by Roger Deakin
Looking at the towels drying on the balconies of the Cliffs Hotel, up winding steps cut in the sandy cliff, I was reminded of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and the beach hotel in which the film is set. You can saunter out from the hotel in the morning straight on to the beach and bathe before breakfast, just like Hulot. The hotel where Jacques Tati shot the film is still there at St Marc near St Nazare in Britanny. A Tati afficionado I know went and stayed there recently. Apart from a little modernisation inside, nothing had changed. The place has stayed true to the film, and therefore timeless. In fact, Tati had a false entrance to the hotel constructed on the beach, making it look closer to the sands than it really is. Everything else was authentic. The dining room remains the same, except that it has one or two discreet photographs of the director and his crew on its walls. The tall, questing figure of Hulot is never still, and always inclining forward towards je ne sais quoi. Like a bicyclist, he must always keep on the move. This leaning man with a spring in his step somehow defies gravity. His lightness of being stands for a gallant, Quixotic, other-worldly idealism. As a man out of his time, he would have been quite at home on this beach.
Burton Bradstock is one of two seaside places within easy reach of Bridport, a traditional stronghold of sea-swimming. Of the two, West Bay, which the older inhabitants still call Bridport Harbour, is much the closer, a few hundred yards from the main part of the town, and it is where the Bridport people used to learn to swim. There was no pool, so they swam in the harbour mouth from a wooden platform with a ladder. Bridport Swimming Club had its own water fenced off by buoys and, in spite of the swell that often surged through the narrow harbour entrance, novices were harnessed with a canvas strap around the waist and climbed down the ladder into what one Bridport swimmer remembers as the ‘black, icy depths’. When they reached the water the rope was pulled taut and the instructor walked along the planks above like a dog-walker. As your confidence grew, the rope was paid out and slackened, and you literally swam for your life.
The Bridport Swimming Club was pioneered by one George Elliot, the proprietor of Elliot’s Stores in the town, and his friends Andrew Spiller and Colonel Roper, reputedly a one-armed swimmer. Spiller swam a great deal from the beaches and in Bridport Harbour from around 1908, in the local sea-swimming races. Their friend and contemporary swimmer, George Wadham, was returning to England from abroad in 1918, and entering the Mersey during the blackout, when his ship collided with another. Although a strong swimmer, Wadham somehow drowned, and his body was washed up three weeks later on the Welsh coast. It was picked up by a boat whose captain actually knew Wadham, who had been wearing only his underpants and a wide money-belt containing eight guineas when his ship went down. Much to his mother’s annoyance, he had a tattoo on his arm: ‘George Wadham, Bridport’. He had five children, all first-rate swimmers except his daughter Gladys, who hated the sea because it drowned her father.
Gladys Wadham’s daughter, Elizabeth Gale, still lives and farms in Bridport and spent her schooldays swimming in West Bay, often cycling the four miles each way from her home in Burton Bradstock to the swimming club three times a day. Her Uncle George, Wadham’s eldest son, was also a famous Bridport swimmer, polo player, and a mainstay of the club. He survived two wartime shipwrecks, always took cold baths, and swam in the sea off West Bay well into his seventies. He would swim far out to sea alone as often as the weather allowed, and once swam up to a fisherman’s boat a mile out to ask the time.
SECOND DAY, June 8th, 1808, we again met at King’s Mill Bridge, where we got into a Boat, and sailed down the River to an island, a few yards below the Bridge, which we claimed a right to by Landing a Boy of the name of Jervis, and it may from henceforth be called Jervis’ Island. From thence we sailed down the Stream to the first bed of Rushes, and having cut some Rushes therefrom proclaimed the Right of Manor down the River as far as our yesterday’s Perambulation, as far as the meadow called Lewisham Mead. We then turned back, up the River to Lydlinch Water, commonly called the Leaden Water, which we sailed up to a Rush Bed . . . From thence round Ham Meadow to the Watering Place, opposite to a meadow called Hayward’s Meadow, where John White swam across the River, with Levi Warren on his back, and landing in the said Meadow proclaimed Two Acres thereof as belonging to the Parish of Marnhull . . . John White swam across the Meadow and landed in Brownes Meadow on the opposite side of the River proclaiming One Acre.
