Floating Read online

  I missed the sociability that I had enjoyed so much on the Waveney with Yanny and Amy. Working from home, alone, meant I often only socialised once a week. I felt guilty, too, for burdening Keeley with all the thoughts that whirred around my head during the day when she got in from a long day in the office.

  As the swims had become more regular and my Waterlog project took off, I had explained to Keeley why I was doing it. Not just to swim in Roger’s wake, but to ease my anxiety. I had told her about how I could never stop worrying: about work, about feeling responsible for her happiness as well as mine, about my perceived failure to live up to the expectations I had set for myself.

  It made me feel better, talking to her, opening up. It felt better than any swim. She hugged me tight and said she would always be there. That we were a team and that our love for each other was all that mattered. Her encouragement gave me the nudge I needed to get back out on the road, weather be damned. She said that if swimming helped in any way, then that’s what I should be doing.

  With that in mind, I splashed out on my own wetsuit and called Joe to see if he wanted to join me on a short trip out of London.

  Around the same time, I ran into Jools, an old work colleague. Six foot four with the frame of a cruiserweight, Jools’s love of extreme sports was legendary. He had completed an Ironman triathlon and had once run a half marathon by mistake. He asked after my wild-swimming trips, which he’d read about in a couple of blogs I’d written, and said he was keen to come along.

  Two weeks later Jools met us at Twickenham station, folded up uncomfortably in the Volkswagen Polo he’d borrowed from his mum for the day. The small boot was stuffed with kit: a wetsuit, neoprene boots, swimming gloves and a GoPro action camera. I had a feeling this swim was going to be a little more hectic than mine and Joe’s quiet glide along the Granta.

  We were heading for the River Windrush in Oxfordshire. More specifically, we were aiming for an oxbow bend, a sweeping curve in the river, the finest Roger had ever seen. While making plans for the day, I’d told Joe and Jools about Roger swimming round the bend again and again, indulging in what he called ‘boomerang swims’. It sounded like the perfect way to start the wild-swimming year, a natural washing machine to clean away my winter blues.

  Of course, Roger had visited the small Thames tributary in August, whereas we were going in mid-February. He may have written about the sky being gloomy, but as far as I could tell this was the only thing the weather had in common with that summer’s day fifteen years ago. It was positively Baltic as we drove onto the M40, the car’s dashboard thermometer reading 5°C.

  We parked up in the Cotswold village of Burford and walked past stone cottages towards the Windrush’s towpath. Within five minutes the heavens opened, our hands scrambling round our necks for hoods, reaching into bags for brollies. A swim in icy rain was not what we had signed up for.

  The rain wasn’t the only problem. It had been particularly wet over the previous weeks, the relentless winter downpours inescapable. And from where I was now standing, by a dead tree in the middle of a muddy field, it seemed almost all of that rainwater had wound up in the Windrush. Its banks were a marshy mess, dull grass poking through the murky brown river. As the water swung left into Roger’s beloved oxbow bend, it raged, eddying on the surface as the river narrowed sharply. If we tried a boomerang swim we’d certainly be swept merrily on our way to the other side, but it was doubtful there’d be much swimming involved. Rather, we’d have trouble staying above the surface.

  There were other obstacles too. A brand-new wooden fence had been erected across the base of the deep river bend, cutting off the peninsula. Despite a public footpath running from Burford out onto the banks of the Windrush, the owner of these fields clearly didn’t want anyone hopping in and out of the water, whatever the time of year. Our fears were compounded by the distant ring of shotgun fire.

  About a hundred metres downstream, two other, more pressing problems arose. A pair of mute swans. If the current and speed of the river, mixed with the crack of gunfire, had made me wary about following exactly in Roger’s footsteps, the idea of encroaching on the territory of a pair of angry waterfowl made my mind up for me. We’d stay close to the banks and swim against the current as best we could, upstream from the fence, minimising any fears of being shot or fending off the jab from a swan’s beak.

