"Waterlog"

[fiefoe]

The project went on for a bit too long, but for most of the book it was pleasant to travel with Roger Deakin around UK and learn about its waterlogged creatures and history.

• The frog’s-eye view of rain on the moat was magnificent. Rain calms water, it freshens it, sinks all the floating pollen, dead bumblebees and other flotsam. Each raindrop exploded in a momentary, bouncing fountain that turned into a bubble and burst. The best moments were when the storm intensified, drowning birdsong, and a haze rose off the water as though the moat itself were rising to meet the lowering sky. Then the rain eased and the reflected heavens were full of tiny dancers: water sprites springing up on tiptoe like bright pins over the surface. It was raining water sprites.
• My inspiration was John Cheever’s classic short story ‘The Swimmer’, in which the hero, Ned Merrill, decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via a series of his neighbours’ swimming pools. One sentence in the story stood out and worked on my imagination: ‘He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.
• now loomed past us in the water only to disappear again into the darkness like characters from Under Milk Wood. Such indelible swims are like dreams, and have the same profound effect on the mind and spirit. In the night sea at Walberswick I have seen bodies fiery with phosphorescent plankton striking through the neon waves like dragons.
• Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control. This may account for the anxieties every swimmer experiences from time to time in deep water. A swallow dive off the high board into the void is an image that brings together all the contradictions of birth. The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born.
• You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming. In wild water you are on equal terms with the animal world around you: in every sense, on the same level. As a swimmer, I can go right up to a frog in the water and it will show more curiosity than fear.
• I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression, and come out a whistling idiot.
• as with Ned Merrill in ‘The Swimmer’, my impulse to set off was simple enough at heart: ‘The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.’
• The sand was white and fine, and shone up through the water. Small dead crabs floated amongst the thin line of shredded bladderwrack and tiny shells oscillating up the beach. The silence was disturbed only by nature’s bagpipes, the incessant gulls.
• a drop of water ever actually reaches the skin of the otter. Its outer fur traps air in an insulating layer very like a wetsuit, and the inner fur is so fine and tight together that the water never penetrates it.
• The intensity of the sky, the white sand, and the rocks that stood up everywhere out of the sea, had a dream-like quality reminiscent of Salvador Dali. Further out, puffs of light breeze squiffed the sea into little Tintin wavelets with kiss-curl tops.
• The looting of wrecks continues to be an important component of the island economy... The current treasure trove was a container ship called Cita, wrecked off St Mary’s and something of a floating department store for the jubilant islanders.
• As I swam back and forth across the bay, face-down in the clear salt water, searching out the diagonals of more old field walls, lulled by the rhythm of my own breathing amplified in the snorkel, I felt myself sinking deeper into the unconscious world of the sea, deeper into history. I was going back 4,000 years, soaring above the ancient landscape like some slow bird, and it reminded me how like the sea a field can be; how, on a windy day, silver waves run through young corn, and how a combine harvester can move through barley like an ungainly sailing vessel.
• Along the tide-mark were thousands of the most beautiful miniature shells, all much the same snail design but coloured russet, orange, peach, white, speckled, grey and silver. Each of them might have represented one of the drowned sailors whose spirits crowd the seabed of the Scillies.
• Back in the deserted railway siding, I sat on the balcony at one end of Alicante and poured out my tea. Perhaps all this destruction was simply what Robert Frost called ‘a brute tribute of respect to beauty’. These six coaches by the sparkling sea had always had something of Xanadu about them for me – always fired my imagination. Now I felt somehow robbed, as though romance itself were at a standstill.
• village is a riot of small rivers, a rural Venice. Half a dozen different streams, all purporting to be the authentic Test, flow under the wide main street and emerge to gossip through the hinterland of gardens, paddocks, smallholdings, toolsheds, old stables and outhouses behind the facade of shops and cottages. The gurgling of fast-flowing water is everywhere, and mallards wander the streets at will, like sacred cattle in India. Their ducklings are regularly swept away on the rapids, so there is always the poignant dialogue of orphans and bereaved mothers to strike anguish into the heart of the passing traveller.
• The colder it is the better trout like it, because water’s oxygen content rises as the temperature drops. (This is why there is such a superabundance of marine life in the oceans nearest the poles.)
• The cosy Wind in the Willows flavour of the Houghton Chronicles is enhanced by the members’ close familiarity with their stretch of water. Every least feature of this landscape has a name... Sheep Bridge, Tanner’s Trunk, Goff’s Shallow, Bossington Mill were all as baffling to me as the nicknames for people and places at school when you first arrive. For all its natural attractions, there was no getting away from the fact that this river was a highly exclusive club, artificially managed for the benefit of a fortunate few.
