Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: A Wallasey timeslip

TIMESLIPS can occur anywhere at any time – that is one of the few things I know about them in all the years I have studied the timewarp phenomenon.

A case in point is the following account, the result of an in-depth interview with a Wirral Globe reader named Ryan some years ago.

In October 2008, Ryan, a 24-year-old software developer from Heswall, went to a family get-together in Wallasey. This resulted in Ryan, his parents, two sisters and two brothers, along with a gang of uncles, aunties and cousins, going to a Harvester pub and grill (nowadays known as the Derby Pool) situated on Bayview Drive, with a glorious view of Liverpool Bay and the waters of the Irish Sea beyond.

On this October afternoon, the skies were grey, and overcast and a wind from the north was stinging Ryan’s eyes as he looked out to sea. His cousin Andrea called to him as he stood in the car park, asking him what he fancied at the grill, but Ryan was depressed and said he wasn’t hungry.

He then heard a buzzing sound behind him. No one else was about on such a cold day, and Ryan’s curiosity got the better of him as he heard the buzzing noise change into a weird howling sound.

He realised it was coming from a huge electrical transformer at the back of the pub on the border of the car park and a grassy area next to a chain link fence. A halo of blue light was now visible around the transformer, getting bigger and bigger as Ryan looked on, and then the software developer felt his hair stand on end and he realised he had stepped into some electrical field.

There was a flash of light, and then Ryan experienced a sensation of falling forwards, and then he heard an explosion of sounds – people – men, women and children, shouting and laughing and there were yelps – and then Ryan fell into the water and for a moment he heard the dulled sounds of the commotion and hubbub as he plunged deeper into the water.

He saw bare legs treading water, female swimmers in what looked like odd coloured balaclavas swimming along the bottom of the pool, and then he instinctively swam to the surface – it wasn’t that deep, possibly, just over six feet in depth, and Ryan was five feet and five inches tall, and by his own admission, the water might have seemed deeper.

When Ryan surfaced he saw people laughing as they slid down a chute into the water, but then someone at the poolside, possibly an attendant, blew a whistle and pointed at Ryan, who came swimming over to him in a confused state – because he could not see the Harvester pub.

He could see what looked like a covered bus stop perhaps or some outbuilding, but no pub – a pub he had just left. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ shouted the attendant, gazing at Ryan in disgust as the latter tried to pull himself out of the pool with wet clothes that seemed as heavy as a suit of armour.

‘I fell in when I came out of the pub,’ spluttered Ryan.

Next thing he knew, a policeman was dragging him out of the pool with the attendant, and then another policeman came upon the scene and he grabbed Ryan’s right arm while the other, stockier policeman held his left arm with a vicelike grip.

This bigger policeman said: 'What on earth do you think you're up to, going for a swim in your clothes, you clot? Have you been hitting the bottle?’

'I’m sorry, but it wasn’t my fault,' said Ryan, 'I was in the pub car park, and there was a big flash of light – '

'Quiet!' yelled the younger policeman. 'You can tell your tall story at the station.'

'What am I being arrested for?' Ryan gasped, listening to his shoes squelch as he was frogmarched from the pool.

'Being drunk and disorderly for a start', said the broad-shouldered constable, 'and a breach of pool rules and etiquette and a - well, you’ll soon find out when you get to the station.'

A gaggle of giggling young girls left the pool and followed Ryan and the policemen. A well-to-do-looking man in a jacket patterned with the type of stripes usually seen on a deckchair approached and in a rather posh voice said to the policemen: 'Good morning chaps, what’s this fellow done?' And he nodded to Ryan.

'He was swimming in the pool in his clothes and bothering the swimmers,’ said the younger policeman.

'I fell in,' protested Ryan, and then he noticed something odd; a silvery cigar-shaped object in the sky – it looked like an old-fashioned airship. Everyone looked up at the object, which passed overhead with a droning sound, heading east towards Liverpool.

'You're not going to charge him because he fell in are you?' asked the toff, smiling at Ryan. The two policemen had stopped by now to look up at that airship.

To Ryan, the upper-class person queried 'Good gracious, my dear fellow, how on earth did you manage to take an unexpected dip in the pool? Were you perhaps under the influence of spirits, or could it have been the result of a wager or a dare?'

At this point, Ryan realised the policemen had no high-vis jackets or radios and the people sitting and standing around the open-air baths looked old-fashioned. The men had short hair and two of the nearby women wore those old cloche hats. Then there was that airship. 

The whole thing just struck Ryan as eerie.

The toff took out a box of cigarettes and said to the policemen: 'Come on officers, have a cigarette and take a moment to unwind. I believe you can release this young man; this has all been nothing more than a bout of youthful tomfoolery, and I'm confident no significant harm has transpired, what?'

The older policeman accepted the cigarette and gave a faint smile. He turned to Ryan and said, 'Mr Davis is right, but look here, don’t you go swimming with your clothes on again or I promise you, you’ll be in the nick before you can say Jack Robinson. Your feet won’t touch the ground.'

'Thanks,' said Ryan, and then he asked 'Mr Davis', ‘excuse me, but can you tell me what year this is?’

Mr Davis winked at Ryan and gestured for him to say nothing more by placing his index finger to his lips. He then said to Ryan, ‘My dear sir, I would strongly advise you to retrace your steps and return from whence you came.’

Ryan paused, baffled by the man’s advice, but then, as the policemen enjoyed the cigarettes and looked up at the airship, Ryan slipped away.

He turned and walked along the poolside, and suddenly he had that same feeling of butterflies in the stomach before the sensation of falling forwards.

Everything became muffled, and then the software developer found himself back in the car park of the Harvester, and that electrical transformer was quiet now. He went into the pub in his drenched clothes and his parents, three cousins and an uncle got up and surrounded him.

They had all been looking for him for the past half hour. Ryan told an uncle what had happened, and was told that the Derby Pool – and outdoor swimming pool – had once existed where the pub now stood – and that was why the pub bore its name.

The popular pool had stood there from 1932 until it was demolished around 1980. 'It doesn't make sense,' Ryan told his uncle, 'I fell in that pool.'

'I can see that,' said his uncle, looking at his bewildered nephew’s soaked clothes. 'We’d better get you back to ours to dry off.'

'You don't believe me, do you?' Ryan asked his uncle, who nodded and said, 'I believe you. I’ve seen some strange things in my time, lad.'

On the sunny Friday afternoon of June 26, 1936, between 9:30am and 10am, the German airship, the Hindenburg passed over Wirral on its way home to Germany from New York. 

Was that the airship a timeslipped Ryan saw that day when he seems to have fallen 72 years into the past into a long-vanished swimming pool?

• All of Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are on Amazon.