by Roger Deakin
The Dancing Ledge is a dramatic petrified beach, with the waves sliding in across it, kicking spray high into the air as they slap and thump into the cliffs beside it, hollowing them out with great thuds you can feel through your feet, ricocheting in reversed surf that races back out to sea and collides head-on with the incoming waves in more fireworks of spray. The restless Dorset sea fondles and gropes at the rock-shelf like a lover’s hand sliding up a stockinged thigh. The pool is a gash in the rock pavement ten feet wide and twenty-five feet long, and when the tide is up the snowy waves shampoo over the rocks and waterfall off its seaward rim. A thousand streamlets flow restlessly back into it each time the water recedes, and a dozen suns shine back at you off the cratered rock.
The little pool swirls and buffets the swimmer to a soundtrack of the muffled explosions of waves in the hidden caves under the cliffs. Its perpendicular walls are seaweedy, and getting out would be difficult if it weren’t for the fact that at one end, the water comes right to the very lip, so the swimmer can flop out like a seal. When the tide is low, and the sea calm, Dancing Ledge can be a swimmer’s idyll. You can lie on the warm grey rock amongst ammonites the size of car tyres, drying off in the sun, then tip yourself back into the rectangle of fresh sea-water. There are signs of a steel ladder or railing having once been fixed into the rock leading to the pool. Now there is nothing, and a refreshing absence of lifebelts or warning signs. The owners of this lovely stretch of coast must have decided that you would need your head examining if you didn’t treat the sea here with the respect it deserves.
Paul, Damian and Andy, the Treyarnon lifeguards, sat in their wooden hut with their feet up on the counter looking out to sea. Business wasn’t brisk today; there wasn’t a surfer in sight, and the only swimmers were Olivia, Gary and me. We left Moll and her owner at the rock pool, and took to the waves in what was now a full-blown thunderstorm, having consulted the three in the well-fugged hut, who clearly thought we were mad. ‘There’s a current that swings clockwise into the cove on the right and out to sea on the left, so keep right and you’re fine.’ Though they have to rescue more surfers than swimmers (people who paddle blithely out to sea on their boards without any respect for its tiderips or the tendency of the wind to blow the board along), they had been called out a few nights back to rescue a whole flotilla of tipsy midnight swimmers who had gone too far out into the treacherous current that drags round the point of the cove and were being carried along out to sea. The lifeguards and several volunteers formed a human chain to the east of the point down-current from the troubled swimmers. Holding hands, they stretched out to form a living boom that would catch them as they swept round the point. The strategy succeeded and everyone had returned to the beach in safety.
The lifeguards blamed the molly-coddling of indoor swimming and warm-water ‘fun pools’ for preventing young swimmers from learning a proper respect for the sea. There is a growing tendency to go out and surf or swim with no thought of self-reliance, only a bland assumption that the lifeguards are there to rescue you should anything go wrong, as though the ocean were a giant fun pool.
I awoke in the cottage at Ruan Lanihorne next morning with the first signs of a cold, but it was my friends’ last full day in Cornwall, and the night before we had planned an adventure I was determined not to miss.
Ever since I stayed one summer in a house across the Helford River at Calamansack, I had imagined swimming Frenchman’s Creek, the mysterious wooded inlet where Daphne du Maurier set her famous novel. I had sailed across there with my son in a dinghy one midsummer evening on a rising tide. We ventured respectfully into the shadows of the silent creek. It felt mysterious all right, full of the dinosaur skeletons of half-submerged oaks dripping with seaweed and the bow-waves of the mullet shoals that come up here to spawn. We had nosed softly up between the dark trees that crowded to the water’s edge as far as we dared, sensing the ghosts of the place.
This was where Daphne du Maurier spent her wedding night on 19 July 1932, moored up with her dashing Guards-officer husband on his twenty-foot motor cruiser Ygdrasil. Tommy ‘Boy’ Browning was the youngest major in the British Army. He had been awarded the DSO at the age of nineteen, was an Olympic high hurdler, and had bobsleighed for England. He and a friend had appeared late the previous summer in Fowey on Ygdrasil. He had read du Maurier’s first novel, The Loving Spirit, and had gone down to Fowey to ‘meet the girl who has written it’. He succeeded, and at seven-thirty on that July morning was on his way by boat up Pont Creek beside Polruan to the remote church at Lanteglos, where Daphne, who had also gone by boat, was there to marry him at eight-fifteen. With typical disregard for convention, Daphne had arranged the wedding early so that she and Tommy could catch the morning tide in Ygdrasil. There was a hurried, bleary-eyed wedding breakfast at the du Maurier house by the Fowey River at Ferryside, and the couple changed into their old boating clothes and set off for the open sea, the Helford River, and Frenchman’s Creek.
