by Roger Deakin
Upstream, there had been a herd of black-and-white cattle, more appreciative spectators who kept galloping to the next bend of the bank opposite to watch, bandy-legged with amazement, as I sped past them, urged on by the swollen water, having leapt in through a gap in the rushes for a dash downriver. The Windrush is a coot river, so there wasn’t a moorhen in sight. Some early and probably dastardly form of gang warfare must have carved out the territory between these two species, and the coots had triumphed.
My cyclical swims were very like the repeated bike-rides I take round the local lanes in Suffolk. The whole quality of cycling is akin to swimming; the economy of effort, the defiance of gravity, the dancing rhythm, and the general need to keep moving, lest you sink or topple. As modes of propulsion, both could safely be classified as environmentally friendly. I enjoy the gliding, swooping motion of the bike as I enjoy the grace of swimming. And the steep plunge in top gear down a hill with the hedges dividing before you sends the air whipping your face as it does in a high dive. You are flying, as you fly and glide when you swim. There is also a governing of the body’s motion on a bike as in water, where no sudden movements are possible and even a stone sinks slowly. So it is hard to overstrain your muscles by swimming or cycling; both are essentially benign forms of exercise. Completing the circle of the bike-ride is always satisfying, landing back in the world of ordinary gravity, as I did when I clambered out of the Windrush for the last time by the pollard willow.
At the birthday party at Coleshill the following afternoon, the sun had come out and there were architects with cantilevered glasses of champagne all over the lawn. I wandered off with a friend to explore Coleshill Park for signs of the false acacias imported from America and marketed as ‘locust trees’ (the American name) by William Cobbett. He sold no less than 13,600 of them to Lord Folkestone in 1822, to be planted in clumps of 200 in the park. ‘They are the most beautiful clumps of trees that I ever saw in my life,’ Cobbett says modestly in Rural Rides when he comes to Coleshill and sees his trees, already sixteen feet high only two years after they were planted. ‘If men want woods, beautiful woods, and in a hurry, let them go and see the clumps at Coleshill.’ Cobbett would cheerfully have replaced all the elms in Wiltshire with a plague of ‘locusts’ given half a chance. We should be thankful he never got his hands on Cupressus lawsonii. My companion and I failed to find even the single craggy old specimen, full of nesting owls, that is said to remain. It is curious that Cobbett should visit Coleshill and advertise his trees so volubly in Rural Rides, yet omit to mention the greatest agricultural building in England – the Great Coxhill Barn – only two miles down the road. I went and stood inside it in the late afternoon sunshine. The enormous wooden doors were open like lock gates, flooding the place with golden light. When he lived nearby at Kelmscott Manor, William Morris loved to visit the building, which he thought as beautiful and dignified as a cathedral.
The evening was warm and tender, and after the party I took a long swim in the pool below Buscott Lock, in what Morris used to call ‘the Baby Thames’, upstream from Kelmscott. The river is still quite a modest affair up here on the borders of Oxfordshire, and the water was clear enough just above the lock to see the dark shapes of tench weaving lazily amongst the lily stalks. I entered the water down a steep bank, slithering over a well-worn muddy shute in the grass; the sort of thing known to opponents of wild swimming as bank erosion. This was obviously a popular bathing place. Swimming in a big circle round the pool, I was observed by several swans and surrounded by tall, untidy old crack willows. These were the very trees that inspired Morris, on his daily fishing trips aboard his punt, to design his ‘Willow Boughs’ wallpaper. I wondered what he would have made of the assortment of big, ugly notices proclaiming the danger of deep water. A smell of fish and duckweed hung in the air.
At Kelmscott, I visited Morris’s grave. I found it in the south-eastern corner of the churchyard beneath a laureate bay between five and six feet tall and nearly spherical, like Morris himself. This quiet corner is a miniature arboretum, with a mature box hedge, two yews, a syringa bush, hawthorn and ivy. It also contains the initialled headstones of Janey and May Morris. Morris’s tomb was designed by his friend and partner in the Firm, Philip Webb, and is said to have been inspired by a piece of early stonework he found in the churchyard. Morris loved the church for its simplicity, and his gravestone is decorated with just two delicate stone carvings, often interpreted as trees. I like to see them as umbellifers; single stalks of cowparsley, or lady’s lace, one of the commonest and most beautiful of wayside flowers. In spring this exquisite plant must flower all around the tomb in clouds of white, echoing the unassuming stone carving. The gravestone lies horizontally, laid a foot or so above the ground on two supporting blocks, like an upturned rowing boat laid keel up for the winter.
