by Joe Minihane
It also reminded me just how much London outdoor swimming had changed since Roger’s visit to Lucy’s home. The reopening of Brockwell Lido, the rebirth of Marshall Street Baths, even a monthly ‘swim marathon’ which started in Hampstead Ponds and worked its way across the capital via the Serpentine to finish at Tooting Bec, were all evidence of this happy development. Swimming outside was now something of a mainstream concern, albeit one that many thought you required a large dose of insanity to enjoy. Attitudes had changed, even if this private corner of Highgate appeared to have stayed very much the same.
I pushed myself out and walked back to my bag, changing fast in order not to put Lucy out any more than I already had. The rain had let up somewhat as I emerged, and she walked me to the main building, taking the spiral staircase around the lift shaft and back into that magnificent lobby once again. We exchanged goodbyes and I tried not to think about our awkward conversation. Vanity project or not, Roger’s journey was now mine. Rather than ponder and worry about our chat, as I might once have done, I focused instead on the delightful surroundings, the perfect water and the glow it had given me despite the autumn chill.
My running shoes were already full of dewy water as I untied their laces, took off my shorts in full view of the southbound platform of Waterbeach station and struggled into a pair of trousers. The path ahead was a mess of off-green stinging nettles and tall grass, soaked from the previous night’s rain and the morning’s mist.
I had brought my bike back to the Cambridgeshire Fens, fifteen months after my first visit here, when I had swum alone in the River Lark. But the path I had chosen on the map to get from high, isolated Waterbeach to the banks of the Cam was overgrown and impassable on two wheels. It was mild, and I cursed and sweated as I pushed my bike on through the mud and wet, my thin trainers acting like a sponge, my sopping socks making me miserable. Just like when I had come here before, I felt like an insignificant brushstroke under the vast, grey canvas of a sky.
Cycling was bumpy and tough going once I finally reached the river, the towpath grassy and awkward to ride on. Despite being the last day of September, the sun was beginning to burn off the low cloud and send the temperature soaring. I began to glow red as I struggled against the difficult terrain, my clothes sticky, my skin calling out for a proper swim, minus the wetsuit. It was going to get its wish. The neoprene was stashed in my wardrobe back in south London.
My destination was a triangular pool where Burwell Lode and Reach Lode met on their way to the Cam before going on into the Great Ouse and away into the Wash. I wasn’t going eel hunting like Roger had done on his trip here, but those slippery characters preyed on my mind as I thought about the day’s swimming. I remembered catching one while out fishing as a teenager, its razor-sharp teeth and slithering body wrapping itself around my line as a friend and I tried to set it free. The thought of one latching on to one of my toes, or worse, sent a shudder up my spine as I continued juddering along the high path, the Fens opening out into a hazy horizon to the east.
Crossing a drained lock, I arrived in the village of Upware, taking a right turn down the long, straight path along the side of Reach Lode. This narrow, straight drainage channel looked dark and tempting as my bike skidded through old tyre tracks. I hopped off and began to push it instead, keeping a keen eye out for the pool.
I passed the turn-off for Wicken Lode and continued on for another half a mile before the river split, Burwell Lode flowing in. The pool sat at its confluence, reachable only to those willing to swim there.
I found an opening between the reeds and looked around to see if anyone would see if I dropped my kecks and got changed without the cover of a towel. The closest person was a farmer in a tractor, ploughing a field about a mile distant, gulls in his wake. The only other spectators were a bunch of cawing ravens. I was safe.
I strode in and immediately lost my feet in deep, silky mud. It clouded around me, sending up an almighty sulphuric stink as I ducked my shoulders under and swam fast to the far bank, a distance of no more than twenty feet. I scrambled out, grabbing at tall grass as cut reeds scratched at my legs beneath the surface. I remembered that eel I’d caught all those years before and pulled myself clear, legs coated in black mud, and took another two strides before sinking into the vast pool.
