River swimming

You’ll keep going your way

I’ll keep going my way

River, stay away from my door

(Paul Robeson’s is an infinitely deeper, more solemn and glorious version of this song than Frank Sinatra’s. It was played at my grandfather’s funeral and reminds me of something of the essence of him, as I remember him, even though that was the first time I’d ever heard it)

When my daughters were very young we spent a lot of time in and around the River Wandle. At one point our house backed onto its banks, and I was warned against letting Cherry paddle barefoot in the very shallow, clear part closest to us due to the frequent volumes of knives and syringes that were reportedly pulled out of it. I came back from a bike ride one day to find the girls, with their dad, planting up some of the banks with a local volunteer group. Violet, barely more than a baby, was plastered head to toe in river mud. I still remember the predominantly male volunteers astonishment that I didn’t instantly berate the girls’ dad for allowing my baby to cover herself in mud. They weren’t to know of course that mud, and rivers, were my domain.

The Wandle is a shallow, meandering sort of river in most of the places we interacted with it. I googled and was assured otters frequented it and the only kingfishers I have seen to date were on the Wandle. I don’t think we ever found a part deep enough for the girls to swim in, which was just as well because they were wading in it years before either of them could swim.

I associated the river inextricably with my experience of motherhood, its meanders seemed to soothe me through the reality of raising two children. I fondly imagined the Wandle parented with me, calmed the girls as it calmed me, intrigued them as it intrigued me, and held us all in its womanly curves. The relentless flow felt like a metaphor for the passage of time as experienced through the eyes of a mother, seemingly always the same whilst constantly slipping away to make way for the new, changes so subtle and imperceptible that still somehow came as a surprise.

Nobody ‘official’ ever told us we couldn’t paddle in the river although well-meaning passers-by were full of reasons why we ‘shouldn’t’, ranging from concerns about dirt and mud, to riverbourne diseases, to an adamance my girls would ‘catch their death’ although to my knowledge not one child has died of exposure or hypothermia from paddling in the River Wandle. We had friends who joined us but many weren’t so lucky. Sometimes passing children would ask their parents or grandparents if they could paddle too and I heard a lot of ‘ugh no! Dirty!’ and other strange attitudes to our waterways. I even once heard ‘no, you’ll get your wellies dirty’.

Now we live in Sussex the Wandle has been replaced by the Arun as ‘our’ river. The Arun is also the river of my childhood and it occurs to me now, as my new relationship with it begins, that I never once as a child paddled or swam in the Arun.

A deep, fast-flowing, tidal river, the Arun begins at a series of springs and ghylls in St Leonard’s Forest, just outside Horsham. A recent bike ride to investigate revealed little of note to the naked eye, trickles and ditches but nothing I could instantly identify as the source of the Arun. Nonetheless by the time it reaches a piece of West Sussex I know as Lee Place, also ‘the end of Harsfold Lane’ that lies geographically somewhere between Wisborough Green, Billingshurst and Pulborough, it is wide, deep and imposing with steep banks. Perhaps this is why I never got in it.

More likely I never thought to. Even for somebody as prone to wandering and blatant trespassing as me the river was off-limits. I still don’t really know why, my parents never to my recollection raised any objection to me returning home in any sort of sodden or mud-soaked state, and I don’t remember being told to keep out of water. I swam in the lakes on family holidays to the Lake District and in the sea at Littlehampton where the Arun returns to the mother. Nonetheless it never occurred to me then that I could swim in the Arun but since coming back to Sussex I’ve felt the pull of the river every time I pass it by.

My good friend and source of all wisdom on open-water swimming Debbie Burton says some people dip, and some people swim. I think I’m the former, because although my instincts now always urge me into the water it’s the experience of being connected with the habitat that I want, I’m a competent enough swimmer but I’ve yet to feel the urge to seriously swim. Maybe it’ll come, as time passes the idea of slipping into the river from one of the various bridges nearby and swimming a way up, or downstream, is appealing.

