My parents set to writing letters to Salisbury, organizing petitions, attending meetings, all with the aim of getting the pool up and running again. I didn’t know this at the time but discovered later that they were equally determined to get the ownership of the pool transferred from the Sports and Social Club to the school. This did not do much to improve my parents’ popularity amongst the locals, whose fear of losing that much-loved liquor license was pervasive.
Somehow, though I don’t quite know how, I recall my father’s saying, one day, that he had come to an agreement with the officials in Salisbury. He would provide workers to clean the pool itself, and would also fix any faulty equipment, if Salisbury would consent to pay for required replacement parts. Salisbury agreed.
I considered my father to be both brave and competent. He had told the powers-that-be in Salisbury that he was going to repair and run this large open-air facility. How was he going to do that, exactly, I wondered? We all understood that my father was technically minded, capable of fixing most household items, but he had never tackled a project as large as a public swimming pool. Would he really be able to do this? I was even more amazed when he told us that he was also going to train African workers employed to work in the school grounds, how to maintain the pool! He was?! How?! I knew that my father didn’t know anything at all about maintaining a pool! I also realized, though, that my father was a quick learner, and that he would, no doubt, acquire all the knowledge he needed by reading books on the subject.
This is precisely what happened. I recall my father’s sitting in our living room, reading endless books on swimming pools, not a topic that, I thought, would normally have interested him, though I soon learned that running a pool did involve having working machinery such as pumps, and the like. Engines and motors of all types had always fascinated my father, I knew, so did it really matter that swimming pool machinery was that much bigger? Perhaps, not.
The first time I went to see Darwendale pool with my father, I recall that it was just disgusting. I had only ever seen a swimming pool once before in my life, and that was the small pool on the SS Braemar, the Union Castle Line boat on which my mother and we children had sailed from England to South Africa. That pool had been small, crystal-clear, bright blue, sparkling. Compare that with the huge pool in front of which I stood now…yuck! No-one would ever want to go in this water, for sure. I couldn’t even see the bottom of the pool, because an appalling mess of stinky, green slime was floating on top of the murky water. Where the pool’s water level had dropped through evaporation over the past many months of non-use, I could see a few of the grimy tiles around the edge of the pool, too, just below its lip.
