Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  All through Bath’s most recent heyday, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people used to immerse themselves up to the neck for hours at a time in the Roman Baths, in the naturally warm, sulphurous springwater. They sat on stone cushions to adjust themselves for depth. Meticulous medical records were kept by the charitable hospital where they treated ‘a great crop of paralytics that daily appear amongst tradesmen’. These were mostly lead workers and decorators suffering from the lead poisoning known as ‘Painter’s Palsy’. It began as abdominal pain and eventually led to paralysis. Drinking one-and-a-half pints of the vile-tasting spa water and immersing themselves for long periods, the patients experienced the natural diuretic effect of submersion on their kidneys, and excreted the lead about four times more efficiently as a result. The medical records classified patients on completion of their treatment under four columns: ‘Improper’ (meaning still poorly), ‘Improved’, ‘Cured’, or ‘Dead’. Of 244 patients whose treatment was reviewed in 1778, nearly half were cured and 93 per cent improved. For most of those who migrated to Bath, however, the worldly pleasures of the place probably outweighed any benefits from the waters. On his visit around 1724, Daniel Defoe found it to be ‘the resort of the sound rather than the sick; the bathing is made more a sport and diversion, than a physical prescription for health; and the town is taken up in raffling, gaming, visiting, and in a word, all sorts of gallantry and levity’.

  Why were the spas eventually abandoned? The chief cause was the coming of the railways, which made the rival attractions of the seaside more accessible. Sea-bathing came into fashion in the nineteenth century, and was considered beneficial to health. Railways also brought the working classes into the spas. Some of the wealthier middle classes avoided the unwelcome intrusion by migrating to European spas like Marienbad and Baden-Baden instead. Brighton, once a spa town with its own horse racing, became a massively popular working-class resort. Encountering this succession of lost pools and dry watering holes felt like finding several pubs shut in a row. I decided to abandon the desert spas, and go looking for more full-blooded swimming.

  10

  TRIBAL SWIMMING

  Worcestershire, 6 July

  I WENT TO THE Vale of Evesham to meet a whole family tribe of river bathers who had written to me after reading a newspaper article I published on the joys of swimming. Their letter had enclosed a postcard of a mill on its own river island beside a weir and its pool, with a note on the back, ‘This is where we swim.’ There was an invitation to come and join them some time in the river.

  Fladbury is a village a few miles upstream of Evesham on the River Avon. Not the Bath Avon, or the Hampshire Avon, but the Avon that runs through Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare’s Avon. I followed my directions to walk down an alley beside a house on the village green, found myself on the banks of the river just above a weir, and recognised the old three-storey red brick mill house across the water. A handbell dangled from a willow. I rang it, as instructed by my hosts, and waited. Two children appeared on the opposite bank and began to approach laboriously on a punt, propelled by hauling on a cable slung from bank to bank. I jumped aboard, was ferried back, and welcomed by Judith, my host.

  I had entered a swimmer’s dream. People lolled half-submerged along the top of the weir, reading or sunbathing, while others paddled themselves about the river in coracles, swam, dived, or just sat about in bathing costumes. It was a water rats’ club straight from the pages of The Wind in the Willows. The mill sleeps twenty-eight, in an assortment of beds and bunks in more attics and bedrooms than I could count. The children showed me up and down little flights of stairs, in and out of a warren of rooms, until I was dizzy.

  Judith’s letter had addressed the question of the right to swim in our rivers. The Environment Agency had written to her suggesting that it was irresponsible of the family to swim in the Avon, as they have very happily done for several generations. Judith was so upset by their patronising tone, and the implication that river swimming was strictly for crackpots, that she was considering starting some sort of swimmers’ campaign.

