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  The Environment Agency, meanwhile, is being influenced by the powerful vested interests of the riparian owners into confusing the natural value of chalk rivers like the Itchen and the Test with their commercial value. It is allowing them to be managed exclusively for the benefit of trout fishery along much of their length. What were once richly varied wild trout rivers have been allowed to become highly manipulated leisure enterprises capable of delivering a more or less guaranteed catch of four or five fish to the people, often tourists, who can pay to fish there. Trout fisheries also persecute the pike, culling coarse fish by electro-fishing, even removing such essentials to the ecology of natural chalk streams as brook lampreys and bullheads. Besides all this, they cut and remove the weed that would otherwise naturally hold up the flow and maintain the depth of water, as well as harbouring the invertebrates that provide vital food in the rivers’ ecosystems. On one short stretch of the Test above Whitchurch, the owner deploys over sixty different traps for stoats and weasels along the banks, which tend to be manicured of their natural cover with strimmers to accommodate the fastidious new breed of angler. What is at stake is the very resource that, left alone, would create and sustain the wild trout: the natural chalk stream.

  Crayfish were once so abundant in the Itchen that when the river keepers cleared gratings and sluices along Winchester College water meadows, there would be dozens of them amongst the weed. But a few years ago the fish farms upstream introduced the American crayfish. The new arrivals carried a fatal disease, the crayfish plague, to which they, but not our native species, had developed immunity. The result has been the near-extinction of the wild crayfish from the Itchen. They are now reduced to a few isolated populations in side-streams or backwaters, having been replaced by their American cousins.

  Now that the coast was clear again, I sauntered along the footpath across St Stephen’s Mead, in search of the once-popular college bathing hole, Gunner’s Hole. It was called after the Rev. H. Gunner, one of the college chaplains. There used to be a wide arc of changing sheds following the curve of the river bank, thatched huts on an island, and a system of sluices to regulate the natural flow of the water. Gunner’s Hole was about a hundred yards long and twelve yards wide, and the stretch of river was dredged of mud and concreted along its banks towards the end of the nineteenth century. It even had a handrail around the area of ‘a high diving erection with four stages and two springboards’, as the Public Schools’ Handbook called it in 1900, continuing enthusiastically: ‘Gunner’s Hole is now second to none as a bathing place in England. Here, under the shade of the limes, are the best features of a swimming bath and a river rolled into one.’

  Sure enough, Gunner’s Hole was still there, secluded under the shade of enormous plane trees and poplars, one or two now tumbled over the water. Its motionless surface was entirely covered by a classic duckweed lawn, the fabled disguise of Creeping Jenny, a monster of nursery folklore who would suck children under if they went too close, closing innocently over them to hide all trace of their fate. The massive concrete walls of the pool were in surprisingly good condition, and, on the basis that stolen fruit always tastes sweetest, I climbed through the concrete river inlet sluice to drop in silently at the deep end. Sinking through the opaque green cloak was like breaking the ice. I laboured down the hundred yards of the pool, mowing a path in the lawn which closed behind me as I went. Moorhens scampered off, half-flying over the billiard-baize green. The water beneath was still deep, but no longer the ten feet it used to be below the diving boards. It had silted up to between five and seven feet. Reaching down, I felt soft mud and ancient fallen branches, and sensed giant pike and eels.

  Breaststroking back like a fly in soup, I reflected that Gunner’s Hole must have been where one of the legendary sea-swimmers of our times evolved his style. Sir James Lighthill was amongst the great mathematical scientists of the century. He became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and later Provost of University College, London. From Winchester he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge at the age of fifteen, and became a fellow at twenty-one. Lighthill was pre-eminent in the field of wave theory and fluid dynamics, and studied and analysed the pattern of the fierce currents that run round the Channel Islands. He was a strong swimmer, and put his knowledge to the test by becoming one of the first to swim the eighteen miles round Sark in 1973. By careful homework, Lighthill calculated the best course and timing to take advantage of the swirling, ferocious tides and currents. In ensuing years he returned and swam round the island five times. On his sixth island tour, in July 1998, aged seventy-four, he swam all day and was close to completing his nine-hour voyage when he ran into some rough seas. He was seen to stop swimming and died close to the shore. As was his custom, he was alone and had no boat with him. He regarded swimming as ‘a most pleasant way to see the scenery’, and swam on his back to conserve energy, describing his style as ‘a two-arm, two-leg backstroke, thrusting with the arms and legs alternately’. I imagined the young Lighthill swimming up and down Gunner’s Hole on summer evenings, perfecting his stroke, observing the complexities of the swimming style of the stickleback, and calculating distances.