from ‘An account of the Perambulation of Marnhull,
upstream of Sturminster Newton on the River Stour’
by John Hussey, Lord of the Manor,
June 1808
It is striking how much water there was in the Dorset Stour two hundred years ago, and in June, too. Now it has been banked up to prevent the seasonal flooding of the water meadows that once made the valley so rich and varied through the year. As a consequence, the river winds almost invisibly through Dorset, hidden from view for much of its journey, or fenced from public access. The account of the ‘Perambulation of Marnhull’, which could have come from Richard Jefferies’s Bevis, or Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, is a vivid evocation of the English obsession with the finer points of ownership that still separates us from contact with most of our native rivers. Like a good many of them, the Stour is in a critical condition, however beautiful it may still seem. There comes a point when so much water is abstracted from a river that it almost ceases to flow. Water is drained from it for the public supply at twenty-one different places. Industry and agriculture also take river water. Agricultural fertiliser drains into the sluggish, depleted river and favours the growth of too many algae and weeds. It is a different river from the one Hardy knew when he lived by its banks at Sturminster Newton and wrote The Return of the Native.
Next morning I went down to the Stour by the deserted boathouses of the Bryanston School Rowing Club. Coming round the corner of some tin-roofed sheds, I came upon a grass snake sunbathing on a bank-side lawn. She spotted me straight away and poured herself away through the grass, with her little head held up high, a flickering tongue, and the flash of white collar. It was good to see the snake; they are excellent swimmers and becoming all too rare, but I was more interested that morning in entomology. I had come to the river out of curiosity about the Blandford Bomber, an almost mythological insect that has terrorised the swimmers, and ordinary terrestrial citizens of the Stour valley, for years.
I went in off a concrete slipway and swam downstream between banks of trees in water that was still and soupy, but smelled clean enough. The bow-wave I made stretched in a wide arrowhead from bank to bank. No sign of the Bomber. I drifted gently down from the boathouses and along the Bryanston playing fields as far as the old school bathing place above the weir, now reduced to a concrete platform where diving boards once stood. Old boys who were at the school in its days of river swimming remember that their naked bathes here would invariably be accompanied by giggling from amongst the trees on the opposite bank from Blandford girls who would congregate to watch. Sometimes, too, there would be a yelp, if one of the swimmers was attacked by the Bomber.
The Blandford Bomber is a sub-species of a kind of blackfly, Simulium posticatum, that emerges from the river in enormous numbers in summer. Naturally, half-naked river swimmers are at special risk. The Bomber’s bite can cause severe swelling and pain commonly lasting a couple of weeks, and one victim I spoke to described standing in his vegetable garden like St Sebastian in shorts, blood streaming down his legs from a low-level Bomber raid. In some years, there have been well over a thousand reported victims.
The most interesting thing about the diminutive insect is the rich and imaginative mythology which has developed around it. To local folk it has always been an alien creature, an illegal immigrant with wings, from Africa or South America. One popular version had the fly brought in accidentally with a consignment of butterflies from a South American entomo-logical expedition by the biology teacher at Bryanston school. Others firmly believed that the insect came in as eggs i
n African mud caked on the boots of soldiers returning from the Congo to the Blandford camp. At one stage alarming rumours that the Blandford Fly might spread river blindness, as similar blackfly species actually do in Africa, began to circulate the town. None of this had any foundation in truth, but those who felt the town was in danger of expanding too fast when the Prince of Wales proposed developing nearby Poundbury were only too happy to fan the flames. One resident actually suggested adding the words HOME OF THE BLANDFORD BOMBER underneath all the town signs on the way in. All these myths tell you far more about English xenophobia than about the Bomber, which is in fact one of our forty native blackfly species, and has been here for millions of years. It needs a specialised habitat, which the Stour happens to provide.