• Gunner’s Hole must have been where one of the legendary sea-swimmers of our times evolved his style. Sir James Lighthill was amongst the great mathematical scientists of the century... On his sixth island tour, in July 1998, aged seventy-four, he swam all day and was close to completing his nine-hour voyage when he ran into some rough seas. He was seen to stop swimming and died close to the shore.
• Jack (Overhill) was amazed. Most people at that time either swam the trudgeon, a kind of crawl with a scissor-leg kick, the breaststroke, or the original backstroke, with a frog-leg kick and both arms windmilled in unison. But this swimmer was kicking his legs up and down, like someone walking backwards. The bathing sheds were on fire with inspiration. This was the crawl, and the disciple swimming it was Jack Lavender, a Cambridge man who had learnt the new style in London, where he swam for the Civil Service. <> The crawl! Stories about it were beginning to appear in Chums and The Boys’ Friend Library. In one, a boy called ‘The Dud’ pretends he can’t swim, then amazes his friends by winning a race swimming the crawl.
• the ghosts of Rose Macaulay and Virginia Woolf, who each swam alone with Rupert Brooke in Byron’s Pool, and of Jack Overhill and his band of roaming bathers. Byron’s lines seemed to echo down from his pool just up the river:
  So we’ll go no more a-roving / So late into the night, /
  Though the heart be still as loving, / And the moon be still as bright.
• I found myself in the right angle of woodland where the cold bath and springs were shown on the earlier map of Gallyon’s Field, a piece of land about as wet as George Hamilton IV’s handkerchief: it had clearly resisted all attempts at drainage.
• cuckoo pint, a plant that loves the wet. It is one of my favourite wild plants. John Cowper Powys, who was obsessed with the magic of bathing and water all his life, liked it too. This was his most ‘poetical’ flower, ‘always growing where the dews are heaviest and where the streams are over-brimming their banks. Born of chilly dawns in wild, wet places, cuckoo flowers are the coldest, chastest, least luxurious, most hyperborean, most pale, most gothic, most Ophelia-like of all our island flowers.’
• the Cambridge archaeologist and dowser T. C. Lethbridge. He was the figure at the centre of the Gogmagog Affair, an archaeological controversy that eventually drove him from Cambridge in frustration and despair in 1952. At Wandlebury Ring on the summit of the Gogmagog Hills to the south of Cambridge, Lethbridge believed there must be a giant figure of Gog embossed on the hill with chalk like the Cerne Abbas giant.
• In his book Maps and Dreams, the anthropologist Hugh Brody describes how the Inuit of British Columbia dream the route of each new hunting expedition, experiencing in their dream the very animal or fish they will hunt and kill, and even drawing a map on a piece of paper before setting off. In Sam Shepard’s play Geography of a Horse Dreamer, Cody dreams the winners of the horse and dog races.
• My journey too would have as much to do with the geography of my mind as with that of this country. In some ways my desire to seek out and join up stories, memories and my own physical experience of swimming in watery places throughout the land had little to do with the official kind of maps. If I had a totemic ancestor, it was the otter, or the eel, swimmers who often cross country by land, following their own instinctive maps.
• the Hebridean island of Jura, where George Orwell lived, and the fearsome whirlpool that lurks in the Gulf of Corryvreckan off the wild northern coast, making it almost impossible to navigate.
• the map of the Fens too, which I now spread out on the big desk. Water was spilt all over it in trickles of blue, some sinuous, continually doubling back on themselves, others the dead straight lines and grids of the Dutch engineers who pioneered so much of the drainage. You could swim halfway round the world in these fens. Here and there a road tried to find its way through the maze of blue lines, but this was clearly, uncompromisingly, a vascular system of water.
• THE APPROACH TO Ely is always dramatic. The city and its cathedral loom at first faintly through the blue haze of the Fens, distinguishable as a whiter shade of pale. As you draw closer the whole island shimmers like a mirage or a UFO that has just landed, and as the cathedral spire comes into focus, the place seems poised to take off again. Even the moated allotments, with their lowly huts like outside privies, derive an air of grandeur from their own row of boundary poplars reaching for the heavens and striping them with long shadows.
• This is a holy island no less striking than Mont St Michel, and no less holy, set off by the graphic flat horizon, rising out of the deep brown earth beneath a sea-blue sky. It dominates the most mysterious landscape in Britain, full of water and odd corners that can still be hard to reach, let alone find.
• He and his father used to trap eels in baskets or eel-hives. ‘They would sink naturally to the bottom once they were soaked enough. What we’d do was get a little tobacco tin and prick holes in it and fill it full of worms, and the eels would go in the basket after it.’
