The ten-metre board

Text 1: Hendon Road Baths, by Graham Tolley

An original twentieth-century memoir.

The top board at Hendon Road Baths was ten metres high, which is a number that means nothing until you are standing on it. From the poolside it had looked like a shelf. From the top it was the edge of the world, and the pool beneath it had shrunk to a blue postage stamp, stuck crookedly on to the tiles.

I was eleven. My brother had done it the summer before and talked about it all winter, and so in July I climbed the ladder without telling anyone, rung after rung, the metal cold and slick under my hands, the echoing shrieks of the shallow end fading below me like a radio being turned down.

At the top there was nobody. Just the board, rough as sandpaper, and a smell of chlorine so strong it seemed to have a colour. I walked to the end. I did not look down. Then I looked down.

My body made a decision without me. My knees locked. My toes curled over the edge and gripped, the way a bird grips a branch in a gale, and I understood with total clarity that I was going to stand there for the rest of my life. I would grow old up there. People would bring me sandwiches.

Below, a lifeguard in a yellow T-shirt had noticed me. He did not shout. He simply stood up from his tall white chair, put down his whistle, and looked, and that looking was worse than any shouting, because it meant somebody was waiting.

I thought of going back down the ladder. I thought of the boys on the steps behind me, who were not there yet but would be, and of my brother’s face.

I counted to three. I counted to three again.

And then I was not on the board. There was no moment of jumping that I can remember, only the board and then no board, the air roaring in my ears, my stomach left somewhere above me, and the blue stamp rushing up and up and becoming, suddenly and enormously, a pool.

I came up gasping and laughing, my nose full of water. The lifeguard sat back down. Nobody clapped. It did not matter. I swam to the side with my whole skin singing.

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