by Joe Minihane
I brooded and stared out of the window at the grey June morning, well aware that I was being ridiculous and overly dramatic, but allowing myself to wallow in it anyway. These swims needed doing and I had to accept that people couldn’t always spare time to come along with me.
It didn’t help matters that this wasn’t simply a trip to a river where I could jump in alone and munch on homemade sandwiches in sweet repose afterwards. I was on my way to the Henleaze Swimming Club, a private quarry pool where I was due to meet the club’s staff and undergo a swimming test before the swim proper. The thought of having to meet and talk with strangers seemed like a hideous ordeal. It didn’t matter that they were fellow swimmers. I was not in the mood to be social.
Roger wrote about a shining lake at Henleaze, with well-kept lawns and a 1920s ambience. But reading his passages about Henleaze I only found myself pining for swims gone by: the vim and vigour of the Dart, the churn of the North Sea at Walberswick or the simple pleasures of an early dip at Hampstead. As the London suburbs rolled past the window and the Thames came into view through Slough, I picked through Waterlog and found a line to suit my current mood.
‘A solitary, fugitive affair’, is what Roger called his journey as he drove the hundreds of miles from Suffolk to Devon for his Dartmoor dips. Like him at that point in his adventure, I was in so deep that I could no longer back out, but the end was nowhere in sight. My swimming to-do list seemed never-ending and appeared to grow longer every time I crossed another one off. It was as if Roger was setting me a challenge, showing me that this wasn’t simply a vanity project, but a worthwhile slog that would come good in the end, despite revealing its difficulties to me almost as often as its joys. I needed to remember that I was meant to be having fun and indulging a hobby.
I tried to keep this thought in mind as I took a lumbering double-decker bus from Temple Meads station through Bristol city centre and out to Henleaze. I felt nervous alighting in this distant suburb alone and walking through the tall, cast-iron gates of the swimming club. I should have remembered Tim’s wise words after I thought I had lost my wedding ring. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’
Alison, the club’s secretary, met me at the entrance to the little wooden clubhouse, where I signed my name in the visitors’ book, an old ring binder stuffed with foolscap. She made me feel very welcome and introduced me to a whole crowd of locals, telling them about my mission to swim all of Waterlog. Nods of approval greeted this. I was among friends here, the shared experience of Britain’s lidos and lakes very much in evidence. I hadn’t needed to be anxious at all; my worries had merely been in my head, just as they always were. After I raved about the pool in Cirencester and the cooling waters of the West Dart to a few of the hardy swimmers in the clubhouse, Alison pointed me in the direction of the men’s changing rooms and Joe, the lifeguard who’d be giving me the fifty-metre swim test I needed to pass in order to enjoy Henleaze to the full.
I’ll admit that this was one of the things that had been preying on my mind ever since Alison and I had begun speaking over email about my visit. I had never earned so much as a ten-metre badge to stitch onto my speedos. I hadn’t even been able to jump in at the deep end without making a scene. I was no champion swimmer. In fact, I felt like I was a fraud. Well, at least that was how I felt as I waved to Joe, a lithe young student who stood over six foot and clearly swam 1,000 metres before breakfast.
I put on my shorts in the open-air changing area, deciding it wasn’t wise to have a go on the parallel bars, which had seemingly been placed there to help swimmers work up a sweat before trying out the lake’s myriad diving boards. Joe stood waiting at the water’s edge.
I asked him the temperature.
‘Seventeen degrees Celsius. Now if you can swim to that yellow marker and back, that’d be grand.’
He pointed to an old police cone a little way along the bank. It didn’t look more than ten metres distant, but I didn’t complain.
I swam quickly and in my neatest breaststroke, putting my keenness to impress Joe down to my relatively new-found ability to get from A to B in the water without impersonating a Labrador. I doubled back and surfaced at the steps where I’d entered. Joe looked down and gave me the thumbs up.
