Text 1: The pool they are closing, by Martin Vale

An original contemporary newspaper column.

The council says the old Wrenford baths have reached the end of their useful life. This is a tidy phrase for a building where my daughter learned to float, where I once spent an entire Saturday trying to persuade my son that the deep end was not a trap, and where the tiles have been blue for as long as anyone can remember.

The proposed replacement is a bright new leisure centre on the edge of town. It will have a gym, a café and a pool with a sliding roof. The artist’s picture shows people in spotless robes smiling at the water. There is no picture of the bus timetable. The old baths are a ten-minute walk from the town centre; the new centre is a mile beyond the ring road.

I know the old place is draughty. The changing rooms smell of damp towels, and the lockers require a coin that always seems to be in the wrong pocket. But on Tuesday evenings, the shallow end is full of children in mismatched armbands, and the café serves tea in cups that look as though they have survived several generations of swimming galas.

At the public meeting, a council officer described the new pool as “a step forward”. I looked around at the people who had walked there after work, carrying wet swimming things in plastic bags. For them, a step forward may be the bus they cannot afford, or the extra distance they cannot manage.

The old baths are not beautiful. They are useful, familiar and part of the town’s ordinary life. Perhaps that is why it is so easy to leave them out of the picture.

Text 2: A note on the parish swimming room, by Eleanor Price

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1891, a woman writes to her brother about a small swimming room recently opened for local children.

Dear Thomas,

You asked whether the new bathing room is as fine as the committee promised. It is not fine at all, unless one counts a clean floor and a roof that keeps out the rain as luxuries. There is one narrow pool, a row of pegs, and a stove that takes its time about warming the water.

Yet the room is busy each afternoon. The mill children come in their workaday clothes and leave with their hair dripping, bright in the face and unwilling to go home. Mr Baines, who teaches them, says that several had never been near water before. He is patient with the timid ones and stern with those who splash the others.

The committee had first discussed building a grand hall with galleries for spectators. I am thankful they did not. The cost would have been too great, and I suspect the children would have been expected to swim prettily for their elders instead of learning at their own pace.

I confess I had thought the room an indulgence. I have changed my mind. On Monday I saw a small girl hold the rail, let go, and cross the pool with no help at all. Her brother clapped so loudly that Mr Baines had to remind him they were not at a music-hall.

The place will never be admired from the street. That is no matter. It has given these children a room of their own, and something useful to do in it.

Both texts are about public swimming facilities.

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