  The weather was perfect and the water tolerably warm, so, throwing caution to the winds, Judith and I set out upriver to discuss our mutual concern for the right to native swimming. We dived off an old stone landing-stage into sixteen-foot-deep clear green water above the weir and recklessly breaststroked a few hundred yards upstream as far as a bridge. Everyone likes to have a fixed point to swim to, even Channel swimmers. Walkers have their horizons and mountaintops, and swimmers count lengths, or go as far as the bridge, or the willow, or a certain boat at anchor, or the other side of the bay. We swam back with the gentle current, past back-garden landing-stages and several moored narrowboats.

  Diving in again from the mill quayside, we felt the colder water below the warm layer on top and nosed upstream again alongside the boats.

  Judith is part of an extended family of Quakers who have owned the mill for years and now share it, with their children and friends, booking themselves in a week or a weekend at a time to avoid overcrowding. Here was a strong family with a shared passion for the water, and certain characteristic ways of doing things. There is a tradition of coracle-building amongst them, and next door to the kitchen on the ground floor was the boathouse, with the little canvas-skinned craft hanging up like hats all round the walls, a larger curragh, an original wooden Rob Roy canoe, and a finely ribbed wood and canvas Canadian canoe. Each coracle was made to its maker’s own special variation on the traditional design, with their name or initials carved into the wooden seat. Several of the children were out in the little craft, standing upright on the seats and deftly propelling themselves by stirring and twisting the paddle in the water ahead. The coracle, which weighs not much more than a rolled-up newspaper, spins about on the surface like the silver whirligig beetles that congregate on sheltered water in summer. One of the family sports is coracle polo. Another is a form of jousting in which you try to unbalance your opponent. I took a turn in one of these floating nutshells and soon found myself in the river.

  Judith disappeared into the kitchen and found the Environment Agency’s letter. I sat dangling my feet in the river, reading it:

  I feel it is my duty to draw your attention to the considerable risks associated with swimming in the River Avon.

  This river contains within its upper catchment a number of large industrial towns and cities including Rugby, Coventry, Warwick and Leamington. This inevitably means that the river receives a large volume of treated sewage effluent which, at times of low riverflow, can constitute as much as 80% of the total river flow. In spite of high treatment standards, this high proportion of sewage effluent poses a risk of bacterial contamination and many people who voluntarily or involuntarily swim in the River Avon suffer stomach upsets as a result.

  The most sinister risk of swimming in any river is the risk of contracting Leptospirosis which can lead to Weil’s disease, a potential killer. The children’s doctors should be made aware of this risk and any subsequent flu-like symptoms should be carefully monitored.

  Any river will have potentially dangerous currents both on and below the surface particularly in the vicinity of weirs and these cause the tragic and unnecessary deaths of many swimmers every year.

  I would strongly recommend that children are discouraged from swimming in the river but are taken to a local swimming pool instead. If this is not possible they should be constantly supervised by a trained adult and the risks should be made clear to the children, their parents, and the family doctors.

  All the children I met at the mill appeared to be excellent swimmers and more than competent in boats. (They had certainly put me to shame in their coracles.) The smaller ones wore lifejackets as a matter of course and the bigger ones swam well and looked out for each other. The letter seemed a sad admission of the agency’s failure to do the very job it was created to do.

  As to the ‘sinister risk’ of Weil’s disease, and the risk of drowning, a recen
t report entitled Health Hazards Associated with the Recreational Use of Water, published by the South West Regional Health Authority, concludes that the joy, pleasure and excitement that most of us get from water far outweigh the limited risks to our health. Weil’s disease is the secret weapon of whatever dark forces are opposed to wild swimming. It has such a wonderfully sinister sound it would certainly have been invented by Steven Spielberg or Ray Bradbury if it didn’t actually exist. It is caused by bacteria of the genus Leptospira carried in the urine of rats, cattle or dogs entering the human body through cuts and abrasions of the skin, or through the mucous surfaces of ‘the mouth, nose and conjunctiva’. In response to public concern about the disease, Dr Robin Philip, an epidemiologist at the University of Bristol, has assessed the risks for ‘recreational water-users’ in Britain. He found that the risks of contracting Weil’s disease, and of dying from it, were actually lower among this group (including swimmers) than for the total British population. He states:

  There are on average each year in the UK, some 2.5 cases of Weil’s disease associated with bathing and water sports (i.e. one case among every two million annual recreational water users). As the case fatality rate in the UK is 10–15 per cent, the chance of dying from Weil’s disease associated with bathing and water sports is about 1:20 million exposed persons (i.e. one case in the UK every four years).

