Free Wait Till I Tell You by Candia McWilliam

spent two years in bed with tuberculosis, and had learnt to smock.
    ‘Dad’s thinking of getting a purple Consul.’ This could be true. Anne’s dad was a big man with a lino factory and her brothers were down for Glenalmond. Scottish snobbery is sweet on the tongue, its private signals words which lift the blood with pride of race – Gordonstoun, Oxenfoord, Skye, Buccleuch, and traps to keep strangers out, Auchinleck, Ruthven.
    The bus went past the big power station and there were the baths, low, white, harled. They were stepped and across their square gable, in wide-spaced blue letters, thin, elegant, casting their shadow back on to the distemper in the sun, was written ‘Portobello Swimming Baths’. Each letter was exaggeratedly tall and thin, half as long again as it need be. The railings of the baths also had this disproportion, and bore long iron ellipses at their tips. The tiles were raspberry red to trim, or white, edged with leaf green, on walls and floor. There was a tremendous smell of chlorine and over the entrance was a notice to tell us that the next waves would be at half-past the hour of two and that spectators would be welcome in the viewing gallery, price 2d. We each paid sixpence and went in through the turnstile which was taller than Anne, though she was older. She was so fair her hair went grey when it was wet. I was so fat that it was a great show of love to let her see me in my bathing suit. Usually, I’d only let my mother, and then in the viewing gallery, what with her bikini and her accent.
    The point at Portobello was to get two goes of the waves, to get rescued and to see a grown up (not a man) with as few clothes as possible. We would get the two-thirty and the three o’clock waves which should just leave time for the other two tasks which must of course not be mentioned, certainly not to our mothers, nor, until afterwards, to each other, this to guard against disappointment.
    We changed in separate cubicles into our black suits. Anne’s hair was short but the baths stipulated the wearing of caps for those with long hair, even men. To be seen in cap at the baths became a paradoxical index of rebellion in Edinburgh for those years. I squeezed my two pigtails into the sore rubber helmet. We wore rubber bracelets at the wrist, to hold the key of the lockers where we had put our clothes. To reach the baths, which were open to the air, we had to walk between the rows of zinc lockers, past the attendants doing wet knitting in white overalls, and through a foot bath, tiled in white rectangles with stiff palmate shapes in dark green on the odd one. The bleach-stinking water was delicious to the feet. The big thing at this point was not to giggle at the notice which said ‘NO SPITTING, NO JUMPING, NO RUNNING, NO PUSHING, NO SHOUTING, NO PETTING’. The trick was to say something dead funny just before you read the last bit, so you had to laugh anyway. Simultaneously, we said the name of a girl two forms above (who had what we called boozums) and we were off, hyperventilating with giggles. We giggled like drunks. It made us wild.
    Out in the sun by the baths, we stood at the shallow end; at a foot’s interval all down the baths, the height was recorded in green figures on the white tiles in feet and inches. The shallow end was 2’6”, the deep end 10’. Four lifeguards stood, one at each corner, in white trousers and singlets; on their feet were white rubber shoes. The pool lay, a flat pale blue rectangle, banks of seats on three sides. At the shallow end was the viewers’ gallery. It was in the tall clock tower of the baths, and beneath it was the mighty pump which made the artificial waves, yet spectators could have tea and pancakes and not feel a thing, looking out through glass at their intrepid friends or children breasting the regulated waves each half-hour. Portobello is by the sea, but we were never tempted by its untimed grey breakers.
    Anne could, of course, swim. I floated very