“I’ve never picked the jobs I’ve done in my life,” says Mark Sadler. But when he retired at 60, finally, he says, “I got to choose.” He became a lifeguard.
The high chair beside the lido in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, is a long way from the dark tunnels of the London Underground, where he spent the last 22 years of his working life looking after the engineering fleet, which has responsibility for keeping trains running. Uniform then comprised of steel-toed boots and a hi-vis vest. Now his “only PPE is sliders, sun cream and sunglasses”.
“When the sun is coming on to the water and the trees are blowing in the breeze, it’s such a tranquil place to be. You get to know nature better, the phases of the sun. The weather doesn’t just happen to me. I feel the weather now,” he says. “It’s an evolution thing.”
Sadler has always loved swimming. As a boy, his mother put him through all the ribbons. She swam until her early 80s. When Sadler turned 50, she suggested he try to swim 100 miles a year. “And I still swim 100 miles a year [in memory of] my mum.”
Sadler is 62 now but three years ago a health scare prompted a rethink. He was giving blood when he felt chest pain. In hospital, he says, “The doctor asked: ‘Do you drink?’ Yeah, probably too much. ‘Do you smoke?’ Yes. They can see by my size that I eat too much. I thought, ‘I’m never going to be in this position again, where I’m in here because of my own fault.’”
Diagnosed with narrowed arteries, Sadler stopped smoking and drinking, and followed a vegan diet. He was recovering at home when the first lockdown started; he never went back to the underground.
As deputy manager of the engineering fleet, work had been stressful. “I’ve always had to earn as much as I can to provide for my wife and family,” he says. “I don’t believe I have natural talents. Where I’ve got in life is through sheer hard work. Managers would say, can you do this, can you do that? I would always say ‘yes’.”
Sadler left school at 16 for an apprenticeship in a cable-making factory. At the underground, he worked 10- to 12-hour days, and often returned to visit the tunnels at night. “If I got the call at 1, I’d be on the go at 1.15.”
He regards his wife and two daughters as “always the most important thing in my life”, but while he worked, “for 20 years or so, it was like they were wrapped in clingfilm”.
He means he could see them, but they were in a separate world. “I know they’re precious. I’ve got them wrapped up. I’m doing everything I can to keep them safe, financially secure. But I’m not in that world with them,” he says.
That’s why at a family dinner, Sadler made his daughters, by then adults, an offer.
“I told them: ‘If you have a child, I will give up work and become a full-time grandparent.’” For the past couple of years he has combined caring for his granddaughter, Freya, three, with lifeguarding. Being a grandparent, he says, has shown “how much I missed” as a father.
The day before we speak, Sadler worked an eight-hour shift, from sweeping the pool to cleaning the toilets. And, of course, sitting in the lifeguard chair. “You can’t take your phone. You can’t eat. You don’t do anything apart from sit and concentrate. It’s mind-blowing.”
For the first six months after he qualified, Sadler was asked at least once a day how old he was. “I was 40 years older than anyone else on the course. People were shocked I’d come into it at 60. But to have young peers gives you a different perspective.”
Now he is part of a community. “In my old job, I used to say to everyone: ‘Every day you’re learning.’ I feel that even more now that I’ve got to 60. I’m doing something that I chose. I can balance my job with my wife and family. It is everything I want.”
Sadler knows that lifeguarding will come to a natural end when he can no longer pass the annual competence test. “But I want another eight seasons at least,” he says. “I want to make it until I’m 70.”
