Greyfriar's Road Baths

The old Corporation single decker, in its muddy brown civic livery with fading coat of arms, ground to a halt outside the school gate and stood wheezing as we all piled on in our usual chaotic fashion. It was like trying to squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube as boys wedged each other through the narrow doorway and up the steps, two, sometimes three abreast, where only one could ever fit. We did that every time; without ever really questioning why.

It was Monday afternoon and our fortnightly Winter trip to the swimming baths, our escape from a turgid timetable, our adventure into the over-chlorinated world of cold water survival; culminating in punishment for our many sins with eye-watering retribution. The fortnightly swimming lessons at Greyfriar's Road Baths were a coach holiday adventure into a mysterious world of chemically induced misery.

As the bus rumbled along, boys gabbled excitedly into the damp air, slowly steaming up windows that would quickly fall victim to excursions into adolescent risqué art. Mad Dave always held court on the back seats, with lurid illustrations of assorted human anatomy, quickly smudged out in case our games master chose to shift his attention from his Yorkshire Post to the woeful activities taking place behind him. He knew boys and their ways well, allegedly having been one himself many years earlier and would generally leave us to our own devices, providing we acted within reason.

An airborne apple core or elastic band projectile was generally overlooked, but there were lines not to be crossed and etching your initials onto the seat-back in front of you was one of them. The initials ZW, scratched so expertly with his grandad's pen knife, doing little for Zac Wigmore's repeated denials when caught red-handed. Journeys to and from the baths were always intrepid, eventful and dripping with condensation.

Greyfriar's Road swimming baths were built on the site of a mediaeval Franciscan monastery and came with ready made legends of ghostly friars wandering the building. We always joked they'd be using the slipper baths next door to cleanse themselves of their dirty habits, because there was absolutely no way they would ever want to plunge into what we laughingly referred to as the Corporation sheep dip.

Not that we ever saw any wandering friars ourselves, as we were far too busy surviving our thirty minute sessions in the chlorine soup. Occasionally, while demonstrating our individually unique floundering skills, an attendant would kneel at pool side and draw out a sample in a glass bottle which dangled dramatically from the end of a piece of string. He would then compare the content with a shade chart made up of graded shades of yellow.These ranged from a delicate 'camomile tea', through to 'tram driver's gauntlet' and finally, a worrying shade of 'dissected smoker's lung.' I often wondered if we ever matched the scarier end of the spectrum, would he blow his whistle frantically, as if something primordial had just wriggled out of the soup and slithered off into a cubicle. Disappointingly, he never did.

Our collective attempts at mastering the art of staying afloat, ranged from the not waving but drowning category, through to Fatty Adcock's, floating like an inflated life raft impersonation, both of which fulfilled the brief in its own distinctive fashion, but never quite satisfied our games master's desperate quest for aquatic elegance. One or two amongst us could power from one end of the pool to the other like manic paddle steamers, but never without flooding poolside changing cubicles and failing dismally in the desired elegance stakes. In the end, our disappointed instructor abandoned his flailing aerobic demonstrations and took to consoling himself with elaborate use of his impressive stop watch. We had, he assured us every session, knocked seconds off our previous bests. What our bests were we never discovered.

When, at last, the whistle sounded end-of-session, we clambered out of the pool looking like the desperate victims of a torpedoed Arctic convoy being dragged onto a life raft. Hypothermic, exhausted and chemically marinated, we dripped and shimmied into the changing room, rushing to cover our naked self-consciousness with layers of dishevelled school uniform as quickly as our bleached limbs would allow. Another ordeal over and now knowing exactly why the friars were grey, we left them to their own perpetual miseries and headed for the waiting bus. 

As our muddy brown Corporation lifeboat drew alongside with the next batch of hapless bathers, we stared at them in silence as they skipped by with the innocent excitement of passengers boarding the Titanic’s maiden voyage. Thirty bloodshot, traumatised and chemically dipped survivors did little to kerb their enthusiasm. 

The journey back to our turgid timetable was always much subdued, as we slowly recovered from our toxic shock. Crisps were munched in relative silence and the urge to create steamy images repressed by the inability to see clearly for several hours. We paid a heavy price for learning the art of staying afloat, even if we had knocked seconds from our previous bests, but the one consolation we all took from the experience was that, should we ever be torpedoed north of Murmansk, we could all survive comfortably until picked up by a passing ocean going liner.