The secret weapon system of the Blandford Bomber is the anti-coagulant in its saliva which helps the pregnant female fly, desperate for protein, to suck your blood. Besides giving you a mild dose of haemophilia, it often causes an allergic reaction. Most victims are bitten on the legs, and the curious fact is that there have always been a lot of boys in shorts trotting about in the Stour valley. Besides Bryanston, there are three other independent boarding schools within bombing range of the river. Well-fed, and possibly even blue-blooded, successive generations of pupils have been attractive targets for the Bomber. Direct hits on boys anxious to get off lessons or games, feet up with the Beano in the sanatorium, must have been well-documented by matrons and teachers.
Bryanston schoolboys were segregated on their stretch of private river, which was kept free of weed for the benefit of the young oarsmen, and they were allowed to bathe in it. Most public schools seem to have colonised their own swimming holes, well-mapped in the arcane mythology of the upper classes and arranged into the characteristic hierarchies. Winchester had Gunner’s Hole, the Milkhole and Dalmatia. Harrow had its own pond, where Byron swam, and Etonians bathed near the college on the Thames. Thomas Hughes gives a good idea of the importance of river-swimming in the Avon to the school life of Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays:
This mile of river is rented, or used to be rented, for bathing purposes by the Trustees of the School, for the boys. The footpath to Brownsover crosses the river by ‘The Planks’, a curious old single plank bridge running for fifty or sixty yards into the flat meadows on each side of the river – for in the winter there are frequent floods. Above the Planks were the bathing-places for the smaller boys; Sleath’s, the first bathing-place, where all new boys had to begin, until they had proved to the bathing men (three steady individuals, who were paid to attend daily through the summer to prevent accidents) that they could swim pretty decently, when they were allowed to go on to Anstey’s, about one-hundred-and-fifty yards below. Here there was a hole about six feet deep and twelve feet across, over which the puffing urchins struggled to the opposite side and thought no small beer of themselves for having been out of their depths. Below the Planks came larger and deeper holes, the first of which was Wratislaw’s and the last Swift’s, a famous hole, ten or twelve feet deep in parts, and thirty yards across, from which there was a fine swimming reach right down to the Mill. Swift’s was reserved for the sixth and fifth forms, and had a spring board and two sets of steps: the others had one set of steps each, and were used indifferently by all the lower boys, though each house addicted itself more to one hole than to another. The School house at this time affected Wratislaw’s hole, and Tom and East, who had learnt to swim like fishes, were to be found there as regular as the clock through the summer, always twice, and often three times a day.
The Blandford town children all learnt to swim in a different stretch of the Stour before the river-fed open-air baths were built in a ‘brick tank’ by the town bridge in 1924. They would plunge into the river off the railway viaduct, now demolished, to collect enamel plates from the murky bottom and, when the baths were opened, the tradition was upheld with an annual plate-diving championship. What would an anthropologist coming to Blandford from, say, the Amazon Basin make of such rituals? To the viaduct-divers, getting bitten by the Bomber must have seemed a comparatively minor risk.
Swimming back upstream, I could hardly detect any current at all, nor any sign of the elusive blackfly.
15
A SMALL WORLD
Suffolk, 2 August
ALTHOUGH MUCH RECOVERED from my Frenchman’s Creek swamp fever, I still felt the need for the comfort of my moat, and drove east next day from Dorset to Suffolk to take stock of my wanderings in Wales and the West Country before striking north. When I arrived home in the night, I met a hedgehog outside my back door, floodlit when I turned on the light. He was foraging amongst the dried rose petals of a Buff Beauty. The little aesthete appeared to be eating them, crunching them loudly like crisps. He was in a world of his own, apparently oblivious of me, except that if I moved my foot or made a sound he would freeze. We continued our game of Grandmother’s Footsteps for some minutes before he trotted off at surprising speed, the shiny coat of spines rippling like silk above his trousers of speckled fur.
