Pat Boran

The journey took no more than ten minutes, despite the occasional reprimands and threats from teachers to turn back.

A journey filled with such expectation that the moment we spied the fabled buildings, grey-roofed, white-walled, almost totally windowless form, even the non-swimmers among us could feel its attraction.

And had we been free to, we'd have charged off ahead, en masse, through its swinging doors to plunge into its depths.

What happened, however, was somewhat more prosaic.

Once inside the pool building, for many of us non-swimmers, excitement quickly changed to anxiety.

The smell was overpowering, the noise in those white-tiled changing rooms deafening, as experienced kids shouted and cheered and stripped to the togs they already had put on that morning before jostling their way out to be the first to the poolside.

Four or five of us were left in a kind of daze.

Someone's sister had warned him about something called Verrucas and we looked suspiciously at the glistening tiles.

Some kept their socks on while they changed, which itself seemed to make them even more unsteady on the slippery floors and raised the tension of the group as a whole.

Right lads, everybody out now together?

A teacher called.

Rigid, white-faced, we made our way towards the pool.

Eighty-two by thirty feet had sounded big, and it was.

But what struck me then, of course, and should have struck me before, was not the size of the pool of restless blue-green water, or the height of the sheet metal ceiling, besides the prison and the church.

This must have been the biggest indoor space in town.

What struck me then, and hard enough to knock the breath out of me, was the depth of the water.

shallow at the point we'd just passed, but here, before us, where the teachers had lined us up along the wave-lapped edge for a last-minute talk, impossibly, unfathomably deep.

Now, listen up, Mr. Melia or Mr. Booth was calling above the clamour of the waves and echoes and reflections.

Though all of our voices were mixed together then and we were just a mixed up herd of humans at the edge of water, where any safety lecture that would have to be delivered would have to be delivered fast.

Standing beside me in the line was my classmate, Tommy,