Hunter Davies - The Heath: My Year on Hampstead Heath

Highgate Mens Bathing Pond, October 2011 (Gregory Wrona/Alamy)

The water is so green and brown and thick, yucky and murky and horrible, that I am always surprised by just how many people swim in it every day, all the year round. Especially, of course, in the summer. Put your hand just two inches below the surface and it has gone, your hand has disappeared, you cant see it, the dirty depths have swallowed it up.

I always worry that if I dont concentrate, dont keep flapping away, as my swimming is appalling, that the whole of my body will disappear from sight.

I also worry about a giant pike having a nibble at my willy. But then I remind myself that the giant pike in the Mens Pond is probably just an urban myth. All the same, who knows what might be lurking down there, twenty feet under?

I am also rather scared of the ducks. As a rubbish swimmer I move in a large circle, clockwise round the pond, going from lifebuoy to lifebuoy, holding on to each one as if I am just pausing to enjoy nature, observing the wildlife, plants and trees, but really I am holding on to get my breath back. I get furious if one of the lifebuoys has been grabbed by a couple of lads; mucking around, splashing each other. Dont they know that its my buoy? At my age I need it. They might well give up a seat for me on the bus, so why not a lifebuoy in the Mens Pond? I suppose it is because swimming is an equalizer. You cant immediately quite tell someones age and condition.

Often there is a mallard on my buoy, but I can deal with them. You have to stare them out, look serious and dont be taken in when they look the other way. Ducks have a wide field of vision; they can see you without looking at you. It becomes a game, both of us facing the other out. He knows perfectly well that I want that particular buoy, but he thinks it belongs to him he was probably born and bred here. They get so bold and daring, those animals that live their lives in close proximity to humans. Just think of the gulls at the seaside which fly off with newborn babies. Allegedly. I am sure that is also an urban myth. But they will steal the hot chips from out of your hands if you are not careful.

I get nearer and nearer to the mallard who continues glowering and glaring sideways, daring me to get any closer. I get to within three feet then suddenly splash him, tell him to bugger off. Doesnt he know who I am? Im a regular in this pond. He flaps and flounces away, muttering mallard oaths to himself. One day I suspect he wont fly off. They will evolve to have no fear. They will fly straight at me and give me a good old bashing with their beaks and wings.

It is now sixty years since I first swam in the Mens Pond. I have done so every summer since and, despite my fears, nothing awful has ever happened to me. I have never caught anything nasty, either disease or infection. Strangers often think of the lack of chlorine when they first see the pond and go, Yuck, no chance; Im not swimming there. Nor have I heard of anyone else catching anything. It must be clean, despite its dodgy colour. It is not stagnant, which helps, fed by the underground streams that flow into the old River Fleet which, further along its route, is long covered over and turned into a sewer, though remembered in local street names and a primary school name. And, of course, in Fleet Street.

When I first arrived to work there in 1959, Fleet Street was not just a street but a locality, an industry, a way of life, an abstract concept, which most newspaper people out in the provinces wanted to reach at some stage in their lives, to say they had done it. I dont think there are any national newspapers offices left in Fleet Street today. I wonder if Harley Street will lose all its doctors in the decades to come, or the City its hedge-funders?

Though the Mens Pond is kept clean by its fresh running water, awful tragedies do happen, as they do in every stretch of swimmable sea or water. In June 2019, a fit local man in his fifties, Chris an architect with two kids lost his life. He was swimming that day with a friend of mine, James, who often does my garden. They were swimming round and round, with James going slowly. James does not need the exercise, as gardening keeps him fit. He goes for spiritual reasons. But his friend had a sedentary job and swam and exercised constantly and energetically to keep himself fit.

James got out first, looked back across the pond for his friend, could not see him and decided he must be out in the far reaches, amongst the reeds and the ducks. It was only later that evening he heard his friend had drowned. And no one had seen him disappear. A heart attack had got him. Down he went. The pond was closed for a day while they dredged it for his body. James later had to attend the inquest to give evidence.

I first remember swimming in the Mens Pond in the summer of 1960. That was the year my wife Margaret and I got married and moved into our first flat in the Vale of Health. We were new to London, did not know the Heath; how big it is, what it contains, how to get around it.

It was an incredibly hot day and I was desperate to cool off. Someone said there were open-air ponds on the Heath, free to all. We set off to search for them from our side of the Heath and we seemed to walk for ages across its expanse, getting lost several times, until we came upon an inviting stretch of open water. In the distance, across the pond, I could see people diving from a remarkably high board at the end of a little pier. Shows you how long ago this must have been: that diving board only exists now in old photographs.

I had no swimming costume or towel with me, as this was really just an exploratory walk to see what the Heath had to offer, but I was so hot and sweaty after the long trek that I stripped off to my underpants and went in. It was shallow, muddy and reedy, and my feet were starting to sink, but eventually I reached some deeper water and was able to start swimming.