The moat had warmed up into the almost-seventies, and I swam the sixty lengths of a mile. It doesn’t look any bigger than the local twenty-five-yard swimming pool, but it is five yards longer, and about twenty degrees cooler. When the water is colder, I often swim just two, four, or six lengths: always an even number because I can only climb in and out at one end. Each length takes seventeen breaststrokes, so a mile is about 1,020 strokes. I wondered idly, as I shuttled back and forth, how many strokes I had so far put in on my peregrinations, and how many more there might be to go, and felt thankful that I was not being sponsored, and not in competition with anybody, even myself. I am just an ordinary man-in-the-pool swimmer of no more than average ability, quite happy as long as I am afloat somewhere interesting and preferably beautiful.
In Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, De Quincey describes the close connection between Words-worth’s inspiration and his long daily walks, and reckons up the poet’s total mileage in his lifetime: ‘I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 175,000 or 180,000 English miles.’ My swimming was never going to be in that league. Nor, I feared, would I ever equal the estimated 127,575 arm strokes and 214,326 leg beats put in by Philip Rush on his 1988 three-way Channel swim. The important thing, I told myself, was that a mile in my moat felt every bit as good as a Channel swim to me, and that was all that counted.
The wild, biologically purified water of the moat is quite different from the abstract tap water, which is much more like electricity or gas: something you turn on or off, something you control, and pay for. As Colin Ward argues in his book Reflected in Water, to have turned water into a commodity is unnatural, because water is a gift, like air and sunlight. It wasn’t until the 1920s that mains water began to arrive in many places in Britain, and people began the adjustment from the familiar taste of their own living, local water to the lifeless ubiquity that comes from a tap. Water used to be an absolute; now there are two kinds, the living and the lifeless.
All artificial, semi-natural systems need maintenance and generate work. The moat is no exception. Once the birds have flown from their nesting, the hedge along the south bank needs trimming to let in as much sunlight as possible. Wearing my goggles, I could see pondweed reaching towards the sunlight like Gaudí’s cathedral spires. Newts swam straight up from the clear green depths to gulp air, then down again, like pearl divers. The immediate task was to take out the excessive waterweed. Left alone, it would simply rot down in the moat, silting it up, and eventually deoxygenating it. It would also prevent me swimming.
I used the weed-crome I have improvised out of an iron-headed garden rake heavy enough to sink when I cast it in across the moat on the end of a length of cord. I hauled in the dark bundles of weed, and pitchforked them on to the bank. In every skein of brilliant green weed something shone or wriggled, or there was the metallic glint of a water beetle. The job took me far longer than it sho
uld, because I always sort through each soggy bundle I have trawled for signs of life, rescue it, put it back in the water, and watch it swim off; young newts, a water-boatman, caddis larvae in their stick houses, or a handful of the countless water snails of different kinds that continuously filter the water. Sometimes I put them temporarily in the aquarium to observe. The water-boatman rows his vivid turquoise body just like a penguin when it swims, and the great water beetles are streamlined with the same torpedo shape. I leave each pile of weed beside the bank for a week or so to drain, and the water voles move in underneath, creating a labyrinth of runs under the cool roof of weed.
It is always hard to know how much weed to take out and how much to leave in, because all sorts of creatures, including newts and dragonflies, lay their eggs on it. I cleared the centre and left weed along the margins, which were still full of life; a single sweep of my net brought up five great crested newts, one common newt, two great water beetles, two big water snails and a mass of little ramshorn snails, like tiny ammonites. Around the banks, the subtle crimson flowers of figwort were just coming out, and when I swam, I saw one of the water voles sidling along under cover of the reed-clumps, disappearing into the bank. From water level, I observed the mating dragonflies joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the dandelion clocks that drifted on the thermals over the moat. No doubt the air is cooler over the surface, as it is in the shade of the great willow at one end, where the moat-water flows up to the sky as sap, through a waterfall of rustling silver leaves.