Gapped text

It was filthier work than I had imagined. Under the leaves lay a thick black silt that smelled of old ponds, and under that were things nobody could explain, including a single roller skate and a set of false teeth. We filled forty-two bags before lunch. Around two o’clock, Terry Valdés, one of the plumbers, scraped at the wall with a trowel, then stopped and called us over to see what he had found.

By six o’clock on the Saturday morning the queue already stretched past the bus stop. There were grandparents who had swum here as children, teenagers who had never been inside, and at least one man in a 1930s-style striped costume. The volunteers agreed that Bernadette should have the first swim. She did one slow length of breaststroke, climbed out, and announced to great applause that it was freezing.

Bernadette Okafor is seventy-one now, a retired PE teacher with a whistle still hanging on a hook by her front door. She has been fighting for the lido since the week it closed, and she walked me round its edge as if showing me a house she intended to buy. When I said, carefully, that it looked rather beyond saving, she laughed. ‘Don’t look at the rubbish,’ she said. ‘Look at the shape.’

When the reply arrived in late May, she read it twice before she would believe it. The fund would pay for the new pipework and most of the filtration; the volunteers would have to do everything else themselves. That left nine weeks until the date they had already announced, perhaps rashly, for reopening: the first Saturday in August.

In the end, embarrassed by months of bad publicity, the council agreed to pay for all the repairs itself, and the volunteers’ role shrank to painting railings and planting flower beds by the entrance. Some of them were openly relieved. Others felt that the lido had been taken away from them for a second time, and Bernadette stopped coming to the work parties altogether.

It didn’t. The conversation simply moved to her kitchen table, and then to a church hall, and by the time I arrived the Friends of Harwood Lido had four hundred members, a bank account and a spreadsheet of useful skills: two retired plumbers, a structural engineer and a woman who had once run a hotel laundry. What they did not have was permission to set foot on the site.

The concrete, it said, was sound. The pipework was not, and the filtration plant was described as ‘of historical interest only’. The cheapest estimate for replacing both came to £180,000. That was less than half of the council’s original figure, but it was still a sum that made the group’s spreadsheet look very thin indeed, and for a few days nobody wanted to talk about it.