Waterlog Read online

  At the end of my first two chilly lengths, a frog leapt off the bank almost straight into my face, and others watched me from the water. That they are far outnumbered now by the toads is due, I think, to predation of their tadpoles by the newts, which much prefer the young of frogs to those of toads. There is no native creature quite so exotic or splendid as the male great crested newt, or eft, as country people called them, in full display. They are the jesters of the moat, with their bright orange, spotted bellies and outrageous zigzag crests, like something out of a Vivienne Westwood show. I hung submerged, in the mask and snorkel, and watched these pond-dragons coming up for air, then slowly sinking back into the deep water, crests waving like seaweed. They are so well adapted to the underwater life, I have to remind myself that they only come to the moat for six or seven months from February to July or August, to reproduce. Then they return to land, where you may not notice them unless you’re a gardener. You dig them up with the potatoes. They hide like bookmarks between old, vertically stacked roof-tiles, or entomb themselves in dusty crevices in the brick-pile. Sometimes they even turn up mysteriously in the kitchen in the autumn. They look a lot happier in the water.

  The voles had been busy, too. As a swimmer, you notice details, with your child’s-eye view of the world three inches above the surface, and the voles had made new holes at water level, just too small to take a tennis ball. But the most spectacular change I noticed, as I breaststroked up and down, was the explosion of birdsong all round the moat. Two rival blackcaps were doing their best to outsing each other across the water in a fiercely inventive contest reminiscent of the duelling banjos in John Boorman’s Deliverance. And all the wood pigeons in Suffolk, who seemed to know there is sanctuary in the trees along the banks, were cooing their hearts out.

  One of these birds was so busy eating just-opening ash buds from a branch overhanging the water, that she took no notice of me as I swam up beneath her. I noticed later that she had a nest in the willow. Why pigeons are so keen on ash buds I don’t know, but they will take the greatest risks to get them, teetering on the ends of twigs and reaching far out into the void to peck at them. They couldn’t do such acrobatics on other trees because the twigs would snap. Ash is more supple and keeps springing back. Each time it whipped, the pigeon almost lost balance, then spread her wings and dipped her tail wildly, and clung on. A little fusillade of raindrops plummeted from the branch and splashed all round me. The ash was far behind all the other trees in leaf; it is always the last, except for the mulberry, so its buds are full of the very first and freshest of the sap. For the ancient Norse people, this tree, Ygdrasil, was the tree of life. So it follows that its sap is the very stuff of procreation, the essence a pigeon will do anything to taste as she prepares to nest and lay.

  Country people have, or had, little phrases birds are supposed to say, and the wood pigeon’s song is usually interpreted as ‘Take two cows, Taffy’, or ‘Joe’s toe bleeds, Betty’. It is no different from Charlie Parker playing ‘Salt Peanuts’, except that pigeons seem to have difficulty remembering how their song goes. They usually manage to get through the first line, but suddenly break off halfway through the second. Then another pigeon starts up somewhere else, like a prompt, and away they all go again. The blackcaps, meanwhile, made my swim a delight with song of such liquid beauty and complexity that it rivalled even the nightingale. It would be hard to imagine two more contrasting birds, yet they worked well together musically; the pigeons providing a base line, and the blackcaps extemporising insanely higher up the scale. I felt like George III, who was serenaded by a chamber orchestra when he bathed in the sea at Weymouth. It certainly beat Phil Collins over the PA at the swimming pool.

  The sun had come out, and with it the damselflies. They appeared from nowhere, right on cue, like a corps de ballet sweeping across the stage. Their dance was accompanied by a new song: the sudden squeaking, oozing, dripping chorus of a flock of starlings darkening the hawthorn hedge in the field. They sounded like some great Victorian cotton-mill, with all the engines, shuttles, fly-wheels and belts trundling at full tilt, squeaking, jolting, rattling and clattering. Afterwards, I sat wrapped in my towel observing the tadpoles doing lengths in their aquarium. Then I decanted them gently into the little bay where the pigeons drink, wished them luck, and watched them disappear into the weed.

