Amid the whiff of chlorine, municipal swimming has its sombre delights
Shortly after seven every morning I am swimming or (to use the fashionable phrase) doing my aquatic aerobics in the Porchester baths, round the corner from where I live. Municipal baths have a culture all their own, halfway between benevolent condescension — 'Let the People Swim!' — and Gradgrind authoritarianism, with long lists of things you must not do. All my life I have associated swimming with the chemicalloaded whiff and echoing demotic shouts of those tiled bagnios, ever since, aged three, I was first taken to one, to be instructed in the art by my elder sisters. In those days 'mixed bathing' was not permitted; and to be taken swimming on a 'ladies' day'. I had to be dressed up as a girl and called Polly.
Until his untimely death, the monarch of the early morning swimming brigade at the Porchester was Lord Annan. He would come equipped with a snorkel device, which enabled him to swim face down and play delightful aquatic games with himself, He was fond of things German — had just after the war played an important role in the civil side of the occupation in the British zone. What he did with his snorkel at the Porchester was to imagine he was a crack German U-boat commander, eyes glued to the periscope and barking out orders: Achtung! British battleship full ahead, six-zero degrees nor'-nor'east. Prepare forward torpedoes!' and so on. Sometimes he did answering voices: la, Jo, mein Kapitan' and 'Number one torpedo fired unt on target!'
I found his U-boating endearing, more particularly since he was capable of more sombre, even ferocious, moods when his progressive notions were thwarted or disturbed in conversation by the latest Thatcherite dogma. Then his face would flush a dark red and, if opposition continued, cranial fury would gather beneath the skin of his bald head — a true Dome of Discovery — and finally issue as steam. The build-up of this — quite literal — head of steam was impressive to those who witnessed it. It was rivalled in its day only by the columns of steam which issued from the equally bald, pink and portentous head of Dr Thomas (later Lord) Balogh. Both their lordships were on the Left but of radically different persuasions, committed enemies about the course to be pursued towards the socialist utopia. I was always hoping to witness an encounter between them in which both were forced to 'raise steam' in order to see who could attain the higher pressure. (My money would have been on Balogh.) Alas, this never took place. Nor, come to think of it, did I ever see Balogh in a municipal swimming bath, to discover his equivalent of Annan's U-boating; I only saw him swim once, at a 'natural' swimming-pool in the garden of the house belonging to his fellow economics seer, Nicholas Davenport. The pool, as I recall, was not much more than a mudhole, and Balogh did not like the look of it. He was finally precipitated into its chilly waters by a gang of TV hooligans, led by Robin Day, Balogh's fury was notable even by his own celebrated standards of incandescence, but naturally, in those turbid waters, no steam issued.
In fact, the Baloghian fires were shortly to be damped down for good. He attended one of the big lunch parties we used to give on Sundays at our house in Ever, and not only did full justice to the food and drink provided — more than justice perhaps — but entered into conversational battle in his most bellicose manner, so that steam rose and fell and then rose again to the wonder of all. By mid-week he was dead of apoplexy, like the cerebritic rector in Mansfield Park, who succumbed 'after three great dinners in the City'. I was worried at first that our lunch had proved the last cheese straw for the doctor, but the discovery that only the day before his demise he had held forth vaporously at one of Lady Pamela Berry's calorific luncheons assuaged my conscience.
I sometimes associate swimming baths with food eaten in convivial surroundings, since it was my habit in the early 1950s, when I lived in Paris, to have a salad or similar light dish after a lunchtime dip in the Piscine Deligny. This was a floating pool and restaurant, a sort of maiden-aunt-like appendage to the bateaux-mouches, which was anchored to the left bank of the Seine, near where the Musee d'Orsay now pulls in the crowds. The d'Orsay was then a derelict railway terminal, and the Deligny, alas, no longer exists, such being the transformations of time and chance. In those days, however, the Deligny was fashionable and mighty particular about whom it would admit. My then boss, Gareth Windsor, an experienced boulevardier and coureur des dames to his dying day, often accompanied me to the pool (when not lunching with le gratin), believing that delectable creatures could be picked up on its boards, beneath their Tissot-like awnings.
No such thing ever happened, to my knowledge. The atmosphere of the Deligny was more masculine, though sedate, even distingue. It was within easy walking distance of those two great institutions, then unequivocally male, the Academic Francaise, meeting at the Institut for its weekly revision of the French dictionary, and the Assemblee Nationale. From the latter would issue, regular as clockwork, the small, spidery but agile figure of Paul Reynaud, one of those delicate personal bridges between the Third and the Fourth Republics, having held high office in both. He had been prime minister when France collapsed in 1940, and was driving from threatened Paris to Bordeaux, to which the government was transferring itself, when a tragedy occurred, He was in a clecapotable high-speed tourer, hood down, the luggage piled into the back seat. Beside him in the front was his formidable mistress, Madame de Pones. On the hag-ridden road, crammed with stragglers, Reynaud was forced to brake abruptly, and an enormous suitcase, loaded with top-secret papers and lingerie, shot forward with implacable violence and carried off Madame de Portes's head. Reynaud shouldered his remorse with him to his dying day, and as a token of it he always wore, when swimming at the Deligny, his mistress's rubber bathing cap, which he had found in that fatal suitcase. Thus I saw him, doing his regular number of lengths in old-style breaststroke, his head in its gay attire bobbing about on the pool wavelets, a Monsieur Hulot figure from the pre-war of plages and complots.
Nothing like the Deligny, with its literary and political resonances, now exists. My favourite bathing place today is a circular one which adorns the gardens of the castle where I stay, overlooking Lake Como. Though heated, its function is skilfully concealed so that it looks like an ornamental pool of stone and is suitably adorned. When I look up I see a putto of lead struggling with a huge fish, the essence of Renaissance statuary. All around me are walls going back to Roman times and the sheer limestone rocks of the Alpine foothills, punctuated by poplars planted at the time of the Risorgimento. But such bliss is for festive times; for my quotidian swimming I am content with the gleaming tiles and chlorinated aroma of Livingstone's London, under its sign 'No Diving!'.
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