  Dr Philip analysed all the cases of the disease between 1982 and 1991, the majority of whom were not ‘recreational water-users’. In fact, farmers and agricultural workers seemed to be the main occupational group at risk. He concluded: ‘Despite the large numbers of people engaged in recreational water sports, the risks of contracting the disease, and of dying from it, seem to be lower among recreational water sports enthusiasts than for the general population.’

  When the British Canoeing Union looked into the possible risks on behalf of the one million canoeists in this country, most of whom naturally get wet in rivers as a matter of routine, they found that the risk of a canoeist contracting the disease is about 1:200,000, and a canoeist heeding the preventive advice given to all river and lake users (see your doctor if you get any flu-like symptoms) would be a great deal less likely to contract Weil’s disease than to die in a road accident in any one year (1:9,600). They put the chance of actually dying from Weil’s disease for a canoeist at about 1:333,000.

  We got back into the water, and splashed about near the weir. Judith showed me the work the Environment Agency had been doing to reinforce it. All sorts of little details were wrong, or unsympathetic to the place. An underwater toe-hold in the quayside, crucial for climbing out, had gone. It had been there for ever, and now Judith’s mother missed it on her swims. An ugly iron ladder had been installed without consultation with the family. The top of the weir where they sit in the water was no longer as bum-friendly as the old flagstones had been. The family meant to have all this changed, right down to the toe-hold. I sat in the cool weir for a long while amongst the rippling minnows, teetering just above the white water the family sometimes shoots over in the curragh into the mill-pool below.

  You can still dive out of the first-floor bedroom window into the river, and the iron handholds at the corner of the house by the weir were worn and polished smooth by generations of palms. There were photographs on the kitchen wall of the half-submerged family enjoying a floating picnic lunch in the river, complete with tablecloth. It is also a tradition with them once a year to set out the dining table on the weir and eat lunch in midstream. Judith and her family are serious amphibians who have swum in the Salt Lake in Utah amongst the salt-flies, and in the Snake River in Colorado.

  Judith said that over the years they had noticed a difference in the way the water levels fluctuate. The river used to rise and fall slowly. During stormy weather the water would sink gently into the fields, draining gradually into the meandering streams and ditches, and eventually into the river. Judith often saw her grandmother cooking in wellingtons because the kitchen was flooded, and they would have to move up to the next floor while the river poured through the house. The mill was designed to accommodate inundation, with drains in the back walls. Now the river can often rise very sharply in the space of a few hours because there is so much tarmac and concrete everywhere, and such efficient field drainage. Streams have been straightened into concrete culverts; old flood meadows have been developed by supermarkets and even housing, so the water has nowhere to go except the river, and a flood can soon build up. In the most recent floods, the water level reached tabletop level in the kitchen, a boat smashed one of the windows, and the ferry was washed over the weir. There was mud everywhere downstairs, and all over the armchairs. Judith had resigned herself to ‘two or three dusty years’.

  Swimming is often enhanced by company, and sometimes by solitude. The same individual may swim for different reasons on different days. I certainly do. The joys of swimming are sometimes those of silence and solitude, sometimes of communion with nature, and sometimes the more friends who join you, the merrier. As with any mildly dangerous sport, there is safety in numbers when you swim in company, as when you climb or walk in the mountains. But there is also strength in numbers if your right to bathe in this or that particular mudhole is at all questioned.

