Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  Judith and the kamikaze swimmers at the mill had told me about a magnificent spring-fed flooded quarry on the outskirts of Bristol, where there had been a swimming club since the 1920s, and where there were diving boards. The wooded, hewn cliffsides of the quarry provided a sheltered suntrap, and there was a long waiting list to join the club. Fortunately, one of Judith’s sisters was a member, and I wangled an invitation to swim there that very afternoon.

  I was welcomed by the superintendent, changed in an enclosure where everyone just left their clothes trustingly on a peg or a wooden bench, and went in off the springboard for a long swim in the glassy, sweet-smelling springwater. It was medium cool, sixty-two degrees, and I shared the three hundred yards of lake with a dozen late-afternoon swimmers, all women. Some swam in conversational pairs, others alone, lost in thought, or just drifted about the huge surface as one might doodle on a piece of paper.

  I had driven over through the Cotswolds and parked in a leafy suburban avenue in the north of Bristol, where I passed through the elegant ironwork gateway of the Henleaze Swimming Club straight into the 1920s. The lake shone like a river by banks of weeping willows and well-kept lawns dotted with little groups of sunbathers. It was long and deep, as though it flowed between the canyon walls of the old quarry. Gardeners and their sheds stood silhouetted along the clifftop. The club is only three miles from the city centre, and wildly popular. Membership is limited to 1,300, with a waiting list of about 800. You have to show you can swim at least 50 metres before you can join, and the lake still has a fine set of high diving boards. The 10-metre board at the top, from which Olympic divers used to give displays in the 1930s and ’40s, is now reckoned too high by the ASA for the depth of water beneath it, so divers use the 7- and 5-metre boards and a 2-metre springboard. Everything is beautifully maintained.

  I took advantage of the absence of congestion on the lake to practise my backstroke, always a problem style in the swimming pool because of the danger of collision with another swimmer, or worse, if you are preoccupied with some knotty philosophical question, concussion on the handrail at the other end. The coolness of the water was a sign of its depth, although the year before it had reached seventy-six degrees at the height of the season. They take regular samples, which are monitored by the public health people, and no one seemed to worry about sharing the lake with carp. This urban oasis was clearly dedicated principally to swimming and diving purely for pleasure, not competition, but from time to time there are friendly distance swims with other clubs. Diving boards are, sadly, becoming quite a rarity around pools, and with so little opportunity for self-education there must be some question about our future as a nation of divers. Mothers and children picnicked on the grass, and we were joined in the water by a septuagenarian regular of the club, clocking up one of her ninety-two swims of the season.

  When the workmen struck springs in 1912 and the quarry flooded, it was bought by a local doctor. He was later approached by a group of enterprising Bristol swimmers who realised the new lake’s potential and formed the Henleaze Swimming Club in 1919. The club was allowed to swim in the lake, and eventually bought it for £450 in 1933. Men changed behind a canvas screen; women in a marquee. Now there’s a fine 1930s half-timbered women’s pavilion and the men sunbathe and change in a sunny arbour with rows of the kind of cast-iron coat-pegs the bullies used to hit our heads against in the school cloakrooms.

  Until recently, a member in his nineties used to swim in the lake most days. They also have two regulars aged eighty-four and eighty-two. One is thin and stringy and arrives after his three-mile run round the golf course in the morning; the other has legs like tree-trunks, arrives on his bike, and sits around smoking a pipe in the men’s enclosure all day. As we changed, my hosts had described his swimming style arcanely as ‘a gut-butting stroke’. By the sound of it, I think he may have been one of the last living exponents of the ‘trudgeon’ style of swimming, later to be superseded by the crawl. An English pioneer of speed swimming, Mr J. Trudgen, originally learned the stroke from the natives of South America, and caused a sensation here when he won an important race on 11 August 1873, swimming with something like an over-arm crawl action and breaststroke leg kicks. In a popular corruption of Trudgen’s name, the style became known as the ‘trudgeon’, possibly by unconscious association with the dainty fish we used to haul out of the Grand Union Canal as boys, the gudgeon.

