Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  It was mid-morning when I came out of the pool, and the sun had chased the mist away. I passed an old man in a ditch, clearing it with a sickle in the proper way, and there was home-made jam set out for sale on a little table at the roadside. At Laxfield they were selling apples outside the allotments and there was late-flowering yarrow and buttercup in the verges. From the Low House pub below the graveyard, I followed the infant River Blyth along a winding back lane down the Vale of Ubbeston for three miles, through a tunnel of ancient hornbeam, hazel, field maple and oak, bombarded as I rode by falling acorns, conkers, crab apples and, at one point, walnuts. This stretch of country is so hilly that you cycle over the crest of one dizzy eminence and you’re level with the top of a church tower just peeping over the next. The tractors were all out seizing the day, attacking the pale stubble with huge ten-furrow ploughs, painting the rounded hillsides brown against the perfect blue sky.

  By one o’clock I had gone through the village of Heveningham, and was speeding down Cock’s Hill past venerable stag-headed parkland oaks when I at last beheld Heveningham Hall, sunlit in Palladian splendour on its grassy hillside, with an endless lake twinkling and flashing in the sun below. I made my way through the grounds along a footpath and found a quiet spot by the western shore to leave my things. There was nobody about, and the owners, who had given me permission to swim, were away. Hauling on the wetsuit, I had a moment’s doubt about the wisdom of swimming nearly a mile-and-a-half of lake alone. But the weather was ideal, nobody had been available at such short notice, and in the wetsuit I would be unlikely to get cold or cramped.

  I swam straight for the middle, heading for a wooded island. It felt fine. The water was green and clear. I wore goggles and gazed into the translucent sunlit mist of millions of microscopic creatures and algae, with here and there a patch of slender ribbon weed reaching up for the ceiling of the lake like an Indian rope trick. I soon fell into the trance of rhythm, the fish-like feeling that can take you a long way before you’ve noticed it. You lean into the water and feel its even gentleness lifting you as you steal through the surface. The secret is to respect it but never fear it, so you can relax and sense the molecules moving around you as you swim. This feeling for the water forms the basis of the training of Gennadi Touretski, who coaches the Australian Olympic swimmers. He is said to study how fish move, and believes that it is not muscular power that makes champion swimmers, but efficiency. Two of the fastest swimmers in the world, Alexander Popov and Michael Klim, are taught by Touretski to behave like fish, feeling the water for the path of least resistance. Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimmer and the first film Tarzan, had noticed the importance of sensitivity to the water as he trained at the Illinois Athletic Club in the 1920s: ‘I studied the purchase power I got on the water with my hands and forearms. Water is elusive, but you can get hold of it if you know how to go after it.’

  As I swam past the wooded island, a heron flapped off lazily over the lake ahead and came to rest by the shore. He kept on doing this all the way, keeping such a precise 150 yards between us that you could have used him to measure distance.

  When Sir Joshua Vanneck bought Heveningham Hall in 1752, he had a new classical house built around the original by Sir Robert Taylor. Two lakes, fed by the Blyth, were dug out of the marsh at the bottom of the hill below the house. The original Grand Hall had been built round six massive oaks which reputedly supported the roof as they grew. Foresters and yeomen used to hang their nets, belts, cross-bows and saddles in them. Later, in 1782, Capability Brown was employed by the Vannecks to redesign the landscape around the house. Brown’s original drawings show that he planned to join up and widen the existing fish ponds, extending them into a far more extensive lake stretching one-and-a-half miles from the house all the way to the village of Walpole, following the course of the River Blyth to the east. But six months after he submitted his plans, Brown died, and although the park was created, the new lake was never dug. By the First World War, one of the two original lakes had become known as ‘the Dead Lake’ because it had silted up. It later reverted to a marsh, with alder trees and sallow growing in it.

  It was in this condition that Heveningham Hall was eventually purchased two or three years ago by its present owners, Mr and Mrs Hunt. The house was in a sorry state, having been sold on behalf of the nation by Michael Heseltine to a man from Dubai, during whose tenure some dreadful things happened to the exquisite original interiors designed by James Wyatt. The Wyatt library was all but destroyed in a fire which raged through the east wing, some Wyatt fireplaces were mysteriously stolen, and the owner failed to keep up the mortgage repayments to his Swiss bank. He then died bankrupt, so that this treasure of English Palladian architecture fell into the hands of the official receiver.

