Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  In a wild stretch of the River Isle, a mile upstream from Ilford bridge, I stumbled on the perfect swimming hole. It was marked as a fishing spot by a little wooden square pegged in the bank. This was No. 38. Someone had sculpted the sheltered hollow into a natural armchair of reeds and hardened earth. A fast-flowing gravelly rill poured into a sudden pool ten feet wide, causing the fallen willow leaves in the river to rise like pike spinners out of the depth, twisting and flashing in the light.

  The intimacy of this unexpected place was a pleasing contrast to the wide open spaces of Camber Sands, and I decided on a dip. I had seen fresh otter prints in a mudbank further downstream. If the river was good enough for otters, it was good enough for me. After some gardening of the nettles around the point of entry, I sat down to get into my wetsuit boots, and was stung. I spread out a few burdock leaves and had another go. I plunged straight into the deep pool. It was too startlingly cold to do more than rocket round it several times, gasping, and shoot out again. Then came the exaltation, mingled with relief to be warm again, as I stood in the sun getting dry. Everything looked suddenly very clear and sharp. White granules of fertiliser gleamed in the freshly-harrowed deep-brown loam. A latticed frieze of brittle umbellifer heads shone against the bright blue sky.

  I discovered afterwards why the water was so cold. The river flowed through shady woodland upstream. I followed a rhyne back over the fields through willows and alders, puzzling how it could be running at a lower level than the river. With their pumps and sluices, the Levels are full of such mysteries; water is everywhere. Bob had said they used to go swimming all over the Levels; he bathed at the Red Bridge at Isle Abbots, and by the pump house at Ilton. Every village here has a Frog Lane, and a sign that says ‘Road Liable to Flooding’. I met a woman by the Westport Canal who told me that when she was a child in the village, there were so many frogs in the meadows that the men would tie string round their ankles to stop them jumping up their trousers.

  This veiled landscape is full of medieval paths and ancient droves. At dusk, I walked out of Fivehead down Swale Drove towards the misty fen. Swale is an old word meaning ‘turbulent water’, and it is the root of ‘swallow’, the bird of swooping flight. All I saw in the fading light was the dull sheen of newly-turned plough sods. Blackberry lianas hung in my path off the hedge banks, either side of a ten-foot holloway driving downhill to the moor and river. The fields were above the level of my head. There had been a pink and purple sunset like a bruise, then the orange glow of Taunton in the distance. The only sound was the clickety-clack of a water pump a mile away. It was already dark enough to get lost. The wooden signposts were beautifully carved, but you needed a brass-rubbing kit to read them. Outside Swell Court Farm, a sign pointing up a path said: ANCIENT CHURCH. BE WARNED. WE HAVE TWO PLAYFUL ALSATIANS. The poplars here all held giant hanging-baskets of mistletoe that could have been bee-swarms in the dark. Looking across at the Levels, I could still make out the pattern of rivers and drains, silver under a lid of hanging mist.

  On Wednesday morning, I woke to more mist flooding the land, floating the church towers and trees. Then it evaporated into a brilliant, shining blue morning, and I swam just outside Hambridge in one of the long, straight drains crossing the flat grazing meadows on West Moor like tall mirrors. It was about fifteen feet wide and four feet deep. This was a more leisurely swim; the black water, exposed to the sun, was less cold than the river. My breaststroking sent a bow-wave wobbling the reeds along the banks, and the eels shifting in the mud. From the water, I could see Burrow Hill rising steeply to a single tree at its summit. A tiny figure was sitting on a swing under one of its branches, silhouetted against the blue.

  In the afterburn of the swim, I raced to the top of the dramatic hill, where the man on the swing, who owned a pair of white goats grazing nearby, politely offered me a turn. The view from this swing is one of the finest in England, across the Levels for miles in every direction until the fields and rivers disappear in mist. Being airborne, and already high from a cold dip, it was like floating above the world as you sometimes do in dreams.

  Immediately below Burrow Hill is Pass Vale Farm, where Julian Temperley makes cider and distils it into Apple Brandy, as he calls it, because the French won’t let him call it Calvados. I called in on him, and we stood drinking cider and apple brandy in the cool barn, looking out at a sunlit doorway framing the farmyard sheepdog, orchards, mistletoe and chickens stretching out their wings and baking themselves in the sun. Julian said cider-makers don’t talk to each other much. They keep their secrets.