  Over tea and rock-cakes on the clubhouse lawn afterwards, the Henleaze Club members were full of suggestions about interesting swimming holes I might sample up and down the country. Some of these sounded highly intriguing, like the two Devon waterholes known to their discoverer as Waterhole One and Waterhole Two: a pair of steep-sided disused quarry shafts he dives into to reach the black water eight or nine feet down. It is fathomless and icy cold as you go deeper, but when you climb out there’s a warm, sunny knoll for sunbathing and drying off.

  The beginnings of the Henleaze Swimming Club in 1919 leading up to its flowering in the year it bought the lake and quarry in 1933 coincided with a spectacular burgeoning of interest in swimming in Britain. In 1929 there were 276 swimming clubs in Britain, and the ASA issued a booklet on the construction of pools. By 1930, the Ministry of Labour was giving 41 per cent grants towards the cost of building swimming pools, and by 1931 there existed in England alone about 1,400 swimming clubs; a five-fold increase over two years. All over the country people were busy putting up diving boards and building or improvising their own baths. The swimmers at Bromborough in Cheshire were building their own pool, helped by the Price’s Candle Company. The Swimming Times reported: ‘They have a 50 yards straight away course and are aiming at one with a lap of 110 yards. The pool is the works reservoir, into which warm and perfectly clear water is constantly trickling. It is, therefore, slightly above tea temperature.’

  A lucrative market in swimwear was also developing very nicely. Jantzen were advertising ‘Kellermann Sea Togs’, modelled on the pioneering one-piece costume worn by the Australian distance swimmer Annette Kellermann, who had done so much to make swimming popular with her spectacular public displays. Reports from new clubs flooded into the offices of the Swimming Times, under such noms de plume as ‘Nauticus’, ‘Buoyant’, ‘Porpoise’, and the joys of one new pool were described ecstatically as like swimming ‘in the presence of St Natatious, the Bath Superintendent of Paradise’. Swimming cigarette-cards were issued by the Imperial Tobacco Company and the Morning Post carried regular articles on swimming and diving by W. J. Howcroft, Joyce Cooper, and Pete Desjardins, the Olympic high and springboard champion, and the only diver ever awarded maximum points by all judges.

  On the lawn of the Henleaze Club, I was busy noting down more swimming holes from the generous collective memory of the members: ‘You head for a little place called Bramford Speke by the Exe on the road out of Exeter beyond Crediton. Take a path off to the left by the bridge and the really great place to swim is across a couple of fields . . .’ Entering wholeheartedly into the spirit of my quest, they were soon poring with me over a map of the Severn hinterland around Nailsea, wondering about the swimming potential of Bathing Pond Wood near Wraxhall, or Watercress Farm at Long Ashton.

  When I described my frustrating, non-swimming visit to Bath, several of the swimmers mentioned the Farleigh Hungerford Swimming Club eight miles away on the River Frome. During the hot summer of 1996, it had received a sudden influx of new members from Bath when the city’s newly privatised pool went under. They put me in touch with Rob, the club secretary, and Phil, the farmer who owns their riverside field. They asked me over next morning for what they call in Farleigh Hungerford ‘Real Swimming’.

  I arrived in the mid-morning on an enchanting south-facing grassy hillside, swooping down to the riverside through a sheltered little water meadow almost within sight of the old castle at Farleigh. At the top of the rise was a wood-framed tin hut with ‘MEN’ on the door, hearts and arrows on the walls, and a pine floor worn smooth by generations o
f bare feet. It was a lot more commodious than the ladies’ changing room, which was roofed by the sky. There were triple-tiered diving boards and, at the other end of the little concrete quay, a fine ash springboard, traditionally coconut-matted. I dived in off this and came up near the other side of the river in water that was deep and cold. There wasn’t a soul about; everyone was at work, but I had been told to help myself to a swim anyway. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I have to own up to breaking rule six of the club, which stipulates that ‘All members must wear bathing costumes or shorts (not slips), nor white.’ Diving naked into a clear, black river pool off old-fashioned coconut-matted boards is not a pleasure that comes along every day.

