Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  Most of the people who come to Ironmonger Row do so regularly, simply because, for a few pounds, the experience gives them an enormous amount of pleasure. They are what Josie in Steaming calls ‘the ordinary men and women who have been coming to the baths all their lives for a swim or a laundry or to get together in a bit of steam to relax and pass the time together’. Next time you see people walking on air down Ironmonger Row, you’ll know why.

  *

  In Steaming, the women bathers stage an occupation of their pool and Turkish baths in order to save them from the threat of closure. The following week, I had an early evening date to play the last game of water polo at the Marshall Street Baths in Soho before they were due to close, under a controversial plan by Westminster City Council to privatise them, and sell off the site for redevelopment into flats. The developers planned to re-open the pool as part of a private fitness club, whose members would enjoy ‘preferential facilities’. The protesting swimmers had invited me to come and join them, having read a pro-swimming article I wrote in a newspaper.

  Marshall Street has always been a public pool much valued by Soho people and office and shop workers from the West End. Few of the lunchtime or evening swimmers would be able to afford to join a private club. The polo players and regular swimmers had formed themselves into a pressure group to oppose the privatisation and ensure that the pool would remain open as a public baths. Wandering through Soho on a hot day, you could always look in through the wide-open doors of the baths at the elegant wide-arched roof, like a French railway station, and see the swimmers clocking up their lengths in the street-level pool. Marshall Street is one of the most beautiful indoor pools in this country. Since swimming is the most popular participation sport in Britain, it seemed astonishing to me that London could still be losing valuable and much-loved public pools like this from public ownership.

  The polo began with a burst of intense training, during which we swam widths at manic speed. Then we pitched into the fastest, roughest, most demanding game in the book, a mêlée of windmilling crawl, staccato breaststroke, even butterfly, as swimmers flung themselves after the ball up and down the pool. You needed reckless courage, rocket-fuelled acceleration, and no scruples whatsoever to succeed. It was like the stock market. Goals were scored with bewildering speed in a flurry of white water designed to camouflage the flagrant fouling that was going on everywhere beneath the surface. This may sound like an all-male affair, but swimmers of both sexes played with uninhibited gusto.

  The last game was over, but not the swimmers’ struggle to persuade Westminster Council to re-open Marshall Street Baths as an affordable public pool open to everyone on equal terms. Something of a fiasco ensued, in which the property developer withdrew, leaving the baths shut and the swimmers high and dry. Westminster Council still refuse to vote the necessary subsidy that could guarantee a future for the building as a public pool. Perhaps the swimmers should enlist the help of the photographer Tom Merrillion, whose fine exhibition of life studies taken at the Moseley Road Baths in Birmingham, and shown at the West Midlands Arts Centre recently, helped to save the baths from closure by Birmingham City Council.

  Winter had really set in, and the night was already freezing when I came out into Marshall Street and biked through the traffic for a second swim at the Oasis open-air pool in Covent Garden. My face was numb when I arrived outside at the corner of Endell Street – perfect conditions for an outdoor swim.

  I walked out to the pool across a coconut rug thoughtfully laid across the frosty paving stones. The air was biting, but the water was simmering at eighty-four fahrenheit, and steaming. A dense cotton-wool mist rose off the surface, diffusing the lights and reflecting off the lifeguard’s glass kiosk. But it was too cold to sit about. He or she (I couldn’t see) paced up and down by the pool muffled in a thick parka with a tracksuit underneath and a bathing costume several layers in, like a Russian doll. All around, London was breathing, clicking and buzzing under an orange sky. Floating on my back in the pool and looking up, I saw the balconies of council flats and bright offices lit up with people at computers in the windows, and, up above, a black starry sky with now and again a jet. As a swimmer, I felt connected to everyday life in a way I never do in an indoor pool. I had ridden here under my own steam, and here I was in the centre of London gazing up at the stars in the utmost luxury of a heated outdoor pool. It seemed the height of civilisation. Yet this was no exclusive private pool; with a Leisure Card from Camden Council, you could get in for £1. With Lubetkin’s High Point pool in Highgate, this must be the best cold-weather pool in London. It was exhilarating to swim wild and free in the middle of the big city in November, breathing in the sharp, frosty air, limbs suffused with the warmth of the pool. Other swimmers materialised out of the mist and glided past silently. All you heard was the immediate lapping of the water and the big rumble and hum of the invisible city beyond the ramparts of flats and offices. Just a few yards away through the darkness, other bathers were visible through the glass walls of the indoor pool. It was warm in there, but there is no warmth as satisfying as heated outdoor water on a frosty night. Floating in the surreal space between extremes of hot and cold, it is so different from the physical world you are used to that you are suspended in time.

