The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin

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But there is something particularly striking about Roger’s questing generation. This generation suffered the misfortune to be born during the chronic anxiety of the Second World War, but Roger’s cohort, or at least its white male members, may be the most fortunate generation ever. Their free-roaming childhoods unfolded as the economy boomed, they missed national service and came of age when sex was invented, between the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles’ first EP. Roger and his peers enjoyed great gifts – a welfare state, social mobility, plentiful jobs, affordable property, accessible global travel – but they struggled, too. In hindsight, the 60s’ social, cultural and psychological revolution seems inevitable but social transformation has to be fought for. He embraced new styles of thinking, feeling and living. Deakin likened the tendrils of the tumour that killed him to tree roots penetrating his brain and lived just long enough to be delighted by the concept of the wood wide web, a fitting mycelial metaphor for his relentless urge to make connections of his own. That mission has outlasted him, and this extraordinary insight into his life will lend new complexity and reach to the network. So I spliced together many thousand shards of memoir, fact and feeling found in his notebooks, letters, jottings and journalism. Then I juxtaposed his enraptured view of the world with the recollections of his friends. Sometimes there is harmony between them; at other times realities clash violently. What emerges, I hope, is a feel for Roger’s passion and poetry, and an honest, unsparing portrait of a life. Roger and I shared the same sky, we loved the same woods The Swimmer is a new book on the writer Roger Deakin; a well known character and formative influence on wild swimming and nature writing. It charts Deakin's life from school days, all the way to his untimely death at the age of 63.

Like many readers, I imagined he would be a dream dinner party guest but, in the end, I never met him – he died, suddenly, aged just 63, in 2006. For years, I enjoyed his writing but also pondered the distinctiveness of his generation and its value – my parents were the same age and, like Roger, had moved at the end of the 60s to seek a new kind of life in the East Anglian countryside. My boyhood best friend is a farmer. I totally believe in working with farmers and not against them. The 1980s were a low point. Since then things have improved so much. A new generation are farming in such a different way.” Norfolk Wildlife Trust was Britain's first Wildlife Trust, launched in 1926 with the acquisition of Cley Marshes. It has 60-plus nature reserves, more than 36,000 members and 1,200 active volunteers.My dad could name every species of bird and every plant, he seemed to be a wildlife superman, but he didn’t have superpowers with butterflies. We learned about them together.” As much a biography of a generation as of an individual [...] Barkham conjures the life of the wild swimming champion and author of Waterlog in a bravura act of creative memoir [...] a rich, strange and compelling work of creative memoir that beautifully honours and elevates the life and work of its subject" The toponym "Barkham" is derived from the Old English bercheham [2 ] meaning "birch home" referring to the birch trees on the edge of Windsor Forest. [3 ] The name evolved via forms including Berkham' in the 14th century and Barcombe in the 18th century. [2 ] I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted. A boomer, he grew up in a postwar era of optimism and economic prosperity, a working-class scholarship boy at Haberdashers’ Aske’s (“we knew how to use the apostrophe”) who went on to a dreamlike Cambridge of punting and Pimm’s. He became a successful advertising executive, was pursued by any number of girls, then found a ruined farmhouse in Suffolk to which, aged 31, he retired. He then teaches, swims, gets involved in the local “faires”, which are like mini East Anglian Glastonburys, befriends Richard Branson and Andrea Arnold, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. He’s a terrible poet but a beautiful writer of prose, and records his life as if he knows that a book like this will one day be written about it.

The last Act covers the funeral and the memorial a year later at Walnut Tree Farm. Everyone made a contribution, names which are familiar to me now, eloquent and deeply, deeply moving in their recollections. Most of all, Rufus Deakin saying “Tony Axon and Robert Macfarlane made the best speeches. Mum (Jenny), Margot and Serena got up together and spoke together which made me cry” (me, too). These are the three women with whom Roger experienced the longest, most ecstatic and most painful relationships. But who was this man who managed to conjure these wonderful books from the same letters and words we have? There was very little about him from what I could find. In King Edward III's reign the income from Barkham Manor helped to pay for the rebuilding of Windsor Castle and, not long afterwards, timber from Barkham was sent to make the roof of Westminster Abbey. [3 ] Here, on the edge of Mellis Common, near Diss, he stripped bare and rebuilt a house, and a community. In the early days he worked in London and returned at weekends to tear down walls, patch up beams, cooking and sleeping outside with groups of friends. There is a sense that Roger was making notes for a memoir throughout his life. The set pieces in his notebooks about his childhood; his uncle Laddie, the anarchist and Grandpa Wood; and at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hampstead school, the camps at Beaulieu Road organised by Barry Goater, the biology teacher’ who infected us all with his wild enthusiasm’. It surfaces again in 1975 at 23 Queen’s Gardens in London after he had left Cambridge and worked as an Ad Man for a few years — ‘the flat of a rampant entrepreneur’, where friends (chums) came and went and Roger earned enough money to decide what he really wanted to do. After a desert island trip to Formentera he thought he knew.

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Roger Deakin (11 Februar 1943 – 19 August 2006)​ gilt als einer der Begründer des Wild Swimming in Großbritannien, dem Schwimmen in offenen Gewässern wie Seen und Flüssen, aber auch kleinen Teichen oder Bächen. Sein Buch "Waterlog", die Beschreibung ​wie er Großbritannien in den unterschiedlichsten Wasserwegen durchquert, gilt als eines der wichtigsten Bücher zu diesem Thema. Let’s create more,” he said. “We are not going to take prime farmland. With regenerative farming you can have a good business and care about the land.