• There was always a market for eels in the Fens. People would sell them in buckets and baskets in Ely market until just a few years ago. But unless you sold out, you were left with eels on your hands, because you can only sell them alive. Once killed, an eel must be cooked straight away, and in warm weather they will die within five minutes of leaving the water.
• Nothing could be so outlandish. An eel is so mottled and green and varnished in mucus it could be an uprooted plant, a mandrake root come to life.
• Floating at this level, I felt half-suspended in the reflected sky and very remote from anywhere.
• A water pump was audible somewhere in the distance, a reminder of the energy-intensive measures which the draining of the Fens has made necessary. Like any other unnatural system of land management, it doesn’t quite add up.
• The water in the lode was becoming brilliantly clear – ‘gin clear’ as they say here... aquatic animals are relatively unconcerned about you once you too are submerged. You have become, after all, one of them.
• Everyone in the Three Tuns agreed with Ernie when he said they were all salt of the earth in the Fens and would ‘give you a sack of potatoes as soon as look at you’. Once you got beyond Cambridge, however, ‘They wouldn’t give you the drippings off the end of their nose.’
• Baptism is wonderfully pagan, and there’s nothing half-hearted about going through the full works in a river. It takes nothing away from the symbolic re-enactment of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection and the washing away of sin, to say that the ritual is really grafted on to something much older and pre-Christian. It clearly harks back to a time when the rivers themselves were deities,
• The sugar factory at Bury St Edmunds leaked some of the highly toxic effluent from the treatment of sugar beet into the Lark. Nothing is more polluting than sugar, which deoxygenates water by promoting the massive growth of bacteria. As the poisoned water went downstream it killed everything.
• In Japan, Morocco or the Isleham allotments, running water is a joy, and always presents the architect or gardener with an opportunity for celebration; the chance to make something beautiful. Water bubbles in a maze of miniature streams and sluices through the village orchards of the Ameln Valley in the Anti Atlas mountains, dances down rivulets across the hot plain from the Atlas to fill the ornamental lakes in the Marrakesh botanical gardens, or swirls down makeshift gutters off the Isleham shed roofs into allotment water butts, where it is highly prized.
• (My swallows): Their little colony of mud nests, looking like a Dogon village in Africa (where I imagine them spending their winters), has been there for ever and must have been kilned almost to earthenware by my winter log fires. Bits fall off from time to time, like fragments of Easter egg, and when I see the birds getting mud from the moat, I think of the original Tudor builders, who did just the same when they made the house.
• There is no native creature quite so exotic or splendid as the male great crested newt, or eft, as country people called them, in full display. They are the jesters of the moat, with their bright orange, spotted bellies and outrageous zigzag crests, like something out of a Vivienne Westwood show.
• Why pigeons are so keen on ash buds I don’t know, but they will take the greatest risks to get them, teetering on the ends of twigs and reaching far out into the void to peck at them. They couldn’t do such acrobatics on other trees because the twigs would snap. Ash is more supple and keeps springing back. Each time it whipped, the pigeon almost lost balance, then spread her wings and dipped her tail wildly, and clung on... The ash was far behind all the other trees in leaf; it is always the last, except for the mulberry, so its buds are full of the very first and freshest of the sap. For the ancient Norse people, this tree, Ygdrasil, was the tree of life.
• The blackcaps, meanwhile, made my swim a delight with song of such liquid beauty and complexity that it rivalled even the nightingale. It would be hard to imagine two more contrasting birds, yet they worked well together musically; the pigeons providing a base line, and the blackcaps extemporising insanely higher up the scale. I felt like George III, who was serenaded by a chamber orchestra when he bathed in the sea at Weymouth.
• North Norfolk is one of those places where the weather never seems to bear any relation to the forecasts. The whole of Britain can be covered in cloud, yet as you approach the coast up here, it is braided with a magic band of blue. The Royal Family must have known a thing or two when they chose Sandringham as a country cottage.
• Holm oaks are the distinctive local tree here, planted all over the estate by the pioneering agriculturalist Coke in the eighteenth century. According to one of the Holkham Hall gardeners, the trees first arrived as acorns in a consignment of china from Italy. They had been used as a kind of eighteenth-century bubblewrap, and Coke told his men to fill their pockets with acorns in the mornings and plant them all round the estate.
• It is only relatively recently that we have come to regard a view of the sea as a thing of beauty. For our ancestors, the sea was to be feared and shunned from sight. When Humphry Repton designed Sheringham Hall, or ‘Bower’, further along this coast, in 1812, he positioned it facing east of south, away from the sea, only three-quarters of a mile away.