  The swimming was mesmeric, and very like I imagine it is in some of the Moscow pools. Yuri Luzhkov, the Moscow mayor known as ‘The Builder’, rebuilt the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, levelled by Stalin in 1931, and turned it into a swimming pool whose golden domes now shine over the Moscow city centre. It would be high on my list of priorities in the depths of a Russian winter. Judith, whom I had met in the summer swimming in the Avon near Evesham, had described swimming in a heated outdoor pool in Moscow behind the Pushkin Museum. You are allotted your own changing cubicle decorated with tubs of geraniums, and emerge from it straight into the pool by diving through a kind of underwater cat-flap. When Judith swam there, the air above the pool was twenty-eight degrees below freezing. Your hair freezes, and there are icicles and snow around the edge of the pool, but the water is warm and steaming. Then you must remember the number of your cubicle and avoid swimming back through the wrong cat-flap. Surfacing inside your cabin, you return to the frozen streets.

  I swam for a long time in the fog, then adjourned to a cinema.

  34

  THE WALBERSWICK SHIVERERS

  Suffolk, 25 December

  I HAD INVITED A group of friends to come and celebrate my journey’s end with a Christmas Day swim in the North Sea. There was little enough good cheer about the weather when we arrived in Walberswick: driving rain and breakers the colour of dirty knickers licking up the beach. We had arranged to meet at eleven o’clock at the Hidden Hut, a clapboard and pebble-dash seaside bungalow with a surprisingly enormous sitting room warmed by a woozing wood stove. My friends Lucy and Madeleine had rented it for the week, and the sweet smell of onion soup already simmering on the hob greeted me as I stepped in out of the horizontal rain to join the gently steaming group in front of the stove. Amongst them were Tim and Meg, serious year-round bathers with a beach hut at Southwold, in a sedate row named after the English monarchs. Theirs is called ‘Karl’. Tim broke the news to me that for the first time in years he was going to have to forgo his Christmas North Sea dip because of a touch of flu. Everyone else, however, already had their swimming costumes on under their clothes, ready for a quick change by the sea.

  Apart from Tim and Meg, none of us was in the habit of doing this sort of thing, but I had the idea of starting something in Walberswick along the lines of the original Hove Shiverers, who began life in the early 1920s with a handful of winter swimmers, and still meet on Christmas Day. I had been stirred to action by reading one of their early annual reports, written in February 1931, which included the ringing words:

  Ten years ago there were no Shiverers. Ten years ago serious winter swimming was at a standstill in our district, and the Hove baths closed its hospitable doors in the winter evenings.
People who worked all day, or children who went to school, if they wished to swim in the evening had no choice but the sea. A few swimmers, newcomers to Hove, looked at the prospect one winter’s night and shivered, and that shiver has spread until nearly a thousand now join in the vibration.

  With a last glance at the smug little wood stove, we set off for the beach in the slanting, stinging rain driven by a freak wind from the south-west. It was cold, yet there was a hint of mercy in this wind and it lacked the bite of the usual winter draughts that come straight from Russia to bear-hug the Walberswick dunes.