  There was no longer any sign of the diving boards or the changing sheds, still marked on the 1953 Ordnance Survey map, but when I swam back to the concrete inlet I caught hold of a bit of the original handrail and climbed over into the fresh, fast water of the main river. In a metaphor for its history, Gunner’s Hole used to carry the main stream, and is now a backwater. Dropping into a pool above the main sluice that controls the river level, I shed duckweed in a green confetti ribbon that went licking away on the stream. Standing chest deep, pinioned to the slippery wooden sluice gates whose grain stood out like corduroy, I imagined a future without fish farms or watercress beds, when the river could flow as sweetly as ever it did in Cobbett’s day, and there could be bathing again in Gunner’s Hole.

  4

  A PEOPLE’S RIVER

  Cambridge, 12 May

  I ARRIVED IN CAMBRIDGE in the morning, in magnificent warm sunshine, frustrated, now, that I had agreed to attend a meeting there first. I had driven up from Winchester via London, where I spent a few days seeing friends, buying maps, and searching for goggles that wouldn’t pinch the bridge of my nose. In the meeting, my thoughts drifted back to the Scillies as overhead projectors whirred, and artspeak and acronyms droned on. It felt interminable, especially as we were tantalisingly close to the Mill Pool, so I could actually hear the river crashing through the weir from where I sat. It is at this weir, above the Silver Street Bridge, that the Cam begins. All the river upstream of here to Grantchester is the Granta, and above Byron’s Pool it is still the same chameleon river but it is the Rhee.

  The moment the meeting was over, I bolted like a schoolboy and nipped straight along the towpath across Coe Fen to the old Sheep’s Green bathing sheds, birthplace and headquarters of the Granta Swimming Club. I spent three years at the university here, so the city and the river are full of memories, including swims from the men’s bathing sheds, which are still there, but padlocked and abandoned beside the iron footbridge, built over the river in 1910. The women’s bathing place was on the opposite bank, a hundred yards upstream in a beautiful walled garden. It had a changing house for bathers, which now stands half-ruined without a roof, and an enchanting view upriver to Robinson Crusoe’s Island.

  I crossed the bridge and went into the walled garden, still a lovely place but oddly neglected in a city with a taste for fine buildings, even little ones. An old japonica grew up the wall, and a pair of yews stood on the lawn. Most impressive of all was the neo-classic summer house, a stone temple of Venus that looked out across the river. I could see where the diving boards and ladders were once bolted into the concrete quay. I changed in the swimmers’ temple, and looked out through its balcony window into the clear tributary it overhangs. A magnificent foot-long perch, the dandy of the stream, swam lazily through the shallows. Someone, perhaps a swimmer, had e
tched an epigram into the stone: SUMMER ’77 WOZ HEAVEN. I went in off the quay and swam upstream towards Grantchester. The river was deep, cool and inscrutable. In the 1950s, the Granta was still so clear here you could see a sandy bed twelve feet down. I swam against the gentle current, past the old willows the river swimmers used to dive off, round Robinson Crusoe’s Island, where Dolby’s boathouse once stood in the twenties, and past the island site of an even earlier, more secluded women’s bathing place, long extinct. It was on the Snobs’ Stream, a leat which branches off the main river here, past the island, and runs down to Newnham Mill by the Granta Pool. Bathers used to reach it via a chain-link ferry that plied from a landing-stage beside the walled garden, and mothers would often take small children. I ventured down Snobs’ Stream, but it was now weedy and overgrown. This was where everybody in Cambridge still learnt to swim long after they opened the hundred-yard outdoor pool at Jesus Green in May 1924. You had to be able to swim across it before Charlie Driver, the custodian of the bathing sheds, would allow you into the main river.