At Fowey, I had bathed in the quiet cove below Menabilly, the house secluded in the wooded hillside to the west of Fowey where Daphne du Maurier and her family lived for twenty-five years. I had walked through the Menabilly woods over Alldays Field to the cove where she used to swim, and waded in over the smooth pebbles between rock pools full of delicate green sea-lettuce and sea-anemones. Venturing alone into the entrance of the deserted cove, I had circled it several times, looking back at the woods that hid the house. I share du Maurier’s predilection for quiet, sequestered places, and a swim in Frenchman’s Creek seemed a natural sequel to the Menabilly cove and the Fowey River.
There can be few more inspiring sights than the oak-wood that crowds the water’s edge and spills over the Helford River, stretching out branches far over the narrow strip of beach that disappears under a spring tide when the river is brim-full. The oaks are ancient and mossy. They have grown undisturbed for centuries, and when you walk along the beach at low tide you have to duck them as they gesture towards the water. They are like the limbs of the wayside trees Thomas Hardy describes in The Woodlanders, ‘stretching in level repose over the road, as though reclining on the insubstantial air’. There’s a crab under every stone you overturn, and rogue oysters on the mud. Green wood, blue river; that is all there is.
When we arrived in Helford village, we tried and failed to find a boat to hire as an escort for a river swim. We had planned to cross the Helford Passage to Calamansack and start from the far shore, but, since this was now impossible, we debated which way to swim the creek: up or down. The tide decided things by turning, so we hurried a mile along a woodland path to the muddy head of the creek and in I went without further delay. There wasn’t a soul about, but there was so much mud that my companions wisely elected to stay on shore.
I could have been swimming down the Limpopo. The tide was just beginning to ebb, the water oozing from the mudbanks. The first hundred yards of this bayou were deep, silky mud the consistency of yoghurt, then a wallow of thin brown soup under a roof of outstretched oak boughs. Every sound I made echoed round the silent woods. The creek was dark and much impeded by the serpentine hulks of fallen trees and floating festoons of tangled seaweed. I lay full length on my belly rowing myself along with my hands like a walrus. As there began to be a puddle’s depth, I proceeded like one of the mud-hoppers that live in the mangrove swamps of West African rivers. Feeling deeply primeval, like some fast-track missing link in our evolution from the lugworm, I eventually squirmed into the relative luxury of deeper water and lengthened into a loping breaststroke, passing under the arch of a fallen tree. As I left it behind, I thought how much I had enjoyed my communion with the slime and I realised that I had also just re-enacted the evolution of swimming. The experience was so unexpectedly delightful, and the mud so curiously warm and friendly-feeling, that I even began to wonder if perhaps I had stumbled upon, or wallowed into, a whole new form of therapy; something along the lines of the primal scream. Mud, I decided, is one of those things in life that i
s only congenial once you’re in it.
I was soon in much deeper water, entering the green pool where, in the du Maurier novel, Dona, the heroine, first discovers the Frenchman’s ship lying at anchor in its hiding-place. In du Maurier’s own phrase, I felt ‘a trespasser in time’, and her remembered evocation of the place long after the ship had slipped away to the open sea at dawn rang true: ‘No rakish masts pointing at the sky, no rattle of chain through the hawse hole, no rich tobacco smell upon the air, no echo of voices coming across the water in a lilting foreign tongue.’ A heron checked me with a quick glance as food, then took off in slow motion, a misty wraith rising out of the water and evaporating over the low treetops. I swam on down the middle of the deepening channel of the creek, and petulant little waves began to slap me in the face. I tasted brackish brown water, but consoled myself with the knowledge that the Helford is one of the least polluted rivers in the whole of Britain. Recently, though, some problems have arisen from the new fashion for growing bulbs in some of the fields by the shore and fertilising them with nitrates. The chemicals dribble into the river and do not agree with the famous Helford oysters in their beds. Nor would they please the mullet and bass that run up the river, or the sea trout that pass upstream through the narrow bridge at Gweek.