‘Well, you’ve passed with flying colours,’ he said, deadpan, before outlining the rules of the lake. No swimming beyond the rope at the far end, no climbing the quarry walls on the far side.
‘Feel free to use any of the diving boards,’ Joe added as I set off.
The towering green platforms loomed over to my right, the highest ten-metre board removed because the lake wasn’t deep enough to accommodate the most daring water nymphs. The middle platform, at seven metres, looked terrifying.
I aimed for the general direction of the old quarry wall, where two swimmers appeared to be sitting beneath the surface. The water was green and cleansing, and I could see my hands reach into the deep, the light refracting as they stretched to feel the essence of the lake in front of them.
At the wall I found a convenient place to perch, my shoulders just above the waterline. I pulled myself high and strained to get a better look at the club from this perfect angle. There was nothing exclusive about this members-only place, but restricting numbers clearly had its benefits. The lawns were closely cropped and the buildings around the lake’s edge looked spic and span, clearly given a fresh lick of paint every twelve months. Entry points around the water were well tended, with reeds cut back and shallow steps to make it easy to get in and out for those members who didn’t want to dive.
I pushed off and swam a dozen lengths of the lake, alternating between breaststroke and front crawl. When I swam the latter, my path was haphazard, the only clue to my whereabouts being the high wheel of my arms and the clear blue sky away from the trees on the banks. More than once I ended up beaching myself in the reeds, looking around to see if any regulars had spotted my mishap.
At the clubhouse end of the lake, breathless, I realised that I couldn’t come to this wild-swimming institution and not try out one of the diving boards. There was no way I was taking the slow climb up to the high platform, but a number of springboards which sat closer to the water did look marginally more appealing.
I hauled myself out and edged along to the front of a beautiful old willow board. In previous weeks I had taken to practising my diving skills, finally learning how not to bellyflop. But in front of the serious swimmers who dotted the banks and powered out lightning-fast lengths of the lake, I chickened out. Instead, I opted to jump, hearing the thunk and boing of the board behind me before I crashed in ungainly fashion into the lake below. I swam across to where Joe had given me my test and clambered out for the last time.
After eating my sandwiches and reading the paper on the lawn, I fell into conversation with Roy, one of the lake’s part-time staff. We chatted about Roger’s visit here and how Waterlog, coupled with the recent boom in triathlons, had ensured the lake remained as popular as ever.
The waiting list was down from Roger’s time, with just 250 people in the virtual queue. But Roy explained that this was because of weekday memberships being introduced, allowing older and self-employed swimmers to come during the week for a cut price. In total, 1,900 members used Henleaze. It seemed a very small number, especially when there could be that many people at Tooting Bec Lido on a hot summer afternoon.
Roy said he had joined Henleaze when he had been a competitive triathlete, looking for a place to train when he moved to Bristol. At the time it was the only place in the city that catered to such outdoor types. He had swum all over the UK: in the spring-fed pool at Cirencester (‘How soft is the water?’ he exclaimed) and regularly at Parliament Hill Lido as a youngster.
‘I used to compete there in the sixties,’ he said. ‘It was always an early season meet, April, and always freezing. It was the longest length you ever swam, although the cold made sure it was the quickest too.’
I thought back to my own dip there, the previous
May. It had been cold then and had taken me an age to warm up afterwards. Roy still looked as if he was a bit handy in the pool. I imagined him in a whitewater blur, powering out a few dozen laps at dawn.
Roy led me back to the clubhouse, where he sold me a copy of the lake’s history for £5. Inside was a series of stunning black and white photos from its heyday, with crowds thronging the banks on gala days. I imagined it wasn’t much different on a sunny Saturday in 2014.
Alison enquired after my next stops on my Waterlog odyssey, and I filled her in on my plans for an imminent trip to nearby Farleigh Hungerford and the river-swimming club there. She gave a nod of approval when I mentioned this hallowed swimming institution. I found myself excited by the thought of going there alone.