  It is no secret that we have lost an enormous proportion of our orchards in this country, and that orchards are still disappearing at an alarming rate. In the last thirty years the total area has declined nationally by about two-thirds. In Somerset, more than half the small traditional farm orchards have gone since 1945. In Auberon Waugh’s village, Combe Florey, the old pear orchards succumbed to the plough ten years ago. Across the border, Devon has lost ninety per cent of its orchards in twenty years. Most of this is because of agricultural conversion; farmers finding that there is more money to be made out of other crops. On top of that, until 1988 the Ministry of Agriculture actually paid them grants as an incentive to grub them up. But a great many small orchards are now being destroyed to make way for development. The sites are usually in villages or towns, and just the right size for a house or two. Ironically, such places often end up being called ‘Orchard Close’.

  The character and diversity of the old fruit trees in a place are a vital part of its identity. In response to the crisis, people are now beginning to plant community orchards, and demanding a greater variety of local fruit from their shops. As Julian Temperley pointed out, we are nowhere near as loyal to our own local apples as the French. When he sees French apples on sale in Somerset towns and villages, he imagines how the French would react to English apples in their local store. ‘They’d burn the shop down,’ he said. Things may be changing. Near Dowlish Wake, a farmer has planted twenty-five acres of cider apples and signed a twenty-year contract with Bulmer’s to supply them. Kingston Blacks, the best of the cider apples, are now so scarce that their value has climbed from £40 to £150 per ton. There’s a man in Herefordshire growing 200 tons a year and doing very nicely. Meanwhile, great debates rage amongst the apple-growers between those who prune to create hollow-centred trees, and those who favour the shape of a Christmas tree, like the Bigendians and Smallendians in Gulliver’s Travels.

  Two miles down the road, the other side of Kingsbury Episcopi, I met Brian Lock, who cultivates twenty acres of osier beds on the marshes. The withies of Belgian Red and Black Maul were stacked in neat bundles of different lengths in his shed. He learnt to swim in the River Parrett in a mill-pool just across the fields. Everyone used to swim in the river. ‘All the parents and children would be there in summer. There would be dozens of us,’ he said. They would dive off the paddles of the mill-wheel, and float on the surface watching the eels on the bottom of the pool. ‘We used to lower down baited hooks, watch for them to bite, then swim away with an eel on the line.’ A couple of years ago, he was out with his dog on a hot day on the marsh. He stripped off and swam naked as he had done as a boy. ‘We used to swim out here in the drains as well,’ he said. ‘All over everywhere we swam.’

  At the village school in Charlton Mackrell, six miles away, boys and girls were given swimming lessons in the River Cary on alternate days of the week in the summer term during the 1930s. A farmer dammed the river with wooden boards to create a deep enough pool, and once he had dipped his sheep, the swimming season began. The pupils thought nothing of finding a leech or two clinging to them when they emerged, but every child in the village could swim. Walter Long, the head teacher, awarded beautifully-drawn certificates and small sums of money to his young swimmers.

  I had arranged with Bob to drive him over to Dowlish Wake in the afternoon, to see his friend about collecting the cider apples. Peter Hansford has been making cider on Ox
enford Farm for years, and used to supply eighteen gallons a day to the New Inn in the village. A blue tractor stood in the yard, with a length of belt running off a flywheel into the shed to drive the apple-chopper. We stepped inside.

  There was an almost religious atmosphere in Mr Hansford’s cider shed. We stood between rows of gloomy tuns with just a sixty-watt lightbulb hanging from the cobwebbed rafters and the bit of daylight that crept in by the door. Each barrel held forty or fifty gallons. A row of nine stood just beside us, raised off the floor on wooden beams. Mr Hansford drew off some of the dark nectar out of a tap in one of the barrels, and offered us a half-pint each. It was viscous, cool and sharp, then the taste of the fruit came through. It was probably vicious too, but I liked it and was soon on a second glass. I asked what kind of apples went to make it. ‘Oh, we call this one Liquorice Allsorts,’ said Mr Hansford. The shed used to be a milking parlour. Now it was dominated by a giant cider press at one end, with a big half-barrel set by it to carry the juice to the barrels. This press was a replacement for the original, which once had two drums of paraffin set down on it. One must have leaked, because ever after that they could never seem to get the smell of paraffin out of the cider. The tainted press had to be burned in the end. In the other half of the shed were stacked-up chairs and trestle-tables and a big carnival mask on the wall. Bacchus was sleeping somewhere in the shadows.

