I used to love days like this, in the pool. Behold my old school pool. Like anything you are introduced to traumatically, and in sudden military fashion, this pool has an aura of the sacred to me. I remember being marched up to the pool for the first time in KG1 (grade 1), about 1500 metres from the classrooms (you can see in the far distance).
We had to keep quiet, not make any noise, or the whole line of us would have to stop and stand still until the teacher had identified the noise-making culprit. Then we would start again on our slow march towards the significant landmark.
Once there, we changed into our regulation black speedos and lined up with a polystyrene (“kaylite”) swimming board to hold on to, to plunge into the shallow end, and make our mad dash, kicking to the other side, amidst the thunderous waves of coldness. You had to be prepared to leap if you were the one next in line, whenever the teacher blew her whistle.
Once we had made it to the opposite side of the shallow end, we would reach up to the cold hard bars on that other side, and pull ourselves up, our bodies shivering like drowing rats. A couple of laps like this, and we were allowed back into the changerooms to dry off.
Days like shown in the photo above, between summer and winter, when the clouds were thick and heavy, but the breeze and air still warm and humid, they were the times when water seemed the element to be in, when underwater summersaults seemed like caressing warm and cool airs of mysterious gods.
