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Lengths in the Cold

A feature by a journalist who spends a year with volunteers restoring a closed 1930s open-air swimming pool

You are going to read an extract. Six paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A-G the one which fits each gap (1-6). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

The first thing you notice about an open-air pool that has been closed for fifteen years is the silence. Harwood Lido sits behind a row of plane trees on the edge of the park, and on the February morning I first visited, the only sound was the wind moving through the railings. I stood at the shallow end looking down into a basin of brown leaves, a rusting shopping trolley and a buddleia bush growing confidently out of the deep end. I had been sent to write three hundred words about a ‘community campaign’. My guide that morning had learned to swim in that deep end at the age of six. [GAP 1] She was right about the shape. Harwood was built in 1936, when towns across Britain were competing to give working families somewhere to swim in summer, and it has all the confidence of that era: a fifty-metre tank, curved white terraces for sunbathing, and a fountain at the far end shaped like a stepped wedding cake. It closed in 2009 after the council discovered a leak and estimated the cost of repairs at £400,000, a figure that, in Bernadette’s words, ‘was designed to end the conversation’. [GAP 2] Getting it took most of the spring. The council was prepared to lease the site to the group for a nominal rent, but only if they could prove that the tank itself would still hold water. So on a raw Saturday in April I found myself wearing borrowed waders, helping a dozen volunteers clear the deep end so that an engineer could inspect the concrete underneath. [GAP 3] Beneath a layer of grey paint that someone had applied in the 1980s was a band of tiles in a colour I can only describe as postcard blue. They were the originals, laid in 1936, and in places they were as bright as the day they were fired. Bernadette went very quiet. Later she told me that her mother used to point at that blue from the terraces and call it ‘the seaside we can afford’. The engineer’s report, when it arrived a fortnight later, was rather less romantic. [GAP 4] What happened next is the part of the story that local newspapers like best, and it is easy to see why. Children did sponsored swims in other people’s pools, a bakery on the high street sold blue-iced buns, and an online appeal raised £31,000 in six weeks. But the money that made the real difference came from somewhere far less photogenic: a sixty-page application to a heritage fund, written by Bernadette at her kitchen table over three weeks of evenings. [GAP 5] Those nine weeks were the only time I saw the group come close to falling apart. People who had worked side by side all spring began arguing about paint colours, opening hours and whether to allow inflatables. Terry and the engineer stopped speaking to each other for a week over the position of a pump. And yet, on the Thursday before the opening, the tank was finally filled, and I stood with the volunteers as the water crept slowly up the blue tiles. [GAP 6] I swam later that afternoon. The water was seventeen degrees, cold enough to take your breath away for the first length and to make you feel extraordinarily alive by the third. Around me, people of every age were doing the same slightly shocked breaststroke. I had come to write three hundred words about a campaign. What I found instead was a group of people who had refused to accept that something worth having was too expensive to keep.

• A. It was filthier work than I had imagined. Under the leaves lay a thick black silt that smelled of old ponds, and under that were things nobody could explain, including a single roller skate and a set of false teeth. We filled forty-two bags before lunch. Around two o’clock, Terry Valdés, one of the plumbers, scraped at the wall with a trowel, then stopped and called us over to see what he had found.
• B. By six o’clock on the Saturday morning the queue already stretched past the bus stop. There were grandparents who had swum here as children, teenagers who had never been inside, and at least one man in a 1930s-style striped costume. The volunteers agreed that Bernadette should have the first swim. She did one slow length of breaststroke, climbed out, and announced to great applause that it was freezing.
• C. Bernadette Okafor is seventy-one now, a retired PE teacher with a whistle still hanging on a hook by her front door. She has been fighting for the lido since the week it closed, and she walked me round its edge as if showing me a house she intended to buy. When I said, carefully, that it looked rather beyond saving, she laughed. ‘Don’t look at the rubbish,’ she said. ‘Look at the shape.’
• D. When the reply arrived in late May, she read it twice before she would believe it. The fund would pay for the new pipework and most of the filtration; the volunteers would have to do everything else themselves. That left nine weeks until the date they had already announced, perhaps rashly, for reopening: the first Saturday in August.
• E. In the end, embarrassed by months of bad publicity, the council agreed to pay for all the repairs itself, and the volunteers’ role shrank to painting railings and planting flower beds by the entrance. Some of them were openly relieved. Others felt that the lido had been taken away from them for a second time, and Bernadette stopped coming to the work parties altogether.
• F. It didn’t. The conversation simply moved to her kitchen table, and then to a church hall, and by the time I arrived the Friends of Harwood Lido had four hundred members, a bank account and a spreadsheet of useful skills: two retired plumbers, a structural engineer and a woman who had once run a hotel laundry. What they did not have was permission to set foot on the site.
• G. The concrete, it said, was sound. The pipework was not, and the filtration plant was described as ‘of historical interest only’. The cheapest estimate for replacing both came to £180,000. That was less than half of the council’s original figure, but it was still a sum that made the group’s spreadsheet look very thin indeed, and for a few days nobody wanted to talk about it.