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The Loaf bathing beach.
Summary
Jenny remembers swimming at the Loaf bathing beach in the 1940's.
Transcript
Walks were the main thing; mother was trapped in the house all the time but when she wasn’t she took us. We swam at the Loaf bathing beach, there was a pool there built, covered with concrete, there was a little muddy paddling pool at the side but the muddy water used to leave the mud, so we didn’t like the paddling pool because it was all “slishy-sloshy” and we really didn’t like the beach because the stones were very big and I cant believe this because in 80 years, when I walk on the beach now, the big stones that used to hurt our feet are small stones and there is even gravel. But we used to go all the Summer, especially the summer holidays, every day if the tide was the right time, to walk along the cliff path because we had a gate from our garden and we learned to swim there. There was a raft there, which people could swim out to, we were never that clever and there was a rock in the perfect place so that when it was very high tide they used to dive from it into the dirty Bristol Channel but the dirty water in the pool, later it was banned because there were limpets growing on the side, which you could never get off so you knew what limpets were, “sucking like a limpet” but the effluent from the factories at Avonmouth were spewing poison out into the Bristol Channel and it was lingering in the pool so we were not allowed to swim in it – it was banned so that is very sad
