For a writer who inspires such devotion, Roger Deakin’s bibliography is short. He only published one book before he died in 2006, the celebrated Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain. Later came Wildwood, the epic arboreal treatise that was topped, tailed and published after his death, and then Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, gleaned from his copious jottings about life in the Suffolk ruin he restored and continued to share with wildlife that had moved in during the years of dilapidation.
Waterlog is often credited with launching the modern outdoor swimming movement, and like many others, I have travelled in Deakin’s damp footprints. I’ve visited Walnut Tree Farm, kept much as it was by the new owners, swum in the moat Deakin reinstated and walked the ancient green lane saved by his campaigning energy.
The Swimmer is an unconventional biography of an unconventional person. In his introduction, the Guardian journalist Patrick Barkham explains that he effectively ripped up a 90,000-word draft he’d laboured on for two years, abandoning an attempt at definitiveness that he felt was contrary to the spirit of the man. What he delivers instead is a kind of tapestry fashioned from notes, letters and published works, with Deakin himself as principal narrator and some creative infill by Barkham writing in Deakin’s voice. Given the previous mining of his notes and recordings, much of The Swimmer will feel familiar to fans. But the first-person narration is liberally interspersed with the impressions, memories and perspectives of dozens of interviewees – friends, relatives, colleagues and associates, pupils from a short but memorable stint as a teacher of English, and lovers, of whom there were many. These perspectives stir sediment into the clear waters of Deakin’s narrative.
This is not unwelcome – in any love there is that moment when the object of our admiration is revealed to be not wholly who we thought. Not more, or less necessarily, but different, muddier. Here perhaps is that moment for Deakinites. Undoubtedly we’re seeing the man more completely than before, perhaps more clearly than he saw himself. The schoolboy, the student, the ad man with a life split between London and Suffolk. The sociable outsider with a hectic, corvid intelligence; a compulsive, impulsive collector of objects, phrases and loves; someone who leaned hard into late-blooming celebrity but who was only really at ease in the water or at home. We pace the brick floor of the Walnut Tree Farm kitchen, eavesdrop on its indoor and outdoor bedrooms. We flinch when he lashes out at those closest to him.
Deakin was, in Barkham’s view, a man determined “to resist the anchor, the mooring, the still water – and the deeps”. His long-term partner, Serena Inskip, said of Waterlog: “We all read it and said ‘Where’s Roger?’ … There was a lot more in him than that but he couldn’t get it out, it was too frightening.” The person who perhaps knew him longest, Margot Waddell, mused that “he never swims below the surface … I don’t think he quite realised there was a choice.” Her memorial address added that on the night he died Roger spoke of being able “to see a very deep hole”. Perhaps if he finally looked into those deeps, he’d have seen something like this remarkable book.
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.
• The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin by Patrick Barkham is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
