Reminiscences; Holidays to North Berwick

As I mentioned earlier, we took our holidays in North Berwick for many years. We started in a shared house and later moved on to one or two holiday let houses. I think these holidays were perfect for everybody in the family; my father was to be found on the bowling green and the three of us children were given unprecedented freedom, for my mother, the peace and quiet must have been wonderful.
I spent almost all my time in the swimming pool. This pool was unheated and was open to the elements. The water temperature was posted daily on a board, and a temperature of 39 degrees F was not uncommon. I learnt to swim there and then later on to dive. There were two pools, a small one for the younger ones and non-swimmers and a large one with a slide (yes, just a simple slide, a spring board and two diving boards, one above the other. The top diving board was quite scary! Tethered to the middle of the pool was a raft.
There was a sequence of changing rooms, with varying prices. A communal ladies’ and another communal gentlemen’s, also 2 grades of single cubicles, unheated and heated.
My method of coping with the cold water was to dive in off the side and swim as fast as I could to the raft and pull myself up on to it. After a quick shiver on the raft I dived back in again and the water felt much less cold. I then carried on swimming, usually lengths of the pool until I had had enough.
There was a stall at the corner of the pool selling Marmite (a substance for which I have never acquired a taste), but my mother always provided a “shivery bite” for when I came away from the pool and I then went to an ice cream parlour on the corner for a hot orange(concentrated orange diluted with hot water). Both of the latter helped!
You could buy tickets for the pool on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and it was not long till I had a monthly ticket, swimming each morning and afternoon whatever the weather and whatever the temperature.
A further (although unforeseen) outcome of all this time spent at the pool was that I had a number of accidents and ended up at Roodlands Hospital for X-ray ?fracture, Once I had broken a toe but that was nothing. However on one occasion I was lying on the raft and did not know that someone had dived under the raft and untied it, so that I ended up with one finger caught. It did not hurt, probably because of the cold and I went back to my mother telling her that it would probably require stitches. She didn’t believe me, so I showed her! This did not require a visit to Roodlands as the local GP stitched it. A nice little reminder to this day – apart from the scar – is osteoarthritis in that finger.
On that happy note I shall leave North Berwick for the meantime, but do not fear, I shall revisit it for you sometime soon.