Even so it took me a long time to swim in the Arun. I’d been living here for nearly a year before I christened myself and the first time I did so it took ages. I can’t really explain why. The area I chose was recommended by several wild swimming publications, all of which seemed legitimate, and there were no obvious NO SWIMMING signs and the presence of a NO DIVING in fact strongly suggested this was a spot many others had deduced was suitable for swimming. But I sat on the bank for a good half hour, sweating after a long bike ride and stripped down to my bra and bib shorts, barefoot and trying desperately not to think about what lay beneath the rushes and what might ooze in the slime at the bottom of the water.

There’s a primal sort of fascination and revulsion at the thought of the secret life of rivers, the nymphs and ghastly worms that live in the riverbed, the horrifying sucker-like creatures we imagine spiral through dank waters, the nibbly insects, the fish - what if they bite? Do fish bite? I’ve seen the size of some of the pike my brother hauled out of the Arun when he was a teenager.

Then there’s the sense of being somewhere I shouldn’t, the awareness that while I don’t know of any reason why I can’t be in the river, I wouldn’t really have any answer to anybody who told me to get out. People feel ownership over land they connect with, I feel it too so I understand it, but some think their feelings are more important and use the depth of that feeling to argue everybody else away.

Contrary to popular belief outside isn’t free and it’s also not terribly friendly a lot of the time. In the past few months I’ve twice been shouted at by angry men for being on public land. I have thoughts on men who shout at women, none of them are good thoughts, and I particularly have thoughts on men who shout at women who are alone or with young children.

Those thoughts loomed large in my mind as I edged around on the riverbank and getting in was a process of gently talking to myself, pushing myself, encouraging and urging myself until in one fell swoop it was done. I let the current carry me a short distance then swam back up against it to scramble out, knees muddied and tingling from the brushes of nettles in amongst the rushes. Whatever invisible barriers lay between me and the river had been breached. Getting back in was the work of a moment.

I don’t really fully know what the pull of river swimming is yet, only that it exists in me and in my children who love the river and embrace it as fully as I do. More fully, they put their heads under and I can’t yet. For reasons unknown I still can’t submerge my head. I think like all relationships the one I have with the Arun will continue to evolve. I think the more I learn about the river the more questions I will have and the more time I will need to spend answering those questions through being in the environment.

Yesterday as my daughters and I played in a particularly good, shallow spot with friends a grass snake swam by, its little head above the surface as its body wriggled side-to-side through the water. I can see us reliving that moment in 50 years, when I am unfathomably old, the girls will say ‘do you remember that grass snake?’ and even through my inevitable dementia I will because who wouldn’t? The moments that make a childhood, make a life, happen in rivers as they happen in gardens and woods and fields and on beaches and up hills and mountains, and only rarely in classrooms and halls and soft play centres and theme parks, but only if we let them, if we’re not afraid to get our wellies dirty.

Reading, synchronicity and the shadow

Synchronicity: ‘A coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning’. Jung.

The Surface Breaks, Louise O'Neill; Mind of a Survivor, Megan Hine; Owl Sense, Miriam Darlington

I often find themes emerging in my reading, where unrelated books come together into one particular area of inquiry. I love these happy little coincidences that I see as synchronicity in action because they remind me of the profound magic of books and reading, and how truly powerful books are.

My latest bout of unwittingly thematic reading has concerned another Jungian phenomenon, that of the shadow.

The shadow is the unknown dark side of our personality and it exists just beyond our consciousness. It’s where we tend to hoard our more base and less Instagrammable urges – greed, anger, selfishness, sexual longings, power cravings. I like to think of my shadow as the world’s most debauched party taking place just where I can’t get to it, which is probably just as well, because the hangover afterwards would be off the chart.

