Swimming by Roger Deakin

Author:Roger Deakin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

5

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.

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