Jaws was the big movie in the cinemas the summer we moved next to the Thompsons, who had a swimming pool, a real one, in-ground, kidney shaped, pellucid chlorine blue, with a crazy-paving all around, not one of those Clark Rubber above-ground jobs, surrounded by insta-decking which were just as good, but fooled nobody (Trigger Warning: bourgeois content throughout).

The Thompsons’ house was Spanish Mission style, a vast stucco and terra-cotta hooptile shell out of the 30s, which gave their backyard an even more raffish appearance, a touch of LA, though I’m getting that only in retrospect. For ten year old kids of course, who knows or gives a damn what the architectural style was, or what it evoked (I did, sadly. My folks had a shelf of big black and white picture biogs of Hollywood stars, part of the part forgotten twenties revival of the seventies, art-nouveau, bell-bottom slacks and rrrragtime). What is ever going to feel as good as diving in a pool with a deep end, on a hot day—36 degrees was baking hot in the 70s, ludicrous heat—in the middle of a hot summer, the wash of cooling, cleansing, transparent cerulean over you, the water’s generosity and totality, the never-mastered surprise of disappearing wholly below the surface, and all of it within the ten year old’s time-sense, an afternoon like an eternity, time a wholly different to thing to what it would become, that pinched margin on everything, instead something that flowed, pooled, eddied around events, sprang from them, the world disclosing itself daily, caught in the act of happening to you, bracing, refreshing aliving as cold chloriney water.