Motes

I went swimming this evening. In a town I had not visited perhaps twice in my adult life, and could not remember. As I drove past the main entrance to the park, with its stone gate posts and tree lined avenue, I realised. "I've been here". Not to the town, I knew that. Right here in this spot.

I parked and had a walk around. To the bridge. We fished for sticklebacks here with Mairi and Cathy, before the little ones were even born. Nylon stocking on a hoop of coat-hanger at the end of a bamboo-cane rod. Those long summers that seemed to last forever. They had a house with a crazily steep drive. I couldn't remember the name of the road, several houses back from the ones I recalled more clearly.

I walked around in the evening sunlight. The shadows were long on the ground and I thought about their little dog, eating all the duck a l'orange, so carefully prepared, that we children didn't like but knew must be ooh-ed and aah-ed over. Exotic. I'd never at that age eaten avocado, or brie, or Parma ham, or frilly lettuce, or yoghurt. Never slept under a "continental quilt". Never met a vegetarian, or anyone who's skin was brown. Never been abroad. Probably would have had a nosebleed if I'd gone north of the Blackwall Tunnel.

In the pool as I swam up and down, I was still feeling a sense of deja vu. Wasn't sure why. I stopped thinking about it, and my mind drifted pleasantly around the edges of nothing in particular. They were putting a girl into a hoist to lower her into the water. I remembered this is how Diana Adams got into the pool too.

My goodness! I think I learned to swim here! Of course, growing up at the seaside we were constantly in the water and the combinations of shallows, confidence and the buoyancy of the salt meant that we all swam after a fashion by the age of three or four. However, our after-a-fashion swimming was not deemed good enough by the school, so for a year we were taken in buses to The Big Pool. Quite a long way away, as not many places had a pool at that time.

But could it really be here? Obviously not that big modern extension, but the original pool, and its diving pool alongside - that seemed very familiar. But then surely all pools looked a bit like that. I swam some more, tried to work out if the pool could be old enough. I even asked at the reception desk when I'd got dried and changed, but no-one could remember when it was built.

As I came out and walked to my car under the tall dark trees, the last rays of sunshine touched the park on my right, and the grass shone a luminous green between the black trunks. I'm sure it was here.

My past is leaping out at me unexpectedly, unbidden, with alarming frequency these days. I am going to the sea tomorrow evening so I'm preparing myself for a possible memory-surge. Just in case.