Waterlog Read online

  It was getting really warm, and, not to be outdone, we stripped off to wade and swim alternately in the general direction of Wells, accompanied by a posse of oystercatchers and several sandpipers, who scampered after invisible delicacies with desperate urgency as the tide went out, uttering little cries of discovery. We again felt the fierce undertow that runs along this coast, and the sea bottom was full of sudden dips and channels. Bathing off this beach, you feel the literal meaning behind Larkin’s line about misery in ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘It deepens like a coastal shelf.’ I thought of the two children, brother and sister, who had drowned a few miles away, at Holme-next-the-Sea a year or so earlier. The family had been picnicking on the wide beach and the children had wandered off to play or paddle in the far-off sea. Their parents suddenly realised they had lost sight of them and began the increasingly desperate search. In line with contemporary fears about paedophiles, much of the anxiety and police attention focused on the possibility of abduction, at the expense of what some might consider the far more obvious danger: the sea. Nobody will ever know what actually happened that day, but it is likely that the children paddled innocently into the warm, inviting shallows, only to stumble into one of those sudden troughs in the sand and find themselves in deep water, clutched by the riptide. In the space of two weeks they were to be carried thirty-four miles round the coast to the beach at Sheringham by the same powerful sea current that sweeps south down the whole east coast of this island, bringing ever more pebbles to the great shingle bank at Blakeney Point.

  There were places where the current tugging at our legs almost stopped us wading, and where swimming would not have been a good idea. Whenever we swam, we noticed how much we drifted. Like the currents, waves behave differently all along this beach, and we came to a place where people were vigorously body-surfing into the shallows. I thought of Byron, who ‘wantoned’ in the breakers in Italy at Lerici. We threw ourselves into the naked buoyant tumbling, and gloried in the abandonment in wave after wave, happy as the bathing pigs of Kythnos we had once discovered.

  We had been sailing across the Aegean in a small wooden sloop, heading for the harbour at the northern end of Kythnos, but were blown so far off course by the Meltemi that we almost missed the island altogether. Having just managed to claw our way around its southern tip into the shelter of a providential cove, we rode out an anxious night and awoke to rosy-fingered dawn and a perfect sandy bay. There was not a soul in sight. But the beach was not empty. In the shade of a tin shelter on driftwood stilts, occasionally strolling into the sea for a dip and a roll in the shallows, lolled a dozen ample sows. I hope those pigs still have the beach to themselves.

  Heading back for tea at Holkham Hall, we followed the tracks of a pram which had been wheeled a mile across the sands. Amongst the big limes and oaks in the park there were roe deer and sheep, and on the higher fields, an abundance of partridges and hares. The estate is not normally artificially stocked with partridges, so their success must be ascribed to the habitat. There has always been plenty of shooting on these Norfolk estates, but there are miles of good hedges too, the crucial factor for the breeding partridge. I had come across a copy of The Shooting Man’s Bedside Book by ‘BB’ staying with some country friends. Holkham featured strongly in the chapter on record bags. It may not make ideal bedside reading for all of us, but on 19 December 1877 a shooting party of eleven killed 1,215 hares, and on 7 November 1905 a party of eight shot 1,671 partridge. It was a neighbouring estate, however, that took the prize for the Record Mixed Bag. At the end of a single day’s shooting at Stanford on 31 January 1889, Lord Walsingham’s party staggered in with an assortment of pheasants, partridges, red-legged partridges, mallard, gadwall, pochard, goldeneye, teal, swans, cygnet, woodcock, snipe, jack snipe, wood pigeon, herons, coots, moorhens, hares, rabbits, otter, pike and rat. A rare tribute to the biodiversity of north Norfolk.

  Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka the Otter, loved the abundance and variety of living creatures in this countryside, and for seven years he lived and farmed five miles along the coast at Stiffkey. When Dudley returned home after tea, this is where I went, pitching my tent in a field that was once part of a wartime RAF camp, overlooking thousands of acres of wild saltmarsh, and Cabbage Creek. It is easy to get lost in this watery maze, and find yourself marooned on a rising tide.

