by Roger Deakin
The last of the fish was being sold in an open-sided shed, and men were sweeping crushed ice over the edge of the quay into the murky harbour twenty feet below. The prospect of a swim looked suddenly bleak. There were bright sounds everywhere. Hammers on metal, radios, welding, hosepipes, and the bass notes of big engines. Under the heavy stench of diesel the good ships Avalon, Ocean Spray, Marina, Keriolet, Prevail, Girl Patricia, Try Again, Trewarveneth and Golden Harvest lay at rest in the dark pine-green water. Men dangled in cradles, painting the Rebecca Elaine, or sat untying knotted nets, bare backs browning, while huge Mafia gulls with fish entrails dangling from their beaks flapped menacingly overhead, missing nothing. Bruisers of the bird world, the gulls circled and landed lightly in the rigging or shat casually on the decks. The boats were painted white with birdshit. Drums of cable, pallets piled high with chain, huge blocks of granite; everything was heavy-duty, and you had to keep your wits about you on the quayside, dodging forklifts, the odd flying rope-end, and the articulated lorries of ‘W. Stevenson & Sons. Trawler Owners’. The black mud and garish green seaweed of the harbour, laced with scum and the rainbow marbling of slicked oil, were hard to recognise as the innocent setting for the Laura Knight painting.
I headed down the coast towards Land’s End in search of turquoise water, and found it in the cove at Porthcurno. My first sight of the water’s dappled beauty was from high above on the cliffs at the Minack open-air theatre. The higher you climb above the sea, the calmer and more beautiful it looks, the waves thinning to the faint pock-marking finish of Hammerite metal paint.
The white sands and clear green water looked inviting and a long way down. I descended innumerable steps cut in the cliff and found myself a perch on the crowded beach. The Bronzed Ones were out in force here, with a strong contingent from Birmingham, all encamped with windbreaks, voluminous towels and big picnic boxes. All family life was there. It was like being in a suburb and listening in to the conversations in every home, or watching a hundred Mike Leigh plays simultaneously. No one seemed the least inhibited about the people next to them. These were families, warts and all.
There were quite a lot of swimmers too, but mostly close in to the beach, which shelves sharply to deep water. It was perfectly clear and quite warm. I swam out of the main cove in a long arc to my left, round the rocks, past two more beaches that are only exposed at low tide. This was the clear, unpolluted Atlantic; the same sea that had been so unbearably cold forty miles west across open water in the Scillies in the spring. I struck out across the bay towards the Logan Rock, and eventually beached in warm shallows, on a just-submerged sandbar a hundred yards or so offshore. This further corner of Porthcurno is what is quaintly known as a ‘nudist beach’. In France or Greece these days it would simply be a beach. Looking across to the cliffs I saw people taking enormous risks in their eagerness to scramble round the rocks to this place. Waves broke gently over the sandbar, and the moment I stood up I felt out of place in my black Speedos amongst the informally-dressed beautiful people who paddled elegantly, brownly, hand in hand in the sun. There was something subtly aggressive about their nakedness, and I was reminded of walking hatless once down a Prague street in winter, the fur-clad heads turning in my wake. Like the ‘naturists’ at Holkham, they wore their nudity like a uniform. I had swum into a Bateman cartoon.
It was just then that I realised the tide was beginning to rise and I had left my togs rather too far down the beach for peace of mind. Setting off at a brisk breaststroke, I aimed for the distant spot of blue which was my shorts, then turned over for a stretch of backstroke, gazing up at the high cliffs and what the composer Imogen Holst once called ‘the contrapuntal wheeling of the gulls’. I enjoyed the comparative solitude. It grew noisier as I approached the beach, and my shorts, rucksack and boots were but a few feet above the waterline with the surf licking hungrily towards them. I put on a finishing sprint to the rescue, then dried out and warmed myself, half-leaning, half-lying on one of the massive quartz-striated pale-grey granite slabs that surround the cove. I was joined by a painted lady butterfly, sunbathing on my blue cotton French Connection shorts.