  Outdoor swimmers, especially in the wild, have always been outsiders with a shared vulnerability to the rigours of the elements and seasons, and to whoever seeks officiously to prevent them risking their necks, or disturbing the trout. Swimming without a roof over your head is now a mildly subversive activity, like having an allotment, insisting on your right to walk a footpath, or riding a bicycle. It certainly appeals to free spirits, which is why the talk is invariably so good in those little spontaneous bankside, beach or poolside parliaments that spring up wherever two or three swimmers are gathered, as though the water’s fluency were contagious. That is why swimming clubs, lidos and unofficial bathing holes are such congenial places.

  Next morning in cloudy Cirencester, Betty, the lady at the turnstile of the heated outdoor pool, took my £2 as I crossed the little river on an old iron footbridge. She told me they were thinking of closing at midday because of the weather. I hastened into the deliciously soft, warm water and set about swimming my mile: 56 lengths of the 30-yard pool. For a while I was alone. At about the half-mile point, the bottom of the pool suddenly lit up with the dappled reflections of wavelets like a David Hockney painting, and I felt the sun on my back. The management responded spontaneously by deciding to keep the pool open a little longer, especially as a trickle of swimmers, mostly women, had begun appearing. They ambled up and down together chatting.

  The pool hasn’t changed very much since it was built by a group of entrepreneurs in 1870. Steam power originally pumped the freezing water from a nearby well, but it was so cold it put people off swimming, so they switched instead to the ‘warmer’ water from the mill-stream. Heating and mixed bathing didn’t arrive until 1931. Until then, the baths were filled every Sunday morning and emptied on Saturday evenings. At the beginning of the week, the water would be painfully cold. ‘Fifty-eight degrees if you were lucky, fifty-five more likely,’ according to one of the ex-grammar-school girls who were marched out every Tuesday to be traumatised in the icy pool for an eternal fifteen minutes. By the end of the week the water temperature might have crept up into the early sixties if the weather had been warm. There was no chlorination, so by Saturday, when the water was dirty and often covered in leaves and green slime, bathing was free, if you could stand it.

  A group of passionate local swimmers, the Cirencester Open Air Swimming Pool Association, refused to see the original pool closed down by the council in 1973 when the inevitable indoor pool came along. Courageously, they took on the outdoor pool as an independent community enterprise, and have made it a success purely through their own hard work and enthusiasm.

  To me, the marvellous thing about the pool is that it hasn’t been modernised. It is a fine example of all the good reasons why it is often best
not to spend money on things. The Cirencester swimmers have had the good sense to leave things alone. The result is an idyllic pool that has contrived to retain its old-fashioned charm. How much more delightful it is to change in a spartan breeze-block shed, hand-painted a jaunty bright blue by the swimmers themselves, and then to stuff your clothes into a vintage, battered wire basket which you trustingly take out on to the poolside with you. All I missed was the Brylcreem dispenser. This is really a miniature lido, with a lawn, a beautiful natural setting, and a bright Mediterranean-blue tuck shop serving Bovril, hot chocolate and something called ‘Shark Bites’.

  I discovered that to save water rates, the Pool Association had reverted to the use of water from the well, following the example of the original swimming-bath company, but also heating it. Hence the pleasant texture, ‘soft as rose petals to the skin’, to quote one of the pool’s patrons, Winifred Waites, in her memoir of the pool. She describes jumping into ‘that inviting blue water, soft as silk, with the blue sky above, the sun on my face, the birds singing, and the lap of the water as I swim’.

  I lunched at Keith’s Coffee House in Blackjack Lane, where all the talk was of the forthcoming Royal Show at Stoneleigh. ‘Brilliant shops,’ said the women at the next table, ‘and lots of farmers.’ On my way out of Keith’s I lingered in the delicatessen department, full of cloth-covered jam-jars of rhubarb and ginger preserve, cream honey, raspberry honey and chutneys in hexagonal jars. I asked the assistant if these were all made on the premises. ‘Oh dear no!’ she said. ‘I expect there’s a factory somewhere which just makes them look home-made.’