Mr Fish

Emily saw Mr Fish yesterday, standing by Park Hotel’s delightful open-air pool. Here’s the pool:

and here’s where she saw him, just by that notice where he always used to stand:

Now this was odd because he died before Emily was born. She wasn’t too surprised to see him, however, because she saw him last year as well, and gave me a very clear description.

Mr Fish was Park Hotel’s swimming instructor in the 1960s. Even better, his Christian name was Ivor and I thought then, and think now, that Ivor Fish is a really excellent name for a man who taught swimming.

We didn’t just laze about in those days, oh no: the hotel was full of children then and we all dashed down the cliff path to the beach straight after breakfast for a swim in the sea. Then after that we all rushed back up again for quarter past eleven for a swimming lesson from Mr Fish in the pool.

We stayed in so long that we all ended up shaking with cold and occasionally had to be brought hot soup from the kitchens which seemed to be kept for just such emergencies. But we weren’t going to miss a moment of Mr Fish’s lesson, because he was the best swimming teacher in the world.

He had a clever way of taking your stroke to pieces and putting it back together in a much better way, and all the time somehow managing to convince you that all this was because you had the potential to take part in the next Olympics if only you put in a bit of attention and listened carefully. One of us did actually swim in the Commonwealth Games a few years later.

He taught us all the different strokes and he taught us to dive. He taught us to swim underwater. But most of all, he gave us confidence, judging our ability and pushing us to the limits but not beyond. He taught me how to do somersaults underwater – eventually I could do nine in a row without coming up for air.

He was terrific and I’ll always be grateful to him. I don’t know whether I believe in ghosts or not, but I hope Emily sees him there again by the side of the pool. He was a man who took such great pleasure in his work it's good to think that something of him might still be there, teaching us all to do a much faster front crawl.