My son is starting swimming lessons at school so I was telling him that we used to have to swim in our underpants if we forgot our swimming kit.
He couldn’t believe this could possibly have happened but it did. It would have been late 80s early 90s. Looking back it does seem odd but the world was a bit tougher back then.
What other things did you do at school that would never happen nowadays?
Our school had its own pool. We swam in the nude as the default. The only alternative was to wear the school uniform swimming trunks, which had to be washed and dry when put on. This meant if you had two swimming sessions per day, you either had to have two pairs of trunks, or swim in the nude for at least one of the sessions. If you had swimming on successive days, washing and drying them overnight was seldom a possibility, so you would have to swim in the nude at least one of the days. If you forgot your trunks or brought the wrong ones in error, had had them stolen, had lent them out and not had them washed, dried and returned, had lost or mislaid them, had had them damaged, stained, or accidentally bleached, or did not have them because you had not been given notice that you would require them, or for any other reason whatsoever, your fault or not, you swam in the nude. Parents never objected, indeed some went further. Quite a few made their sons swim naked until their voices broke, or it was otherwise clear they had “something worth covering up”. Some refused to provide trunks at all, on the basis that in a boys' school, there was never a need to cover anything up, and buying them would be a waste of money. I knew two boys who had their trunks permanently confiscated for misuse. Rather than explain their misbehaviour to their parents, they went nude thereafter. None of this “do it in your underpants” stuff: that would have been regarded as unhygienic. Breach of pool regulations was generally punished by caning, on the spot. In order to make it fair if you were swimming naked, if the boy concerned was wearing trunks, he would have to take them off, hand them over, then stand with legs apart and grab his ankles while four or six heavy strokes of the cane were applied to his bare bottom, while the rest of us watched. Trunks were not normally returned, then or later. One more added to the naked numbers. It is just as well we all preferred swimming in the nude, anyway, since nearly everybody necessarily did quite frequently. There were always some naked boys in the pool, but it was a majority only when a group of boys was transferred to the pool from another activity because it could not run, such as when a playing field was declared unfit during the morning. Those boys would overwhelmingly not have their trunks, since they did not know they were needed, so the vast majority would be swimming nude. When I outgrew my trunks on turning 13, I couldn't be bothered replacing them. They were more trouble than they were worth.
