Not quacking, but drowning

My first swimming lesson at school is one of my few early memories. The class had been warned for days before that it was coming, and had been duly dispatched with notes for our parents indicating that trunks (not swim shorts!), and towels would be required for the first session.
On the day itself there was a nervous buzz in the class, and I believe our stern matriarch of a teacher, Miss Middleton brought the actual lesson forward in the hope that once the lesson was over we would calm down. The swimming pool was actually on school grounds, a rarity in an infant school in the nineteen-seventies, and probably even now.
Before we could start swimming, there was the humiliation of having to change into our costumes in the classroom, as there was no spare staff to supervise the changing rooms. Some accommodation to decency was provided by a heavy velvet curtain being draped at adult-shoulder height across the room, the boys and girls separated to each side and the teacher supervising us all. However this still exposed us to the empty playground through the classroom windows.
Towels draped across our shoulders like comic-book super heroes, we walked to the pool, strictly forbidden territory before, and sat on the stained wooden benches surrounding the pool. The room was hot and humid; my fellow classmates who had the misfortune to be wearing glasses found that they steamed up the moment that they had entered the room. The light in the room was a pallid green, the only illumination coming from three skylights in the roof which has long since been covered in algae.
The teacher’s distorted voice, echoing around the room started a long sermon of things that we could not do in the pool, no shouting, bombing (I didn’t know what the term meant then, and even now I’m a little vague), diving, pushing, or ducking… I’m sure the list continued well beyond this.
We were finally allowed into the water, gingerly working our way down the metal steps into the too-warm water, until eventually all twenty of us were in the shallow pool, the water coming to our armpits.
The voice from above commanded us to walk round in a circle, presumably to get used to the feeling of the water against our chest. We quickly found the problems of a compression wave building up in front, limiting the speed. We were then told to pretend we were ducklings, and flap our arms under the water.
Happily quacking away, I tripped on something under the water, which my fellow pupils had so far avoided. With hindsight I’m sure it was a rubber brick, used in life-saving exercises by the older children. I stumbled into the water, eyes and mouth wide open.
The bubbling noise in my ears, and stinging chlorine in my eyes and back of my throat overwhelmed me. I had lost all sense of direction, with my feet scrambling along the bottom of the pool trying to get a grip. I finally gained a footing and managed to stand, snot running from my nose, and tears streaming from my red eyes. Rubbing them made little difference. The whole experience could only have lasted for a few seconds, but it felt much, much longer. Slowly I composed myself, and made my way to the edge of the pool.
Craning my neck upwards I could see Miss Middleton looking down disapprovingly, clearly upset about something, but due to the water in my ear, and the acoustics of the room, I could not hear what. However her stabbing finger pointing towards the ladder at the side of the pool required no explanation. For the rest of the miserable lesson I sat on the side, shivering under my towel despite the warmth of the room, watching my classmates splashing and enjoying themselves.
Explaining what had happened to my parents that night over tea, I had little sympathy from my mum who was more worried about the damp kit in my school bag, but my dad did remember that when he was a teenager he had helped dig the pool where (I felt) I had nearly drowned.
If I wanted to over-dramatize the experience I would say that I still hold a deep fear of water. However I swim regularly two or three times a week at the local pool, so it appears that there are no ill effects, apart from a pathological fear of rubber bricks!