Roger Deakin - Waterlog: A Swimmers Journey Through Britain

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Roger Deakin, who died in 2006, was a writer, film-maker and environmentalist of international renown. He was a founder member of Friends of the Earth, and co-founded Common Ground. He lived for thirty-eight years in a moated farmhouse in Suffolk. Waterlog, which was first published in 1999, became a word-of-mouth bestseller, and is now an established classic of the nature writing canon.

This Summer I went swimming

this summer I might have drowned,

but I held my breath

and I kicked my feet

and I moved my arms around

moved my arms around.

Who would not be affected to see a cleere and sweet River in the morning, grow a kennell of muddy land water by noone, and condemned to the saltness of the sea by night?

T HE WARM RAIN tumbled from the gutter in one of those midsummer downpours as I hastened across the lawn behind my house in Suffolk and took shelter in the moat. Breaststroking up and down the thirty yards of clear, green water, I nosed along, eyes just at water level. The frogs-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.

It was at the height of this drenching in the summer of 1996 that the notion of a long swim through Britain began to form itself. I wanted to follow the rain on its meanderings about our land to rejoin the sea, to break out of the frustration of a lifetime doing lengths, of endlessly turning back on myself like a tiger pacing its cage. I began to dream of secret swimming holes and a journey of discovery through what William Morris, in the title to one of his romances, called The Water of the Wondrous Isles. My inspiration was John Cheevers 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 cartographers eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.

I was living by myself, feeling sad at the end of a long love, and, as a freelance film-maker and writer, more or less free to commit myself to a journey if I wanted to. My son, Rufus, was also on an adventure Down Under, working in restaurants and surfing in Byron Bay, and I missed him. At least I could join him in spirit in the water. Like the endless cycle of the rain, I would begin and end the journey in my moat, setting out in spring and swimming through the year. I would keep a log of impressions and events as I went.

My earliest memory of serious swimming is of being woken very early on holiday mornings with my grandparents in Kenilworth by a sudden rain of pebbles at my bedroom window aimed by my Uncle Laddie, who was a local swimming champion and had his own key to the outdoor pool. My cousins and I were reared on mythic tales of his exploits in races, on high boards, or swimming far out to sea so it felt an honour to swim with him. Long before the lifeguards arrived, we would unlock the wooden gate and set the straight, black, refracted lines on the bottom of the green pool snaking and shimmying. It was usually icy, but the magic of being first in is what I remember. We had the place to ourselves, we would say with satisfaction afterwards over breakfast. Our communion with the water was all the more delightful for being free of charge. It was my first taste of unofficial swimming.