I passed back through the imposing gates and onto the main road back to town. I stood tall and realised that all my niggling morning anxieties had been washed away in the quarry pool. There was a lesson here: to never doubt swimming’s redemptive powers and to remember that worrying about imaginary concerns never fixes anything. Coming to Henleaze had been a timely reminder of what I had learnt with Mark. I was ready for more solo adventures now and knew that there was nothing for me to worry about.
Farleigh Hungerford was the place everyone with any wild-swimming knowledge always mentioned when I told them about my retracing of Waterlog.
‘It’s the last river-swimming club in England, you know,’ was the usual refrain, followed by happy tales of swimmers clogging the field next to the campsite which now looks after the club, pushing off from the raging weir and crashing into the water from the old diving boards.
The club’s secretary, Rob Fryer, had found a certain fame in recent years. He could often be seen on popular countryside magazine shows espousing the joys of river swimming. His Wild Swimming Europe guidebook had become something of a hallowed text for aficionados.
I was increasingly aware that the Farleigh and District Swimming Club was perhaps the epicentre of British wild swimming. And being a summer-only affair, I couldn’t put off a visit much longer.
I hadn’t done too much reading up on the club, or the water of the Frome which flowed through it, before I took the train west. A cursory look at the club’s Facebook page would have stopped me in my tracks.
Dated August 2013, it read:
On 3rd August when we tested the water, the result was bad. We posted warning notices.
We re-tested on 12th August and the result had improved to the top end of ‘poor’ and we will be testing again soon. In the meantime we have to advise members against swimming. If you do swim please take precautions not to swallow any water.
Water is now flowing over the weir again, and the river looks beautifully clear, compared to the murky soup it had turned into in the hot, dry weather. This should not be taken as an indication of water quality, of course. We are hoping the rain we’re having will improve things.
Ten months on and thankfully none the wiser, I arrived on a stinking hot afternoon, having walked the three miles from Trowbridge train station. I’d had to yomp through tall grass along the busy A366, thanks to every public right of way being either overgrown or cordoned off with lightly buzzing electric fences. So much for public access to the countryside. Solo jaunts weren’t just a struggle because of the lack of good company. They could be a chore because of my inability to drive. I’d been spoilt by my friends and family driving me around the country.
Save for a single car in the shade of an oak tree and a towel and a pair of swimming trunks slung over a metal field gate, there were no other signs of life as I walked onto the banks of the club’s swimming hole.
Before changing I went to take a look at the water. Since Dartmoor I hadn’t seen a drop of rain, and it showed in the still, murky Frome. The weir was bone dry, which if I’d seen that Facebook post would have told me that things weren’t looking too good for a swim. A couple were swimming at leisurely pace upstream, gamely struggling against the current and chattering away, oblivious to my presence.
Roger had had the swimming club all to himself when he visited, the weir raging and the need for swimming trunks deemed unnecessary. Unwilling to upset my fellow swimmers by going au naturel, I went and donned my shorts in an old tin shed which doubled up as a male changing area, the flagstones cold on my feet. I dodged a pile of fox shit, bundled my clothes into my bag and made my way back down to the water.
The old triple-tiered diving boards which Roger described were no more. Only the sad, decrepit frame remained, its red paint peeling off and fluttering away into the field. Rust nibbled at its feet. As at Henleaze, modern health and safety had done for this go-to spot for more daring outdoor swimmers.
The ash springboard which Roger had sprung off naked into the Frome was still in evidence, though. Its coconut matting was warm underfoot, and remembering my entrance into the water in Bristol the previous week, I tiptoed out to the far edge to take a look down into the depths. The river looked brown and dirty, and I suddenly felt very alone, with no professional help close by if I did somehow come a cropper after jumping in head first. Chastened, I walked back onto the grass and round to the weir entrance.