  We dropped our bags on the sodden ground and started getting changed. It was at this point that I realised that a wetsuit and silicone swimming cap were not going to be adequate protection for the task ahead. I placed my bare foot on the muddy ground and it instantly grew cold, going numb in a matter of seconds. Meanwhile, Jools tugged on his thick-soled neoprene boots and strapped the GoPro to his head, grinning.

  We walked to the water’s edge, where a calm pool above what would usually have been the bank made for a relatively easy entry point. Jools went first. Chest high and a couple of metres into the channel, you could see that even he was struggling. Joe followed and looked winded by the push of the water against him. I was up next.

  Roger talked of a sparkling stream and a clear gravel bed, but I could only just make out my hands as I swam as strongly as possible behind Jools. At one point, feeling the current tug me towards the centre, I found myself reaching for his huge mitts, which heaved me back towards safer water.

  Yet for all this, and the fact that my hands and feet felt as if they’d been given a particularly strong local anaesthetic, it was hard not to find joy in it all. As Jools smashed out an absurdly powerful front crawl, actually managing to swim upstream, I lay on my back in the shallows. I could feel the winter’s gloom lifting from me. If I wasn’t an atheist or lapsed Catholic, I’d have called it a spiritual experience. Everything was about that moment and that moment only. I felt as if I had transcended the everyday. Being in the water made me feel reborn. I felt a great urge to get going, to revisit more of Roger’s swims, to emulate his feat and use nature as the cure for my anxieties.

  I looked downstream, at the swans’ necks raised like periscopes, as cars passed on the nearby road. They were a few hundred metres away, but I swear I could see a look of mystification and horror on the drivers’ faces as three grown men dressed for a Channel swim frolicked in a Thames tributary in deep midwinter. The subversiveness of it all added to my sense of elation. There was happiness in being the other, the outsider, something I was sure my predecessor would have revelled in.

  By now the sky was a heavy, gunmetal grey, with more rain beginning to sweep down the valley. I hauled myself out as Jools stayed suspended in midstream, his arms a windmilling blur against the colourless winter backdrop. Joe was not far behind. We stood by a pollard willow and began the tortuous task of disrobing. If it had been difficult on the Waveney, the frozen waters of the Windrush made this all but impossible. Joe sat on the grass shivering, his suit seemingly clamped to his ankles as he attempted to wrestle himself free.

  With Jools now out of the water and reviewing his action cam footage with pride, we dressed quickly. Despite wearing thick socks and walking boots, my feet remained frozen. We tramped back to the car, my body giving the tiniest hint of an endorphin rush under the countless layers of winter clothing. We decamped to a local pub and demolished a pie and a pint, before I nodded off in the back seat on the drive home, the first swim of the year done. I dreamt of longer, lazier days, when wetsuits weren’t needed and swims could be done in twos and threes. It would only get warmer from here on in, surely?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  April

  Benacre Broad and Covehithe Beach, Suffolk

  Snow and rain continued to fall throughout March and I stayed trapped at home. A swim in this weather, dressed up to the nines in expensive water sports kit, just wasn’t going to do it for me, despite the happiness and sense of freedom I had found on the Windrush. I wanted something more languid. Essentially, I wanted a summer swim. And with the weather finally starting to perk up at the start of April, I made my move.

&
nbsp; Yanny had talked often over the winter of swimming at Benacre Broad, not far from his Beccles home or, indeed, Roger’s moat at Mellis. So, with the early spring sun burning off the clouds, I hopped on a train to East Anglia for what would turn out to be the first of many trips with a bigger group of friends in an area I’d once called home.

  I lived in Norwich for four years. Three as a student at the University of East Anglia, one more staving off the inevitability of career and adulthood. They were some of the happiest times of my life and I was glad to be going back after a few years away. Many of my old university friends had returned there after moving away, and getting off the clunky old InterCity 125 at Norwich station, it felt like a homecoming. I walked through the cathedral grounds, staring at its high steeple to try and catch a glimpse of the peregrine falcons which had made their home on the city’s highest vantage point. I reminisced about old times and thought about recapturing the youthful spirit of those days on my swimmer’s journey. There was a simplicity to them, a romanticism which had grown rose-tinted down the years, of long days spent drinking in old pubs, talking about music and books, of late nights and house parties and the belief that anything was possible. This all played directly into the easiness and possibility I felt when I was in or around water.