  31

  A MILL-RACE

  Norfolk, 23 October

  BACK IN EAST Anglia, a bonus autumn day of clear skies brought me to Norfolk for the afternoon, with the bike on the car. I parked in Aylsham and set off on two wheels in quest of a pool on the River Bure. I had received intriguing intelligence about it as a favourite bathing hole of the family of George Barker, so hidden away down snaking lanes that if I found it, I would certainly bathe undisturbed. It was called John’s Water, although no one knew why. The late October sunshine, bowled underarm down the lanes, threw my pedalling shadow many yards ahead.

  Towards dusk, I was bicycling along the valley of the Bure where it passes between the estates of Blickling and Wolterton Hall. A layer of mist veiled the water meadows a few feet above the ground and suffused the alder copses. It flowed down the valley through the trees and hedges just at the level of my crossbar. I followed the meandering road for several miles, fording the mist, until I reached a solitary mill cottage by a twin-arched red brick bridge. A vigorous mill-race sped through one of the arches, darting its turbulence far out into a wide black pool which whirled evenly between dense banks of reeds and watercress. It could have been a scene from Constable. I had arrived at John’s Water.

  I leant the bike in an open-fronted cart shed, stripped off, eschewing the wetsuit but glad of the trunks and the boots, and waded into the icy water. The fine gravel bed was shallow at first, then shelved deeper into the mill-pond. I plunged in and was soon out of my depth, swimming with the eddy up towards the mill-race where it spouted from the bridge. Then I launched myself into it and shot downriver into the weed-carpeted shallows. I swam on, in water that reached halfway up my thighs if I stood up, much as ice reaches halfway up a champagne bottle in a bucket. The river was embroidered with such vivid green braids of water buttercup that I half expected to meet Ophelia lying on the bottom, garlanded unseasonably in its white flowers. I was swimming down an ice-floe, but it was so clear, so sweet, so lush that I soon warmed to the cold and paddled and waded back up through the eddies, gathering watercress as I went. This was one of the best crops of wild, untutored cress I had ever seen, let alone picked. It banked up along the dusky river like green cumulus clouds. I circled the pool twice more, shooting the rapids of the mill-race, crazed with the opiate cocktail the brain and body must have sluiced into my frozen veins.

  As darkness fell, I sat on one of the old carts in the shed drinking the hot chocolate I had brought with me in a flask, listening to the moorhens’ falsetto croaking in the rushes, the tut-tutting of an anxious wren, and the steady surf of the mill-race.

  I had come back to stay in Suffolk to make ready for winter in the house: to saw logs, receive a delivery of heating oil, and write up my notes in front of the fire. The forecast was for the first cold spell, and like everyone else in the countryside that night, I panicked when I returned home, and went stumbling about outside in the dark throwing blankets over the tractor bonnet, running the car into the barn to keep cosy, and giving the cats extra rations. The kitchen door was like a sieve. The cold night air raced in through every crack and rotten hole. At midnight I found myself struggling with a roll of gaffer tape, patching the worn old door until it ended up looking like Just William after he’s been in a scrap and had his face seen to by his big sister.

  By the following morning it had begun to rain hard, and an oil lorry appeared in the yard. Its driver hopped out and berated me for the state of the bumpy track that leads across the common to my house. ‘This is no road for a lorry, mate. Just look at that! I’ve lost a light off the top and the mirrors are all bent to buggery.’ I hadn’t finished apologising and promising to lop all the trees when he began a tirade against my oil tank. ‘Plumber who put that there wants shooting an’ all.’ I began to feel a deep sense of inadequacy. Only the day before his employers had laid off two drivers because of a shortage of orders. ‘Then today we get thousands.’ Fixing me with a meaning glare through the pouring rain he continued. ‘The buggers all wait until the first frost to order. Then they panic. They all tell you it’s desperately urgent and they’ve nearly run out. You get there and there’s a hundred gallon or more in the tank. There was one week in the summer when we all sat about in the yard and not a single order. It’s a joke.’