I looked around me at the British at play. I have always been persuaded by the marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy’s aquatic theory of human evolution, which he first suggested in an article in the New Scientist in 1960. His ideas were later developed by Elaine Morgan in her book The Descent of Woman. Unlike Desmond Morris (who was put off swimming by nearly drowning when he was seven) they believed we spent ten million years of the Pliocene era of world drought evolving into uprightness as semi-aquatic waders and swimmers in the sea shallows and on the beaches of Africa. We went through a sea change to become what we are, and our subsequent life on dry land is a relatively recent, short-lived affair.
Apart from the proboscis monkey of Borneo, we are the only primate that regularly takes to the water for the sheer joy of it. We are also singularly hairless like dolphins and, alone amongst the primates, have a layer of subcutaneous fat analagous to the whale’s blubber, ideal for keeping warm in the water. Hardy’s ideas were sparked off by the curious fact that the vestigial hairs on our bodies are arranged in a quite different pattern from those on other apes. Hardy spotted that if you were to put a swimming human into a water tunnel, the hydrodynamic lines would coincide precisely with the lines drawn by the pattern of body hairs. This is just what you would expect to find in a creature evolved for streamlined swimming whose babies take quite naturally to water. My young friend Stan took his first swim in the bath just after birth, and was already a leading light in the Hoxton Ducklings Swimming Club at the age of one. Herman Melville’s experiences in the South Seas, recounted in Typee: A Peep At Polynesian Life, convinced him of our natural affinity for water:
One day in company with Kory-Kory, I had repaired to the stream for the purpose of bathing, when I observed a woman sitting upon a rock in the midst of the current, and watching with the liveliest interest the gambols of something, which at first I took to be an uncommonly large species of frog, that was sporting in the water near her. Attracted by the novelty of the sight, I waded towards the spot where she sat, and could hardly credit the evidence of my senses when I beheld a little infant, the period of whose birth could not be extended back many days, paddling about as if it had just risen to the surface, after being hatched into existence at the bottom. Occasionally the delighted parent reached out her hands towards it, when the little thing, uttering a faint cry, and striking out its tiny limbs, would sidle for the rock and the next moment be clasped to its mother’s bosom. This was repeated again and again, the baby remaining in the stream about a minute at a time. Once or twice it made wry faces at swallowing a mouthful of water, and choked and spluttered as if on the point of strangling. At such times, however, the mother snatched it up and by a process scarcely to be mentioned obliged it to eject the fluid. For several weeks afterwards I observed this woman bringing her child down to the stream every day in the cool of the morning and evening and treating it to a bath. No wonder that the South Sea Islanders are an amphibious race when they are thus launched into water as soon as they see the light. I am convinced that it is as natural for a human being to swim as it is for a duck, and yet in civilized communities how many able-bodied individuals die like so many drowning kittens from the occurrence of the most trivial accidents.
As D. H. Lawrence says in his essay on Typee, ‘we are most of us who use the English language, water-people, sea-derived.’
Beach anthropology only tends to confirm my enthusiasm for Hardy’s hypothesis. I contemplated the webbing we (but no other apes) have between our thumb and forefinger, and the splashing humans, hairless apes squealing with pleasure in the sea, and wondered about the transformation that comes about in most of us – when we sit on the beach, or bathe, or swim – from Homo sapiens to what Norman O. Brown calls, in Life Against Death, Homo ludens; from neurosis to playfulness. Perhaps we are simply more at home in or around water than on dry land. Per
haps dry land is our problem.
People certainly work, or play, hard on the beach. They build the most elaborate sandcastles, construct dams and create lagoons, race the tide in elaborate water games, spend hours skimming pebbles on the sea, lug heavy equipment for miles down cliffs, through sand dunes, up cliffs again. They spend fortunes on elaborate, powered water toys, wait for days for the right wave to surf, make beach camps like nomads, sit in beach huts all day gazing out to sea, or simply take off their shoes and socks and paddle. The painter L. S. Lowry would sometimes experience such a compulsion to sit on the seafront at Sunderland that he would take a taxi there, 135 miles from his home in Cheshire. My own version of regressive heaven was to spend the rest of the afternoon very much like the swimming pigs I had met with Dudley on Kythnos, alternately toasting on my rock with Margaret Forster’s biography of Daphne du Maurier and ambling down the beach to wallow in the pure turquoise water.
