Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  As I had swum my mile, I kept meeting a solitary whirligig beetle making its way from one end to the other in a series of loops and circles, like calligraphy. Like the pond skaters, it wasn’t swimming at all, but walking on water, on a raft of its own meniscus. Its apparently random progress set me wondering where it was going and why. But it might just as well have wondered the same thing about me. The encounter made me think about the individuality of insects, which we are used to imagine as automatons, all programmed to behave exactly alike. The year before, Microcosmos, a French feature film about the real lives of the insects in an ordinary field in southern France, had impressed me with its evocation of the little everyday aspects of an insect’s life – preening its antennae, or making a bed in a campanula flower. Such scenes gently reminded us of our own ways; of our kinship with creatures we often think of as in a world apart.

  The two directors, Marie Perennou and Claude Nuridsanay, had soon found insect individuality manifesting itself in the differing acting abilities and temperaments of their little thespians, and it had proved necessary to hold casting sessions. In one scene, a ladybird was to climb a blade of grass and take off from its tip. Out of twenty ladybirds, the directors found just three natural actors they could rely upon to play the scene as scripted. And out of several dung beetles auditioned, they found only one who would roll his dung-ball obligingly before the camera. The others had obstinately refused to demonstrate their savoir-faire. Amongst amphibians, I have certainly noticed marked individuation in the garden toads that often stray into the kitchen, possibly because there is an Aga in there. When I pick them up to carry them back to the vegetable garden, where they are supposed to be on pest control duty, some go quietly without a murmur, but with others there is an unseemly struggle as they try to escape, and they perfume my hands with the slightly noxious imitation venom that is supposed to make you drop them in disgust.

  Swimming the last few lengths, I thought what a moated people we are, suspicious of Europe, and not at all sure about the Channel Tunnel. No wonder moats were such a popular idea in the sixteenth century, when the French, Spanish or Dutch might invade at any moment. Every Little Englander could have his own personal English Channel. I realised then that I was indeed swimming the Channel; that I was no different from Wemmick in Great Expectations in the little moated cottage home he invites Pip to visit:

  I highly commended it. I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a gothic door, almost too small to get in at.

  ‘That’s a real flagstaff, you see,’ said Wemmick, ‘and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up – so – and cut off the communication.’

  The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and not merely mechanically.

  16

  EXTINCTIONS

  Suffolk, 4 August

  NEXT DAY I met an otter in the Waveney. I swam round a bend in my favourite river in Suffolk and there it was, sunning itself on a floating log near the reed-bed. I would have valued a moment face to face, but it was too quick for that. It slipped into the water on the instant, the big paddle tail following through with such stealth that it left hardly a ripple. But I saw its white bib and the unmistakable bulk of the animal, and I knew I had intruded into its territory; knew also that it was underwater somewhere close, sensing my movements. It hadn’t paused to puzzle over my unconventional mode of approach. It just went. It didn’t miss a beat. We can scarcely be said to have communed, yet I can replay every frame of the brief encounter in slow motion, right down to the just-vacated wet log rolling back into balance, oscillating slightly, and my own emotions, a mixture of elation at a rare moment’s audience with the most reclusive animal on the river (Ted Hughes called it ‘a king in hiding’) and shame at having interrupted its private reverie.

  That otters came within a whisker of extinction in England and Wales during the late fifties and early sixties is well known. It happened suddenly and insidiously. But there are hopeful signs that they are now gradually returning to many of their traditional rivers. It has taken thirty years for the powerful poisons that killed them, organochloride pesticides like aldrin, dieldrin and DDT, to flush out of our rivers, and for people to realise that otters will only thrive in waters that are left wild and untutored, as well as unpolluted, with plenty of wet woodland, untidy wood stacks, nettles, story-book gnarled trees full of hollows, and as few humans as possible.