  I swam upstream towards Paradise Island, where bathers used to camp and picnic with canoes. The Granta felt soft and lazy after the lively Hampshire trout rivers. Then I turned and swam downstream under the bridge and past the men’s bathing place, where there were once diving boards and ladders. The men’s springboard used to have a ‘run-up’ that stretched right across the lawn of the bathing enclosure, so you could dive and hit the water halfway across the river. Forty yards further on there used to be another board, at a deep place they called ‘Aunt Sally’.

  The men’s bathing place was an unofficial academy of swimming, and Charlie Driver presided over it from 1903 until he retired in 1937. He was a fine gymnast, high-diver and ornamental swimmer, and used to put on displays at the annual gala on the river. Charlie was short, dark and handsome, with curly hair and a black moustache. He saved a good many bathers from drowning, and he was always ready to teach people to swallow-dive off the high-board, or to demonstrate the techniques of ornamental swimming: the propeller, the torpedo, the submarine, the spinning wheel or the water-top. One of his young apprentices in 1910 was Jack Overhill, who became the most celebrated river-swimmer in Cambridge and founded the Granta Swimming Club in 1934.

  Jack Overhill swam in the Granta every day for sixty-two years. He began swimming all through the year when he was eighteen and continued until his wife, Jess, died when he was eighty. He died in 1989 aged eighty-six. He would break the ice to swim in winter, sometimes cheered on by the skaters, and was always a mainstay of the Granta Christmas Day swim, which attracted fifty-two swimmers in 1934. The tradition was to swim a friendly 50-yard Christmas handicap, but it was occasionally shortened to 35 yards if conditions were too rigorous, as in 1921, when the air temperature was 16 degrees fahrenheit and the water 35 degrees. There were only two entrants for the race that year, Billy Swann and Jack Overhill. Billy Swann got out after 20 yards because it was too cold. Jack was ahead anyway, and won.

  Jack Overhill left school at fourteen and began life as a shoemaker like his father. He wrote thirty-three novels, and left a remarkable record of the day-to-day lives of ordinary swimmers in the river at Cambridge in some of his diaries and unpublished work. Under the good-humoured tutelage of Charlie Driver, the young Jack’s swimming and diving gradually improved. He swam in the flooded Grantchester meadows with his friends, practised high-diving off the top bedrail on to his bed, and was delighted when his heavyweight friend Boss Benton finally fulfilled his ambition to break the springboard by performing a ‘Naughty Boy’, a running dive in which the diver bounced his bottom on the board before entering the water. He was one of the self-styled New Town Water Rats, who almost lived at Sheep’s Green in the summer. He won his first swimming trophies in July 1919, at the age of sixteen, in the Cambridge Peace Celebration sports on Midsummer Common. His friend Archie Clee thrilled the crowd on that occasion with a daring dive off Victoria Bridge into shallow water.

  The Cambridge University swimming team, the ‘Tadpoles’, swam in the Granta further upstream from Sheep’s Green towards Grantchester Meadows, and in 1924 Jack Overhill, swimming for the Cambridge Amateurs, just missed beating J. T. A. Temple, the university champion. Jack was one of the first people in Cambridge to swim the six-beat crawl. One evening in 1920 he was standing on the iron footbridge by the bathing sheds when a man in a red bathing costume came downstream and passed under the bridge, swimming a stroke he had never seen. He drew parallel with a racing punt, kept level with it for a while, then pulled away to one of the ladders and walked off to change. Jack was amazed. Most people at that time either swam the trudgeon, a kind of crawl with a scissor-leg kick, the breaststroke, or the original backstroke, with a frog-leg kick and both arms windmilled in unison. But this swimmer was kicking his legs up and down, like someone walking backwards. The bathing sheds were on fire with inspiration. This was the crawl, and the disciple swimming it was Jack Lavender, a Cambridge man who had learnt the new style in London, where he swam for the Civil Service.

  The crawl! Stories about it were beginning to appear in Chums and The Boys’ Friend Library. In one, a boy called ‘The Dud’ pretends he can’t swim, then amazes his friends by winning a race swimming the crawl. In another, a boy-swimmer called ‘Fish’ Fanshaw raises ‘a water-spout’ with his feet as he does the hundred yards in seventy seconds. Overhill taught himself the crawl from an illustrated article in an encyclopaedia, although Jack Lavender did come down one Sunday to hold a master-class, demonstrating the crawl as he lay across a chair. After that, the river went quiet for weeks as swimmers practised the six-beat crawl, muttering to themselves the varied rhythm of its leg-kicks: ‘Major, minor, minor, Major, minor, minor’.