  When we arrived on the beach and confronted the sea, the entire swimming party spontaneously bottled out. This was outright mutiny, a wholesale desertion by the Walberswick Shiverers, but what could I do? I was left gamely trying to balance on one leg in the wind and struggle out of a pair of long-johns and into my frozen Speedos. Trunks always seem especially sensitive to the relative humidity of the surrounding atmosphere. Like the seaweed we used to bring home from holiday to hang up by the back door and forecast the weather, costumes breathe in humidity and hold on to it. They never quite dry out, even dangling before the fire all night. The long-johns got stuck round my ankles, and wrestled me on to the wet pebbles just as more well-insulated well-wishers, Virginia and Florence, came into sight along the beach, Virginia in a massive fake ocelot coat, me in goosepimples.

  Once in the trunks, I wasted no time getting rainswept, and strode with as much casual determination as I could muster straight into the khaki waves. The sea was not quite as cold as I had feared when I woke up in the night and thought about it, but it was still a case of gritting my teeth and thinking of England for that first moment or two. Having the loyal Shiverers on the beach was a big boost to the morale or, put another way, a big deterrent to copping out. I would, however, have preferred them to be in the water with me. Once fully immersed and striking out for deeper water, I experienced the intoxication of the fiery cold, and found myself splashing about and even body-surfing with manic energy. A dog spotted me and thought it would come and join in the fun. It scampered down to the shore, got one paw wet and instantly retreated. I stayed in far longer than I had intended and even received a modest round of applause when I emerged, to the outstretched towels and concerned piling-on of warm sweaters normally reserved for young children. Very welcome it was too, and my knees glowed bright purple as our party of non-playing swimmers crunched back, still snug in their bathing costumes, towards the beach huts and over the dunes, home to the Hidden Hut and Lucy’s onion soup.

  35

  ON ICE

  Suffolk, 1 January

  WHEN THE MOAT and ponds froze hard on New Year’s Eve, I went out on the ice next morning to attend to their conservation for the coming year by cutting the overhanging branches and brambles away. If I couldn’t take a swim in the moat, at least I could take a walk or a skate on it. Of course, I could have hacked a hole in the ice and taken my New Year’s Day dip as they do at Highgate Ponds or Tooting Bec Lido. But it is unwise for a swimmer to do such things without help at hand. In any case, this was a rare opportunity to venture on the ice and do work that is awkward to do from a boat.

  The ice was full of ripples, like the sand at low tide on Camber Sands, evidence of the Arctic wind that blew over it as it froze. Too bumpy for ice-skating. Here and there was an unexplained hole that had patched itself with clearer, blacker ice, like a window into the water below. Thoreau used to cut such holes in the ice on Walden Pond, kneeling to gaze into the ‘quiet parlour of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass’.

  A few winters ago I entertained a dozen friends to lunch on the frozen moat. We carried the dining table out there, and had just begun our pudding when there was a sound of cracking ice that ran like thunder from one end to the other. I have never seen people get up so fast. Several guests screamed and dived for the bank. Others were too relaxed in their cups to worry, and indeed the ice held perfectly firm. It was like a scene on the Titanic. On another occasion I made a bonfire on the ice, and it burned for hours without ever melting its way through into the water. Afterwards, we just swept away the ash and skated over the dark frozen patch where it had been.

  The adventure of each sinuous bough, reaching out over the water in search of sunlight, had created flowing, serpentine lines that I hesitated to cut through. I had to remind myself of the trees’ ability to regenerate themselves. Then I made the first incision. I worked with a small triangular bowsaw. It is surprising how much you can do with one in a day. Bowsaws have the supreme advantage of being quiet and allowing you to work at your own human pace. The manic dictatorship of the chainsaw seems to deafen you to all reason or judgement. A chainsaw is ideal for mechanical chores like cutting up logs, but it deprives you of the greatest pleasure of working in the woods: the opportunity to listen to the natural sounds around you. The knowledge that the ice may not stay for long concentrates the mind wonderfully, and by the end of the day I had produced a good pile of next year’s firewood. I built it into a hollow cairn on the bank, after the fashion of the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, who has often done his finest work in ice. In the summer it would remind me of the ice, and wild hops would clamber over it. The moat was still partially surrounded by trees but they no longer oppressed it. It could breathe more freely. I made a bonfire of the brushwood and warmed myself by it in the dusk.