It was much bigger than I had expected, perhaps a hundred metres across. Very few people would have come to these waters, and it felt isolated, with a delicious cold edge. I made sure not to swim too far into the middle, aware that I was alone and far away from anyone. By now it was really warm, the sun high and doing a last impression of summer. I dropped my feet and found it deep, far more than the five feet Roger claimed. I kicked in furious fashion to stay afloat and felt the coolness of the water against my chest and arms, the sign that it was time to think about getting back to my clothes. There was Reach Lode to renegotiate after all.
I sunbathed by my bike, eating sandwiches and keeping a watchful eye on an armada of swans and their young heading downstream. They stopped and took a long look at the detritus of my lunch – orange peel, crumb-filled cereal bar wrappers and empty foil – before heading off to terrorise other river-goers.
Roger’s swim here was a long one. After taking in the pool he had headed along Reach Lode and turned down Wicken Lode and on to the crystal-clear New River, a distance, by my calculation, of some two and a half kilometres, one and a half miles in old money. I could hardly swim that distance in an indoor pool, let alone in a cold Fenland river in autumn. How he had managed it on a May morning remained a source of fascination to me. As I’d already established, my swimming stamina was nowhere near as impressive as his, so I got back on the bike and rode around to the bridge which led over Reach Lode and away up Wicken Lode. Riding felt less like hard work than battling the cold water. I already knew how it felt on my skin, and that was enough for me.
The water did indeed look clearer here, just as Roger had said, and I gave plenty of thought to putting on my wet, muddy shorts and going for another dip. But as I pedalled on I came across the towering bird hide of Wicken Fen Nature Reserve, keen birders waving at me as I cycled past. Roger had managed to avoid the gaze of avid twitchers by hiding in the reeds on his swim here, and there was no way I was going to hop in with an audience. Instead, I satisfied myself with a ride along this winding, beautiful river, where the English summer was having a final hurrah. The path opened out and walkers and barge-dwellers shouted hello as I pushed on. I felt a warm sense of elation on top of the burn of my adrenalin rush from the earlier swim, of Roger’s journey once again giving me memories to treasure.
I parked my bike behind a bench where Wicken Lode and the New River met. It was here that Roger had clambered out and walked back to his things, hidden deep in a reed bed. I closed my eyes and dozed for a few minutes, the reeds singing. I opened them and caught sight of a kestrel directly overhead, head still, wings flapping at speed. I stared at it for what felt like minutes before it swooped towards the ground and flew up high once more, this time further upstream. I put on my helmet, straddled my bike and set course for Ely.
CHAPTER NINE
October
Jaywick Sands, Essex – River Doe, Suffolk – Heveningham Hall, Suffolk
After my Fenland adventure, I decided to stay focused on East Anglia, heading to the Essex coast. Jaywick and neighbouring Clacton were in the grip of election fever, a by-election having been triggered by the local Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, resigning and switching allegiance to UKIP. It was polling day, and Carswell’s sheepish, lopsided grin loomed up on the side of a bus as we arrived into town, the nation’s media already setting up camp by the seafront and awaiting the verbose party leader’s arrival.
Jaywick had been in the headlines for weeks and I wanted to come at this critical time to see it for myself. Every news report and article was filled with doom and gloom. The one time self-sufficient seaside town was now the most deprived place in England according to the Office for National St
atistics, ripe pickings for those preaching an anti-immigration message.
That image jarred with everything Roger says about Jaywick in Waterlog. He comes across as a hopeless romantic as he reminisces about his first holidays here in the late 1940s. Even though what he saw was rundown and tired, he found joy in the unpaved roads, the jaunty names of the chalets and the ‘defiantly anachronistic’ spirit of the place.
I had cadged a lift off my parents, sitting in the back of their Volkswagen as if the past twenty-five years had never happened. They had been keen to come on one of my Waterlog swims and were particularly curious about Jaywick because, like Roger, this was the first place my mum saw the seaside. My great-granddad owned a static home which he kept at the Martello Caravan Park and my uncle Dave had told me more than once about going to the arcade and hearing ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol Harum for the first time. It seemed like an epochal moment for him.
We pulled up into a potholed car park where the last remnants of a car boot sale were being packed up. Three men sat in the front seat of a blue transit van, reading the paper and blowing cigarette smoke out of the windows. There was a very real sense of being at the end of the world here, and not in the same way as on Bryher. It felt like a place that the world had forgotten and left to its own devices. A dead end rather than a destination.
