Wednesday 19th June 2024
Patrick Barkham came to talk to us about his new biography, The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin. Patrick showed us what a multifaceted character Roger was: his humour, inspirational nature, and sadly, a dark, difficult side too in some of his relationships. Patrick told us how, 90,000 words into his first draft, he’d abandoned it to weave the story from Roger's own voice in the notebooks he’d kept from eight up and the recollections of those close to him.
Roger was a child of the Second World War. Patrick said his mother Gwen was charismatic and perhaps domineering, his father Alvan quieter, ‘a gentleman’. Roger was a wild child — in both senses. He grew up north of Harrow, but the fields behind his home had cuckoos and snipe and Roger kept slow worms as pets. It was a short hop from winning a scholarship for Haberdashers’ School to Cambridge, where Roger’s tutors included Kingsley Amis.
Patrick painted a vivid portrait through words and photographs of Roger’s life in 1960s London as he began a career in advertising. Later, Roger started treasure hunting in north Suffolk for houses, many then standing empty and unloved. He bought Walnut Tree Farm for the equivalent in today’s money of £65,000, even though it had ‘crept away to discreetly die like an old cat’. He was not afraid of hard work, up a ladder by day, and sleeping in the roofless eaves or in the fields around the house by night.
In 1975 Roger began teaching at Diss Grammar. He was an unconventional and inspirational teacher; there were some amusing and touching recollections from ex-pupils. But three years of expanding their horizons was enough and Roger’s willingness to challenge and argue led to his being ‘a brilliant environmentalist’. We have to decide, he said, ‘whether life is a little grasping affair or whether it is wonderful’. He saved a row of ancient trees in nearby Cowpasture Lane*. The farmer who’d begun to chop them down had merely coppiced them, Roger said as he brought their destruction to a halt. In 1983 he co founded ‘Common Ground’, to protect local wild spaces.
Roger loved swimming in the ‘moat’ near his house, and once even staged a dinner party on the frozen water …until a loud cracking interrupted this! His then partner, Margot Waddell, suggested he write ‘that swimming book you’re always talking about’. Waterlog came easily. Patrick said that writing was the work Roger had been born to do. Wild Wood, much larger in scope and harder to write, was not published until after his untimely death, aged 63. Yet ‘Roger ripples’, as Patrick calls them, are still growing. Among them, wild swimming of course and tree-planting by the farmer’s son from Cowpasture Lane. An enthusiastic audience asked thought-provoking questions and, as we drove home under a midsummer’s full moon, slowing to avoid a hare crossing, my thoughts were full of the wonders of wild Suffolk and what Roger Deakin might have done next.
Tricia Gilbey
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