• accompanied by a posse of oystercatchers and several sandpipers, who scampered after invisible delicacies with desperate urgency as the tide went out, uttering little cries of discovery... Bathing off this beach, you feel the literal meaning behind Larkin’s line about misery in ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘It deepens like a coastal shelf.’
• I listened to the sea percolating into the marsh, sliding up every little meandering mud canyon, between the glidders and uvvers – the mud banks – trickling about the mycelium of creeks, gently rocking the glistening samphire. Even the tiniest channels in the mud or sand mimicked the patterns and movement of a great river.
• The girls’ clothes, draped over sea lavender, might well have included blouses or aprons of a fine red cotton, then the fashion in Stiffkey, because the ‘mashes’ were a popular children’s hunting-ground for the much-prized scraps of the red drogue parachute targets, which were towed to and fro all day by aeroplanes, while gunners practised, filling the wide sky with black puffs of smoke.
• Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka the Otter: Tarka had taken four years to write, and went through seventeen drafts. Williamson rewrote Chapter Eleven, which begins at the source of five rivers up on Dartmoor, thirty-seven times. He described the writing of those paragraphs to Hughes as ‘chipping every word off the breastbone’.
• I WENT TO WALES because the place is stiff with magic, because the Rhinog Mountains are something like a wilderness where I would be free to wander like pipesmoke in a billiard room, and with the kind of apparently random purpose with which the laughing water dashes through the heather, rocks and peat. I went there to be a long way from all the powerful stimuli Wordsworth said prevented us, these days, from doing any proper thinking.
• I hiked off uphill through the bracken. There is so much of it in the Rhinogs that the sheep all carry it around on their coats like camouflaged soldiers. I watched a ewe standing between two big rocks the shape of goats’ cheeses. They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones. He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape. By grazing the moors and mountains they keep the contours – the light and shade – clear, sharp and well-defined, like balding picture-restorers constantly at work on every detail.
• There was birdsong everywhere; the rising notes of pipits, like the turning of a rusty wheel, the mew of the buzzard as it spun into view. Redstarts flew from tree to tree, taking the line a slack rope would take slung between them. Economy in flight is what makes it graceful. Look at the swift, which hardly seems to move its wings at all, or the planing buzzard, ascending a thermal.
• There was no sign of these tunnels on the map, and I was content for them to remain a mystery. Indeed, it was infinitely preferable to me that they should not be on the map, and never should be. This was one of those magical places the people of northern Greece call Agrafa, ‘the unwritten places’. They are the remote and secret places in the Pindos mountains, bordering Albania and Macedonia, that were deliberately left off the map by the inhabitants
• Water rushed about everywhere here, and amongst the remains of a settlement I found a spring inside a kind of stone temple covered in ferns. I went down to drink from it, and felt its atmosphere and power. The sense of a Delphic presence was so palpable, the Oracle might just have gone for lunch.
• I made delicious tea with the river water, devoured bread, goats’ cheese and pennywort leaves, and fell into a deep sleep, lulled by the song of the waterfall, of Minnehaha, Laughing Water, the bride of Hiawatha, watched over by the dark shapes of menhirs on the hilltops.
• it was made special by the place, with its buttercup lawn shaped into an inverted comma and enclosed by a stone wall that retains the ancient, sloping track running past at a higher level, and tapers from five feet to nothing in a way that a modern architect would completely approve. There were surely never any drawings for this, yet the proportions and sense of harmony with the natural architecture of the water, rocks and trees were very fine. Whoever built it had, as Alexander Pope put it, ‘consulted the genius of the place’. It was highly distinctive, like a Greek stage, shaped by years of use and now all the more beautiful for being a ruin and so remote.
• the researchers were surprised to discover that whereas it had been thought that cold water must increase the predisposition of the blood to clot, the opposite was the case. The viscosity of the blood plasma was reduced, and there was an increase in other anticoagulants. Perhaps most interesting of all, there was an increase in the numbers of lymphocytes and white cells in the blood after leaving the water. This would increase the strength of the immune system... Such results may lend some credence to the claims made for cold bathing by certain English public schools, along the lines of ‘mens sana, in corpore sano’, although not the supposed bromide effect on the libido. It is ironic to consider that all those cold showers, at school or in the army, were actually heightening desire and increasing fertility amongst the nation’s youth.