The raised tomb suggests levitation, and the flight of the soul from the body. There is something American Indian or Icelandic about it. It brought to mind a moment in Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, when he discovers the graveyard of the extinct village of Dunstable near the banks of the Merrimac, and reflects how remarkable it is that the dead should lie everywhere under stones. Like Morris, he deplores the oppressive effect of ‘all large monuments over men’s bodies, from the pyramids down’. A monument, he suggests, ‘should at least be “star-y-pointing”, to indicate whither the spirit is gone, and not prostrate, like the body it has deserted’. Thoreau despairs that we are always writing ‘Here lies’, when we might put ‘There rises’.
I couldn’t help thinking that it was in his boat on the river that Morris was probably most at home, and that it is just what he would have chosen to row him over to the Other Side. Writing to Janey Morris in 1888, he described the river here as:
Altogether a very pleasant river to travel on, the bank being still very beautiful with flowers; the long purples and willowherb, and that strong-coloured yellow flower very close and buttony are the great show: but there is a very pretty dark blue flower, I think mug-wort, mixed with all that besides the purple blossom of the horse-mint and mouse-ear and here and there a bit of meadow-sweet belated.
Morris lived most of his life by water; by the moat at Water House, Walthamstow, as a boy and then at the two Kelmscott houses, here and by the same river at Hammersmith. It would be quite natural for him to be buried in a boat, floating above the ground.
26
SWALLOW DIVES
Suffolk, 5 September
MY NEXT DESTINATION being the coast of Essex, I took the opportunity to make the detour to Suffolk, and the moat. Returning to my village past the familiar, centuries-old Neighbourhood Watch sign always makes me smile. Some wit has emptied a shotgun through it at close range, turning it into a colander which whistles eerily on windy days; an aeolian burglar alarm. It hadn’t deterred the squirrels from pilfering my walnuts. When I arrived, they hardly paused in the serious business of walking their booty off the tree, along the barn roof, down the big crack willow and off to some subterranean vault to be laid down in date order for later on. I see them in winter, wandering the lawn disconsolately, trying to remember where the secret hiding places are.
The moat still maintained a steady sixty degrees fahrenheit, in spite of the weather, which was suddenly turning cool and briskly autumnal. The usually pristine clarity of the water was obscured by a surface oily with pollen dust from the fields. When I swam, it rippled before me into viscous rainbows, streaking and curling itself about in animated marbling, leaving a clear, black wake a yard wide that reflected the inverted heavens and the trees. By the time I had turned and was on my way back, it was already closing together again like curtains, and I came out like a bee from a flower, dusted in pollen. Most of the adult amphibians had left the water by now, and the weed had stopped growing. Dead leaves floated down underwater and settled belly-up on the bed of the moat.
I was prevented from lighting an autumn fire by the swallows that had arrived from Africa in April
and were still occupying their nests in the chimney. Swallows are really cave birds, so it is easy to understand the attractions of a massive thirty-foot-deep brick flue easily big enough to fly up and down. The chimney is over 400 years old, and it is tempting to think that this particular family of birds, by now a dynasty, has been returning here to nest over all those summers. The last of the second clutch of fledglings, now fledged, was still roosting in the nest. Even after they have begun to fly they still return to the chimney nests each night, chattering long after dark, like children in a dormitory. Of all birdsong, the happy talk of swallows is my favourite. Theirs is a language I almost begin to understand as I stand by the fireplace eavesdropping on them in the chimney. They call to each other continually as they dip and wheel after insects, or swoop down, dapping the surface of the moat. But in the chimney their conversation is different, more intimate, more expressive and varied, sometimes bickering, often simply a cascade of delight. Their maiden flight is the most heroic feat. On their very first attempt, the fledglings must rise vertically like harrier jump-jets some twenty-five feet up the sooty chasm before they reach daylight and the open air. Once there, their delight in the novelty of flying is expressed in great swoopings and soarings and flutterings above the house. I watch their earliest arcs of ascent with heart-stopped parental joy.