I swam about a mile down the creek out into its mouth, imagining Uncle Laddie’s navy-blue motorboat chugging softly through these waters on the high tide to explore the creek, and silently humming bits of James Taylor’s ‘Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon’. Straight ahead, across the Helford Passage, I could see the house at Calamansack where I had stayed. An east wind was driving straight up the open channel from the sea. Miniature waves beat gruffly at the sandy beach, and I landed by one of the massive, spreading oaks. My friends were waiting generously with my pullover and a welcome towel. As we walked back to Helford village for hot chocolate and cream tea I felt elated, as I usually do after a long swim, but my voice was beginning to crack up. I thought little of it until I woke up in the night with a raging fever and a sore throat.
We had to leave the rented cottage in the morning, so I dragged myself over to Fowey, took the ferry to Polruan, and holed up alone in the cottage by the water for a whole lost weekend of fever, hallucinating and dreaming of the Corryvreckan whirlpool, which was already making me nervous. I dreamt of its untold depths and steely cold, making a maelstrom of my bed, half drowning under the billowing duvet, only vaguely aware of the sun outside and the flapping sails of the boats sailing placidly in and out of Fowey harbour.
14
THE BLANDFORD BOMBER
Dorset, 31 July
I HAD LOST THE rest of a long weekend altogether in Cornwall, in a welter of feverish dreams, mostly filled with anxiety about the troublesome task with which I had somehow saddled myself. The idea of swimming another stroke seemed entirely out of the question and I was no longer even sure which day it was. Visions like the sea paintings of Hokusai gripped me as I rose and dipped giddily in and out of consciousness. I was at the mercy of great tidal waves, or swept, gasping, down gigantic white-water versions of the Thames or Humber. The alarming thought occurred to me that I might actually be turning into Ned Merrill. In ‘The Swimmer’, Merrill sets off on his triathlon of swimming, jogging and drinking his way through the private pools of Long Island in apparently good condition, but then things begin to go subtly wrong, and he eventually finds himself wading through a thunderstorm, half-crazy, and on the verge of hypothermia. Sentences from the story floated into my mind and haunted me: ‘He had swum too long, he had been immersed too long, and his nose and his throat were sore from the water.’ Was this Weil’s disease, come to catch up with me after my dismissive comments amongst the coracle swimmers on the River Avon?
I have a vague recollection that it was Monday when I dragged myself up to friends in Dorset for a rest cure in a hammock in a hilltop orchard. The weather, with its usual sense of irony, was magnificent. The doctor said it wasn’t Weil’s, just flu or a throat infection (‘Probably picked it up in the sea,’ he said cheerfully), and after two days aloft in the hammock, and many cups of tea, I was ready for the beach and the cold-water cure of the Dorset coast.
Some of the best sea-bathing in the whole of England is to be had in Dorset, from the glamorous sands of Bournemouth all the way to the crumbling cliffs of Lyme Regis. Given the right weather, it is an ideal place to indulge yourself in some serial swimming. It was in Dorset that I had first tried out my idea of an amphibious ramble, when I had swum consecutively, the previous year, off Studland Bay, Dancing Ledge, Kimmeridge Bay, Lulworth Cove, Stair Hole, Durdle Dor, Ringstead Bay and Chesil Beach in the space of a few days. At seaweedy Kimmeridge I mingled with mullet too lazy to move, and lay so long on the hot rocks, the fossilised relics of a 140-million-year-old tropical seabed, that ammonites imprinted themselves all over me. I hadn’t quite reached Burton Bradstock, two miles from Bridport, which is where we now descended from the hilltop.
