advertisement for a ‘SECRET SWIMMING AID – Your Friends Will NEVER Know’. Wow, that’s for me! I sent off some of my earnings, and eventually a smallish, brown paper parcel arrived. What I told my mother it was I can’t remember, but I got it up to my room and opened the package.
This thing
might
have been secret when Victorians wore full-length bathing suits, but it certainly wasn’t going to be very secret now. It was a very wide rubber belt that came from above my waist to half-way down my thighs. Running up and down around the belt was a rubber tube, with a non-return release valve at the rear in the middle of your back and a mouthpiece that came up from the front.
God help me! I went to the beach with this thing rolled up under my normal bathing costume. ‘Your Friends Will NEVER Know’ – if they were blind, perhaps, because here was this skinny white kid with the most bulbous bathing costume ever around his loins. I walked out into the sea. The North Sea is very cold, even in summer. I walked out further. I had to get this thing underwater. Once the grabbing iciness had got to my waist I turned my back to the shore, rummaged around down the front of my briefs. I wonder what my friends, who would never know, would
think
that I was doing. I found the pipe. No, not that one,
that
one. I pulled it up and, still standing facing the sea, bent my head down and started blowing.
The sensation under the water was very strange. Very strange indeed. As the tubing filled with air it straightened itself out, pulling the belt both upwards and downwards out of my costume. ‘Flip’ up on to my stomach. ‘Flap’ down one leg, up my back,down the other leg. I wonder whether the guy who designed this ever used it. He was selling this contraption and risking a manslaughter charge if it didn’t work and I got drowned.
With one sudden, last big blow into the mouthpiece, which of course emptied my lungs, the belt became fully inflated and lifted my backside clean out of the water, thrusting my head under the waves. I was very aware that my Friends Will Never Know. They might have looked out to sea and wondered what the large black bum was bobbing about on the water, but I could rest assured that they would not connect it with me.
The advertisement was true! I was swimming! Well, I was flailing my arms around under the water trying to get my head back to the surface before I drowned but I couldn’t argue with the fact that I was afloat. A lucky wave arrived at the same time as I moved my arms in the same direction and I flipped briefly above the water, grabbed a breath and went under again. It might be of great interest to the designer to know that now I was bent over backwards, legs and head underwater, crotch floating upwards, and that the waves were carrying me nearer the shore. Again, that was lucky because I was able to grab the sea floor and stand upright. Fighting the gadget’s desire to flip me again, I found that the only way to get it off was to take off my swimming trunks, something that I was loath to do, so instead I fought my way around to the release valve situated in the middle of my back, grabbed it and pulled. The air started to come out in bubbles. As the bubbles rose in a direct line from my arse I can only assume that, although My Friends Would Never Know, they might well have got the wrong idea altogether as to what I was doing. I never used the SECRET Swimming Aid again.
The learning of magic continued and I could think of being nothing other than a magician. The problem was that I had no idea how you became a professional magician. I shared mythoughts with my parents who tried to dissuade me with the old argument about getting a ‘proper’, secure job. Their brushes with showbusiness had all been through my father’s stepsister, the infamous Auntie Maureen. The family rumour was that apparently she had had eight husbands, and none of them were hers! With my parents’ insistence that magic
This thing
might
have been secret when Victorians wore full-length bathing suits, but it certainly wasn’t going to be very secret now. It was a very wide rubber belt that came from above my waist to half-way down my thighs. Running up and down around the belt was a rubber tube, with a non-return release valve at the rear in the middle of your back and a mouthpiece that came up from the front.
God help me! I went to the beach with this thing rolled up under my normal bathing costume. ‘Your Friends Will NEVER Know’ – if they were blind, perhaps, because here was this skinny white kid with the most bulbous bathing costume ever around his loins. I walked out into the sea. The North Sea is very cold, even in summer. I walked out further. I had to get this thing underwater. Once the grabbing iciness had got to my waist I turned my back to the shore, rummaged around down the front of my briefs. I wonder what my friends, who would never know, would
think
that I was doing. I found the pipe. No, not that one,
that
one. I pulled it up and, still standing facing the sea, bent my head down and started blowing.
The sensation under the water was very strange. Very strange indeed. As the tubing filled with air it straightened itself out, pulling the belt both upwards and downwards out of my costume. ‘Flip’ up on to my stomach. ‘Flap’ down one leg, up my back,down the other leg. I wonder whether the guy who designed this ever used it. He was selling this contraption and risking a manslaughter charge if it didn’t work and I got drowned.
With one sudden, last big blow into the mouthpiece, which of course emptied my lungs, the belt became fully inflated and lifted my backside clean out of the water, thrusting my head under the waves. I was very aware that my Friends Will Never Know. They might have looked out to sea and wondered what the large black bum was bobbing about on the water, but I could rest assured that they would not connect it with me.
The advertisement was true! I was swimming! Well, I was flailing my arms around under the water trying to get my head back to the surface before I drowned but I couldn’t argue with the fact that I was afloat. A lucky wave arrived at the same time as I moved my arms in the same direction and I flipped briefly above the water, grabbed a breath and went under again. It might be of great interest to the designer to know that now I was bent over backwards, legs and head underwater, crotch floating upwards, and that the waves were carrying me nearer the shore. Again, that was lucky because I was able to grab the sea floor and stand upright. Fighting the gadget’s desire to flip me again, I found that the only way to get it off was to take off my swimming trunks, something that I was loath to do, so instead I fought my way around to the release valve situated in the middle of my back, grabbed it and pulled. The air started to come out in bubbles. As the bubbles rose in a direct line from my arse I can only assume that, although My Friends Would Never Know, they might well have got the wrong idea altogether as to what I was doing. I never used the SECRET Swimming Aid again.
The learning of magic continued and I could think of being nothing other than a magician. The problem was that I had no idea how you became a professional magician. I shared mythoughts with my parents who tried to dissuade me with the old argument about getting a ‘proper’, secure job. Their brushes with showbusiness had all been through my father’s stepsister, the infamous Auntie Maureen. The family rumour was that apparently she had had eight husbands, and none of them were hers! With my parents’ insistence that magic
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