  His firm, once a small and friendly local one, has recently been taken over by a national conglomerate. ‘Pigs they are; they’ve got the manners of pigs. You walk past them in the yard and they won’t look at you. And if you do anything not quite right they put you on remand, so next time you’re out. What is the point of running a business like that? I’m too old to care but it riles me all the same.’ He drove away, still furious, and tore off his wing-mirror on a tree beside the track. The lorry lurched ominously to a halt. When I reached him he had picked up the bits and was standing in a puddle. ‘I don’t believe this,’ he said, looking at himself in the shattered mirror like Richard II, with job prospects to match. I took him inside for a cup of tea.

  It was too wet for digging, so I found myself turning the compost. The best view of the moat is from behind the heap, and turning it made a change from sitting inside at my desk watching raindrops on the windowpane. Compost-making is like a strenuous version of cooking, and it often steams satisfyingly. I had taken to decomposing newspapers, and had a big pile of them, left out to soak in the rain. They are much easier to tear into strips when they’re wet, and of course you must always tear down the grain of the paper. In this respect, newspapers behave just like trees.

  The work was held up every now and again by an interesting story: CBI COSTS POLLUTION CLEAN-UP AT £40 BILLION; IN THE SPACE OF JUST ONE YEAR, WHERE DID OUR RIVER GO?; ‘COMMON’ BIRDS IN DANGER; BLAIR PUTS BRAKE ON LEGAL RIGHT TO RAMBLE. It felt good to be tearing up news of environmental disasters and composting it. Curing bad news. The secret of rotting down newspapers is to keep them wet and layer them with plenty of succulent nettles, comfrey, grass-cuttings and manure. The moat benefits directly from my composting: I don’t use any artificial fertilisers on my garden, so there is no leaching of nitrates or phosphates to pollute its waters. The compost also benefits from the moat. The summer waterweeds I dragged out with the crome were rotting down well. The compost is a composite living being that needs to breathe and be watered. Even at the dead of winter, it can be full of symbolic heat. It is central to the ecology of an organic garden, and I am deeply involved with mine.

  Having worked up a sweat, I took an incandescent plunge in the rainswept moat, swam as far as the hazel halfway along and back, then pranced indoors across the lawn and stood, steaming pin
kly, before the open fire. Listening to the rain outside I dreamed, into the flames, of a steam cabin I would one day build by the moat, a village caldarium. All you would need is a small, well-insulated wooden shed with a boiler beside it, heated by a wood-burning furnace, and a ‘Natando Virtus’ sign over the door. By European or Roman standards this is not so eccentric a notion. I stayed with a perfectly respectable family of German friends in Austria recently who piled out of the sauna every afternoon before tea and rolled naked in the snow.

  32

  PENGUIN POOLS

  London, 2 November

  I HAD NEVER SET out to make this a comprehensive tour of the nation’s swimming holes, but sitting before the fire reviewing my notes and maps, one very obvious omission became quite clear: I had hardly swum in any of our cities and I had barely dipped a toe in London. It made sense to make amends straight away and sample some urban swimming during the winter months. So I migrated to my perch in the big city, a flat in Chalk Farm, to swim round the capital, beginning in the famous ponds on Hampstead Heath, and moving on to the lidos at Parliament Hill Fields and Tooting Bec; the club pool of the RAC in Pall Mall; the Ironmonger Row Turkish Baths; the Marshall Street Baths; and the Oasis in Covent Garden. The Thames has changed since an intrepid friend of mine swam alone in it at night amongst the moored barges off Butler’s Wharf. Swimming is now forbidden by the Port of London Authority’s bye-laws. Apart from the danger from constant river traffic, the water itself, although not as polluted as it used to be, can still seriously damage your health. On the walls of the authority’s offices they still have photographs of bathing beauties on what was once the Tower Bridge Beach, and at Greenwich Beach there were swimmers and ice-cream stalls until the 1940s. Bargeloads of sand were brought up to the beaches by the council.