Now the weather had worsened, I was itching to get a fire going. I caught myself for a moment wishing the birds would hurry up and leave, as you sometimes do when a guest lingers that bit too long after dinner. Thomas De Quincey says that people often felt this way about Coleridge, who could be relied upon to arrive for lunch and stay for a week. However, whenever such selfish sentiments creep up, I remind myself that I’m a mere newcomer to this ancient dynasty of nomads, who settled here centuries before I ever appeared on the scene and will, I sincerely hope, long outlast me here.
27
THE JAYWICK PAPERS
Essex, 17 September
JAYWICK SANDS IS the first place I ever went on holiday. It was only two or three years after the war and I was probably about four. It must have made a big impression, because I remember aspects of it quite clearly. Most of my uncles, aunts and cousins seem to have been there, and we had rented one of the wooden houses on stilts by the bay. I remember being lifted up to touch the ceiling by an uncle, and paddling about in the sandy pools beneath the forest of soused crutches that propped up the houses. The smell of sea and seaweed permeated everything, and my cousins and I spent a lot of time running up and down the wooden steps that led to other houses, jumping off into the soft wet sand. It was like living in our own sandcastle. I was enchanted with this shack city, and have been in love with the shed life ever since. To this day I am never happier than in my tool shed, or in someone’s beach hut.
My most vivid memory of the Jaywick holiday was of catching my first fish. Uncle Laddie, the prankster in the family who later taught me to swim in the Kenilworth swimming pool, fixed me a simple fishing rod with a bent-pin hook and took me down to the beach, where I landed an enormous plaice almost instantly. This was borne back to our shack villa in triumph, and enjoyed by one and all for lunch. It was some years before I learnt the truth; how Laddie had bought the biggest plaice at the fishmonger’s and attached it to my hook by sleight of hand. The benevolent conspiracy was the high point of the holiday.
This was the first time I had returned to the place since that early taste of the beach-bum life. My Essex friends had often spoken of Jaywick as a hippie holiday home where people squatted the wooden houses, lived on apples from a bucket, and had dogs on bits of string. Such tales only fed my desire to return there. Because of its low-lying position on reclaimed marshy ground near the mouth of the Blackwater estuary, it isn’t just time that passes Jaywick by. It is a cul-de-sac on the map too, secluded from the mainstream of visitors who stray out of Colchester on summer days to Clacton, Frinton and Walton on the Naze, windsurfers strapped to the roof-rack. Nobody has spent much money on Jaywick, with the result that you can still feel some of its original atmosphere and character. The deserted Jaywick Drug Stores has somehow survived, with a dusty display of Ex-Lax chocolate in the window, and over the road, the Model Farm Restaurant is still going, even though the model farm isn’t.
I took the small grey German army-surplus rucksack I use for my swimming gear down to the far end of the beach, by the big boulders of a breakwater that protects one end of the bay. There were pools in the fine sand full of whelk-, oyster-and cockle-shells, and limp bladderwrack on the concrete. These were the shells of the best oysters in England, Colchester oysters from Mersea Island twenty miles away up the estuary of the Blackwater and the Colne in Arthur Ransome country. Around the rim of the bay people were settling down for the evening. A woman was taking in her washing off a line rigged on poles in the sand. I heard the pips for the six o’clock news on somebody’s radio.
The swim was icy but wonderful, with the sun setting behind the nuclear power station at Bradwell across the huge waters of the estuary beyond St Osyth and Brightlingsea. The sea was so bright that two suns were setting. One in the sky, hovering under a thin cloudbank and one in the water, melting down the nuclear power station. It is rare to watch a sunset over the sea on the east coast, and I had the perfect viewpoint from water level. I swam in brown, deep water in a ripple-sanded lagoon to the west of the man-made spit of rock that forms a tiny harbour for what’s left of Jaywick’s fishing fleet; two or three little boats, with tiny cabins like allotment sheds, tugging at their moorings in the whizzing tide-race.
