Pool of Memories starts in the classroom, where children meet Mrs Hall. She works for the council and has come to conduct a children’s consultation about the fate of one of Birmingham’s older municipal building – Moseley Road Baths.
She shows the children a power point containing many photographs of the current state of disrepair of the building and talks about the options the council are considering – permanent closure, renovation or selling the building off. Just as the consultation gets underway Mr Barton, caretaker of the baths and his staff knock on the door. He holds an invitation from Mrs Hall. Confused, Mrs Hall says she didn’t write the note and admits to never having visited the baths. She reluctantly lets Mr Barton and his staff join the children and asks them to introduce themselves – Cassie, Louise, Abi and Chris and Mr Barton briefly outline their jobs and relationship to the baths.
As Mrs Hall continues her powerpoint Mr Barton begins to act strangely, he has been having headaches for some weeks. He suddenly breaks into the character of someone telling a child off, much to the embarrassment of this staff and the bewilderment of Mrs Hall. When he comes round he has no recollection of what has just happened. This then occurs a further two times before Mr Barton leaps up and leaves the room.
The staff react with stunned silence before tentatively admitting that strange things have been happening at the baths and that Mr Barton has (unbeknownst to him) experienced such transformations previously. Chris leaves to find Mr Barton and the children are invited to make sense of what has just happened, before a member of staff, Cassie, puts forwards the idea that voices from the past connected to the baths might be trying to speak through Mr Barton.
Chris reappears in a panic; he reports that Mr Barton is calling himself William Hale and is moving things around in the hall. Abi recollects that Mr Hale was the original architect of the baths and the children are asked to go to the hall to help.
Hall
Once in the hall, Mr Barton as William Hale implicates the children and staff as gentlemen in the early 1900’s visiting the site of the soon to be built Moseley Road Baths. He conjures up an image of what the baths will look like and involves them in playing out situations and in creating elements of his design. Finally he gets them to mark out the size of the gala pool and takes them on an imaginative journey where they dangle their feet in the water and take in the sights and sounds of the newly constructed pool. As the voice of William Hale leaves Mr Barton another member of staff, Louise is taken over by another voice – this time of a solo swimmer enjoying the beauty and tranquillity of the pool. She flings herself into the imaginary pool only to be caught by the other surprised staff members who end up puppeting her around the room until they can bring her back to safety…and to her senses!
There is a moment where staff and pupils alike talk again about what is taking place and after confirming it is indeed voices from the past they deicide to try and create the conditions to invite the voices, arguing to Mrs Hall that if she really wants to get a sense of the right fate for the baths she should listen to those people who have used it through the ages. Mr Barton suggests returning to the very beginning of the bath’s history – the slipper baths, which were opened before the two swimming pools. He breaks children in to small groups and with a member of staff they physically recreate the slipper baths and talk about who used such places, their geography, features and history as well as linking them to personal experiences of bathing.
After several minutes of discussion and play, Mrs Hall calls everyone together to protest that whilst this is very interesting she was promised voices to help her in her consultation and that none have come. At this point Abi transforms into Mrs Naylor, the bath superintendant. She implicates the children as workers in the baths and tells them off for a shambolic week. As she lists the complaints, children are involved in negotiating some rules to deal with soap and hot water running out, dirty baths and people overrunning their allotted time etc. At the end of these conversations Mrs Naylor sends the workers to play out different areas of responsibility. At the end of this sequence Abi emerges half recollecting being bossy with the children and excited that a voice has spoken through her.
It is not long before Chris succumbs as well, this time transforming into an old Muslim man telling of his experiences of visiting the slipper baths to wash for Friday prayers. He talks about how the staff were always respectful and disappears behind a screen which lights up to reveal him in shadow ritually cleansing himself. Mr Barton remembers Fridays as a busy time when Muslims came to the baths before going to mosque and he commentates over the image the various stages of the cleansing. Chris emerges from behind the screen bemused as to why he is so wet.
As the children tell him what has happened, the final staff member Cassie is also taken over by a voice – that of a woman who was baptised in the gala pool. She too walks behind the screen to show in shadow what happened. As she reappears Mr Barton recalls all the other events that have taken place at the baths over the years from dances to it being used as a first aid station during the war. Staff enthusiastically play out these different uses, being interrupted by Mrs Hall who feels that things are getting a little out of hand and that attention should be pulled back to the main reason why they have come together – the consultation. She asks for a short break to recover herself and sends the children away to have a think about their experiences of swimming – the thing she believes is the main function of the building for the future.
BREAK
After break the children return to the hall and find Mrs Hall waiting for them, she says there’s no sign of the other staff and is keen to retake control over proceedings, so starts without them. She asks children to recount their experiences and memories of learning to swim. The staff arrive shortly afterwards and seeing that Mrs Hall has started without them begin to ‘mischief-make’ in shadow, pretending to get changed for a swimming lesson. Mrs Hall is annoyed at having her agenda hijacked again but nevertheless reports on what the children have said. Abi picks up on some of the exciting things they have talked about and wants to have a go at playing them out, she get up on the stairs and gets children to instruct her as to what they have done. Just as she is about to leap off, Mr Barton transforms into Mr Wyatt, an overly strict teacher who shouts at her, forcing her to jump off into the imaginary water. He then harries Mrs Hall onto the stairs and bullies her too into jumping. She breaks down and reveals that she had a traumatic incident as a child where under bad tutelage she nearly drowned. Mr Barton re-emerges and reassures her that the staff at Moseley Road Baths were really nice, and as he speaks Cassie becomes Mrs Yates a well respected and liked teacher from the past. She implicates children in a swimming lesson and takes them through a warm up drill, a relay race and ‘cool down’ stretches.
As Cassie comes back to herself Mr Barton tells of how things were very different in the past and that people would be involved in things at the pool that today would be considered too dangerous, such as jumping off the balcony or diving through hoops at galas. The staff’s imagination is caught by these events and they play them through for children. However part way through their playing, all the staff freeze, collectively taken over by the voices. Stuck in an image of diving, fragments of all the voices encountered during the sessions are reiterated, finishing with a voice from the future – that of a member of the council panel approaching their final decision about the baths.
As the image breaks and the staff recover themselves Mrs Hall points out that this decision has not yet been made, with the final meeting taking place the following week. Furthermore she says she has not collected the children’s responses to feed back to the panel. Mr Barton suggests they do this now, and the children are broken into small groups to discuss the implications of the three potential options outlined in the earlier classroom section and to take a vote about what they would like to see happening to the baths.
The votes are collected together and notes made on what the children think and feel. The programme ends with Mrs Hall and the staff thanking the children for their contributions and guaranteeing that the children’s voice will be heard by the council.
A teacher/actor then speaks to the children out of role to explain that the programme is based on true events and that all of the people they encountered as ‘voices’ really did exist. Teachers are signposted to further resources and to the real life campaign group for the Moseley Road Baths should children want to follow up their in role work with real life action.