We passed a polling station, a nervous-looking Labour supporter tugging on a cigarette and fingering his rosette as if trying to put off the inevitability of defeat. Young families pushed prams along the waterlogged promenade, the beach hidden from view by a high concrete wall. The chalets here were either dilapidated beyond repair or smart and tidy to a fault. There didn’t seem to be much in between. It may have been forgotten by the rest of the country, but that wasn’t to say Jaywick wasn’t still proud.
My dad and I scaled the sea wall and walked along the low dunes, the grey waves smashing into the beach away to our left. Dad pulled a cap out from his coat pocket and tugged it onto his bald head. Far out to sea, the turbines of an offshore wind farm twirled in the face of the North Sea’s breezy assault. There was no one swimming, just the odd dog walker hunkered deep inside a windproof coat.
We reached the far end of the beach, where large riprap boulders protected the coast north towards Clacton from being inundated by the sea. I didn’t think it possible, but the North Sea here felt wilder than further up the coast in Suffolk and Norfolk, more akin to Bamburgh. Even if I managed to get past the initial white-tipped waves, settling into anything like a swimming rhythm was going to be impossible.
The beach arced away to the south and offered a marginally more sheltered place to enjoy a quick dip. Despite it now being October, I had left the neoprene at home again. It was a sunny day, even if some encroaching grey cloud began to spit its contents over us as I slung my bag down and began to get changed. Dad held my clothes while my mum, her tiny five-foot frame wrapped up in a purple down coat, took pictures on her iPad. It was great to be spending time with my folks.
By now the rain was starting to come down more heavily, so I ran in and let the waves take me. Either the chill of autumn hadn’t yet reached this stretch of Essex coastline or I was getting used to cold water, but there was no breathless punch, just the cold tingle of salt water.
This was my first time in the North Sea since visiting Bamburgh and I enjoyed its unpredictable nature, the waves rearing up from all directions and the fact that if I kept my head low and looked out to sea, it felt like I was way out by the Dogger Bank rather than twenty feet from dry land, a towel and a flask of hot chocolate.
I stayed in for longer than expected and emerged red, Mum fussing around me as I got dressed. She fretted about hypothermia and the need for me to get somewhere warm, but all I wanted was to stand for a few moments and enjoy the afterglow of the swim. I looked around the coast to the old Martello tower and realised that Jaywick was forever in a time warp, its otherness drawing in anyone who came here without preconceptions, or with a willingness to have them busted.
We took a short walk around to the caravan site. We crossed a deep ditch which my mum said led all the way around to nearby St Osyth. In the 1960s, the campsite used to put on horse rides for holidaying kids, taking them around this now overgrown route and back, an adventure that still held strong memories fifty years on.
The site was much as Mum remembered it. The shop in the same place, the caravans in neat rows and beautifully kept. The only difference was a large ‘fun pool’ at the centre of the park. Swimming in the sea probably wasn’t high on the agenda of those coming here with children in the twenty-first century. It was a shame, but I could see why. The North Sea is unforgiving and does not allow for casual frolicking in the shallows.
We walked back along the promenade, across Sunbeam Avenue, the large windows of the wooden chalets affording huge views out to sea. It was good to be disabused of any notions of decay about this place and share in some happy family memories too.
In Clacton, we ate egg and chips by the pier, the sea churned up and smashing into the high wall at the back of the beach. The purple and yellow bunting was out in force in preparation for the inevitable success of UKIP that evening. But my swim had shown me that this town and area were far more than a political football. The Essex coast had a proud history that was more important than any political ideology, its sea providing happiness even if it looked bleak on the surface.
My dwindling list of Roger’s swims still contained a few more dips in East Anglia, all drawn from the final chapter of Waterlog. These last efforts of my predecessor traced ‘a sort of ley line’ from his farmhouse moat in Mellis to the sea at Walberswick, but having already swum in the latter, and with other swims further afield to attempt too, I decided to pick off the remaining rivers and lakes one by one, in a more haphazard re-creation.