  Fortunately, the new owners resolved to revive the noble Vanneck tradition of sparing no expense. They set out to restore the house to its former glory, and complete Capability Brown’s unfinished grand plan by creating the extended lake as he had designed it two hundred years earlier. It was an enormous project. The old lake was drained and the contractors bought the conveyor belt that had been used to build the Channel Tunnel to carry away the earth and silt as they dug it out. In a classic builder’s cock-up, ten men originally spent three weeks assembling the immense machine on site, only to discover it was back to front, and although it might carry mud into the lake, it would not carry it out. They then spent two more weeks dismantling and reassembling it the right way round. The resulting lake stretches very nearly to Walpole. The intention is to excavate the remaining leg to the village in the near future.

  I hummed ‘The Bold Navigator’ to myself as I swam, an old navvies’ song, imagining Capability Brown in silk breeches sketching his plans, and the immense cost in human toil of digging lakes like this at Holkham, Blickling, Blenheim or Chatsworth, or even excavating the original fish ponds here by hand. The navvies camping out in shanties, the armies of wheelbarrows and spades, wheelbarrow-bridges and viaducts over bottomless puddles of mud, the men dragged scampering after their barrows, locked between the shafts, along sprung, precarious planks. The excavated silt had been banked and planted with sapling parkland trees in the way Brown indicated on his plan. Here was a unique insight into the way great estates must have looked in the eighteenth century before reaching the maturity we see today.

  I had to use the empty shell of a freshwater mussel plucked from the mud to cut open the try-your-strength plastic wrapping of a ‘Power Bar’ I had bought in the bike shop and tucked into my wetsuit boot. Refuelled, I swam on, plunging my face into the sweet-tasting water, my rhythmic exhalations reverberating noisily below like off-key whalesong, as though the whole lake were a sounding board. As I neared Walpole in the final stretch, submerged skyscrapers of waterweed loomed up and pale green fingers frisked me as I swam through and landed.

  ‘It’s 007,’ said one of the three tractor drivers I encountered as I walked back in the dripping wetsuit. They were preparing seed drills and harrows to sow a wild-flower meadow on the excavated earth banked up beside the lake. They spoke proudly of the wild life that was already attracted to the lake and, as I walked on, an oystercatcher skittered away off the shore, complaining loudly.

  After lunch by the lake, I biked to Walpole and over to Bramfield, then pressed on to the gorse heath of Westleton, and a sudden view of Blythburgh church beyond a free-range pig city of tin huts in acres and acres of mud. The foreground somehow emphasised the nobility of Blythburgh’s church tower, presiding with its reflection and its church roof full of carved angels, over the Blyth estuary and marshes, now flooded by a high tide. During the Civil War, Cromwell’s soldiers had lain flat on their backs in the nave, trying to shoot down the angels. They only succeeded in winging them, and the bullet holes are there to this day.

  When I reached the A12, I was shocked by the sudden violence of the traffic. I had to go along a half-mile of it, then cross over and turn off. Lorries thundered by, leaving too little room, bu
ffeting me in their slipstream. I felt suddenly vulnerable, in a way I never did in the water. I thought of Ned Merrill, trying to cross the two-lane highway in his swimming costume under gathering storm-clouds, mocked by the passing cars:

  Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen him, close to naked, standing on the shoulders of Route 424, waiting for a chance to cross. You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had his car broken down, or was he merely a fool. Standing barefoot in the deposits of the highway – beer cans, rags, and blowout patches – exposed to all kinds of ridicule, he seemed pitiful.

  It is a turning point in the story, when you realise Merrill has lost everything, that he is naked right down to his trunks, that when he reaches home there will be no home. It will be boarded up, empty. It is then that he asks himself, ‘At what point had this prank, this joke, this piece of horseplay become serious?’ He knows he cannot go back, because ‘he had covered a distance that made his return impossible.’ By the standards of the A12, no doubt my journey would have seemed absurd. But it was always an entirely serious enterprise, if at times surrealist, and unlike the tragic Merrill I felt enriched by my long swim.