  But the honours for the most impressive swim in the Cam still belong to Tom Ford. In 1936, when he was fifteen, he swam upstream against a headwind and fast-running stream from Baitsbite Lock to Jesus Lock, a distance of 3½ miles, in 2 hours, 22 minutes, 11 seconds. That same season he swam 5 miles in a race from Kew to Putney in just under 1 hour and 10 minutes.

  The Sheep’s Green swimmers would go in for other river fixtures too: the Ely Mile, where they dived in off barges, and the Prickwillow Gala, where a makeshift board was nailed to the underside of the bridge for the diving competition. One year it gave way under a diver. Anything up to sixty swimmers used to line up on punts ready to plunge into the Silver Street Mill Pool for the start of the annual Swim Through Cambridge in July. Competitors would swim down the Backs, where the sheer walls of the colleges rising straight from the water make it impossible to land for much of the way. Just as you were feeling the cold at Magdalen Bridge, you would swim past the outflow of the old electricity power station on the right bank, and the water would turn miraculously warm. The swim ended at Jesus Green, and was eventually abandoned in the early sixties because of the polluted state of the river. In earlier years, the river water had been so clear that Charlie Driver would often put a glass of it on the table in the pavilion at the bathing sheds and extol its purity.

  Getting out of the river without ladders when I arrived back at the walled garden could have been difficult, but I swam round into the entrance of the tributary that flowed in by the stone temple. It felt suddenly much colder, as though it were springwater from underground, and it was very clear. I came out up a brick step into the garden, changed, and walked out along the footpath towards Grantchester Meadows. The path was rutted by bike tyres and fringed with meadowsweet and rushes. I passed the Pembroke College water meadows, which used to be flooded in winter for ice-skating at night, and still have the lamp-posts that held the floodlights.

  The meadows were full of buttercups and the smell of wet grass. I went up to Grantchester, ignoring Byron’s Pool because it is now ruined as a swimming hole by an ugly concrete weir and the constant drone of the M11 a few hundred yards away. Byron and Rupert Brooke, who both loved this place and swam naked here, would hardly recognise it. Brooke used to canoe up from Ki
ng’s College as an undergraduate, and later moved into the village. The nymphs, like T. S. Eliot’s in The Waste Land, are departed, and have left no addresses. I entered the river instead from just below the village, at a bend where there’s a gently shelving beach of gravel and bits of old brick. From here, I drifted downriver all through the meadows, by pollard willows in a row down the far bank, overtaken by the occasional punt. Tractors worked the flat fields and lovers walked in the meadows or lay together on the bank. Here and there I met friendly anglers in muddy bays between the rushes. I glided on in the still green water, brushed by the rubbery stems and pads of lilies. It is now a general characteristic of lowland rivers that there is too much fertiliser leaching off the land, and too much waterweed. Sunset was coming up, and reflections trembled on the willow trunks. Moorhens jerked along the mudbanks on luminous green legs, their red bills and jet-black feathers vivid in the evening light. Fats Waller could have written ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ to moorhens, with the line ‘Your pedal extremities are simply colossal.’ They walk like little girls at parties in their mothers’ high heels. I love them because their feet’s too big.

  On a magnificent May evening, I seemed to be the only swimmer in this much-swum stretch of river. Jack Overhill and his Granta Swimming Club friends used to stroll through these meadows wearing only trunks in the sunshine, following the winding banks, diving in where it looked inviting at Otter Corner or Deadman’s Bend, and drying in the sun. They used to swim the two and a quarter miles from Grantchester Mill to Silver Street in an annual event that began, at Jack’s suggestion, in 1934. There were 33 entrants for that first swim, won in 56 minutes, 42 seconds, and the swimmers had to walk most of the first 200 yards from Grantchester mill-pool through the shallows. Jack Overhill’s son, also Jack, used to perform 50-foot swallow dives from the top of a tree at a point in the meadows where the river was 20 feet deep. The fifteen-year-old had learned to swim across the river at three, and had his picture in the Daily Express and the Cambridge Chronicle, standing next to eighty-year-old George Mason, vice-president of the swimming club and the oldest swimmer in Cambridge.