A week after visiting Jaywick I took the train to Diss and met Luke, with whom I’d swum at Mendham Mill the previous summer. I rarely saw Luke without Tim and Molly, despite us having been friends for far longer, since our earliest days at university. With two kids and a life as a touring performance poet he was always busy, so to catch him like this was as much a treat as going for a swim in this pretty corner of England. It was damp and cool as we drove along country lanes with the windows down, Luke singing along to his favourite Pete Doherty tracks as we headed east from where Roger had once lived at Mellis, towards the village of Eye.
Roger had undertaken this final journey of his in late September, so I had a rough idea of what to expect from our impending paddle. We were heading for the Abbey Bridge, a hump-backed affair which traverses the River Dove on the eastern side of this pretty village. Roger talks of being shocked into going in by the sight of two duelling kingfishers and shocked into getting out by the sheer cold. But despite the nip of the water, the picture he paints is of a bucolic swimming hole, frayed ropes hanging from a Scots pine, mist rising as he clambered out and rode his bike on towards the sea.
Unfortunately for Luke and me, this didn’t quite tally with the view we were greeted with as we stared over the parapet and into the Dove. The water was covered with a film of scum, while Fruit Shoot bottles bobbed in the reeds. These were, of course, temporary abominations, but I cursed Roger’s sometimes one-eyed view of the countryside. I’d seen it in the filthy mess I’d found along the River Lark and his failure to mention that Beezley Falls was a paying attraction. To me it felt like a need to see Arcadia where sometimes riverbanks could be more like Perfidious Albion.
It would be fair to say that over two years of trailing Roger had left me sometimes cynical and frustrated, as well as feeling elated and relaxed. As I slung my leg over the rusting fence and onto the steep conglomerate bank, I had to remind myself that Waterlog was not a guidebook and that I had turned it into one for my own purposes. That I was seeing the countryside from my point of view, and Roger had seen it from his.
Things did at least look more promising at the water’s edge. It was raining, but we were ab
le to duck under the arch of the bridge and get changed in the dry. The Dove slipped over a low wall and ruffled around the pool we had seen from the road. I could imagine it being the ideal swimming spot on a warmer day.
Luke was wavering about getting in, and I can’t say I blamed him. He only had a pair of very snug swimming trunks for protection, while I had brought the full works with me: wetsuit, cap, boots, gloves. I walked out into the wet afternoon and dangled my feet over the edge. I could feel the cold of the Dove trying to bite at my toes through the outer layer of rubber.
‘Is it jumpable?’ asked Luke, holding his bare arms to his chest as he stood behind me.
I slipped deeper and found myself standing waist deep.
‘That’s a no, then,’ he said, as he took a step back and assessed his options.
I swam into the fast eddying pool, keeping my head above water. Luke followed, huffing as he swam a cursory few strokes and then scurried out, punching the air as if he’d just won an Olympic race.
I stayed in for a few minutes longer. The frog’s-eye view of the Dove was pleasant, if not delightful. If you ignored the floating fizzy drink bottles and discarded crisp packets, not to mention the rumbling of cars passing over the bridge, it was a handy place for anyone desperate for an outdoor swim.
Desperation was fast becoming the watchword of this adventure. I really wanted to get the trip done and dusted before swimming outside began to resemble a military operation when it came to getting changed. That or taking swims so short they could only really be classified as ice baths.
We left the bridge behind and spent a pleasant afternoon driving about the Suffolk borders, reminiscing about old times, talking about how my journey had gone, his plans for his next show, based on coming of age at university. It was nice to know that over a decade since we had graduated we were all doing well, all living lives that could be considered a success. Swimming had helped me see that I didn’t need to judge myself through the prism of work. I was still doing many of the same jobs I always had, but realised that they did not define me and were nothing to be embarrassed about. To spend time with an old friend meant a lot at that moment. I was proud of him and him me. We picked up Luke’s kids from school and went and ate fish and chips in Diss, sitting opposite the town’s Corn Hall, a happy foursome. Roger’s bucolic notions about the River Dove couldn’t have been further from my mind.