09/05/2010
I was visiting my long-time friend Carol, who I first met under unusual circumstances at school in the 1970s, at her home. Her lovely niece, Henny, was also there, padding around in a bikini. They told me that Henny had just got a job as a lifeguard at the pool in a local leisure centre. Carol had bought her the swimsuit as a “congratulations & good luck” present, and Henny was trying it on to see if it fitted. (It did- she looked superb in it.)
“I hope the changing facilities are better than they were at our school,” I remarked to Carol.
“Goodness!” she replied. “Don’t remind me of it. That changing room- and especially those showers- almost put me off sport for life.”
Henny looked surprised. “But you’ve always been keen on sport,” she said. “Was it that bad at your school?”
“Worse than bad…” I sighed.
It was an all-girl school, and Carol and I had been 14 or 15 years old when we were introduced to the compulsory sports sessions. The lessons themselves were enjoyable; immediately afterwards was a nightmare.
Upon returning to the changing rooms, we were forced to strip totally naked and slowly walk in single file through a clean but dingy and narrow corridor- about 15 yards long- under a series of shower heads spraying lukewarm water on us. There was no escape for any of us, as there was a teacher at each end of the showers watching us and making sure every single girl went through them. You can’t imagine how humiliating it was for me at that age as I stared at the bare bum of the girl who happened to be in front of me at the time, knowing full well that, whoever the girl behind me was, she was gazing at MY bare bum- there was nothing else to look at in that bleak, wet corridor. Many were the red faces as we eventually put our school uniforms back on because of the embarrassing showering procedure we’d all had to endure.
Eventually, we sort of got used to it. The temptation to tickle between the cheeks of the naked bum in front of you was immense, and many times it wasn’t resisted. I was a victim of this, the wicked tickler being Nicola- but I got her back on the next occasion. She was (and still is) immensely ticklish, and I sometimes wonder what the teachers at each end of the shower made of the loud peal of helpless laughter she emitted when I tickled her bum. It was then, through our mutual suffering, that Carol and I actually became friends.
This concept of naked girls being herded like cattle through the showers was not as rare as it should have been in British schools during the 1970s. The odd thing was that, in many other ways, our school was very progressive. All the teachers were female, and none looked over thirty; the headmistress herself was only in her mid-thirties. Corporal punishment (specifically, caning) had been banned at the school more than 10 years before it became illegal in Britain in 1987. And we were trained on computers- yes, they were the size of couches, but no other school in our county had one for the use of pupils.
Perhaps it was because of this “progressiveness” that we were so closely monitored in the showers- hygiene was a big issue in those days. And there were benefits to having modern-thinking teachers…
Miss Walsh (later Mrs Taylor) was a blonde and (as I recognise in retrospect) beautiful young teacher who was in charge of swimming- we had to travel from the school to the local swimming baths- as they were then called- for two miles on a hired bus. On one occasion, she wanted to demonstrate a certain method of diving to us (she was particularly good at this) and, lacking a swimsuit, she simply stripped bare and made her way to the side of the pool, beckoning for us to gather round to see her dive.
“Now, notice how I keep my legs straight and together. I want you to keep your eyes in particular on the soles of my bare feet. Watch how they mirror each other as I keep them firmly together,” she told us.
Now, stripping off in front of other females may have been the norm for Miss Walsh when she was at university the previous year, but we were young, curious girls in our mid-teens. To see a fully-formed nude young woman close-up was a novelty in itself; to see a nude woman who, as a teacher, was an authority figure was thrilling. And I can assure you that, although she held our attention at that moment as no other teacher had done before, very few of us- her pupils- were looking at her feet as she sprang off her bare toes into the water to perform a superb nude dive.
For the rest of term, Nicola, myself and a group of other like-minded girls in our form conspired to trick Miss Walsh into stripping off again by asking her to demonstrate certain styles and manoeuvres in the water when we suspected she didn‘t have a swimming costume with her. Happily, we succeeded several times; if modern filming equipment and YouTube had been around in 1976, footage of the nude Miss Walsh swimming a full length of the pool underwater would be amongst the all-time most-watched clips.
Funnily enough though, once I did actually start watching the soles of her bare feet when she dived and imitated what she did, my diving from the board improved beyond all recognition, and I actually won a couple of school prizes for it. Later, I also won a diving prize at university- but with my bikini on!
Poster:
Jane Anna