dead white fingers and toes were all par for the course.
But there were some fun bits. I used to enjoy the freedom that my green water-wings gave me. Water-wings were the nineteen-fifties answer to arm-bands, and gave you the illusion of being able to swim, even when you couldn't really. Everyone had to wear swimming caps in those days. When I was very young I remember I had a soft plastic one that did up in a bow under my chin. I don't think it did a very good job of keeping the water out, but it was better than nothing. Later I progressed to the rubber ones which were murder to pull on and had a strap under the chin. But I wanted to talk about the fun bits, and pulling on rubber swimming hats definitely was not one of them. Bathing costumes were mostly knitted affairs, that pulled almost down to your knees when you emerged from the water.
The circular water cascade afforded a great deal of pleasure to unsupervised kids before it was fenced in. You could climb up each roaring white-water step, until you eventually got to the top, where you were mistress of all you surveyed, until the bath attendant yelled at you to come down of course. This of course was when I was older, old enough to go to the Lido willingly and voluntarily. But going with like-minded friends instead of parents made all the difference. We would practise jumping from the high diving board, and counting up to ten until we hit the water. We would throw things into to the deepest part. which was about nine feet, and dive to retrieve them. Yes, by the time I was ten I had practically grown fins.
It wasn't only the Lido we went to either. We patronised enthusiastically both Hornsey Baths in Holloway and Prince of Wales Baths. I remember, my mother and I went for an actual bath there once, and took our washing as well, but that was later, when times were really hard.
As for Hornsey, we used to go there on the bus with the school. I remember we used to fight for possession of the long streamer of forty or so tickets, but apart from that, we behaved ourselves. Being allowed to go swimming was a privilege that we did not wish to forfeit.
I don't remember actually learning to swim. I think it was a bit like learning to read. Suddenly I could do it without really having to go into the mechanics of the matter. So by the ageof eight I was the proud possesser of not only my fifty yards certificate,but my hundred as well, which meant that I had swum twice right round the pool without stopping.
When we went to Hornsey baths on our own, we were officially only allowed to stay in the water for half an hour, but if it was not very busy the attendant, a large kindly lady, would turn a blind eye and let us stay until our fingers turned wrinkly. (Washerwoman's fingers, my grandmother used to say.) There was a series of tiered platformsat the deep end from which we used to practise diving. I will never forget the sense of achievement when I managed to dive off the top one.
To sustain us for the mile and a half walk back we would buy a halfpenny's worth of broken biscuits at the baker's shop in Seven Sisters Road. I would still be starving by the time I arrived back home, and I remember with what acute enjoyment I used to polish off my favourite dinner of fried egg and chips.
It is difficult to know whether to follow each topic until I was a child no longer, or to proceed strictly chronologically. But that would mean that I would have to constantly keep on returning to topics. So now, bear with me. We have returned to London, my mother and I and I am thirteen. But still on the subject of swimming pools, it really is saving the best till last.
I found my mother muttering to herself one day 'I wonder if that Ladies' Pond in Kenwood is still open, where I used to go.' So we made a point of going to find it. We walked past the pond where I had fallen in as a child and later lost my toy yacht, past the men's pond, and then skirting Kenwood, another ten minutes' walk brought us to the notice which banned all males of our species. We walked up a short woodland path and arrived at a beautiful, tranquil pool. I can see it now in my mind's eye, glinting in the evening sunlight. Families of ducks seemed to have no objection to sharing their pond with humans, and continued to swim peacefully across the sparkling, greeny-brown surface, leaving hardly a ripple in their wake.
A concrete platform, very civilised changing cubicles and a series of cork rings fixed at intervals over the pond, distinguished it as a swimming area. But you had to be able to swim. There was no shallow end.
That summer I went there many times. My school was only about a mile's walk over the fields, so we used to go after school and sometimes when the days were long and light, even before, and then go into school assembly with dripping wet hair.
There is one little postscript to this. Years later when I was living in South Africa for a time, I met someone who subsequently became a very good friend of mine. We had both grown up in North London, that was coincidence enough, but what really bonded us, was that we both knew and loved the Kenwood Ladies Swimming Pool.