  36

  TO THE SEA

  IT WAS LATE September, just over two years after the rainstorm in the moat when I had first conceived my amphibious journey, and eighteen months after my first swims on the Scilly Isles. I had been at my desk all summer writing up my log and often swimming in the moat, which helped clear my mind, rendering the impressions and recollections of my wanderings more lucid. The more I wrote, the more I missed my adventures and longed to make one more swim across the county, beginning in my moat and ending in the sea.

  I rose early in the autumn half-light, crossed the wet lawn in my nightshirt, and swam several lengths of the moat, mist rising off it from six inches above the surface. I wore goggles and plunged my face underwater at each stroke so that the clusters of duckweed looming up looked like the models of molecules built by Crick and Watson in their Cambridge laboratory in the early sixties. It was a cold, grey dawn, and the icy water jolted me awake, then settled me into an aquatic frame of mind for the journey ahead. I had drawn a sort of ley-line across the map of Suffolk, beginning in my moat and joining up all the swimmable water on the way in a ‘subterranean stream’ to the sea twenty-five miles to the east at Walberswick. This was to be my route, a kind of homage to John Cheever and ‘The Swimmer’. Instead of walking or running like Ned Merrill in the story (or Burt Lancaster in the film), I would bicycle, in the hope of doing the trip in a single day under my own steam.

  After breakfast, I pedalled off down our village green in a dense fog. In spite of a promising weather forecast, here I was with both bike lamps on at half-past eight wondering what on earth I was doing. My route lay along a procession of some of the most beautiful churches in Suffolk – Mellis, Yaxley, Eye, Horham, Stradbroke, Laxfield, Ubbeston, Huntingfield, Walpole, Bramfield, Blythburgh (which is probably the finest, anywhere), and finally the wonderful ruins of Walberswick. If the mist would only clear, their flint towers would stand out on the horizon like milestones all the way to the sea.

  I soon reached Eye, where I leant the bike beside the Abbey bridge over the River Dove and clambered down the bank to a pool almost directly below the brick arch, hidden from the road by the parapet, where the girls from the old Eye Grammar School used to come to bathe. Two frayed and much-knotted ropes still dangled from a tall Scots pine. I was mentally preparing myself for a ritual dip when a pair of loudly disputing kingfishers shot past me straight through the bridge. They shocked me into going in, and going in soon shocked me into coming straight out again into the relative warmth of the mist, now penetrated by sunbeams and beginning to lift as I went up Dragon Hill o
n the long haul to Stradbroke. My course passed through Horham, where Benjamin Britten used to retreat from the endless visitors at Aldeburgh and compose at his cottage. Always a keen bather, he had a plastic swimming tank in the garden.

  By the time I reached Stradbroke five miles on, I was looking forward to the warmth of the village swimming pool. Here was a place that has had the good sense to build its health centre, indoor pool and village hall next door to each other as if to confirm that swimming can seriously improve your health and social life. Inside, twenty Suffolk women in grey rinses and black one-piece costumes were having a fine time doing water aerobics, like a bingo audience. I swam lengths in a lane down one side of the little twenty-metre pool, in water at eighty-two degrees, with two other local swimmers, and was struck by the easy informality of the place. This is where the citizenry of Stradbroke come to relax, take their exercise, exchange gossip, and linger in the privacy of steam under the hot shower. The infants learn to swim here almost from birth, and the older children are taught to roll like the Esquimaux in the brightly-coloured kayaks that hang upright round the walls like chrysalids.