• All through Bath’s most recent heyday, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people used to immerse themselves up to the neck for hours at a time in the Roman Baths, in the naturally warm, sulphurous springwater. They sat on stone cushions to adjust themselves for depth. Meticulous medical records were kept by the charitable hospital where they treated ‘a great crop of paralytics that daily appear amongst tradesmen’. These were mostly lead workers and decorators suffering from the lead poisoning known as ‘Painter’s Palsy’. It began as abdominal pain and eventually led to paralysis. Drinking one-and-a-half pints of the vile-tasting spa water and immersing themselves for long periods, the patients experienced the natural diuretic effect of submersion on their kidneys, and excreted the lead about four times more efficiently as a result.
• Swimming without a roof over your head is now a mildly subversive activity, like having an allotment, insisting on your right to walk a footpath, or riding a bicycle. It certainly appeals to free spirits, which is why the talk is invariably so good in those little spontaneous bankside, beach or poolside parliaments that spring up wherever two or three swimmers are gathered, as though the water’s fluency were contagious. That is why swimming clubs, lidos and unofficial bathing holes are such congenial places.
• by 1931 there existed in England alone about 1,400 swimming clubs; a five-fold increase over two years.
• I ventured further up the river under a low canopy of alders, imagining the Marx Brothers farmers, the swimmers on their bicycles, and the camp in the orchard in those more welcoming, big-hearted days, before things became tight and private, fenced and tidy. Two moorhens taxied off before me like the Wright brothers, scampering ever faster across the surface until they just teetered into lift-off, trailing a gangling undercarriage of olive-green legs and spidery feet.
• John taught me how to swim the rapids, even sliding over the most unlikely shallows, by keeping my head down in the water and breathing through the snorkel. This automatically tilts the rest of your body higher in the water... Seeing a boulder approaching you at high speed, with the irresistible force of the river behind you, is terrifying at first. But by surrendering your body to the current, it is surprising how easily and naturally you are swept down, like the translucent leaves you see dancing underwater in the sunlight. The current urges you along the best course, but you must keep steerage way as you would in a canoe, by swimming faster than the river. You realise why the otter’s tail is called its rudder.
• But of all the Dartmoor rivers, the Erme is the most secretive. It rises in the long shadow of Hartor Tor and flows south through Ivybridge into a farm landscape around Holbeton so hilly that everyone gets an aerial view of their neighbour. Fields, barns and hedgerows are tilted at all angles like the counterpane of an unmade bed.
• We stood on a wooden bridge watching a procession of seaweed carried up by the tide. It created the curious illusion that we and the bridge were moving like a boat through the water, back out to sea.
• After a good deal of dithering, the Department of the Environment agreed to help fund a £14 million filtration scheme by the Environment Agency to try and improve matters. In other words, a private commercial company was allowed to leave a legacy of serious, lasting pollution for the rest of society to deal with at public expense. The polluter, meanwhile, walked off scot-free.
• The players strode far out into the sea with their nets, several of them swimming on into the evening waves to encircle the imaginary shoal. Then they began singing and hauling the wet and heavy nets up the beach, and everyone found themselves wading in and helping. Then, as the big sun swooped low, the actors lit a fire at the centre of a circle of stones, having manoeuvred their audience into a perfectly-timed line of sight for a tableau of fire, dark sea, horizon, and the sun, balancing itself on the horizon, poised to drown.
• Penzance Pool: The freshly painted blue and white pool was literally dazzling. It is pure 1930s in its exuberant, extravagant use of concrete and in the flowing lines of its romantic, impractical shape. At first sight I thought it more fascist than anything I had ever seen, with its serried ranks of open-fronted changing cubicles surrounding the water like rows of soldiers... The pool had opened at the height of Britain’s interest in lidos and all they stood for: healthy urban living, sunshine and sunbathing, the new cult of the outdoor life. Many of these ideas had originated in the Weimar Republic of Germany, in the social ideas that produced the ‘Volksparks’, where outdoor swimming pools were not only part of the park, but very much its symbolic heart.
• We are also singularly hairless like dolphins and, alone amongst the primates, have a layer of subcutaneous fat analagous to the whale’s blubber, ideal for keeping warm in the water. Hardy’s ideas were sparked off by the curious fact that the vestigial hairs on our bodies are arranged in a quite different pattern from those on other apes. Hardy spotted that if you were to put a swimming human into a water tunnel, the hydrodynamic lines would coincide precisely with the lines drawn by the pattern of body hairs. This is just what you would expect to find in a creature evolved for streamlined swimming whose babies take quite naturally to water.
• Giraffes are about the only mammals that can’t swim, because their long necks upset their balance and they capsize. <> At Newmarket, there are several elaborate open-air equine swimming pools, and all the trainers now regard swimming horses as an essential part of their routine... Elephant swimming races are major national events in Thailand, and the champion animals are heroes every bit as famous as Red Rum.