  The only sound was the roar of the weir just downstream, and the piping of an approaching kingfisher. Like a gas flame leaping into life, it suddenly burst over me. Later, as I lay sunbathing up by the hut, it came and flickered about the diving boards, fishing the pool. The river was fringed with old alders and willows, their gnarled roots exposed and polished by the toes of countless swimmers. Steel ladders led down the banks, which plunged vertically into deep water. I sat on the slippery stone steps of the weir and edged along them to the middle. Downstream the Frome was shallow, fast-running and very clear over a stony bottom dappled in sunlight. In wet mud by the diving quay, I saw the five-starred prints of an otter, so fresh that the mud still stood up where the claws had pricked it.

  The place was refreshingly free of notices. A discreet message from the county council exhorted swimmers to cover up all cuts with plaster – always a wise precaution against infection – and not to drink the water. (They come and take a sample here once a month to make sure it is safe enough for swimming.) Five feet off the water, the springboard gave a reassuring clank each time I sprang off. Fish rose in the pool and I dived into the widening centre of each ripple.

  The river swimming club at Farleigh Hungerford goes back some seventy years to 1930, when a group of local people were already swimming in the River Frome by the Greenhill brothers’ farm. People would walk the three miles or so out there from Trowbridge for a swim and a drink at the Hungerford Arms – and perhaps a taste of the Greenhill brothers’ cider. Others came to Farleigh to picnic at the castle or the watermill, or to visit the watercress beds there. Originally, the core group of young swimmers bathed from the right bank of the river nearest the road. The four Greenhill brothers, keen swimmers themselves, had the farm on the other bank, and invited the bathers to use it, and to camp on their land.

  By 1933 they had elected a president, George Kemp, and a secretary, George Applegate, and formed a committee. A swimming hole had become the Farleigh & District Swimming Club. They designed their own coat of arms, the club initials rampant around a castle, which they wore on their black one-piece costumes. A flag of the same design was run up the club flagpole whenever they swam. The original club was about thirty strong. George Applegate’s dad, who was an engineer in Westbury, built the sturdy steel-framed diving board platform and a footbridge spanning the river. The club headquarters was the Hungerford Arms in Farleigh, and club rules were drawn up. Rule six was the one I had accidentally broken, against skin dipping, and rule seven said, ‘Decency must be strictly observed.’ Rule nine forbade members to use obscene language. A membership card for the 1936 season shows the annual subscription as 1s 6d (7½p, equivalent to about £5 today) and carries advertisements for Usher’s Ales and B&B at the Hungerford Arms. Under the headline HAPPY DAYS, MINNOWS!, the local Trowbridge chemist (himself a keen swimmer) offered helmets, ear-plugs and water wings.

  Bill Blick used to cycle over to Farleigh every morning for a swim all the year round, breaking the ice if necessary. There was a Christmas Day swim, with Arthur Wells’s home-made wine to revive everybody, and there were days towards the end of the season when they would floodlight the river with the headlamps of cars and swim on into the night. Members included the local butcher and fishmonger, and Tom Clarke, a photographer from the Wiltshire Times. He recorded many of the idyllic scenes from those days, now in the club archive; groups of bathers cooling in the weir like Busby Berkeley’s Babes, diving from the boards, or swimming in the pool. Half a dozen of the Farleigh swimmers – Les Prince, Roy Virgo, George Applegate, Les Wells, George Raymond, ‘Timber’ Woodman and Frank Francis – would camp out in the Greenhills’ apple orchard each year from Easter until September, swimming every morning at six-thirty before cycling to work at Trowbridge and helping with the hay-making.

  The Farleigh swimmers set about building a wooden changing hut, the footbridge, toilets, wooden steps to the top of the weir, a wooden diving-stage (the steel one came later), and a primitive springboard improvised from a long plank nailed over a treestump: ‘A bit dangerous when wet and slippery, but it served its purpose.’ Later on came George Applegate’s three-tier angle-iron frame with three extended springboards for diving into the deep pool. ‘We made the foundation of cement and a lot of scrap iron including old cycle frames to bind it together. The diving-stage was the pride of our swimming club, and there were steps in and out of the river. A lifebelt was hung handy in case of emergency but most bathers were pretty safe with so many good swimmers around.’ There were diving competitions, galas, swimming races with neighbouring clubs, and silver cups to be won. During the war, the Land Army women used to come from the local farms in hot weather to bathe. Not all the club swimmers returned in 1945. Their friends made a metal plaque in their memory and bolted it to the support of the springboard.