  7

  TIDERIPS AND MOONBEAMS

  Norfolk, 12 June

  I SET OFF EARLY in a glowing dawn and drove on empty roads to the Norfolk coast, where I had arranged to meet Dudley, an old swimming and sailing companion. I could think of no better prospect than to enhance the day with bathing, walking and conversation on one of the best beaches I know. The journey through the rolling countryside of north Norfolk always feels to me like crossing over into another land, another state of mind. It is close to home, yet remote. The sudden lightness of being there, with such endless miles of level space, feels like a holiday, even for a few hours. Time passes slowly when you are a dot on the horizon. There is no anti-depressant quite like sea-swimming, and Holkham is where I usually go when I’m feeling sad. Striking out into the enormous expanse of cold sea, over the vast sands, I immerse myself like the fox ridding himself of his fleas. I leave my devils on the waves. North Norfolk is one of those places where the weather never seems to bear any relation to the forecasts. The whole of Britain can be covered in cloud, yet as you approach the coast up here, it is braided with a magic band of blue. The Royal Family must have known a thing or two when they chose Sandringham as a country cottage.

  You arrive at Holkham beach as you would at Glyndebourne, Epidaurus or Newmarket races; there is a sense of occasion, as befits a visit to one of our most impressive stretches of wild coastline. Opposite the entrance to the Holkham estate you turn into a dramatic wide boulevard of poplars called Lady Anne’s Walk and pay the Viscount Coke’s amiable gatekeepers a modest sum to park. We felt we should be showing our passports. Even at this hour there were a couple of parked horseboxes with the ramps down, and a few Volvos with ‘A dog is for life not just for Christmas’ stickers in the back. This elegant cul-de-sac leads half a mile across the grazing marshes to a narrow gap in the Holkham Meals, the strip of mixed pine and holm-oak wood that runs along the dunes west to Burnham Overy Staithe and east to Wells.

  Dudley and I set off barefoot over the sandy boardwalk through the wooded dunes and emerged blinking from the shade into the great gleaming theatre of Holkham Bay. A majestic sweep of dunes delineates an endless beach where, at low tide, the sea is only a distant whispering line of white. In the middle of all this are a couple of piratical sand islands that get cut off by the tide and are popular with lovers and picnic parties. Further west towards Burnham the dunes rise into a whale-back ridge reminiscent of the Malverns. There used to be the rusty hulk of an early Austin almost completely buried in the sand, but now I suppose it has sunk for ever, or dissolved. Coming along below the dunes was a string of twenty racehorses and their lads, returning to the horseboxes. It is the sort of thing you expect to see in Ireland, but there are often hoof-prints in the Holkham sand, and you can gallop for miles beside the sea.

  We made for the surf across the almost deserted beach and half-waded, half-walked into the sun towards Scolt Head and Burnham Overy Staithe. One of the great joys of Holkham beach is to swim in the lagoons that appear in the sands as the tide goes out. Most are only just deep enough for a wallow, but some are up to four feet deep in places. They can be very warm, and I once stepped on a Dover sole in one. Miles from anywhere, we came upon a waterhole that was especially long and deep, and splashed about in it like two desert travellers in an oasis. Watching the little waves criss-crossing and buffeting each other, Dudley remembered how, as a boy learning to sail in Canada, he would study why this or that current behaved the way it did, or why there was a deep channel in the sand here but not there. Standing knee-deep in the sea and feeling it tug this way and that before we plunged out into deeper water, we agreed that these ar
e indeed serious questions. Swimming into the sun, we struck out against the current. Our coast is being altered by the sea at every tide, and every storm, and nowhere more than here on the east coast. Back there on the beach I had searched for a whale jaw the size of an armchair that was stuck fast in the sand last winter, but was buried now, or washed away. Holkham is compulsive beach-combing. Razor shells are strewn everywhere like bones in a Mad Max film, and the delicate, finely perforated shells of sea urchins are beached like tattooed bums or paper masks.