• Elaine Morgan quotes the case of an elephant that went for a two-hundred-mile island-hopping jaunt in the Bay of Bengal. The journey took twelve years to complete, and some of the hops from island to island were across at least a mile of open ocean.
• I had imagined swimming Frenchman’s Creek, the mysterious wooded inlet where Daphne du Maurier set her famous novel... 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 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.
• 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.
• 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 is only congenial once you’re in it.
• 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.
• Most public schools seem to have colonised their own swimming holes, well-mapped in the arcane mythology of the upper classes and arranged into the characteristic hierarchies. Winchester had Gunner’s Hole, the Milkhole and Dalmatia. Harrow had its own pond, where Byron swam, and Etonians bathed near the college on the Thames. Thomas Hughes gives a good idea of the importance of river-swimming in the Avon to the school life of Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays:
• The year before, Microcosmos, a French feature film about the real lives of the insects: 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.
• The last coypu on the Waveney was martyred like Hereward the Wake in some reedy outpost of the marshes in 1989... 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.
• 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,
• Richard Mabey, who has often walked the East Anglian beaches, has a sense of the way this shifting coastline may work on the mind: ‘I sometimes wondered if the closeness of these unstable edges of the land was part of the secret of Norfolk’s appeal to us, a reflection of a half-conscious desire to be as contingent as spindrift ourselves, to stay loose, cast off, be washed up somewhere unexpected.’ <> That evening, I visited Suffolk’s own lost city of Atlantis, and swam at nightfall over the drowned churches of Dunwich. Pilgrims have been coming here for years to gaze at what no longer is, or to look out to sea in rough weather and listen for the fabled submarine ringing of the bells of fifty sunken churches;
• the Wissey is one of the purest lowland streams in East Anglia. <> Feeling like a philanderer of rivers, with the water of the Little Ouse still in my hair, I went in respectfully through some reeds and began breaststroking tentatively downstream,
• A series of wooden breakwaters set diagonally into the Wissey caught my eye as I swept along in a green tunnel. They were like paddles dug in to steer a canoe, and created similar eddies in the stream. These were croyes, constructed by the Environment Agency to deflect the current and enliven the river. By forcing the current through a narrowed gap they cause turbulence, which will gradually gouge out a pool downstream, flushing away the sandy bottom to reveal gravel. Different kinds of creatures live on gravel, so this enriches the diversity of the river’s life. When the river is in flood, eddy pools develop as havens for fish and other creatures to hole up; shelter from the storm.
• I was unable to resist a detour at Ashford-in-the-Water to walk up to Water-cum-Jolly for a dip in this lively, wooded trout river. I still don’t know for certain that the place-name wasn’t a fiction on the part of the map-makers; that my swim in the big, deep, brimming mill-pool, walled by a limestone cliff, with a forty-foot wide cataract thundering into the mill-race beneath a shuddering wooden bridge, wasn’t a mirage of the long-distance swimmer engendered by the rigours of the long road, and that enticing, almost pidgin English name. ‘Water-cum-Jolly’ seemed to embody in three words the very essence of the joys of swimming.
• Immediately uphill, a tributary stream cascaded down a series of waterfalls and saucered pools over mounds of tufa accumulated through the centuries. If it weren’t so natural and ancient, it would be easy to mistake tufa for the kind of artificial rocks you see at the Chelsea Flower Show. It is really petrified water that has built up, like the fur in a kettle, from the lime that is carried in the streams. It is voluptuous and spongy and loves to dress itself in fine mosses and algae.
• Like pigs, leeches suffer in our language from the abuse of their name. There was a self-contained air about it as it inspected the rim of the pool, as well there might be, since leeches are hermaphrodites, like their relatives the earthworms.
• Considering that in potholing your life can depend on the ability to squeeze through a letterbox crack or a hosepipe cave, I was mildly shocked. It was interesting how many were first-generation descendants of miners. They agreed that the instinct to go underground was probably in their blood;
• High-diving displays were held at the pool every afternoon during the season, and a £5 prize was offered to anyone who would dive off the high board. It was thirty metres high and the pool was twenty-four feet deep.
• BACK IN BERNIE’S Café at Ingleton, they had told me to expect an experience somewhere between potholing, swimming, surfing and rock-climbing if I ever ventured down the inside of Hell Gill.