  I turned off down a timeless sandy avenue of oaks, potholed by rabbits, to a distant farmhouse on a promontory jutting into the wide Blyth marshes. It was four-thirty. I had arrived just in time to catch the high tide and swim off a hundred-foot wooden jetty built out from the headland over the water a few years ago for the filming of Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers. There was no need for the wetsuit because the brackish tide was warmed by the huge solar collector of black mud it had flowed over, all the way from Walberswick harbour, as it rose. I lowered myself off the jetty into a foot and a half of estuary water and propelled myself over the bed of delicate, smooth mud, out into the deeper waters of a maze of submerged drainage channels. Rows of gnarled wooden stakes, on which the unwary swimmer might impale himself, marked these channels, many of them just beneath the surface, so I embarked on a kind of maze swim which took me all the way back to that very first day’s swimming on Bryher, and the ‘Scilly Maze’ of pebbles on the beach. But the water was astonishingly warm and delicious, and so was the sensual healing of the silky mud. I swam out into the marsh, following the deeper channels, listening to the constant chorus of the thousands of seabirds that thronged the glistening horizons of the river. This is where the mullet come up in shoals in summer to bask in the warm shallows. When I dug out a handful of mud, it was full of the blackened shells of cockles and a million invisible microscopic creatures.

  Afterwards at the house, my friend Meg, one of the Walberswick Shiverers from Christmas Day, filled watering cans from the hot tap in the kitchen, and I stood in the back yard holding them one by one above my head, sluicing off the mud in a glorious hot shower. Tim came out of his workshop and joined us for tea outside the back door. There was now just time to bike on down to Walberswick across the heath before sunset.

  I cycled by the woods where George Orwell made love to Eleanor Jaques, his neighbour when he lived at Southwold, and into the village past the ruined church where he used to sit and read. I passed the house of Freddy the fisherman (‘The Sole Plaice for Some Fin Special’). It was a quarter past six, and the sun, which already shared the sky with the blushing new moon, was beginning to go down. I hurried out over the little wooden bridge where they hold the annual crabbing contest in summer, and printed faint tyre-tracks across the last two hundred yards of cracked saltpan desert mud on Walberswick marsh. Scaling the sand-dunes, I ran down the deserted beach, flung off my clothes and waded into the surf.

  I felt the sweetness of tired limbs and fell headlong into the waves, striking towards the horizon that appeared intermittently beyond the breakers. I had left my rucksack and clothes beside a beautiful pebble starfish on the beach, another echo of the Scilly Maze. Perhaps I had at last swum my way through it. When I reached the relative calm of unbroken swell, I looked back towards the shore. A crimson mist lay over the sea as a red-hot sun dropped over the pantiled roofs behind the sand-dunes. The sea-fret shaded to a deep purple along the curve of the bay where Dunwich should have been, and obscured the giant puffball of Sizewell B. One of the beauties of this flat land of Suffolk is that when you’re swimming off the shore and the waves come up, it subsides from view and you could be miles out in the North Sea. An orange sickle of new moon hung above the chimneys in a deep mauve sky. Autumn bonfires glowed in the mist and floated white smoke-rings above it. The beach shone in the gathering dusk as the tide fell and the sea grew less perturbed. I turned and swam on into the quiet waves.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I could never have made this journey, or written the book, without all the encouragement and inspiration I have received along the way. I should like to thank especially Kate Campbell and Terence Blacker for believing in the book from the beginning and fostering it so generously. Jane Turnbull, my agent, has provided endless good-humoured support, and I thank those friends whose contributions and imaginative insights on the emerging manuscript have been invaluable: Tony Barrell, Oliver Bernard, Sue Roe, Tony and Bundle Weston and Dudley Young.

  David Holmes has given the book a special beauty with his subtle illustrations, and I thank him heartily. Gary Rowland, too, has been characteristically magnanimous, not only in designing these pages, but swimming through some of them too.

