Texts for Translation 2005:
  Andrew O'Hagan

Would Swimmers Wearing Green Bands
Please Leave the Pool Now

I spent most of my childhood underwater at the Auchenharvie Baths. I
loved it there, being calm under the chlorine broth, looking up through
begoggled eyes at the white legs of the other swimmers, pleased to know
those oxygen-lovers would never conquer the lower depths as I had. In
the fabled Scottish summers I would go there first thing in the morning
and be the last one to leave the pool. It took cunning, but I worked
out how to stay on, turning wrinkled and pink-eyed, forever ready to
dive down once again to some imagined kingdom below.
A man wearing white shorts sat on a high umpire’s stool, making sure
nobody went too far in any direction, and now and then he would have to
take down the big hook off the wall to save the life of some
dive-bombed toddler flailing in the middle and taking in water. Bad
behaviour was heavily prohibited at at the baths, but there was no
stopping the majority, and some days the place became a sort of aquatic
Bedlam, with a multitude of hysterical actions going on above and below
the surface. An illustrated list of crimes was pinned at five-yard
distances around the walls, and we knew them better than we knew the
Ten Commandments:

No Smoking
No Bombing
No Petting
No Eating
No Running
No Shouting
No Ducking
No Acrobatics
No Pushing
No Splashing

No Petting? Most of us were at an age where the thought of ‘petting’
made us fall casually into a coma, so the poster of crimes came to be
portentous as well as funny. Kids would scream with pride when they
managed to invent a crime that wasn’t on the poster, like swearing
underwater or peeing in the baby pool.
Crime is often companionable, but when I think of the Auchenharvie
Baths I really think of solitude. It was one of the few places in my
life where I found it truly possible to be a child: my imagination went
unchecked, and I taught myself how to sit on the bottom of the pool,
waving my arms for balance, the distant sounds like echoes that
couldn’t penetrate the world I had made down there. I felt like the
sultan of the seven seas, unreachable, defiant, before reluctantly
travelling upwards after exactly 1 minute and 5 seconds (my personal
best) to rejoin the world of instant noise and air and umpires watching
the clock.
The only lure was the cafeteria. They had a machine in there that
would give you good stuff if you put the right coins in and pressed the
right buttons: Caramac bars (F6), curry-flavoured crisps (F11), a
roll-and-sausage (F10). The latter could be heated up to a gaseous
puffy mess in the adjacent microwave oven, the first of its kind I’d
ever seen. I hated leaving the pool -- it seemed a bit of an imposition
to suddenly have to walk on carpets and pavements when the water had
seemed so accommodating. The days were long, and at the end, I’d look
out the window of the cafeteria at the Scottish clouds and begin to
prepare myself for the journey home. The clouds could promise a second
dousing, and drops of water to oil the tongue, all the better to speak
your excuses for being so late and smiling and unsorry.

Ends

Andrew O’Hagan, Novelist and essayist, author of The Missing, Our Fathers, and
Personality, all published by Fabers.

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