• There is something atavistic about all swimming, but this was so intensely primitive it was visceral. I felt like Jonah inside the whale. Each time I dropped, or was swept, into a new cauldron, I thought it would be bottomless; the turbulence made the water opaque. Borne down this magical uterus, deafened by the rushing and boiling of the flood, with the sheer rock and just a crack of sky high above me, I felt at once apprehensive and exhilarated. Water was cupped, jugged, saucered, spooned, decanted, stirred and boiled. It was thrown up in a fine spray so you breathed it in, it splashed in your face, it got in your ears, it stung you with its force, it bounced back off every curving surface, it worked unremittingly to sculpt the yielding limestone into the forms of its own well-ordered movement. Beneath the apparent chaos, all this sound and fury conformed to the strict laws of fluid dynamics.
• A seal appeared and swam some of the way across with us, all whiskers and openly inquisitive, coming up from below at every point of the compass in turn. We could only guess where it was swimming underwater, and it never came up where we expected it to. It was quite harmless, and a useful bearing in the water: on the wide horizon of a longish swim, anything that can help convince you you’re actually moving is a help.
• G. M. Trevelyan’s house-master at Harrow, Edward Bowen, an ascetic bachelor who once walked the eighty miles from Cambridge to Oxford within twenty-four hours, told him, ‘O boy, you oughtn’t to have a hot bath twice a week; you’ll get like the later Romans.’ T. H. White thought once a fortnight was probably about right, arguing that, ‘The true voluptuary wears sackcloth nearly all the time, so that when he does put on his sheer silk pants he can get full satisfaction out of rolling in the hay.’
• 360 feet of turquoise water in a sheer-sided quarry on Belnahua. The island encircled a huge natural swimming pool, raised above sea level, whose waters were so utterly transparent that when we swam, we saw our shadows far down, swimming ahead of us along the bottom... The light and the skies kept changing all afternoon: from bright blue with distant dazzling clouds to deepening red and gold. Diving from the rocks into the immensely deep, clear, brackish water, intensified the giddy feeling of aquatic flying.
• Everything on Belnahua was ruined, except its wild beauty.
• The beaches were all silver, black and grey, with fine black sand and all denominations of the island’s slate coinage, some flecked with a starry night sky of fool’s gold, others striated with the finest random white pencil lines of quartz, the doodling of mermaids. The tides had sorted and screened them by size, stacking them like books end-on in flowing lines and whorls that traced the eddies and turbulence that clamoured over them.
• Jura: Orwell was anxious to get out of London, and wanted his three-year-old son Richard to grow up in the country. What could be better for a small boy than a wild island? He set about farming and gardening in a small way, went fishing, planted fruit trees, bought a rowing boat with an outboard engine, and began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. The hardship and the adventure of the place must have appealed to him. But as desert places, the Western Isles were also where the Celtic saints retreated to hear the voice of God in the silence.
• This was water straight from the mountain that sends your blood surging and crams every capillary with a belt of adrenalin, despatching endorphins to seep into the seats of pleasure in body and brain, so that your soul goes soaring, and never quite settles all day.
• he liked hardship, and had always enjoyed testing himself, posing as a tramp in the Kentish hopfields, down and out in Paris and London, fighting in Catalonia, running a village store in Wallington, keeping goats in the outskirts of Marrakesh, or farming on Jura.
• The special menace of the Corryvreckan is created by the sheer force of the Atlantic tidal wave, which sometimes races through the passage at the rate of fifteen knots. The effect of the pyramidal rock is to create a standing wave up to thirty feet high which combines with a welter of eddying turbulence along both shores to create the Corryvreckan whirlpool.
  What no navigation guide could communicate is the deeply unsettling atmosphere of the place, the intense physical presence of the whirlpool and the scale of the turbulence. Wind and tide were herding the waves into the narrow gulf, and they stretched away, falling over themselves, for a mile across the sea beyond the outer coast of Scarba.
  The whirlpool was clearly visible, three hundred yards offshore towards the western end of the gulf. Inside its circumference was a mêlée of struggling white breakers, charging about in every direction, head-butting one another. Outside, the surface was deadly smooth.
• the kind of thing Orwell’s police state in Nineteen Eighty-Four had abolished, because they knew such wilderness nourished freedom of thought and action.
• My feet, by this time, had been for a distance swim in my boots. I sensed the imminent onset of trench foot under the composting socks, and incipient blisters boiling up like party balloons.
• Behind me, Bamburgh castle stood out like a cloud in a sky that continually changed. It took a long time for the water to deepen, but then I was cutting through the oily calm in a soundless dream of swimming.
• At the narrow turkey-neck of the oxbow were two old pollard willows. One of them masqueraded as a hybrid, with dog-roses, hawthorn and elder growing from the marsupial recesses of its anguished trunk. Each was an independent world, with whole cities of insect life in the grimy wrinkles of its bark, and generations of birds-nests in its dense topknot.