  Three miles on, by the entrance to Burnham Harbour, opposite Scolt Head Island, the channel buzzed with dinghies going in and out. Boats were pulled up on the beaches, and families picnicked in the dunes. I swam alone across to the island and back, dodging the Lasers and Enterprises. I felt the vigorous tug of the tide, and crossed the channel diagonally. If Nelson ever bathed, this would surely have been one of his haunts, close to his native Burnham Thorpe. But it was the policy of the navy to discourage and even forbid sailors to swim. Traditionally, few fishermen were swimmers either, the idea being that if you are going to drown in a shipwreck it is better not to prolong the agony.

  We followed the path through Overy Marsh towards Burnham, passing two houseboats moored under Gun Hill. One was based on Noah’s original drawings for the ark, with a single window facing west across the marsh. It bore a notice: ‘This ark is used by a local artist as a simple working space. You are welcome to see inside when he is here. The only item of value inside is the Vieuw.’ From the spelling, we deduced that Noah was Dutch. I could think of worse places to be stranded in the Flood.

  A butterfly went past over the sea lavender. I said it was a swallowtail. Dudley thought it was a cabbage white. ‘That’s the difference between us,’ he said. I kept my eyes firmly on the sandy path ahead, hoping to find a lizard out sunbathing. Dudley would probably think it was a stick, but I would know it was a lizard. We were, after all, in one of English Nature’s prime reserves. There have been attempts to reintroduce the sand lizard here, but they have an uncooperative way of eating their own young. These dunes are also home to the natterjack toad, who likes to dig himself as much as a foot into the sand in the daytime, emerging at night to roam the flotsam line of the beach, hungrily rummaging the dead seaweed for the Assiette de Fruits de Mer of small creatures it contains.

  Swimming into Burnham Overy Staithe on the mud-warmed rising tide, we entered a time warp. Sailing people sat about amongst the dinghies with picnic baskets and those Acme Thermos flasks finished in pale green Hammerite that weigh about the same as a milk churn. A woman in rust canvas shorts and plimsolls, with masses of fair curls like Titty in Swallows and Amazons, was fishing lifejackets out of a Land-Rover Discovery. She told us that the channel through which we had just swum was known affectionately to the locals as Dead Man’s Pool. They have a way with metaphor in Burnham, always seeing in the New Year round a bonfire of old boats.

  A friend who has spent her springs and summers in Burnham Overy Staithe all her life, once told me, ‘I can trace the creeks in the lines of my own hand.’ We walked back towards Holkham, navigating through waves of sea lavender on the saltmarsh mud, crazed and frosted with salt, until we reached the dunes again and ascended Gun Hill, where I spotted a common lizard sunbathing obligingly before a clump of marram grass. The view into the hazy distance of this great sweep of utterly wild coast silenced us both for some time. Three miles inland we could make out the elegant wooded landscaping of Holkham Park, with its landmark obelisk and the fine house well sheltered from the sea, looking out instead over a lake. Holm oaks are the distinctive local tree here, planted all over the estate by the pioneering agriculturalist Coke in the eighteenth century. According to one of the Holkham Hall gardeners, the trees first arrived as acorns in a consignment of china from Italy. They had been used as a kind of eighteenth-century bubblewrap, and Coke told his men to fill their pockets with acorns in the mornings and plant them all round the estate. Until Thomas Coke built Holkham Hall in the middle of the eighteenth century, there had been almost no trees here at all, but, as the historian David Dymond discovered, no fewer than 2,123,090 trees were planted on about 720 acres of the park in the twenty years from 1781. It is interesting that although the holm oaks and Scots pines, all planted by Coke, form a useful evergreen screen against the cold winds blowing in across the North Sea straight from the Ural Mountains of Russia, they also hide it from view. It is only relatively recently that we have come to regard a view of the sea as a thing of beauty. For our ancestors, the sea was to be feared and shunned from sight. When Humphry Repton designed Sheringham Hall, or ‘Bower’, further along this coast, in 1812, he positioned it facing east of south, away from the sea, only three-quarters of a mile away. He thought that ‘A view of the sea . . . ought not to be the first consideration.’

  A little further on, we were greeted by a sign, courtesy of English Nature, informing us that ‘Naturists are requested to keep to the beach. Naturism is not permitted in the woods, or outside designated areas within the dunes.’ Curious about the ‘designated areas’, Dudley and I headed straight off in search of them.