  I was swimming ten miles from the moat, where the Waveney defines the border between Norfolk and Suffolk. It is a secret river, by turns lazy and agile, dashing over shallow beds of golden gravel, then suddenly quiet, dignified and deep. It winds through water meadows, damp woods and marshes in a wide basin that was once tidal from Yarmouth to Diss, close to its source in the great watershed of Redgrave Fen, where its twin, the Little Ouse, also rises and flows off in the opposite direction, into the Fens. With its secret pools and occasional sandy beaches, the Waveney is full of swimming holes, diving stages improvised from wooden pallets, dangling ropes, and upturned canoes pulled up on the bank. Every two or three miles you come to a weir and a whitewashed watermill.

  I swam on beyond the otter pool, under some sort of spell. It struck me that the animal’s particular magic does not stem so much from its rarity as its invisibility. It is through their puckish, Dionysian habit of veiling themselves from view that otters come to embody the river spirits themselves. Henry Williamson knew this when he wrote his great mythic poem of Tarka the Otter. In the best traditions of spirits, the otter reveals itself through signs. You hunt for their tracks on sandbars, or for their spraint, the aromatic dung they leave behind to mark their territory, like clues in an Easter-egg hunt, under bridges or on the lowest boughs of willow or alder.

  That otters were once plentiful in the Waveney was clear enough until recently if you went to the Harleston Magpie, which used to be a principal meeting place for the Eastern Counties Otter Hounds. Before the pub was altered, there were still otter masks and pads on the walls there, and up the road at the De la Pole Arms in Wingfield they have even installed entire animals, mummified in glass cases. One of my Suffolk friends inherited a red and blue tweed hunting coat that would have been worn by a member of the Eastern Counties Otter Hounds. It must have been hot work, hurrying on foot up and down the river bank, and from pub to pub along the valley, in tweed suits. A student of rural customs, he also once saw an otter pad mounted on a wooden shield with the enigmatic inscription: ‘Shanghai Otter Hounds, Wortwell Mill, 1912’. Quite by chance, he stumbled on the explanation in a bookshop the following year, looking through the memoirs of an officer of the Shanghai Police, Maurice Springfield, who, it seemed, had been the Master of the Shanghai Otter Hounds, and bought some of the dogs in Suffolk around 1912 to take back with him to China. He must have been allowed to hunt them with the East Anglian contingent, perhaps by way of a road test, running down the unfortunate otter at Wortwell Mill.

  In the autumn of the year before, I had crossed Suffolk to Westleton Village Hall one Saturday morning to attend a training session in animal tracking organised by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust so that we could take part in a survey of the Suffolk rivers for otters, mink and water voles. About forty of us sat in the hall studying slides of their footprints, and learning more about their ways. Small plastic tubs containing otter and mink shit were solemnly passed round. It was a bit like a wine tasting. You waved the poos under your nose, sniffed, then passed on the sample to your neighbour. Our tutor described otter spraint as ‘fragrant’, with something of the quality of jasmine tea, but perhaps an added nuance of fish oil and new-mown hay. A sample of jasmine tea was also circulated. You need a good nose to be a successful otter detective. We took it on trust from our tutor that otter spraint is also ‘tarry
and tacky’. Mink, on the other hand, have, or do, ‘scats’. Scats look quite like spraint, but smell like burnt rubber or rotten fish. I felt the aesthetics of the matter posed some threat to our scientific objectivity.

  That afternoon, we had all gone down to the Eel’s Foot at Eastbridge, within sight of the Sizewell B nuclear power station, and walked along the bank of the Minsmere river in a crocodile looking for real live otter spraint. The Minsmere otters, no doubt observing all this from the safety of some hollow tree, would have witnessed the unusual spectacle of forty humans queuing to lie full-length on the bank and sniff small dollops of poo, making appreciative sounds. Someone spotted a bubble and all forty of us froze, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but it was just a bubble. I find I have since rather gone off jasmine tea.

