Going for gold...

THE teacher would open the door and the first thing to hit you would be the tepid humidity. We'd step inside to the changing rooms – lads to the left, lasses to the right – and there would be that strange, constant hum of hidden machinery. Then, with bathers on and black rubber caps stretched migraine-taut over our heads, we were herded through the foot disinfectant pools and into the room that amplified whispers into shouts.

And before us, under the bright, dirty yellow of the fibreglass roof, that huge, moving, almost living mass of water with the squiggly lines along the bottom.

Down that ladder and inside and it would be only slightly colder than your body temperature. Then it would be just the same (or was it that your body temperature was just the same as it?). And you would know, because you had seen a picture of one of them empty, that you could walk with your head above water for a while.

Then, all of a sudden, your feet wouldn't touch anything because the floor had fallen away from under you and you had stepped off into the watery abyss.

The swimming pool at St Saviour's School still gives me the creeps. I had strange phobias when I was younger – clowns, nuns and a primary school swimming pool – and I believe if I had ever seen in real life a clown dressed as a nun dangling his feet in the deep end I would now be one of those blokes with no hair and long fingernails who live in bed-sits full of newspapers and speak only to their Action Man in a made-up language.

It's strange. I was never scared of the sea. In fact, I lived at the beach during the summertime. I think it had to do with the fact that I couldn't swim. I once slipped under and all I could see for what seemed like hours were the legs and half-arms of the other swimmers splashing about, oblivious to me sinking. Then I saw the biggest legs rush towards me in slow motion and their owner pulled me up into the air.

Then, in England, my dad taught me to swim. Very patiently. He did it at Shipley Swimming Baths, a huge 1970s leisure pool.

It had a separate kiddies' pool and a huge, Olympic-sized one in the middle. At the end was a diving pool with various springboards and at the top, the hallowed top box.

It looked to be 50ft up and every now and then big-headed blokes with handlebar moustaches and tattoos would fling themselves off it, wriggle all the way down and then part the water in a perfect, almost soundless dive while poolside, leggy, tanned blondes would giggle at their dare-devilish feats.

One of these blokes sneered at me because I walked to the edge, looked down and went back down the ladder.

'Rubber chicken,' he called me.

Shipley Baths had one wall completely made of glass and hanging from the ceiling, a cafe-cum-viewing gallery. It was here that the moustachioed divers would buy the leggy blondes coffee and make them giggle and outside, in the spacious car park, they would drive them home in their orange MGB sports cars.

Life was pretty peachy if you could swim and had a moustache in 1977.

Shipley Baths held so much potential. They were bathed in a promising, life-affirming Technicolor glow. Back home in Keighley and things were Pathe newsreel black and white.

Our baths were Victorian and echoed with defeat. If Shipley Baths were Mark Spitz – young, dynamic and devilishly handsome, butterfly crawling through glittering turquoise – then Keighley's were Albert Steptoe in a tin bath eating a jar of pickled eggs.The railings on the viewing benches were chipped and rusting. The diving boxes were falling to bits. There was a steam room and Turkish baths at the back that lugubrious old men would walk around to. And high above the diving boxes a round window sprouted grass. This was where we had to go for our weekly swimming lessons. Afterwards there would be Seabrook's salt and vinegar crisps with the most watery tomato soup ever and the stink of chlorine on the bus back to school.

When I came on holiday I would envy Guernseyfolk their Beau Sejour swimming pool – all fake grass and plastic sun loungers and lifeguards in pristine white.

Our baths had a tatty 'Bombsplashing prohibited' sign by the diving boxes and our lifeguards were three winos in off-white with yellow stains (they were the real reason why any kid in Keighley in the 70s learned to swim sharpish – the thought of being rescued and resuscitated by these derelicts was more of an incentive than the promise of drowning Rolf Harris).

Then to grammar school. I foolishly picked games as part of my subject choice. Not only did we have to play rugby in torrential downpours, the school had the world's first covered swimming pool.

Like St Saviour's, it was fibreglass, but unlike St Saviour's the sun barely shone through, as we always seemed to have swimming in the dead of winter.

Our two games teachers were a pair of sadists – one an ex-army instructor and the other an ex-Dewsbury Rugby League Football Club forward who was over the hill.

They would make us feel like the characters in the Borstal film Scum. The water was freezing as the heater never worked (no strange hum in that place) and it was made worse by the teachers' terrible gags.

'I used to play water polo – 'til me pony drowned. Hor, hor, hor.'

Then one day, after a heavy snowfall, we all cheered when reports flew round that the pool was closed.

In fact, it was better than that. The place had been crushed by the immense weight of snow. It looked like it had been in an avalanche. A total write-off. Yippee!

I've been in the pool at Fort Regent in Jersey, with its glass wall and doozy springboards. I've shivered at Ilkley Baths (what kind of masochist builds an outdoor swimming pool in West Yorkshire?) and shivered more at the wedding cake fountains of the pools at Butlin's in Filey (what kind of uber-masochist builds an outdoor swimming pool in North Yorkshire?)

And there've been fancy heated swimming pools at numerous hotels, Tooting Bec Lido and even millponds.

But not one has compared with La Vallette bathing pools. They may not be in as pristine a condition as they once were. More bits have fallen off each time I visit and the diving boards that once stuck out of the sea at high tide like the masts of a sunken ship have long gone.

But what other swimming pool has those views?

And what other pool have I swum in way after midnight with my wife, both of us naked and happy and over a decade younger than we are now?

The sight of me sans keks nowadays, I fear, would cause the fishes to leap from the sea and fling themselves gurgling onto dry land in a mass display of piscine hara-kiri.

Enjoy swimming pools while you can, kids. For some of us they don't last forever.