What a delightful book.
Roger draws inspiration from “The Swimmer”. This the tale of a man that decides to swim his way home via his friends swimming pools on a hot day they only get in America. To my shame I know it as a film that maybe only the 70’s could produce. Burt Lancaster stars, and it was made in 1968. The source material is a short story written in 1964 by John Cheever.
Waterlog begins with Roger swimming in his moat. Class conscious it is not a good start, but all is forgiven when it transpires this is a more rustic version of a moat which people seem to have dug for none defensive reasons around parts of their homes in Suffolk during the 17th century. Already a sketchy walk idea is emerging for me. Roger bought the ruin in 1968.
Soon Roger is swimming in the Scilly Isles and I expect the book to take the form of a traverse across England. It does not, instead he splashes and leaps around the map over the process of a year.
The writing is wonderful, I am easily carried along by his enthusiasm, his world is very much my world. An interest in the arcane and fairly pointless, the discovery of a sunken boggy bit of ground that would once have been a Victorian swimming hole is a delight. The fact he has a set of I-Spy books dating back to the early period of the series initial success as points of reference just strikes the right chord.
Roger quietly defines convention and slips into the wild water at every possible convenience. His travel down the River Test is a rewarding read.
What struck me was the amount of wild swimming that was stilling going on relatively recently, and presumably still does. I will look more carefully at the knotted ropes hanging from trees on my riverside walks. Indeed my whole perception of this third element has been changed. I am no swimmer, it was rather beaten out of me in cold outdoor swimming pools, under the title of “swimming lessons”. Horrible things in pools that were past their best. More swimmers than non-swimmers drown is the statistic in my head, it seems unreasonable to leap into any body of water unless totally necessary.
Roger has no qualms, he seems to have been born with rather too few fear glands and at times his behaviour borders on reckless. Even by his own admittance in the text some of his exploits were less than wise.
Many of the swimmers he meets are of the more elderly generation less used to mains water I suspect and so more at home in the village swimming hole than we are now.
It makes you realise we have lost something, but Roger’s wilful disregard of what amounts to social convention makes you realise that just below the surface these things are still possible. We allow ourselves to be badgered into compliance. Those rent-a-cops with their day-glo waistcoats largely spout nonsense and hope an official air will carry the day.
His recollections of the sugar beet factory at Bury St Edmunds chimed with mine and I laughed at a forgotten memory when he mentioned the misting machines used to mask the terrible stink of sugar beet processing.
He reminded me to cherish the quiet places, revel in the orchards I see from time to time, they are a disappearing landscape.
The book has short chapter structure, very much like the dips he takes, it is filled with forgotten history, recollections and detail. It is a book I cannot really recommend enough.
His voice was so strong and immediate and his swimming strength so obvious, it was like a punch in the stomach to discover Roger Deakin had died in 2006, age 62. I actually only discovered this on about paragraph 4 of this blog entry. I wondered who was going to look after all the things he cherished at his homestead, the birds in the chimney, the life in the moat.
To discover someone so full of life and then find they are in fact dead. It is so much more dislocating than the end of “The Swimmer” could ever be. I felt like I knew him, he was that sort of writer, that sort of man.
Here is The Guardian article relating to his death.
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