  From 1937, Williamson farmed 235 acres here, struggling to bring the derelict farmland back into good heart at Old Hall Farm. He recorded his day-to-day adventures in The Story of a Norfolk Farm, and in a regular column in the Evening Standard which ran all through 1944 and ’45, under the title ‘A Breath of Country Air’. He always left writing the column until the last possible moment, and his two little boys would be waiting in the kitchen, re-tying the laces of their plimsolls ready for the sprint up Stiffkey street to the post van at half past four. The poet of Tarka bathed with his children in the warm water of the marsh pools, often by moonlight, after as much as twelve hours’ prickly work in the harvest fields.

  At dimmit-light, or dimsey, as they called twilight on Tarka’s River Taw in Devon (where Williamson lived before and after Stiffkey), I went out over Stiffkey Marshes and swam in the Stiffkey Freshes. A deep pink moon rose up over Blakeney Point, whose bleached pebbles shone from across the water. Although I couldn’t see them, I knew there were seals not far away on its outer beaches. A line of small boats rode at their moorings out in Blakeney harbour.

  I felt the tide running in as I entered the sea. It advanced at astonishing speed, gaining three or four feet each minute, spilling over the almost level muddy sands in a rolling three-mile meniscus that stretched unbroken all the way west to Wells. The water was warming itself as it inched up the wandering guts and channels where the sun had beaten all day. It was calmed by the sheltering arm of the great shingle bank opposite. I floated out into the freshes, the water beyond the marsh, through bands of seaweed, letting myself drift with the tide along the strand towards the mouth of the Stiffkey River, where there were houseboats, half-hidden in the winding creeks, shuttered, silent and dark against the moon. I listened to the sea percolating into the marsh, sliding up every little meandering mud canyon, between the glidders and uvvers – the mud banks – trickling about the mycelium of creeks, gently rocking the glistening samphire. Even the tiniest channels in the mud or sand mimicked the patterns and movement of a great river.

  As I bathed, I imagined Williamson, now an otter himself, swimming at dusk with nine children in one of the marsh pools, with the reflected wing-tip lights and the roar of the warplanes returning to the airfield behind Stiffkey. Then the air would be quiet again, as it was now, except for the cries and splashings of the children, and the marsh birds. The girls’ clothes, draped over sea lavender, might well have included blouses or aprons of a fine red cotton, then the fashion in Stiffkey, because the ‘mashes’ were a popular children’s hunting-ground for the much-prized scraps of the red drogue parachute targets, which were towed to and fro all day by aeroplanes, while gunners practised, filling the wide sky with black puffs of smoke.

  When Williamson died, it was Ted Hughes who delivered the memorial address at the service of thanksgiving in St Martin-in-the-Fields. Hughes had found and read Tarka at the age of eleven and counted it one of the great pieces of good fortune in his life. For the next year he read little else. ‘It entered into me,’ he said, ‘and gave shape and words to my world as no book ever has done since. I recognised even then, I suppose, that it is something of a holy book, a soul-book, written with the life-blood of an unusual poet.’ Hughes regarded Williamson as ‘one of the truest English poets of his generation’, although he never published a word of verse. Tarka had taken four years to write, and went through seventeen drafts. Williamson rewrote Chapter Eleven, which begins at the source of five rivers up on Dartmoor, thirty-seven times. He described the writing of those paragraphs to Hughes as ‘chipping every word off the breastbone’. The two men became friends when Hughes, not much over thirty, an
d still spellbound by the magical book, found himself living in the middle of Devon on the Taw not far from where Williamson, now in his sixties and also still under Tarka’s spell, was working in a hut on a patch of land he had bought with the prize-money his book had won him long ago. (He had sold the Norfolk farm by the end of 1945, his dreams unrealised.)

  I have always admired Williamson, not only for the beauty and ice-clear accuracy of his writing, but for the moral basis of his vision, which sprang from the natural world and his passionate concern to take care of it. In this, he was far ahead of most of his contemporaries. Hughes described Williamson at that service of mourning as ‘a North American Indian dreamer among Englishmen’.

  When I came out of the water, my shadow fell twenty feet along the shell-strewn shoreline. The moon was rising towards a thin band of mackerel cloud, and terns, duck and wading birds called to one another all over the marsh. Nothing much had changed since Williamson was here, driving his grey Ferguson tractor in a mackintosh tied up with baling twine, building his wooden tide-doors to keep the river from flooding his fields, and trapping eels in his ditches.