  I had met my Waveney otter downstream of Mendham Mill, near where I began my swim, diving in from a lush meadow where giant puffballs grow in late summer, once in such profusion that I mistook them at first sight for a flock of sheep, or the naked bottoms of swimmers. The breaststroke had again served me well by being so silent. I swam on downstream, over festive streamers of waving ribbon weed, brushed by the floppy leaves of yellow waterlilies, through endless meandering bends, past swans that hissed, but swam away, and turned off into the still, secret world of one of the drainage channels that run in straight lines across the flood meadows. It was five feet wide, full of moorhens and humming with insect life. Damselflies of all hues and patterns courted each other madly right in front of my nose, quite unconcerned. They even flew about in flagrante, performing the extraordinary feat of flying and copulating at the same time; a kind of insect Mile High Club. Huge dragonflies, some blue, some brown, hawked up and down the water right over me, or perched undisturbed on lilies. As I pushed through between the reeds, rows of bubbles rose ahead of me as eels sank deeper into the mud, or where a moorhen had dived and was swimming off underwater. Eels are the favourite food of otters, and the most nutritious of all fresh-water fish. This was just the sort of haunt that would have appealed to the animal I miss most on this river: the coypu. It set me thinking about the different attitudes we adopt towards animals. Like the otter, it was a good swimmer, had luxuriant fur, and was recently driven to extinction on this river by the activities of humans. In its special way, it has also created its own myth; indeed the legend is all that is left of it, for since it became extinct in Britain, no one, apparently, would even dream of reinstating it.

  The last coypu on the Waveney was martyred like Hereward the Wake in some reedy outpost of the marshes in 1989. There used to be plenty of them pottering about incautiously along the river. I saw my last one in July 1986, preening itself on the banks of a stream at Thornham Magna in the headwaters near Eye. I also met several on canoe trips down the Waveney. Like mink, these harmless vegans originally escaped from fur farms. They are a native of South America, and probably suffered from some of the same animal racism now directed at the mink. They lived in the rivers and marshes and had all the usual rodent propensities for breeding and occasionally bingeing on carrots or sugar beet. Another of their favourite activities was to burrow teasingly into the banks of rivers and flood defences, thus whipping up even more paranoia amongst the farmers about the danger of inundating large parts of East Anglia.

  The animals were good swimmers and had webbed feet. The females produced quins twice a year, and had their nipples high up on their bellies above the plimsoll line, so they could suckle their offspring as they swam alongside, keeping themselves well hidden in the marsh. Coypu could grow to over a yard long, and twelve stone in weight, so they never really had any natural predators in East Anglia. Being very big as well as very fecund and very greedy, they were too much for the Ministry of Agriculture, who, like Pat Garrett before them, hired a posse of men to hunt down every last coypu in the marshes. Cage traps the size of garden sheds began to appear up and down the Waveney, baited with carrots and sugar beet. Men in peaked caps and white vans buzzed up and down the valley. The operation dragged on for years, until someone at the Ministry twigged that it wasn’t only the coypu who were adept at self-preservation. The very last thing the good ol’ Norfolk and Suffolk boys at Coypu Control wanted was to see the last of the coypu exterminated. Rumour has it that they were eventually persuaded to finish off the job by the mention of generous coypu-sized redundancy packages.

  The Waveney Clarion, community newspaper, voice of the people of the Waveney valley, was quick to recognise the rich symbolism of Coypu Control. If an animal chose to immigrate to the Marshes, why shouldn’t it be welcome, whatever country it hailed from? True to its liberal traditions, the newspaper came out in full support of the colourful blend of fun-loving, gourmandising, hard-drinking Latin-American culture and general laid-back rodent mischief-making embodied in the fat-bottomed coypu and its struggle against the dastardly, jackbooted, but gullible Coypu Control. And so Mick Sparksman’s Coypu Comix cartoon strip was born.