13
CROSSING THE FOWEY
Cornwall, 18 July
IT WAS AFTER dark when I drove through the maze of twisting lanes that leads to Polruan down the east bank of the Fowey River. In places they are so narrow you brush the steep banks on both sides. I spent the night in the Citroën at the top of the cliffs by the coastguard’s lookout cottage. I woke up gazing out at a heavy sea mist from the open back of the car, and lay dozing for a while under my parachute, listening to the muffled engine of a boat coming round under the cliffs.
Polruan and Fowey face each other across a natural harbour formed by the deep estuary of the river, sheltered by the hills on which the two places stand. Conservative Fowey calls Polruan a Socialist Republic, because they come under a separate district council which has always been more radical. Fowey has never quite recovered from the council houses Polruan built all over the hilltop and skyline opposite. There’s a sense that they have still not resolved their enmity in the Civil War, when Fowey was Parliamentarian and Polruan Royalist.
Besides the pervasive presence of the ghost of Daphne du Maurier, Fowey and its river have always held a special importance for me because it was a favourite haunt of my mother, and my Uncle Laddie, who spent most of their childhood in Cornwall. My grandfather was public health inspector in Truro, and the family had moved there from Walsall. There were seven brothers and sisters altogether, and they grew especially close because of the relative social isolation of a Staffordshire family in a Cornish school. When they first arrived, the Cornish children thought they were from Warsaw and spoke to them in pidgin English. As outsiders, they continued to relate far more within their own family than outside it. Laddie, who was the oldest, eventually acquired a boat, a modest cabin cruiser in which the brothers and sisters led a Swallows and Amazons existence up and down the River Fal and on voyages to Fowey and Polruan. Here, too, was the summer cottage of a girlfriend, whom I would visit on absurd, marathon, all-night drives to and from London in my mid-twenties, in the best romantic traditions of du Maurier.
I knew it was not going to be easy to swim across the mouth of the Fowey River from the moment I arrived. The root of the problem is that ever since the days when du Maurier and her dashing chums lived here, it has been a place for showing off. The moment you go on, or in, the water, you’re on stage. The town is stacked up the hill like a grandstand, and it bristles with binoculars and probably telescopes too. Everybody has a scenic window, the kind that would cost a fortune if you broke it, as a lookout point. Everyone is watching everyone else, giving running commentaries on the trim of their sails or the condition of their paintwork, or describing the course they would be taking if they were at the tiller. There are coastguards on patrol, pilots leading enormous cargo ships up and down the river to load up with china clay from St Austell, tugs, ferrymen, water taxis, and the Fowey Yacht Club, all keeping a weather eye on the cut of your jib.
I walked down the steep narrow streets into Polruan to catch the ferry across the river to Fowey, taking my place on the quayside behind an orderly queue of dogs. There always seem to be more of them than people on the ferry. In August, every dog in the land converges on Cornwall for its summer holiday and there is much throwing of sticks on every Cornish beach. On the way over I pondered the tidal currents of the harbour. In town, I looked up the tides, ate baked beans on toast in the Lifeboat Café, and tried to decide on my best course over the river.
After much debate with my friends in Polruan, I decided the ideal place for a crossing would be the harbour mouth, from the rocks below the ruined castle on the Polruan side to Readymoney Cove on the Fowey side, close to the open sea, a distance of about half a mile. If things went well, I said flamboyantly, I might swim both ways. The best moment was going to be half an hour or so before the top of the high tide, so that I would be able to take advantage of the slack water before the tide began to ebb again. At all events, you want to be out of the water by the time the tide turns because it is at the beginning of the ebb and flow that the tides run with greatest power.
That afternoon, I swam out into the harbour mouth on the high tide simply to get the feel of the water and currents. I hadn’t intended it to be more than a short trial run, but was just settling nicely into the rhythm of the swim and deciding that I might as well keep going, when I was suddenly intercepted by the coastguard. A big grey powerboat, a-quiver with antennae, came sprinting across the water out of nowhere, and snowploughed to a halt like a skier a few yards off. ‘Are you all right?’ they called.