  8

  BORROW & THOREAU

  North Wales, 14 June

  I WENT TO WALES because the place is stiff with magic, because the Rhinog Mountains are something like a wilderness where I would be free to wander like pipesmoke in a billiard room, and with the kind of apparently random purpose with which the laughing water dashes through the heather, rocks and peat. I went there to be a long way from all the powerful stimuli Wordsworth said prevented us, these days, from doing any proper thinking. My only purpose was to get thoroughly lost; to disappear into the hills and tarns and miss my way home for as long as possible. If I could find a string of swims and dips, each one surpassing the last in aimlessness, so much the better. The great thing about an aimless swim is that everything about it is concentrated in the here and now; none of its essence or intensity can escape into the past or future. The swimmer is content to be borne on his way full of mysteries, doubts and uncertainties. He is a leaf on the stream, free at last from his petty little purposes in life.

  I took my Great Uncle Joe’s copy of George Borrow’s Wild Wales, the account of a three-week walk across that country in the summer of 1854. Borrow, who was a great swimmer as well as walker, is in some ways insufferable. He never ceases to pose on the page as he posed in life, and his prose is generally heavier going than even the wildest of Wales. Nonetheless, in his grandiloquent fascination with history and language (he liked to call himself a ‘word-master’), and in his genuine curiosity about the lives of country people and gypsies, he is hard to ignore, and wins you round in the end.

  Borrow used to swim all over the Norfolk Broads, where he lived, all year round, and in the North Sea when he moved to Great Yarmouth. If he couldn’t sleep, or was bored with the company at home, he would walk twenty-five miles to Norwich and, after a rest at his mother’s house, tramp back. He was six foot three, with a mane of white hair and massive shoulders, and cut a striking figure in Great Yarmouth in his sombrero and long sheepskin coat, with his servant, Hayim Ben Attar, and his black Arab steed, Sidi Habismilk. In the summer of 1854, Borrow embarked on his Welsh walk carrying only a small leather satchel with ‘a white linen shirt, a pair of worsted stockings, a razor and a prayer-book’. Great Uncle Joe had Wild Wales with him in Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight in 1892, where he was doing time at the age of twenty on the trumped-up charge that he was a dangerous anarchist. I have often imagined the young idealist reading the book in his prison cell, dreaming of the freedom of the open road and the hills.

  The Rhinog Mountains stretch south along the coast for eighteen miles between Snowdonia and Barmouth Sands. It was to this trackless quarter that I drove from Stiffkey, arriving in the dark to camp by the sea on Shell Island, south of Harlech, where I had arranged to meet my cousin Adrian in the morning for the first day’s walking and high altitude swimming.

  We began by scrambling uphill from the Roman Steps, a haphazard stair of roughly flat stones that was once a trade route through the Rhinogs. We were aiming for the llyns, Welsh for tarns, higher up. Connoisseurs of these mountains like Adrian are used to the absence of paths, and after much toil we eventually hoisted ourselves level with the lofty Llyn Du. We looked across it to an almost sheer ascent of some 650 feet to the summit of Rhinog Fawr at 2,347 feet. A brisk wind coming up the mountainside off the sea ruffled the surface of the tarn, which must have been 350 yards long and half as wide. The immense shadow of the mountain rendered the water opaque and black. To judge by the almost vertical plunge of the mountain into the llyn on the far side, it must have been very deep. We were about 1,700 feet above the sea and feeling distinctly cool, even in our mountain gear. My companion began to shiver, and, lacking a wetsuit, decided to give this particular treat a miss.

  This was a moment I had anticipated with relish. I slipped off a rock into the velvet deeps and swam suspended in what suddenly felt like giddy depth. It was icy. I swam straight out and across the middle of this chasm, gulping air and moving fast towards a sloping ramp of grey fissured rock at the far end of the ruffled tarn, entertaining the usual fantasies about what company I might have below. But it was still a beautiful swim, my feelings of awe intensified by the gothic mist. Adrian, who is Head of PE at a Gloucester comprehensive school, cut a reassuring figure across the water. The rock here is mostly Cambrian, a hundred million years old. The rock and the country are one and the same: Cambrian and Cambria. The two next oldest rocks, the Ordovician and the Silurian, are named after two tribes of ancient Britons who lived on the Welsh borderland.