  The Clarion was one of the most successful community newspapers of the 1970s, and circulated amongst the growing colony of romantic, liberal-minded people who lived, or had settled, in the general vicinity of the Waveney and shared the Whole Earth Catalogue ideals of the Woodstock era. Many had come from London, like me, and were working hard at the country life. Coypu was the star of the paper. Dressed in plaid trousers and a knotted scarf, he was a hippie Rupert Bear, getting up to all the tricks the Chums had hardly dared to dream about. Yet he was an innocent too. With his friends Reg Rabbit, Ramblin’ Dog and Shiftless Mouse, he was forever having near squeaks with the Coypu Control officers. He had a weakness for Adnams ale, carrots, sugar beet, freshwater mussels and jugs of home-made sugar beet wine. He was always ‘starving’ and always escaping by hopping into disguise, as a duck, a rabbit, a scarecrow, even a snowman. He once hitched a lift to London in a Lowestoft bloater lorry, feasting and sipping Adnams all the way. In the Coypu v. Rabbit Annual Cricket Match, the rabbits got all the runs and the coypus were sixteen all out. Coypu was an active member of the bungling Coypu Liberation Army and helped organise their annual Reggae and Cider Bonfire Party. He also staged a successful raindance during one of the East Anglian droughts. His favourite hymn, whistled at times of crisis, was ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

  I returned through the meadows, swimming upriver against the gentle current to Mendham Mill, where the painter Alfred Munnings spent his boyhood. Munnings’s brother, Frederick, eventually took over as miller from their father. His nephew Robert Moss gave me a lively account of his swimming education on holidays there as a child during the First World War.

  The young Robert and his cousins learnt to swim in three stages. First, in March, they were driven forty miles in the open back of the mill’s lorry to their Great-Aunt Ellen’s house at Mundesley, on the north coast of Norfolk. Here, they were taken to the shore clad in striped bathing costumes and totally immersed in the sea. It was believed that wetting their heads protected them from chills. The old lady came in with them in the icy March winds, and the rule was, ‘No bathe, no lunch’, whatever the weather. Even during a year’s sojourn with the navy in the High Arctic at 80 degrees north, Robert Moss was never so cold again.

  Swimming lessons were resumed at Mendham Mill, where a huge weeping willow stood by the boathouse, and the river was shallow enough for the children’s mothers to stand where the willow branches dipped in the water, but too deep for the children, who supported themselves by holding on to the tips of the willow twigs, gaining confidence from the sensation of actually swimming. Their mothers caught hold of their feet and taught their little legs the breaststroke.

  They were then ready for Stage Three, in the confluence of the main river with the mill’s by-pass streams. Here they learned to use the traditional technique of the village children. It depended on a bundle of reeds about five feet long and eighteen inches thick, bent into a gentle V-shape and tucked under the armpits to act as primitive water-wings. There was an ample harvest of buoyant reeds in the ov
erflow channel between the floodgates. They feature in Alfred Munnings’s painting in the Royal Academy of a young man and woman rowing their boat into the bank of reeds in that very channel. The bundle was tied with hempen yarn, usually scrounged from the man who mended sacks at the mill. It required skill to make it. It had to be tied not too tight and not too loose, so that each time it was used a few of the reeds would escape. The theory was that by the time the bundle had finally disintegrated, the aspiring swimmer would no longer need its support. It worked, too.

  That evening, I went to Bungay in search of ‘Bungay Beach’, one of the town’s swimming holes, across the marshy wastes of Outney Common, where the river kinks into a two-mile oxbow. The path led over a slender single-span footbridge of cast iron and concrete that is only sixteen inches wide; just wide enough to walk. The town reeve had it built in 1922, and its economy of design is breathtaking. It has a single handrail on one side only, and spans twenty-five feet. It is like a bridge on a willow pattern plate, and it can only be there for swimmers. The path now ran through a densely wooded island to its upstream end, where rhythmic thwackings I couldn’t quite place echoed round eight giant horse chestnuts that supported several dangling ropes with wooden handles over a deep, green pool surrounded by polished roots. Two boys were drying their costumes by flogging them against the trees. Swimming up to the tangle of tree roots in deep water, I experienced one of those sudden intimations of dread, known to all wild swimmers, about what could be lurking beneath the surface. This was a perfect pike pool; what if a big pike was hiding up in one of the holes in the bank beneath the roots? I swam quickly for the open water in mid-stream.