  I passed through town, tottering over the cobbles of Elm Hill, past the arts centre where I’d embarrassed myself as a first year student at an open mic poetry night, and out onto the Dereham Road.

  Molly was parked up in the Jet garage, face lit blue by the glow of her smartphone. I rapped on the passenger window.

  Molly was a friend of friends. Close with Yanny, she had moved to Norwich to study on the creative writing MA at UEA a few years after I had left. We’d met on the odd occasion, exchanging hellos at mutual friends’ birthday drinks. Beyond that, we hardly knew each other.

  Yanny had told me she’d be up for a swim when I’d joined him on the Waveney. Molly is from Cornwall and has a long history of throwing herself into cold water. She’d once swum across Falmouth Harbour as part of a school P.E. lesson. I thought back to my inability to jump in the deep end at Bishops Stortford’s grotty Grange Paddocks municipal pool, trying to repress the memory and shake off twenty years of residual embarrassment.

  It was what you did as a kid in Cornwall, Molly told me as we drove out of town, through narrow country lanes towards the Suffolk border. Our chat about swimming holes, Roger Deakin and how my journey was coming along was occasionally interrupted by brief bouts of road rage, Molly switching between shouts of ‘Fuck’ and flicking Vs at errant drivers. The window was wound down, causing the breeze to blow her red hair across her face, and I could see the glee in her eyes behind her oversized sunglasses. It made the drive oddly compelling.

  Yanny and his wife Suz were waiting for us at Covehithe church, which stands high on the cliffs about a mile south of Benacre Broad. Every year, the sea edges ever closer to this ecclesiastical ruin. The road towards the water was blocked by a metal gate, a huge sign proclaiming ‘No Access to the Beach’ and warning of a steep drop towards the sea. The coast erodes here faster than anywhere else in the UK. Five hundred metres disappeared between the 1830s and 2001. The path where Roger walked to Benacre Broad is now shifting sand under the heavy longshore drift.

  I was particularly excited about this swim. We were going to double-dip. First we’d tackle Benacre Broad itself, in what Roger called ‘water liked cooled tea’, before striding across the shingle beach and into the galumphing, grey waves of the North Sea. It was a windy day, so the idea of a swim in calmer waters before being buffeted by the ocean was hugely appealing.

  Ignoring the warning signs about landslides on the old path, we set out for the broad. We wandered along the edge of the cliffs, through a fallow field and then past a pig farm, the snuffling of sows reaching us on the spring wind. We clambered over a heavy wooden fence, Benacre Broad opening out in front of us. The water here was salty now, seeping through the beach and ending its time as a freshwater lagoon, as it had been in Roger’s day. But it wasn’t this that bothered me.

  Once again, a fence was hampering my progress. Strung all around the water’s edge, back inland and along the rear of the beach, this electric barrier was here for good reason: to protect the ground-nesting birds. Reeds grew tall in the shallows, so even if we braved a sharp jolt from the fence, we’d still face a huge natural obstacle. We repaired to a convenient bird hide, resting on stilts, to survey our options. From this vantage point, it was abundantly clear that stealing a swim here was going to be nigh on impossible. Roger’s August excursion would have been less strenuous, and despite my experience in the Windrush, I’d yet to catch the insouciant trespassing bug in which my predecessor seemed to revel.

  Instead, we made for the beach. By now, the wind was really whipping in. It is never still on the east coast, but the gale was making it hard to stand up straight, let alone pull off my clothes and get changed into my swimming shorts. I made brief mention of the fact that I’d packed my wetsuit. Molly, by now in a bikini despite the chill, gave me a withering look.

  ‘Don’t be a dickhead.’

  I could tell right away that Molly was going to be just the person to help me get into the water when feelings of uncertainty or fear swelled up. The idea of ‘don’t think, just do’ appealed to me and had cropped up on countless anxiety advice blogs I’d read in lieu of seeking out professional help for my problems. It was the kind of helpful advice Keeley had given me too. And out here on the exposed east coast, it was just what I needed to hear.