  Halfway across, I turned and swam on my back and confronted the dark presence of the mountain. I thought of the phrase ‘deep as England’ in Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Pike’. Wales may be yet deeper. I was a prehistoric creature in my glistening wetsuit, ready to be fossilised unless I kept moving. I scrambled on to the huge, grey, ramped rock at the far end, and slithered higher up it to enjoy the view for a few moments before the wind began to bite. I took a header back in off the rock, my highest dive yet. The imperative to keep moving kept my mind off the chilled water, and I soon acclimatised once I got into the rhythm of the breaststroke, urgent at first, until I began to relax. I doubt I would have had the nerve to attempt the swim had I been alone. It was far colder when I came out; this was no place to stand about with nothing on. Neither of us had any doubt that a warming assault on the summit of Rhinog Fawr should be our next move. The cloud had by now almost cleared, and views were opening up on all sides. Some chocolate, and we were off on a spiral route up the northern slopes of the mountain to reach the south-western ridge, and the summit. As we clambered up the last few feet of chaotic rock, the cloud was clearing, and there were views across the sea and up the coast to Anglesey, where the sun had come out, and along the other Rhinog mountains stretching south in line towards Barmouth Sands; Rhinog Fach, Y Llethr and Diffwys.

  We now descended on a circular route to the next tarn, Gloyw Llyn, which winked at us from below. We followed a stream, at first a tentative rill amongst the rocks and tussocks, but soon growing into a fully-fledged torrent. Just as we were whingeing about the boggy going, and clambering round a series of minor waterfalls, we came upon a classic swimming hole. It was a verdant pear-shaped pool sheltered by a grassy bank to one side, with steep mossy rock rising out of it on the other, clothed in stunted gorse and tussocks. It felt warmer here, and we had both worked up a sweat. By now the sun was out, shining straight through the lens of water onto the golden peaty pebbles of the bottom. We stripped off and leapt in. It took our breath away. The pool was three or four feet deep with just enough room to swim, as in a treadmill, against the current. Every second was an eternity. Neither of us stayed in for longer than a minute but sprang out on the knife-edge between aching and glowing.

  A buzzard circled overhead. It saw two figures bounding downhill over bog moss and cotton grass to the big tarn, Gloyw Llyn, now
gilded by the sun. It watched them climb out on to an outcrop of rock, take off all the clothes they had only just put back on, and dive into the lake. As it soared higher into the sun, the bird observed the two pale, naked figures crossing and re-crossing the tarn, and diving far down off the rock several times into the deep, clear water. Then it drifted away across the mountain.

  On the way down the mountainside we passed through an ancient grove of stunted oaks, the trees so encrusted with mosses and lichens they looked like old cheeses left in the fridge for too long. The second tarn had been more than twice the size of the first, and nearly as cold, and we still luxuriated in the after-effects of the soft, sweet-tasting water’s rigour. It had provided the crowning swim of the day.

  We returned to civilisation for dinner at the Victoria Inn at Llanbedr. It was the sort of place where Borrow might well have dined. To my sadness and his, Adrian had to return home that night. I was going to miss his wit as well as his pacemaking. ‘Will there be anything else?’ asked the waitress as she cleared our table. ‘What would you suggest?’ we enquired. ‘Well, nothing really,’ she said.

  After supper I went back up the mountain and camped at the top end of a lake, Llyn Cwm Bychan, on a little sheep-mown peninsula where the river enters it. It had been in such flood a couple of weeks earlier that it would have submerged my tent to a depth of three feet. When it rains hard here, the water simply cascades off the mountains. It would be a perfect spot for an early-morning swim. I lay for a long while by the moonlit lake, imagining Borrow here, reflecting on the convivial pleasures of the day.

  I always dream a lot when I am camping, in the sweet repose that comes with exercise and physical fatigue. ‘The dreams are getting obsessive and I don’t even know if I should own up to them,’ I put in my notebook. ‘By now I am dreaming almost continuously of rivers, seas, tides and ponds.’ Tucked up on my peninsula with the sound of the river vibrating through the turf, I dream I am swimming in a still, black canal overhung by a cobbled wharf with a high roof, like a pagoda. At one end of the wharf there are wooden lock gates in deep water, and beyond the gates is something, I don’t know what, that needs retrieving. I am with my dream friend from childhood and the other members of my own version of the Famous Five. We are definitely trespassing. One of us is going to have to creep on to the wharf and plunge down under the lock gates to reach the other side. I am the one who dives and I swim down and down under the looming gates in the green water, but I never know what is on the other side because that is the moment I wake up.