On our way to the beach, we chanced upon Peter and Barbara, some friends of my hosts. They were a handsome, bronzed couple from Portland Bill who confirmed to us that they practically lived on the beach. We encamped together under the hot cliffs on the pebble ridge of high tide. When I suggested a swim, Peter began earnestly rummaging in our pile of clothes for change, and ended up having to borrow ten pence from his wife. ‘An offering to Aphrodite,’ he explained as he tossed in the coin. He normally invested as much as a pound, he said, in propitiation of the sea gods, and traced the origins of the habit back to his time in the navy. It was plainly important to him, and I said I thought Neptune must think me something of a cheapskate, only ever having poured the odd dribble of wine to him over the side of a sailing boat. I took to the water with trepidation and was pleasantly surprised at its kindly embrace. The beach shelves steeply here and the water is soon deep and dark. We swam out and looked back from the sea to the little resort, all yellow and blue like the classic seaside posters on post-war railway platforms. The bright orange cliffs are layered like Battenberg cake and there’s no telling, even by the geologists, how many years separate each layer. They are full of fossils waiting to be discovered by the hammering of the next winter storm. Some lie about in the rocks below the cliffs, wherever there has been a tumbling down of debris. On the beach, the pebbles are tiny, rounded and flat, very comfortable for bare feet. They were hot that day, too. Two swans flew overhead across the lazy sea with whistling wings, heading towards the great swannery at Abbotsbury behind Chesil Bank.
Peter returned to the others and I looked back at the beach café, where people sat out in the sun, eating real Battenberg and gazing out to sea. Burton Bradstock is clearly a place where locals like to come, planning a day around its simple attractions: the beach, the bathing, a spot of fossil hunting, the shelter of the cliffs, the exceptionally good café, the odd frisbee, a magazine, or perhaps a book. There was definitely a higher-than-average proportion of readers on this beach and it was unusually quiet, like a library, or a club. There were several serious swimmers, too, and the heads bobbing in the sea here and there were reassuring company.
I swam along on my back, gazing up at the jackdaws and swallows that trafficked above the cliffs, feeling, or fancying I felt, a great deal better than I had on dry land. Perhaps it was just the body’s bravado. Skirting the edge of the sea and daydreaming like this, I was also skirting the boundaries of unconsciousness: the line between dreaming and drowning. At the same time, part of me felt I could continue with ease, all the way to Portland Bill, twenty miles away along the massive pebble embankment of Chesil Beach. It curves away to the south from Burton Bradstock, and its stones are so precisely graded by the sea, from fine at this end to huge and smooth at Portland, that they say a fisherman lost in fog and coming ashore anywhere between Lyme Regis and Portland Bill can tell exactly where he is from the size of the pebbles on the beach. I had swum off Chesil Beach itself the previous year, far out of my depth even a yard or two out, and felt th
e strength of the longshore tidal currents. John Bayley, in his memoir of Iris Murdoch, relates her narrow escape from drowning on one of their Chesil swimming expeditions with the Dorset artist and designer Reynolds Stone. Emerging from the sea up the steep shingle, the two men were so engrossed in conversation that they did not notice their companion very nearly sucked into the undertow, dragged under by a wave, and only saved by the impact of another. It is not until much later that night in bed that Iris mentions the incident, more as a curiosity than a matter of life and death.
Safely back with our little group on the beach, I sat about with them on the rocks telling swimming stories. Barbara’s concerned a radio ham who lived on Portland Bill next to the coastguard cottages there and swam in the sea off Chesil Bank every day of his life, until he was struck by lightning during a sudden thunderstorm on one of his dips and died. Peter’s narrative was equally gloomy and concerned an incident at Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras Hotel in the 1920s. In high spirits after a jolly evening, one of the guests climbed into the big water-tank in the roof and went swimming. He drowned, and wasn’t discovered until four or five days later, when the hotel water began to taste odd and a plumber was sent to investigate.
Another of the swimmers’ tales was about Jeffrey Bernard and the actor John Le Mesurier. They were old drinking companions, and would invent ever more absurd private games to amuse themselves secretly in company. A long-running favourite was to see which of them could casually insert the most outrageous clichés into a conversation undetected by anyone else. They had entered a pub in a small Devon seaside resort, and remarked to the landlord how inviting the sea looked that day. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘but it can be treacherous. Only last week, a young boy went swimming out there and drowned.’ Everyone in the pub fell into a respectful silence, and, after a pause, Le Mesurier said, ‘Well, it just goes to show, you can’t be too careful,’ at which Bernard snorted loudly into his glass, burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter, and the pair were obliged to leave, never to return.
