Old Town Sports..... Fiction

[Torchwatch]

I used to be a good swimmer, not a great swimmer of course but good enough to race for my club and earn my county colours a few times. Then there had been the evening at the District Scout Swimming Gala where I had almost single handedly cleared the trophy table for the glory of my troop. I was thinking this as I stood knee deep in the lagoon pool of my local leisure centre, watching my 7 year old son splashing about on the very edge of the tiled beach. He couldn't swim, he never tried too, he just wasn't interested. I just stood there the hems of my long baggy board shorts soaking up water and becoming heavy. Since my son wasn't going anywhere I waded into waist deep water and swam a few strokes, my shorts now fully soaked dragging me back as hard as I swam forwards, it all felt wrong; my wife had bought me these shorts, they matched my son's and I began to hate them as they dragged me back and tried to pull away from my body.
I glanced over to my son to check on him, he looked plain and a bit flabby just like his mother, I have to admit I had become a bit flabby myself, too much comfort food to keep me going through interminable night-shifts in the cold of winter. I thought back to when my mother had booked me in for swimming lessons at the old pool when I was 7. The young woman behind the reception desk had been helpful but bored, she'd booked in loads of kids already that week and I was just another one. My mother had asked why the cheque was made out to the swimming club and not to the swimming baths and the woman had replied that the club provided the teachers and the baths let them the pool.
My first swimming teacher was Mrs Fox in the learner pool, though everyone called it the baby pool. She was a strict battleaxe, kids became more afraid of her than of the water. She taught us to place our faces in the water and to blow out, to do a doggy paddle then a front crawl and breast stroke. She made us swim whole widths and then lengths of the pool without touching the bottom although it would have been easier to just walk across through the water. She had an assistant named Victor he used to watch for kids suddenly drowning, he had a long pole with a hoop on the end and wore a boxer's dressing gown over a pair of swimming shorts, we thought he'd stepped out of a nativity play as one of the shepherds.
Every few weeks Victor would take a few kids from the baby pool and take them to the big pool, they'd come back either smiling and happy, carrying a small plastic bag containing something something yellow and black, or they'd look scared, some especially the girls even crying.
One week Victor dropped the hoop of his pole in the water ahead of me and told me to grab it, he pulled me out of the water and with two other boys led me away to the big pool. The lane closest to the side had been cleared of other swimmers and Victor led us to the deep end. He told us to get into the pool and just tread water for a few minutes. I felt scared at first not being able to touch the bottom but I soon got used to it and gained confidence. Victor then called us to the end of the pool and told us we had to swim a length without touching the side or the bottom, or drowning. We went one by one, I went second, the boy ahead of me panicked and grabbed the side of the pool just past the half way mark. Victor had pulled him out and brought him back to rest. Then my turn started, I went off too fast at first as I was still afraid of the deep water below me, by the time I was two thirds of the way down the pool I was getting really tired, I could hear Victor shouting at me from the side to keep going so I did, I found the energy from somewhere and my aching arms and legs splashed on through the water my lungs gasping and while rapidly losing all the stroke training I'd been doing I reached out and touched the far end of the pool.
I saw Victor above me reaching out a hand to pull me out of the pool, he was smiling. He let me drop onto a bench and left me there to get my breath back while he let the third boy try to swim the length of the pool. When Victor came back to me he shook my hand, handed me a plastic bag containing something black and yellow and told me that from next week I was in the big pool.
I went back to the changing room and open the bag, it contained a pair of black Speedos and a yellow swim cap with the club's name printed on the side. I just couldn't wait to get changed, rush home with my mother and try on the new swim things in my room. I'd worn short swim shorts up until then but the Speedos just felt great when I put them on, the rubber swim cap felt a bit strange but when I looked in the mirror I saw myself reflected as a proper swimmer.