swimming with the Brits

Today being Sunday, I went to my second favorite place of worship.
I went to the swimming pool.
This time I took a 319 bus from Clapham Junction down to Tooting Bec and I went to the Lido.
It was opened in 1906.  It was called Tooting Bec Swimming lake.

They didn't allow women in until 1917. And until 1931 they had separate days for men and women.
Some ladies wrote strong letters of complaint and as of 1931 the pool was open to everyone, all the time.
In 1960 they opened the pool up all year. And there are photos of people in nifty swimming trunks hacking at the ice on the pool before they leap in.
There is a cafe and a children's paddling pool and little cubicles where people can change.

I just want to remind everyone that this is an open air unheated pool in Britain.
It is Sunday. It is sunny. But this is not flip-flop, sleeveless T-shirt weather.
No this is the last day of July in Britain and everyone has a cardigan on and an umbrella in their shoulder bags.
This pool is 100 meters long. That is long.

But what I loved about this pool, where people have been swimming for 110 years is that there are no lanes. Everyone just gets in and swims.
I was standing on the side and I asked this gentleman who was taking off his goggles.
" I am new here. Are there any rules about swimming?"
he said, " Oh no. You just get in and swim. it sorts itself out somehow."


And it did. Nobody cannoned into each other. Some people in the shallow end were even swimming across the pool. People in wet suits. People in bikinis.  Everyone just swam and gently moved around each other with not one cross word.

It seems that sometimes, things just sort themselves out somehow.

rolling countryside and empire line dresses

A trip to Derbyshire.

St. Pancras Station

the flower stall at the station

  Which is a county in the Midlands. The Middle lands of Britain.
There is a farm outside Derby that they say is the furthest point from the sea in all of Great Britain.
(That would be a mere 90 miles.)
It is here, they say, that the Industrial revolution started. It had the first factory.



At school I liked history. The endless roundabout of the Protestant to the Catholic. The Vikings swept in from Scandinavia.
The Romans marched up from Italy and gave us the straight roads, Verulanium and the baths in Bath. William from Falaise in Normandy hopped quite neatly over the channel,  speared King Harold with an arrow in the eye, and got all these messy English  people in order, with the Domesday book of 1066 when he went round every village and wrote down in this big book, who lived there.
There were good Kings and good Queens. And ineffective ones. And nasty ones who killed off all the competition. And there was a nice married couple who came over from Holland. And there was the houses of York and Lancaster who fought each other for power for decades. And there was Charles the first who was very little and his son Charles the second who had very curly hair and sandwiched in the middle was Oliver Cromwell who stopped everyone dancing. And they cut people's heads off right and left. We had virgin queens and homosexual princes and a king who couldn't keep his  cod piece buttoned up.

So why...why...would I have been interested in the Industrial revolution, pray tell?
answer is... I wasn't.
Factories and mining passed me right by.

So my trip to Derbyshire, to walk the dales with my delightful god-daughter Steffie. (She isn't really my god-daughter , but we both decided to call her that because her route into my life requires explanation and her mother would have said ... " sounds right to me.") This trip with Stefffie was not about the county that sparked the Industrial revolution. No.





What came to my mind was the trip that Elizabeth Bennet made with her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner to Derbyshire, when she had already rejected Darcy once in the woods outside Lady Catherine de Bourgh's estate in Kent; (stay with me here,) and she and the Gardiners went to visit the Darcy stately home, Pemberley, not knowing he would be there...but oh no, oh yes, he was. And they had a very nice time, without even a cup of tea, and then when they went back to their little inn at Lambton, he came racing over and  told them about Lydia and Wickham

Yes, it is true ladies and gentlemen. If world history was based on the Shires and people of Jane Austen, or the spy stories of John Le Carre, or the middle earth of J.R.R.Tolkien; I would be a scholar.

So we walked around the dales of Derbyshire and all I saw were the trees which would have caught the fabric of Elizabeth's flowing empire line dress.

Or the bench where she would have stopped to catch her breath.

Or the fields where her ballet pumps would have allowed her to twirl with the possibility of a second chance at love.

Oh my. Oh yes. 

Welcome to my world.

trains, trains, trains.

Can I begin to tell you how much I love trains?

I love trains.

I’m not talking about the grubby ones that go underground .

I am talking about the sleek ones that sit on Platform 8 of Paddington or St. Pancras or Waterloo and purr murderously as you walk the length to find the coach where you booked your seat.

Eventually you just hop on and weave yourself from carriage to carriage, trying to walk a straight line as the train inches itself out of metropolitan-land. “ Sorry” you say as you brush someone’s shoulder with your hip. “ Sorry” you say as you slide sideways and your newspaper lands in someone’s lap.

I always book the quiet coach. Which is where people can’t talk on cell phones. And if people talk, they are asked to talk in a whisper.

When people disobey there is always the experienced traveler who will cough and then ask them nicely if they knew where they were sitting.

Just now, on the 8.45 from London Paddington to Swansea, calling at Reading, Swindon, Bristol Parkway and Neath; the conductor came through and touched the arm of the man who was reminding his secretary to change his eleven o’clock meeting, and said “ If you wouldn’t mind, sir..”

I get a cup of tea from the onboard café. They ask if you if would like fresh milk in it and totally understand when you want to take out the tea-bag before it gets too stewed. “ Enough milk in there for you? Would you like a drop more? Say when..”

I sit by the window , always facing the way the train is going. Somehow I think I will miss things if I see them after they have gone by.