  It wasn’t just about conquering fears. If I was going to swim all through the year and complete my Waterlog mission in short order, I needed to build up my stamina. I changed awkwardly into my swimming shorts and Molly and I entered the water together, Yanny and Suz watching, sweet coffee and starchy towels out and ready for our exit. The beach shelved steeply, and as my feet cooled in the roiling waves, I dived under, all the air pushed from my lungs as I surfaced and gasped. I knew this wasn’t going to be a lengthy swim, but I wanted to take a good look at my surroundings. I rolled onto my back, the huge dome of Suffolk sky wheeling above me as I tried to stay as still as possible while remaining afloat.

  Back on the beach, two dead trees poked their spindly limbs through the shingle. These were once part of the bluebell wood through which Roger had walked, the remnants of which we had cut through on our walk down to the beach from Covehithe church. Sandblasted and bright white, their trunks were buried deep, branches sprouting just a few inches above the beach’s surface. From my sea-bound vantage point, they swayed on the horizon. I imagined their brittle branches snapping if I dared try to clamber over them once I was dried off.

  The relentless tide had changed much here since my predecessor had made the short journey from his home. The salty broad, the bluebell wood ‘blindly marching into the sea’. It felt good to be in a place where I could report changes, rather than just idly wonder about the small tweaks in landscape which Roger would notice. Even since his death, just seven years previously, Covehithe and Benacre Broad had inched further into the grey pull of the rollers. Nothing, not even concerned locals, could stand in the way of the power of the sea.

  I rode one of those rollers back to shore, Suz holding a towel wide to welcome me to dry land, her glasses covered in sea spray. Despite the chill breeze I realised that I wasn’t feeling the cold too badly and dutifully posed for a photo in a salty pool under the cliffs, my wet shorts clinging to my thighs, my feet covered in heavy sand and pebbles. I revelled in the same feeling of possibility and freedom I had enjoyed on my Oxfordshire dip, except that this time, without the wetsuit to dull my senses, it was something approaching a chemical high. It coursed along my arms and legs and turned my pasty white body bright red. It felt magical. While I luxuriated in this soaring rush, Molly, whose scorn for the wetsuit I had to thank for this growing high, headed off to the bird hide, using it as a convenient changing room on this otherwise exposed stretch
of coastline. At that moment nothing mattered and I had no worries.

  With spring here Yanny’s enthusiasm for my Waterlog project was blossoming. He spoke effusively about how he could drive me all over Suffolk to his favourite swimming haunts. We decided Bungay beach, that elusive spot on the Waveney just off Outney Common, would be our next calling point. Molly wanted in too, work depending. It was like the old days were back again, but with swimming and nature taking the place of cheap booze and student house parties.

  We strode off back to the car, Molly and Suz cooing over the pigs as Yanny shouted out warnings to me to stay away from the crumbling cliff edge. The waves here had me energised and I could feel them pushing me on into a summer and a world where wild swimming, and following in Roger’s footsteps, would be my only thoughts.

  CHAPTER SIX

  May

  Parliament Hill Lido, London – Ironmonger Row Baths, London

  Summer was beginning to come on strong, so I pulled the dusty tarp off my bike and cycled the eight miles through central London from Camberwell up to Hampstead Heath. Instead of my usual dip in the green-brown waters of the ponds, I was heading for Parliament Hill Lido. This art deco gem had just reopened for the season and I wanted to try its waters before the weather got searing hot and the crowds began to swell.

  The previous week Joe and I had immersed ourselves for twenty minutes at Highgate, the water a barely believable 8°C. We emerged delirious, incapable of speech, giddy laughter giving way to terrifying shivers. I had ridden my bike the short distance from the pond to the Parliament Hill café in wobbly fashion, my teaspoon clinking violently against the china cup as I tried desperately to warm up. It had been funny for a brief few minutes until we realised we were on the edge of hypothermia. I had got cocky after Covehithe and the ruddy warmth I’d experienced on the beach. Today I wasn’t going to be so cavalier, even if the desperation to feel what I’d felt after my Suffolk swim burned deep inside me.