Before Sunset

Swimming in the ponds on Hampstead Heath is my favourite thing to do in London. On a day in midsummer when the city is hot and the trees are full of green, there’s no better place to be. 

My time in London has been made by trips to those Ponds. My best friend and I bike there whenever the weather is fine, until a day in late September when the growing cold means our last dip of the season, and the passing of another summer is marked. 

Knowing what the end looks like and that it will come makes us savour the ponds while they last, and it keeps us conscious of just how lucky we are. 

Of course, this year’s season of dips never started. Swimming on the Heath is forbidden under the lockdown rules and the Ponds have been cordoned off. The lifeguards originally hired to ensure people in the water enjoyed it safely have been repurposed. They now police the perimeter and make sure nobody gets to swim. 

Mostly I’d accepted that outcome and abided by the lockdown restrictions. But with the heatwave last week and frustration mounting, I decided to make a break for it and swim anyway. 

My justifications were arbitrary in the way that justifications for what we want always are - retrospective, and untrue. 

But my planning was strategic. I knew the lifeguards retired for the night shortly after 8.30 and that there’d be an hour of daylight afterwards when the water would still be warm from the day’s sun. So, already in my swimming shorts for rapid entry, I biked out to Hampstead to arrive at the ponds just before 9, a towel in my back-pack. 

The hitch was that when I got down there, there was a police car parked outside and a couple of community support officers escorting teenagers out of the water. It was a good natured bit of enforcement and nobody caused any trouble. But standing on the west side of the pond, behind the fence, watching people rounded up for swimming, I felt myself seethe. 

The source was a perverse sense of unfairness. Something which I loved had been taken away through no fault of my own and instead of accepting misfortune as a fact of life, I smarted on the shoreline at the perceived injustice. 

After the police had gone, I saw the girl. She had taken up a position alongside me overlooking the Pond, and was poised to vault the fence that separated us from the water. She was tall. Had black hair and was in a bikini and shorts. We chatted easily about how we’d both come to swim. 

Afterwards I would say that if she hadn’t started at the fence first, I’d never have got-up the courage to do it. I said to her that if she went, I’d go too. And then I saw her foot on the lower rung of the fence, and it was like she didn’t care about authority or the police, and then I, emboldened, didn’t care about authority or the police, and we were both over the fence together, laughing. 

We jogged down the bank at the other side, stripped off our clothes, and in a panic that the police might be back any moment, dropped into the water. I had never seen a girl in the men’s ponds before. 

We swam out to the roped rectangle which in happier times is the authorised swimming zone. Her ahead of me, swimming well and fast, while I looked around at the couples on the far bank with their feet in the water and beers in their hands. 

We romanticise meeting attractive strangers. Imagine a spark lit and hours of unselfconscious conversation. But the truth is partial-immersion. We chatted pleasantly but carefully while we swam. I asked only the expected questions: stayed on the permitted routes: did no fence hopping. And so I learnt things like her name, that she was Russian, studied history of art at the Courtauld, had already done a couple of lockdown swims. 

We went right out across the pond, almost to the otherside. Past the buoys and the jetty and the space where the diving board normally goes, and where I’d once spent a perfect afternoon learning how to do a flip. 

By now there were others who’d joined us in the water. A man doing laps shouted “Anarchy in the UK” as he passed us. 

The best ending to this story would be the police coming back. A dashing escape to hidden grassland. And the night spent together laying low while helicopter searchlights combed the Heath for our presence. 

None of that happened. Instead we got tired and swam back to shore, where we toweled off and there was no sign of the police. 

Back on the other side of the fence, there was more chatting but no theatrics. The resentment at lost joy was gone, replaced by an easy contentment and some smugness at the illicit fun stolen without sanction. 

We agreed to meet the next night at the same time in the same spot. But when I came back, she wasn’t there. I was surprised that it didn't bother me. The disappointment quickly forgotten once I was out in the water, propelling myself through the earthy blue while reliving the moments of past summers and imagining those yet to come.