• Like all running water, it wanted to turn everything into the image of its constantly undulating form. It worried at the river banks, hollowing them, rounding them into oxbows. If you made a very slow-motion stop-frame aerial film of a river’s history, it would look like a swimming snake, or a writhing garden hose when water is run through it. Left to itself, a river will always meander. This is how rivers grow longer, and slow themselves down, and hold more water, and make themselves more interesting and pleasing to the human eye, as well as to the creatures that live in them.
• 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.
• 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.
• Until 1858, two years before the fort was built, the floating prison hulks familiar to readers of Great Expectations were moored in the deep water of the estuary along here. They were crudely converted decommissioned naval vessels where prisoners were consigned to await transportation to Australia. Although Dickens locates the hulks in the Thames Estuary in his novel, they were in fact in the Medway.
• I was swimming off the end of a natural pier; the sensation you get when you bathe off a sailing boat far out to sea. It led me to a deeper feeling for Keats’s lines, in his sonnet ‘Bright Star’: ‘The moving waters at their priestlike task/ Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.’ <> It is only by swimming in deep water that you really sense the motion of the tides as a cosmic event, as one with the moon and stars.
• Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool, built three years earlier in 1934, was not only the first piece of modern architecture in Britain to hit the headlines and capture the popular imagination; it is still probably by far the most exciting swimming pool anyone has ever built.
• Lubetkin. They dramatically demonstrated the potential of reinforced concrete as a new and poetic way of building that could flow and spiral like water. Each tapered ramp is between only 3 and 6 inches thick, with no intermediate support over a 46-foot span, yet it will stand the weight of 24 people evenly spaced along it.
• It is long demolished, but the photographs immediately make you think of the circus, or the monkey houses in the modern zoo. The parallels between Lubetkin’s ideas of the zoo as spectacle and the subsequent evolution of ‘wildlife’ television need hardly be underlined.
• Penguin nests are even more modernist than Lubetkin. They have a nouvelle cuisine approach to nest building, constructing careful arrangements of three pebbles and a stick. The architect was very keen that the Tree of Heaven should be retained on the site beside the pool. He was right, because it stands beautifully for nature against the cool lines of his rationalist art. But as the keepers pointed out, it is also an invaluable source of that vital twig each penguin couple needs for its nest. They will spend hours underneath it, like shoppers in John Lewis, choosing the right one.
• The sublime word ‘swimmingly’ is born of such moments: so is the Greek word ekstasis, root of ‘ecstasy’, which means simply to be outside your own body – exactly the state you achieve in a cold-water swim. If you tread on air on your way from the pool, it is because you are floating somewhere just above your corporeal self.
• It is not water you perceive so much as light, and how water can play with it. We all look at pools differently since David Hockney. Where Courbet paints a wave, Hockney paints a splash, or the play of a hose on a lawn. His pools are erotic and innocent at the same time, just like real swimming pools.
• There is, too, an affinity between pools and lawns. Both are simulations of nature, with the one essential ingredient – wildness – carefully filtered out. They resemble life, but they are not alive. The lawn has been reduced to a single species; the pool-water neutered. Both are great status symbols.
• the club’s avant-garde purification plant. The water is treated in the French way, with ozone instead of chlorine, so the pool is a far more benign environment.
• in Australia, as Ken Worpole relates in his book Staying Close to the River, it is apparently not the done thing for men to swim breaststroke. On a first visit to Australia and its swimming pools, he began to notice that he was invariably the only man doing the breaststroke, and asked why. His host, a sociologist, said, ‘You should understand, Ken, that in Australia, swimming strokes are deeply gendered.’
• Polo: Then we pitched into the fastest, roughest, most demanding game in the book, a mêlée of windmilling crawl, staccato breaststroke, even butterfly, as swimmers flung themselves after the ball up and down the pool. You needed reckless courage, rocket-fuelled acceleration, and no scruples whatsoever to succeed. It was like the stock market. Goals were scored with bewildering speed in a flurry of white water designed to camouflage the flagrant fouling that was going on everywhere beneath the surface.
• Here and there was an unexplained hole that had patched itself with clearer, blacker ice, like a window into the water below. Thoreau used to cut such holes in the ice on Walden Pond, kneeling to gaze into the ‘quiet parlour of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass’.
• A few winters ago I entertained a dozen friends to lunch on the frozen moat. We carried the dining table out there, and had just begun our pudding when there was a sound of cracking ice that ran like thunder from one end to the other. I have never seen people get up so fast. Several guests screamed and dived for the bank. Others were too relaxed in their cups to worry, and indeed the ice held perfectly firm. It was like a scene on the Titanic.