I regularly cross paths with Leonard’s shadow. He knew the outside and the inside of these houses. There are still trees and shopfronts he would recognise. I think he’d feel at home in my front room, with his grandfather’s collected Dickens on the bookshelves. And I often wonder if he swam.

Leonard would have been nine when the lido opened. Three decades earlier, Captain Matthew Webb had swum the English Channel for the first time, larded with grease  and using a head-up breaststroke. A mania for sport was as British as tea and imperialism. I know that after the war my grandfather swam in the lido year-round and, with a touch of eccentricity characteristic of him, used to condition his eyes to seeing underwater by holding them open while he immersed his head in the kitchen sink.

I think of the family admiring the newly excavated pool. The big oak trees that frame it would have been much smaller then. And I think of Leonard back there, a decade later, on leave, looking at the innocent green of the plane trees and the chestnuts with the grateful eyes of someone who, chastened by reality, turns to the consolation of the secret books.

As a Baptist – he states it clearly on his army papers – he knew about the symbolic properties of immersion, about purification and rebirth, about the water of life. I believe that more than orthography connects swimmers and sinners. And in the pool, perhaps still, there may be a homeopathic trace of him.

*

HOPING TO LEARN MORE about Leonard, I began to make speculative enquiries down at the lido. I told some of the other swimmers about my family’s history in the area. I explained that my grandfather, Raymond, used to swim there in the 1930s with his cousin Charles, and I cast around for witnesses to that and earlier eras, in vain.

One lunchtime, a man called Catford John – whose name probably doesn’t require even this much explanatory parenthesis – was making a rare visit to the sauna, which he generally avoided for fear of picking up a fungal infection. He had scrupulously cared-for feet and strongly held views about the poor podiatric hygiene of most of the swimming club members. John suggested I speak to Francis.

Francis was in his eighties, still a noticeably handsome man, with unexpectedly green eyes and olive skin, and what remained of his hair was black. Some recent catastrophe had deprived him of free movement. He came four or five times a week to swim, making his way painstakingly along the length of the pool with a walking stick. He was always accompanied by his companion, a Polish woman of about seventy named Jana, whom Francis had belatedly taught to swim. Her solicitude to him now seemed like a form of recompense for his teaching.