I turned and looked back towards the shore and the curious collection of bungalows that lined the seafront, lit by the dying reflected sunlight, their wooden clapboarding picked out in garish colours. At one end of the little curved sandy bay was the Jaywick Beach Bar, with a fifteen-foot square of concrete jutting out into the water, and beyond it, further off, a Martello tower. A fishing smack rode at anchor, trailing a wake that ploughed the smooth surface of the tide-stream. The bungalows were tiny, with much brightly-coloured picket fencing around them. A light plane flew in over the bay and came in to land behind the houses on a tiny airfield that had a windsock and a board advertising pleasure flights along the coast. The ancient gnarled remains of a groyne heaved out of the sand, the concrete slabs thrown together like dice by storms. The defiantly anachronistic spirit of Jaywick was distilled in a sign on the miniature promenade advertising the pub: NEVER SAY DIE – LIVE ENTERTAINMENT. The promenade was tiny, more of a sea path squeezed in behind the sea wall, and the bungalows, with their stilts and verandas, crammed together facing out to sea like punters at a racecourse trying to get a view. On the skyline of low sand-dunes a horse and rider trotted round and round.
I swam in the shelter of the breakwater, parallel with the racing tide, straight into the eye of the sun, watching seagulls bobbing past at a terrific rate, and a pair of canoeists leaning on their paddles to make headway. An unusual stillness often comes over the sea at this time of day, and the voices and the rhythmic splash of wood on water carried a long way to me with absolute clarity. Dogs barked in the marram grass, chafing their string leashes, the horse snorted, and the strains of Status Quo floated across the bay from one of the dimly-lit verandas. I tried to imagine what it must have sounded like here in the 1930s, when people spent their evenings dancing to a band in the Brooklands Club or a gramophone in the Morocco Café. I kept on swimming towards the subsiding sun, down its fiery wake, as if this were the last I would see of it before winter. I wanted to retrieve it like an elusive beachball. I was sunbathing.
Like a lot of makeshift landscapes, Jaywick grew up as plotlands, sold off in the 1930s by a developer from Dulwich, F. C. ‘Foff’ Steadman, with ambitions for the place as a holiday resort. In 1928, Steadman paid £7,500 for the reclaimed marshland, dunes and dykes, but Clacton Town Council refused him planning permission for houses because they were unhappy about the sewerage arrangements on such low-lying land. Undeterred, Steadman got permission
instead for ‘Beach Chalets’ and ‘Bathing Houses’. By 1929, he was offering beach chalets in the London papers for £20 to £100, and plots with land for car-parking or a garden for anything from £25 to £200. The chalets caught on with East Enders and by 1931 there were 200 of them at Jaywick. They drew water from a standpipe and had Elsan toilets, emptied by contractors, known locally as ‘The Bisto Kids’, with a tank on wheels – the ‘Honey Cart’ – pulled by a pair of horses known to all as ‘Bugger and Sod’. In the same year, over 200 citizens crowded into the Beach Café for the first meeting of the Jaywick Freeholders’ Association.
You can catch the cockney flavour in their genius for naming things. When they were flooded in 1948, one of the locals, Adrian Wolfe, built the first sea defence, instantly christened ‘Adrian’s Wall’. There were no street numbers, but every chalet had a name: Lazy Days, Windy Way, Whoopee, Spindrift. Like the street names, they speak volumes about the romantic aspirations of the plotlanders. The little streets of Jaywick are all grandly called this or that ‘Way’, and named after the flowers of the sea shore: ‘Sea Lavender’, ‘Sea Thistle’, ‘Sea Holly’, ‘Sea Cornflower’, ‘Sea Pink’. In truth, every one of these plants is now extinct in Jaywick, so their names evoke a cumulative melancholy as you wander the potholed streets. There is even a Snakes Lane in Jaywick, named after the long-departed grass snakes that lived in the rushes in that part of town. Later, in homage to the motor cars which made Jaywick possible, they christened another twenty-five avenues after a litany of extinct manufacturers from Humber to Alvis, with the happy result that you could holiday in Sunbeam Avenue.