I watch for cows grazing. I often say, though they can’t hear, “I don’t eat you.” I should tell them I consume vast amounts of their butter and cheese, but I want them to think well of me as I pass by.  I marvel at Clouds.  I look for Farms. Hills. Ancient trees. Horses. Isolated cottages. Tractors. Harvesting. I try and read the station names as we whip through and always fail. I look for bridges, Old signal houses, up on stilts, where a man would sit and switch the tracks from Caernarvon to Fishguard Harbour. I look at backs of houses; with their conservatories, washing lines, vegetable plots; their hopeful table and chairs for the 5 days of British sunny afternoons. I look for glimpses of the sea and barges on winding rivers. I spot caravans and little boxy houses and wonder who lives there. I look for the long stretches of countryside inbetween power lines and the odd chimney stack and I think, they could film a Thomas Hardy novel here.

Sitting on a train at high speed is not the same as sitting on a steam train. I can just about remember the trains where all of the carriages had individual compartments and when traveling on your own you would sit in the ‘ladies only’ compartment to avoid the unsavoury elements.

My grandfather Charles worked for the Great Western Railways. He was a conductor. Before he became an inspector with a special peaked cap.

My mother’s annual holidays as a child would be a trip on the train because free rides was the gift of his employment. And her biggest treat, she always told me, would be a custard slice from the station café on the platform before the train pulled in. 

At one stage we were going to buy a house that had a train track at the bottom of the garden. “ Might be nice,” she said. “ The sound of a train. So calming.”

me and my cup of British Rail tea

Did I tell you just how much I love trains? I really love trains.

anglesey

Many, many years ago. When Doctor Who was middle aged and wore a knitted scarf; I spent a year playing Miss Caswell in the Mousetrap. She was, I was told, a lesbian.  So they put me in a tweed suit and asked me to speak as if I was teaching a group of dimwits to play field hockey.  I must have been effective because my only note was to dye my hair because it was the same colour as the scenery.

I got a few things from that year at the St Martin’s Theatre. I got a fold up bicycle because I got fed up of people telling me they’d catch the last bus home with me if I came for just the one drink. I got proper money, because this was my first brush with earning more than you needed to fill your fridge with your weekly wage; enough to buy a ‘round-the-world’ plane ticket. And I got two friends. Peter Penry-Jones, a welsh man of intelligence, eloquence, and power, playing Giles who was the owner of Monkswell Manor Hotel. And David McAlister who was the policeman who climbed in the hotel window at the end of the first act. Who turned out to be Miss Caswell’s brother and the killer. I apologise if you haven’t seen it. But I promise you I am saving you from one of the most illogical and stupid pieces of theatre you would ever have seen. David was an actor who loved not only acting but the business of acting, which is rare.

red wharf bay. 1870

After a year, David and I could not look at each other for fear of laughing. Not helped by the day I came onstage with my leg in plaster from a bad sprain and because, as I said, he came to the play late, he just turned round and left the stage in giggles leaving us all to interrogate ourselves. David toured and toured and sang and toured until he died last year, way too early. Peter took care of me. He talked to me like I was grown up until I dared to think I might be. He filtered the world I was walking into through his intelligence and his logic and his Welsh sense of poetic resignation.

Peter or PPJ as I called him, had a wife who was an actress of talent and success and two young sons; so finding the whole business a bit distasteful; he handed over the pursuit of work to his wife and he gave his sons all the attention possible.

I lived with Peter and his family when my flat was being gutted. I visited Peter up in Anglesey in the stone cottage he had inherited from his parents. I drove Laurie, the youngest around in my father’s  sports car

(He remembers this, not me)  I went to a not very religious church with them on a Sunday morning, because Peter thought the vicar had a good mind and voice. When I came to America, I would always go and visit them in their large house in West Norwood. “ I want to live in Marble Arch.” Angie would say. “ Sigh” is what Peter would say.  And take the dog out for a walk. Rupert the elder became an actor. Laurie the younger did too. Peter feared for them both.

Rupert met his wife doing a production of “ Dangerous Corner.” He came out to LA with Dervla after the run ended and they lived next door to me. Laurie met his wife doing a production of “Liaisons Dangereuses”. He and Polly came out to live in LA for a few years.

peter and Rupert

Rupert and Dervla, Florence and Peter

Laurie and Polly

laurie and Angie

I visited Peter in that stone cottage a number of times. Once when we went mackerel fishing from the rocks. Once when Rupert and Dervla’s new baby was born and they asked me to be godmother as we were all walking across the mile long beach. Once when Peter was ill and I gave him a foot massage, which still has Angela in a state of incredulity. 

And now, some seven years after Peter has gone, to stay with Angela in the house that is full of him. From stone terraces he built with his father. To rose bushes that he planted. To the blue summer house he built high up in the orchard. To the steps he made so that Angela could climb through the stone wall to the driveway. The views from all the windows are the greatest of cinema. The desk was his father’s. the jugs were collected by his mother. The Aga was Angela’s idea. The garden was theirs.

the aga and the kitchen

peter's mother's bedroom

The sitting room

Gertrude's jugs

Although Angela wanted to live in the middle of London, when Peter died, she spent more and more time in the stone cottage on the edge of Red Wharf Bay. In Ty Mawr Llan. In the village of Llandonna.

the grocery store in Beaumaris

that grocery store again

macaroni cheese and flowers from the garden

Rupert and Dervla are coming up with their two children in a couple of weeks. Laurie and Polly will be up later.

angela

This morning, a wonderful elderly couple brought by the Sunday Telegraph as they always do on a Sunday and they stop for coffee.

David told Angela that he had sat with Peter when he wasn’t well and had asked what his one wish would be. Peter had said, “ To see my family walking along this beach.”