  Eventually the farm was being run by just two of the Greenhill brothers. One of the early club members, Blanche Francis, remembered them. ‘They were a couple of charmers, like the Marx Brothers. They let the boys roam all over their land, riding their motorcycles, camping and swimming.’ When all but one of the brothers had died, in 1970, Castle Farm was sold, and the new owner took a less liberal view of the swimming. The club was faced with extinction when she eventually announced she would not continue their licence. But they were saved by the generosity of the farmer on the opposite bank. It cost them £1,000 and a lot of extra work to move everything across the river – diving boards, changing huts, toilets, steps, etc. – but they did it, and the club flag is flying again at Farleigh.

  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. The previous year, the Farleigh swimmers had been joined one hot Sunday by a bullock which leapt in beside them off an old diving board support. A crowd of 200 watched it swim downstream pursued by club members with a rope. It had eventually scrambled back ashore. Nothing like this ever happens in swimming pools.

  One of the moorhens suddenly exploded like a car alarm and wouldn’t stop its hiccupping, even when I climbed out and lay drying in the sun on the warm coconut matting, my head over the edge of the board gazing down into the water. Dandelion clocks filled the meadow, and the yellow smudge of ladies’ bedstraw. A cabbage-white butterfly explored, alighting on a lost white sock, then a girl’s bathing costume put out to dry on the hedge and left behind. It must have thought the badges were flowers, the way it pondered them as though slowly reading: ‘Frome Girls’ Swimming 25m’, ‘ASA Rainbow Award 50m’. The tin changing shed clicked as it expanded in the sunshine. A young pheasant cleared its throat and coughed haltingly in the hedgerow.

  11

  SALMON-RUNS

  Dartmoor, 9 July

  DARTMOOR LOOKED DAUNTING, especially on the enormous map, which had taken up the whole of my billiard-table desk in the Map Room in Cambridge. Even on paper, I kept losing my place, running my finger along rivers spawned amidst the thin brown contours of peat-bogs, hills and tors. By
the time I actually crossed the moor in the car the following afternoon, I was in a suitably wild, dark mood after sweating in traffic for hours on the way down through Somerset. It was one of several moments when I began seriously to question the whole outlandish project. I had naively imagined bouncing along the lanes of England in some open-topped bus, bursting with friends, their towels and costumes hung out to dry like flags in the breeze, and me at the wheel like Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday. Instead, of course, they were all far too busy with their own lives, and my journey was proving a much more solitary, even fugitive affair.

  A cold dip in the West Dart River by the stone saddle bridge at Hexworthy came along just in time. I threw myself into a deep pool just upstream, gasping at the shock, and swam down into the stony salmon-haunts below. Surfacing, my spirits began to revive. I was, after all, on my way to visit friends; a family of Dartmoor river-swimmers. The West Dart is spectacular just here, dropping fast over the moor, surging at giant granite slabs ten or twelve feet long. I climbed round into the rapids above the pool and shot down into the eddy in the shadow of the bridge, disturbing a dipper that flew a rock or two away. The water tasted cold and fresh. Watched by a group of Japanese tourists on the bridge, I wallowed, splashed and dived, washing away the journey, feeling a little like an inexpert otter in the zoo, then dried off on warm granite. Half an hour later, the salmon were leaping there.

  On Thursday afternoon I went with my friends, under oath of secrecy, to a bathing place where the Dart is joined by an unusually cold moorland torrent. We will call it the Sherberton Stream. Almost from its source in two springs high up beneath the summit of a tor, the torrent rushes headlong downhill, shaded by dense woodland all the way. So the springwater emerges into the Dart as cool as it was underground. The Dart slid like a white glacier into a deep, black pool, through a steep valley of oak and holly woods.