  To those who have supported the expedition, and the book, with their ideas, hospitality, inspiration and, on occasion, guidance towards secret swimming holes, I offer my thanks. Others have swum alongside, rowed boats, provided hot baths, or ferried me to remote shores, all with the utmost goodwill. I want particularly to acknowledge: Lydia Alexander, Meg Amsden, Steve and Liz Ashley, William Astor, Tony and Teresa Axon, David Baird, Caroline Booton, Jules Cashford, Mavis Cheek, John Clarke, Sue Clifford, John Cornwell, Paul Crampin, Geraldine Daly, Clive and Jayne Davies, Mervyn Day, Andrew Edwards, Gavin Edwards, Biddy Foord, Carol Freeman, Rob Fryer, Jeremy and Erica Hart, the late Maurice Hatton, Mike Hodges, Tim Hunkin, Carol Holloway, Jon and Lois Hunt, Robert Hutchison, Denis Johnson, J.D.F. Jones, Liz Kessler, Angela King, Caroline Kenneil, Carol Laws, Julie Llyn-Evans, Richard Mabey, Sid Merry, Tricia Mersh, Lucy Moy-Thomas, William and Alison Parente, Rob Parfitt, Megan Patterson, Brian Perman, Saranne Piccaver, Olivia Pomp, Andrew Sanders, Judith Smyth, Mark Thompson, Michael Tomlinson, Stephen Turner, Adrian and Margaret Turton, Errollyn Wallen, Mike and Kate Westbrook, David Whatley, Jules Wilkinson, John and Fleur Wilson, Ken Worpole, Sarah Young and Caroline Younger.

  I am unable to acknowledge individually all the dozens of people who helped me in my search for local swimming folklore, but I am especially grateful to Mick Andrews, Jenny Davies, Pop and Pearl Day, Don Dewsbury, Ruby Hulatt, Tony Pinner, and June Shrubbs in Cambridge and the Fens; Gladys Adams in Harleston; Robert Moss in Suffolk; Amy Harvey in Chagford; Bill Mitchell in Cornwall; Evelyn Buckland in Somerset; Jenny Cavender and Elizabeth Gale in Bridport; Ailsa Wilson and Richard Hoseason Smith in Scotland. My thanks to the swimming clubs and pools who made me so welcome, especially at Diss, Farleigh Hungerford, Hathersage, Henleaze, Highgate, Ingleton, Marshall St., Parliament Hill Fields, Penzance and Tooting Bec; to Paul Kibbett and David Robinson at London Zoo; Val Russell and Robin Freeman in Winchester Library; David Beskine at the Ramblers’ Association and Dr Mike Ladle of the Institute of Freshwater Ecology.

  In the editorial department, I would like to thank Roger Alton for pitching me into the deep end by inviting me to write an early article on swimming for the Guardian; Jonathan Burnham at Chatto for commissioning the book and Rebecca Carter for her meticulous, patient editing of a text that often meandered and sometimes overflowed – any remaining omissions or mistakes are mine. Respect and acknowledgement are also due to Charles Sprawson, author of the modern swimming classic, Haunts of the Black Masseur, and, of course, I owe an obvious debt to John Cheever’s short story, ‘The Swimmer’.

  The following
texts are amongst those quoted in this book: ‘The Swimming Song’ written by Loudon Wainwright III © 1973 Snowden Music Inc., (Used by permission. All rights reserved); D.H. Lawrence ‘The Third Thing’ by permission of Laurence Pollinger Ltd and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli; extract from Ted Hughes’s address at the memorial service for Henry Williamson by kind permission of the Estate of Ted Hughes.

  The cross-section drawing of Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool at London Zoo is copied from an original Lubetkin drawing.

  INDEX

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  Aire, river, 213

  Alresford, 28

  Ardlussa, 246

  Ardpatrick, 232–7

  Arncliffe, 210

  Arne, 132

  Ashburton, 127, 129

  Ashford-in-the-Water, 205

  Avon, river (Warwick.), 110–16, 169

  Aylsham, 292

  Bamburgh, 253–55

  Barbondale, 226–7

  Bartinney Hill, 158

  Bath, 108–9

  Beesley Falls, 220–1

  Belnahua (Hebrides), 237–9

  Blackaton Brook (Dartmoor), 129, 132

  Blackwater, river, 264

  Blakeney Point, 83

  Blandford, 175–8