  There is nothing quite so good as the feeling of hot sand sifting between your toes as you walk along the tops of dunes. We followed an undulating ridge path through a deserted, silent dunescape. Surely there was nobody about? By and by we came to a little village of driftwood windbreaks built around the natural declivities in the dunes. Still no sign of life. There were stacked-up red, yellow and blue plastic fish trays signalling a desire for privacy and goodness knows what else. Then, one by one, heads began appearing over the parapets of what the poet Kit Wright has described as ‘lust bowls’. Just as suddenly, the heads bobbed out of sight again and the silence continued. It was like the Somme at midday. We were surrounded by dozens of humans in this superheated warren and they had all gone to ground. Nonetheless we felt observed. It was an odd feeling, which we readily exchanged for the freedom of the beach below. ‘They’re obviously much engrossed in their books,’ observed my companion.

  Hastening away in the general direction of the distant sea, we encountered another of English Nature’s notices: MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC ARE WARNED THAT THIS PART OF THE BEACH IS UNDER USE BY NATURISTS. The telling use of the words ‘warned’ and ‘under use’ made it quite clear that in the well-dressed offices of English Nature a naturist would be regarded with the same degree of alarm as an unexploded mine. Looking back from the beach towards the Somme as casually as we could, naked figures could be seen rising up from time to time out of the bunkers for surveillance purposes. It was like a scene from Watership Down. The Unclothed Ones were mostly male and very white, but a few varied in hue from underdone to deep Greek Island tan. Every now and again, in ones or twos, they would make the long trek across the beach to cool off in the sea. There was a distinctly erotic air to the place that somehow lent a restless, urban feeling to the wild and beautiful dunes, and put them out of bounds.

  The noticeboards and the frisson of nudity about the dunes bespoke the continuing British confusion about bodies. Well into the nineteenth century, to go swimming was to go naked, especially in the wild. I have a print of a photograph, taken at the bathing-lake in Victoria Park, Hackney, in 1899, in which not a single one of literally hundreds of boys bathing is wearing a stitch, and there is not a girl in sight. Until halfway through the eighteenth century, people still swam in the sea principally for their health, but during the next fifty years they came to the beaches more and more for pleasure. The elaborate bathing machine was simply a recognition by the Victorians of the erotic potentialities underlying sea-bathing. Mention of the seaside was often the occasion for a nudge and a wink. The characteristically English obsession with swimming costumes and near-nudity was the raison d’être of McGill’s seaside postcards. You find it in the heavy-handed humour of a letter, dated 1930, to the Swimming Times, on behalf of ‘The Slowbutsure Breast Stroke Swimming Club of Wobbleham Village, Little Loweringham’. It is there, t
oo, in the Amateur Swimming Association’s edict, in the same year, that costumes ‘must be non-transparent, shall be one piece, devoid of open-work, and reach within three-and-a-half inches from the base of the neck, back and front. In the leg portion, the costume shall be cut in a straight line round the circumference of each leg.’ Even as recently as the 1997 World Championships in Australia, when Steve Zellen lost his trunks as he dived in at the start of a race and swam on, he was disqualified. (Arguing his case before the judges, he said he would have stopped had it been a backstroke event.)

  English Nature’s warnings alerting people to the possibility that a naturist might pass within their field of vision shared something of the comical quality, it seemed to me, of the Vatican’s precautions, described in this cutting from the Telegraph I found recently on a friend’s study wall:

  VATICAN OBLIGES SHY SWAMI

  Special arrangements of unusual rigour have had to be made at the Vatican over the weekend for the Papal audience of Pramukh Swami, an Indian spiritual leader, who has not seen a woman for 46 years. In order that he should not break this rule inadvertently in the Vatican of all places, women, including nuns, were kept away from the route as the 63-year-old Hindu monk was brought to the Papal palace and ushered into the Papal presence on Saturday. The sect’s leader is accompanied by nine other monks and by a group of laymen whose special task it is to warn him in good time of the approach of a woman and then guide him with his eyes shut.