Ian McMillan: Boarded-up baths bring a flood of memories

The boards that serve as wooden windows sometimes have the boarding firm’s name stencilled on in a form of crisis advertising so that as you pass by you can note the number down in case you ever need a boarder-up.

As I stroll past I often think “Well, at least somebody’s getting work out of it” and I imagine Boarding Up HQ with boarders-up poised and ready as the firm’s CCTV scans the city for signs of smashing glass and at the first tinkle and the first shatter the boarders-up are off and away like Batman and Robin out of the Batcave, in a white van rather than the Batmobile. Well, the Batmobile would just attract unwanted attention.

The other day I thought about this when I came down Hough Lane in Wombwell and noticed that Wombwell Baths, a victim of the cuts, was boarded up.

There was a campaign to keep the baths open which, in the end, failed; although there’s always a hope, in a Big Society way, that volunteers might be persuaded to keep the baths open, which might happen in the same way that I might win Rear of the Year.

When I was a child, my dad took me to the baths very early on a Saturday morning partly to avoid the crowds and partly because I suspect he was embarrassed about his big purple trunks.

His way of teaching me to swim wasn’t, I have to admit, very effective. He’d stand in the shallow end of the little baths (as opposed to the big baths which were for proper swimmers) wringing his hands as I stood there wringing my hands. He’d then try to get me to lie in the water and I didn’t like that because water got in my ears and my mate Keith Barlow had told me that water in your ears led to a disease that he called Brain Soak which rendered your memory totally ineffective. “It’ll hold you up,” my dad would say. “You’ll float.”

Once or twice I did manage to float for a couple of seconds and then my dad would move on to the second part of his learning technique, which was to say, in an encouraging voice: “Move your arms and legs at the same time.”

I tried it and thrashed about a bit like a drunk uncle at a wedding disco and the water not only got in my ears but also in my nose and sometimes in my mouth which, again according to Keith Barlow, would lead to the twin evils of Nostril Rot and Chloride Ulcers.

My terrified splashing would signal the end of the lesson and we’d climb out, get changed and go home for a bacon sandwich because, as my dad always said, “all that exercise makes you very hungry” as his purple trunks flapped on the washing line like a flag of convenience.

I guess that many people who pass Wombwell Baths will have stories like that to tell; some people used it regularly, right up to the end, and fought hard to keep it open and now it just sits there with its wooden shutters keeping swimmers out and memories in.

When I got home after passing the baths, I couldn’t stop thinking about the boarded-up windows and how they’re becoming a symbol of these times we’re living through. You wander down a high street and shops are boarded up and at the edge of towns half-built estates are boarded up and little factories and one-person enterprises are boarded up.

If you’re being positive you can say that at least something that’s boarded up isn’t demolished; it’s still there and when the good times finally return the boards can be prised off and chucked in a skip and everything can start again.

But I hope people like my grown-up kids and my grandson Thomas don’t remember this decade as the decade of closure, because walking through a closed-down town does something to your hopes and aspirations. A shabby street makes you feel shabby, makes you feel like boarding yourself up and sitting in the house and not going out to talk to anybody because the place where you used to meet is shut.

I’m sure that in hundreds of years historians will be baffled by the evidence they see of all this closure. They’ll publish learned articles entitled “Early 21st Century Boarding Up and its Effects on the Leisure Industry”, and they’ll spend an afternoon discussing the fact that Boarders-up became the new aristocrats towards the end of 2013, and apprenticeships in boarding-up became like gold dust. That’s before the recovery came of course. It was just round the corner. Or have I just got Brain Soak?