Peterborough Lido 1936

 This morning we got up to try the 07.30 pensioners' early swim at the Lido. 

 

 

Changing in the row of empty cubicles and setting clothes down on the benches, we dived into a balmy 28.5C under the watchful gaze of two boys covered with  windproof blankets marked Lifeguard.

As I swam up and down in silence with about 15 other elderly, rotund swimmers I looked again at the architecture surrounding the blue painted pool and mused about its significance. For it was built in the era of 1936. 

1936 was the year of the Berlin Olympics and the movements of 'Health and Beauty' in Britain, and 'Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude)' in Germany. Things were all going swimmingly. Young people were swept up in the fashion of body culture, well-being, and healthy walking in the mountains. Fitness and mixed bathing and a good deal of general reduced-clothing recreation was greatly welcomed at the time. And probably a lot more besides. 

Even in England people took to the outdoors and the new freedoms. 

I always remembered the swimming medals and certificates of life-saving that were kept sentimentally in my father's sock drawer. 'Newark Lido High Diving Certificate Ralph F. Lowings.' There were even a couple of photos of a group lolling on the grass there, smiling at the camera. Women in their fussy bathing hats, men in sensible trunks held up with belts, not knowing the devastation of society soon to come into their lives.

But part of the heady joy of vitality was the creation of numbers of city lidos. And Peterborough lido is one of those that remain and its architecture still harked for me back to those times, as I swam slowly up and down. 

I saw the stylish flair of the flatter-pitched tiled roofs and the square minimalist practical arcades under the sundecks that surrounded the large pool below. A curved clock tower looked over the pool and the spread-out lawns for more sun-bathing with shade trees. It could have been taken from any similar pool in Austria today. For that is what it actually is, a Tyrolean Freibad. And England too was swept up in the new wave of state-encouraged fitness and this lido remains to bear witness to this. We found only later to our cost that in Germany it was all part of a less innocent idea of purity and body culture. Eventually separating certain groups from others, marking them with logos, and restricting their liberties and forbidding some groups from working in certain jobs. 

At the four corners of the Lido were square towers and with no effort they could be seen as watch towers, and I recalled the sad images of Germany with the same watch towers overlooking those incarcerated inside.

We pensioners who had risen early at this tranquil hour, swam up and down and listened oddly to 30 minutes of  Diana Ross and the Supremes, The Four Tops, the Temptations and James Brown the father of soul.... singing his hit number 'Get up like a sex machine'. 

But it was not ear splittingly loud, unlike any trip to Bourne Indoor Swimming pool where the bored lifeguards seem to enjoy turned-up rap day and night, and with its half a second reverberation time resulting in the cavernous pool being a mind-blowing cacophony of unmusical rant.

As we all plodded up and down trying to lose a few calories I saw the large murals of calligraphied poetry and we tried to decypher them. One in particular seemed especially baffling.

It was a pleasant experience to swim in a Lido but it wasn't Wild Swimming with its insinuation of being slightly illegal, so for me wasn't the same as a swim in the gravel pit, or the tarns, which in a way might even be seen as an act of resistance or rebellion. 

I asked the Lifeguard if he missed the times of fun and 'dive-bombing', shoulder fights and splashing wars that used to take place in outdoor pools, but was met with disbelief and a long serious lecture on dangers, and on the importance  of  'keeping you safe.'  "You can dive in there!" said the Lido Youth. 

I replied wickedly that 'he had a point, and that I can always go and lark around in the gravel pits scattered around the place, where no-one can see.'

One later shouted down to me not to touch the rope lane marker.

We went and had a warm breakfast and I went and looked at the news on the Internet. I read about a man who was going to lose his job when the new, segregating, government regulations came in, in eight weeks, and that movement around Europe remains controlled. Interstate travel in USA is 'being made notifiable' said the headline. 

I hope this, too, is not part of a less innocent idea.