I had the water to myself, the couple who’d swum earlier now dozing on the banks with a picnic spread out around them. It was cold, far more so than at Henleaze. Swimming against the current proved surprisingly difficult, the Frome full of an urgency which wasn’t at all apparent when I had stood staring at it from the great height of the diving board.
I soon reached that wooden entry point and decided to turn and swim back to the weir. Nose just out of the water, the five-foot-high board looked impossibly distant, more like a ten-metre platform than a piddly springboard.
I swam a few lengths of this stretch of the Frome, sticking to club rules about not swimming downstream from the weir (despite its beauty and the preponderance of inviting pools) and further upstream than the long meander which led away to the nearby farm, before hopping out and drying in the sun. I ate cheese and chutney sandwiches and gulped cold water, unwilling to leave now that I had settled into the slow rhythm of the place. That and the fact that to get home I’d have to walk the long road back to Trowbridge. I could have done with Tim or Molly being there to give me a lift.
After a few more minutes’ lolling, I convinced myself that I couldn’t by all rights say I’d swum at this famous swimming hole without having at least jumped off Roger’s ash springboard. I walked back out towards it and eyed it from the safety of the bank. I inched along it, toes tucked over the edge, readying myself to jump.
I had just turned back when a loud party of picnickers appeared behind me, choosing an area directly behind the board to lay their blankets and eat before taking a swim themselves. I felt ashamed of losing my gumption at the last minute and swore I caught the pitying eye of at least two older ladies in the group.
I spun on my heels and took two long strides before closing my eyes and jumping, wheeling my arms and legs in ungainly fashion. I crashed into the river hard, smashing my forearm flat on its surface. I came up gasping for air, my arm smarting and legs sore, and swam the last few metres back down to the weir. My ears were still roaring as I reached for my towel and rubbed myself dry. I changed in the open, stuffed away my wet things and passed back through the gate. No volunteers had been down to collect the £1 fee, levied thirty times a year until you become a fully fledged club member. I felt a little guilty for getting a freebie as I trudged back up the A366, off to meet my train in Trowbridge, the day’s swim already being sweated out in the June heat.
CHAPTER SIX
July
RAC Clubhouse, London – River Lune, Cumbria – Ingleton Pool, Yorkshire – River Doe, Yorkshire – Cowside Beck, Yorkshire – Leeds to Liverpool Canal, Yorkshire
I returned to London happy but in need of a swim in clearer, cleaner water. I had started plotting a route through the Yorkshire Dales just for this purpose, but before heading north I got on my bike and rode from Camberwell t
o the RAC Clubhouse on Pall Mall. Roger came here with a friend to enjoy the rarefied surroundings after dips at Tooting Bec Lido and Highgate men’s pond. Getting to those popular places was easy for me, and I had already visited them many times on my recreation of his ‘swimmer’s journey through Britain’.
Despite not having a friend with RAC Clubhouse access, I was kindly allowed to swim in the private, members-only pool by the sports centre’s manager. I enjoyed the fact that, like Roger, I arrived on a push bike, decked out in cycling gear and carrying a backpack which was sprayed with dirt thanks to my lack of a mudguard.
Like everywhere on Pall Mall, the RAC Clubhouse is a place of privilege, something which has always made me feel uncomfortable. Whenever I’m in such places I feel like an interloper, just a stroke away from being asked my business and escorted towards the exit. But as I pushed through the revolving doors, my clammy palms leaving prints on the freshly polished brass handles, I was instantly made to feel welcome. A chirpy security guard pointed me down a sweeping spiral staircase, past classic photos of The Beatles which adorned the wood-panelled walls, and on towards the pool.
The whole sports centre was restored in 2003, retaining the same Grecian splendour which Roger enjoyed on his visit in the late 1990s. Everything was marble and polished to a slippery sheen. I took a seat on a balcony which overlooked the water and awaited my compulsory tour of the facilities, parked next to one regular buried deep in the Daily Telegraph and another taking a mid-morning doze in a wing-backed armchair.