The Drying Rooms - Chapter Eighteen

Cold Water and Naked

‘She recognised it with a gasp: the concrete edge of the pool’

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Audio version of Chapter Eighteen

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Vermilion and pink oleander petals floating in the warm water of our pool in Bahrain.

The cold grey grit under my toes at the edge of the school pool.

Swimming, like water itself, connects and merges. It connects her old body with her young body. Sensory memories float across time and place: warm seas, cold seas, cool lakes, indoor and outdoor pools.

At school we swam in an outdoor, unheated pool, located in the grounds of the senior school, our future destination, full of the cool, scary teenagers that I longed to become.  So the walk up the path, past the playing fields, and down into the dip of the senior school orchard was chattery and excited. But it was also fraught because as we queued up while a member of the male staff unlocked the wooden door to the pool enclosure, we knew what we were about to face: bitingly cold water and nakedness.

It’s a strong, clear memory. Dismal and shivery. There was nothing fancy about the pool. The pool itself, large and concrete, was surrounded by wooden fencing. Too high to peek over. At the far end, down some shallow steps, there were dark wooden changing areas, with overhangs for shelter and attached wooden benches leading into dark, damp corners. I can feel the rough wet concrete and tangles of hair under my bare feet. The boys and girls changed in separate areas. But of course, we weren’t ‘changing’, we were just taking off all our clothes.

Then, in naked goose-pimpled huddles, we faced the acute embarrassment of converging up the steps to the pool edge, where we lined up, ready for the icy plunge.

Sometimes in the telling of this moment, she leaps to her feet to demonstrate. First, she imitates the line of shivering little boys, both hands crossed over their willies. Then, she imitates the line of shivering little girls, all with one hand down, acting as fig leaves, the other across their chests. She remembers some girls were already ‘developing’ — Cruel Matron’s word. 

The nakedness caused a stir amongst us but it was considered normal, something that just was. Now I see it as a combination of 1930s spartan toughness and a 1960s progressive, slightly bohemian thing. Once in the pool, it was forgotten. The good swimmers (me) at the deep end; the beginners clutching white polystyrene floats in the shallow end.

But we weren’t naked at the swimming competitions. And on those days, the pool wasn’t dismal and cold. It was sunny and full of people, buzzing with the excitement of the special day.

In real life, I can’t remember if Cruel Matron attended the swimming competitions, but in Maudie, she’s definitely there.

Extract from Maudie

It was a perfect day for the Swimming Comp. The sun was shining and excited groups of boys and girls were gathered under the house banners, ready to cheer their teams: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton and Donne.

Maudie was at the competitors’ end in her blue swimming costume and white cap. This was her big day. But after last night, she was exhausted. Could she still do it? The four-length crawl was the first race. Right now, she could barely keep her eyes open. Last night she had wet the bed.

Axe’s cold, cruel voice in the middle of the night in the washrooms was still ringing in her ears, “I don’t care if you’re swimming for Shakespeare tomorrow – or the Queen for that matter. Go to the drying rooms. Now! And think about your disgusting habit.”  

No. She’d have to pull out of the race. Let Lucinda take her place. There was no way she could win now. But just as she was about to fake a tummy ache, she saw Axe in the staff stands. She was next to Miss Dipper and she was laughing! How could she laugh after last night!

The megaphone crackled “Take up positions!”

A sudden surge of strength, powered by anger, ran through Maudie’s body. “I’ll show her!” she thought.

She crouched down, her toes on the concrete edge of the pool, eyes focussed on the sparkling water ahead. Every muscle taut and ready.

She doesn’t have a photo of the pool, so she searched online ‘XXX school, 1960s, swimming pool’ and up came a photo of the familiar over-lapped fencing, broken in places, with blurred members of staff, almost recognisable, leaning against it. There is a girl – a teenager – frozen in mid-dive in the foreground.

But it’s not what she was looking for. She wanted her gang, the young ones, the junior school children — and then she remembered the DVD of old photos lent by a friend. Alone, late at night, clicking on the screen, jumping from one dreamlike image to another, and suddenly there it was! She recognised it with a gasp: the concrete edge of the pool. That’s what she immediately saw and remembered. Not the sweet children. They are a little before her time, she thinks. But that concrete pool edge! A haptic memory trigger.

The momentousness of those swimming competitions: the excited crowds of children, the nerves, the victorious roars, the crashing defeats. For she wasn’t the only little fish. There were others. Two of them, both girls, were in her class. Her direct rivals, yes, but also her friends. For, like her, they were school-holiday children. They also flew off to hot countries with warm seas and swimming pools. She shared a recognition with them, a tacit knowing of what they called home.

She loved those swimming races.

Every muscle taut and ready.

Now, in her socks, she positions her toes on the edge of the step leading into her kitchen. Can she still do it? Drop into a crouch, arms stretched back, ready to swing ahead and propel her body forward, horizontal to the water. Can she recreate the starting position? The alert springiness in a small, supple body desperate to win.

No. Of course not.

Her eyes level with the washing machine, her slightly arthritic knees bent, her heavy old bum in the air, the best she can do is a ludicrous pose that looks something like yoga.

So where is the memory? It’s not in her body. Yet its quality is so physical. A deeply remembered physicality in the mind.

She knows the pure bursting energy of a child is forever lost. But, as with dancing, the muscle memory is still there.

She still has the urge to take off once she’s in the water, to race. She gets restless just hanging around in the shallow end of public pools with small children playing ball; she wants to swim far out.

In Turkey.

She wants to leave her flip flops on the hot white sand of her known place for over twenty years: the peaceful beach backdropped by umbrella pines and mountains.  She wants to plunge her head into the warm silky silence, feel a cool current stroking her legs. She wants to see tiny silver fish flickering past her goggles. She wants to swim far out, starting with a powerful crawl then settling into a steady breaststroke. The only sounds her own breath and the rhythmic splash of her body disrupting the water. And on each surfacing, the vastness still stretching in front of her. And the shimmering line of the horizon always ahead.

And once she’s far out, she wants to float on her back and stare at the sky.

But nowadays, when she’s swimming on her own, she no longer plays with the slight jeopardy. Now constrained by obedience to her age and her family, she swims parallel to the shore, within sight of the few people on the beach.

A friend once said she had her death sorted. She loved swimming too. Also in Turkey. The friend told her that when the time came, she would just carry on swimming out to sea. Simple. Easy. But that’s not how her friend died. In the end she died in a hospital in Germany with her daughter by her side, who did everything she could to get there in time.

Death by drowning. That’s how Cruel Matron died. Many years after both she and Cruel Matron had left the school. Well, that was the rumour circulating years ago – twenty years? thirty years? How many years ago? She can’t remember. Cruel Matron died alone. Trying to rescue her dog in a frozen lake. Her daydream image has shifted from twigs tangled up in grey hair at the edge of a ditch, to an old woman’s body floating face down in freezing water, a sodden skirt, sturdy legs, sensible shoes.

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