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Gran lined her drawers and shelves with old newspapers, and to this day the combination of newsprint and the sharp smell of old varnish, reminds me of swimming Sundays.

There was a heavy oak chest of drawers at one side of Gran's bed. The clothes I kept at her house were all in the bottom drawer, and my drawer was the one that stuck the most, swollen with damp. I would have to jerk at the brass handles until the drawer gave way, inch by inch, and I could reach my swimming costume. It was a turquoise ruched affair, and as I grew, the fish-scale effect of the ruches disappeared as the material stretched, accommodating my unsettling new body.

Even if the pool was empty, Gran would insist that we shared a changing cubicle. We would walk along the white and black chipped tiles and stop at the same cubicle every week, right up at the deep end, under the big clock. Gran liked that particular cubicle, because the spectators up in the gallery would have a hard time seeing down past the clock. I never saw any spectators.

Pulling the faded canvas curtain over the space at the top of the door, Gran got me ready first. She would make me stand up on the wooden seat, slats bleached with decades of chlorinated water dripping from bathing suited behinds. I had to stand up there, because if I stood on the slippery tiled floor, someone in the pool might see my knickers come down and over my impatient feet.

Personally, the fear of getting a verruca and being banned from the pool worried me more than someone seeing my knickers.

The yellow bathing cap Gran bought me was a manufacturing abomination. To distract the wearer from the fact that it was actually designed as an instrument of torture, the cap was decorated on one side with a giant chrysanthemum, cunningly crafted from orange and white rubber petals.
There was always a Kirby grip in Gran's purse, and she would have it at the ready, caught onto her top teeth, twisting my hair into a vicious ponytail and securing it, with the Kirby grip, on top of my poor head. Keeping her left hand on the captured hair, Gran would lift the swimming cap from her string bag, and flick it onto my head. She freed her left hand at the last second, leaving the ponytail under the cap, and with both hands, she would yank the sides of the tight cap right down, deftly fastening the chinstrap to the small metal buckle dangling against my cheek.

During my swimming lessons I must have had the look of someone permanently startled, with my eyebrows arched high on my forehead, my scalp pulled up tight by the ponytail.

Before she gave me my weekly lesson, Gran made me stand, fidgeting and fretting, facing the cubicle door, while she removed her shoes and stockings. She would shake her empty stockings, roll them together, and then put them into one shoe. Once my clothes were hidden under a big white towel, she pulled the snib back, letting me loose to cannonball into the deep end, and swim down the length of the pool, to wait for my lesson.

I had been threatened with a thick ear if I ever removed my bathing cap in the water, and an unquestioning child, I did as I was told. However, once I hit the water, the cap would swell and rise, making me look as if I had massive egg shaped skull. The cap only stayed on my head by means of the strap digging hard into my chin, and I would wonder why I had to wear a bathing cap in the first place.
Gran never went into the water and I had never seen her swim. Yet for twenty minutes, I did breadths, backwards and forwards, while she shouted instructions. She would glare daggers at anyone who dared swim in front of me, or worse, got a bit too exuberant and splashed her, sweltering and still wearing her tweed coat at the side of the shimmering pool. Through her expert tuition, I developed a strange, but effective, puddock-like stroke, which hauled me through the water at a fair pace.

At the end of my lesson, I was free for half an hour, and that was never long enough for all the surface dives, handstands and roly poly's that I was so good at performing for my Gran.
Then out, blue-lipped and shivering, to be stood back up on the wooden bench, stripped and dried vigorously and covered in Cuticura talc. Gran always gave me a bar of chocolate covered puff candy to eat while she replaced her stockings. She called it Nellie's Special Chittering Bite and only ever bought the proper stuff, made by Ross's. Puff candy was one of the few things she never managed to make herself.
On the way back for the bus, we would nip into the paper shop for The Sunday Post and six morning rolls. I could hardly see, red eyed from the chlorine in the pool, but I was allowed to tear the rolls from the freshly baked soft wads and count them into a paper bag, because Gran knew my hands were clean.

Sometimes, at the bus stop, she would look at the indentation made from the small metal buckle digging into my cheek, feel my wet hair, and tut.
Helen Hastings
1908 - 1997

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