I’ve always loved English swimming pools. I can’t help it – I am a pool-fancier. The lumpy feel of the blue lining beneath pale feet; the peculiar, chlorinated smell of the pool hut where you do the knicker trick; the scratchy pool towel, the near-collapsing deckchair by its side; the greying sky overhead. There’s the swimming, too, but that’s not what gets me. No, the English pool is a particular social idea, a knowing nod to vulgarity, a paradis artificiel in our rainy climes.
Chips Channon, an early adopter, knew it when he insisted on putting in a pool at Kelvedon in 1937, as did Viscount Astor when he went against his mother Nancy’s wishes and did the same at Cliveden. Rishi Sunak, presumably misty eyed about California, put one in at his house in Yorkshire, although his can’t have been a joke.
In the past few weeks, the English pool will have been ‘opened up’ for the season, its strange blue cover winched back anew. In my village in Oxfordshire, the pool man has been furiously circulating in his van, pouring chemicals into these hallowed blue squares. More than the ice-cream van, more than the smell of cut grass, more than the cricketers, it is the pool man that heralds summer to me.
But his arrival presents me with an annual etiquette conundrum. How acceptable is it, really, to ask to use someone’s pool? Is it, as I suspect, by invitation only? In anticipation of a summer well-spent in these pleasure gardens, I poll friends for answers. The response is mixed.
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