The shadow is in my view essentially a structure created by fear of the true nature of ourselves. The parts of my nature I fear the most are my imagination, and my emotions.  And the reality of my shadow is that I do everything in my power not to come across it, which means severely tempering both of the above.

But the student must have been ready, because along came three books that opened the door to that debauched party in my psyche.

I went to an evening with bestselling author Louise O’Neill to listen to her talk about The Surface Breaks and from the second she came into the room I could feel I was in the presence of somebody unafraid of the shadow.

She’s open about her goals for writing, as she said, she doesn’t care if her characters are likeable, she cares that they are honest. They are. And how. Raw and brutal. I admire her more than I can possibly express for her comfort with discomfort, or rather her willingness to endure discomfort.

And when I read The Surface Breaks, which I did in one sitting like a woman possessed, what stayed with me afterwards was how incredibly uncomfortable it was. The main character is in permanent discomfort at best, excruciating pain at worst.

The book, a feminist re-imagining of The Little Mermaid, is beautiful, and powerful, and thoughtful, and brave, but it’s also really uncomfortable. The antithesis of my happily-ever-afters with their quaint teashops, cosy nights in front of a roaring fire with hot chocolate, and other simple pleasures.

Life, after all, involves both.

O’Neill inspired me to think about my own shadow in my writing, and reminded me that writing is a journey. It’s a lifetime’s work to get to know oneself, especially when we change all the time, and I see all creative endeavour as a product of deep self-knowledge that allows the truest expression.

If we don’t explore the whole – the bad side, the shadow, the darkness – how can we express the real?

After The Surface Breaks I picked up Mind of a Survivor by Megan Hine, which has been on my TBR for ages and of which I was reminded after listening to The Wild Show.

This is nothing like gritty fantasy-based YA. This is nonfiction, part memoir and part guide, a deep look at the mindset of survival and examples of that mindset in practice. 

And while some of the incidents Hine describes seem carved from fantasy – a night in the middle of the Nairobi desert warding off a pride of hungry lions armed with nothing but a small campfire, for example – this book is no less real. No less aggressive in its shattering of some pretty little myths we’ve long carried around with us.

Hine reminds us that survival can be as much about self-preservation and caution as it is about heroism and courage. And she also reminds us that the wild is neither nurturing and protective, nor hostile and unforgiving, but utterly indifferent. It does not care if we live or die.

I think that indifference, that truly bleak knowledge that somebody or something just does not care, is worse even than the darkest parts of the shadow. It’s the least human characteristic of all. Even a desire to cause harm, is generally rooted in a universally shared human experience like pain or fear. Simply not caring, is non-human to a terrifying degree.

Much of our relationship with nature relies upon us humanising it, controlling it and cutifying it to better cope with this vast indifference. I thought of this often as I read Owl Sense by Miriam Darlington, one of the most psychologically aware pieces of nature writing I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.

Her study of the native owl species of Europe takes her on a journey of inner and outer knowledge and progress and Owl Sense is as much a personal development book as it is a study of nature and wildlife, in my view.

She talks often about how we both mystify owls, using them to inform legends, and attempt to bring them under our control by turning them into cute must-have fashion accessories. She talks about her discomfort with the growing pile of owl memorabilia she accumulates during her quest, the piles of knick-knacks, bags, cushions and other accessories with cute owl prints and motifs.

Through nature, she draws attention to human nature. How fragile our perceptions can be, how easy it is to ride roughshod over the true nature of a thing in our attempt to reduce it to something within our understanding and ultimately, control.

In her tale of the Exeter eagle owl, she demonstrates how even the most awe-inspiring predator and creature of legend can be reduced to a pathetic joke if it exists out of time, and out of place.

I think we can do similar for the shadow. Not mock it or dismiss it like Darlington’s poor eagle owl, but simply accept it. Acceptance of a thing removes its power over us.

Funny, how we try so hard to humanise nature to remove its power, projecting onto the great outdoors what we’re afraid to apply to the microfacets of our own selves.