‘Absolutely fine, thanks,’ I said, trying to strike the same note as you would for ‘Just putting the milk-bottles out’. ‘Just taking a swim.’
They explained sternly that I shouldn’t swim in the harbour without permission from the harbourmaster, and told me to turn round.
‘But I’m halfway across already. I might as well keep going to the other side,’ I suggested, feeling like a fish arguing with an angler.
They disagreed, and it was getting too chilly to tread water and engage in debate, and besides, they were bigger than me. So I headed back to Polruan, my spirits a little dashed, to the amusement of my friends on shore.
Over dinner that night at a cottage on the waterfront, we laid the plan of action. It was the weekend and there might be too many sailing boats to make a safe crossing. My only option, apart from giving up, was going to be to swim concealed from the coastguard by my friend Brian’s boat, hoping, if caught, that they would forgive me if I took the sensible precaution of swimming with an escort.
Next day, we took the escort boat to the appointed spot with perfect timing. I went in off the rocks and began the swim. Brian and his children, Holly and Joe, chatted away as we went, and I eased into a steady breaststroke, keeping to the seaward side of the boat, out of sight of the harbourmaster’s office. The necessary subterfuge added to the fun. If this were a Channel-swim report, I would add that I was swimming at 29 strokes per minute and had set off at 4.25 p.m. The Fowey River is 40 feet deep at high tide, and I began to feel the depth of the water beneath me. Roy, of the Tregeagle, one of the two tugs that lie at anchor just off Polruan, had told me that at a point opposite the ferry from Fowey to Bodinnick, further upstream, there is a 50-foot hole in the river bottom with a fresh-water spring in it. We were giving it a wide berth.
I tried to avoid swimming into floating seaweed, but each time it wrapped itself around an arm I would shake it off with an involuntary shudder. The fear of unknown things in the deep is never very far away. There was one nervous moment when an enormous rubber-hulled Galaxy SP24 racing powerboat with twin Mercury 75 engines appeared to head straight for us like a giant black condom, travelling fast with its nose in the air and a ten-year-old at the wheel. Otherwise, there was little traffic on the water, so we could maintain a reasonably straight course, heading out towards St Catherine’s Castle to the seaward side of Readymoney Cove to compensate for the tide, which was still rising and carrying me upstream. It was calm, but a sea breeze made it choppy enough to break off my sentences now and again with a sa
lty slap in the face as we conversed. The children in the boat kept watch for jellyfish, but none appeared.
As I approached Readymoney Cove, my mind drifted back to my Fowey girlfriend. The little sandy bay held romantic associations, and memories of night-swims to the diving rafts moored offshore. Fowey figured in my childhood mythology as the place where Uncle Laddie often moored his boat on the trips from Falmouth, and loved to swim. He and my mother would set off exploring upriver, having brought the little craft over on one of their camping trips. On other expeditions, they would rove about the Fal and the creeks of the Carrick Roads, or go up the Helford River. The stories of their adventures, of driftwood fires and night swims, were the stuff of my bedtime stories.
I swam right into the cove and waded through the clear, sandy shallows on to the little beach. It may not have been quite up to the standard of Philip Rush’s three-way Channel crossing in 1988 (in 28 hours, 21 minutes), or Dr Chris Stockdale’s Channel swim, followed by a 203-mile cycle ride to Solihull from Dover and a full marathon round Birmingham, but it felt good all the same. It had been a straightforward crossing, so far unnoticed by the coastguards, and not wishing to cool off in the breeze I plunged back in for the return trip to Polruan, still shielded by the boat. A swim over any sort of distance is very like climbing a mountain. You look ahead from the shore and feel daunted. Your objective looks so tiny in the distance. Once in the sea, though, you begin to relax and lose yourself in the rhythm, feeling the texture of the water, opening up your lungs and breathing deeper, becoming aquatic. I was by now swimming confidently, although still conscious of the great depth of water beneath me, and the need to reach the other side before the tide turned. I now had the advantage of slack water, but once the tide begins to run, with a twenty-foot head of sea-water combined with the fresh-water stream of the river itself all wanting to escape to the open sea, there is a sudden unleashing of massive pent-up energy through the relatively narrow channel of the harbour.
