Living the life aquatic on Hampstead Heath

Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal
by Al Alvarez
(Bloomsbury, £14.99)

Like today’s politicians, the current crop of writers haven’t done a lot else with their lives. With their creative writing courses and visiting professorships, they are the wonks of letters. Not so grizzled veteran Al Alvarez. Bass notes of Hemingwayesque pheromones gather around him. He is a poet and a novelist but also a poker player and an Alpinist.

Alas, that was then. A gammy ankle, clumsily reset in the Sixties, finally caught up with Alvarez in his seventies, and the only way he can satisfy a craving for action is by regular dips in the ponds of Hampstead Heath. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound much like “feeding the rat”, a lively metaphor for indulging an adrenaline addiction which was coined by the late mountaineer Mo Anthoine and became the title of Alvarez’s biography of his friend. But as it happens, taking the waters on the Heath gives the writer’s inner rodent plenty to gnaw on.

For one thing, he is no fairweather bather. The mordantly titled Pondlife is his diary of bracing excursions to the Hampstead Riviera, in all conditions and seasons. With apologies to Defoe, it’s a kind of journal of the plage year. Each entry begins with a record of the water temperature: degrees Fahrenheit are to Alvarez what units of alcohol are to Bridget Jones — the fewer there are, the better he feels about himself. In the depths of winter he takes his recreation through a hole in the ice, like an Eskimo fisherman. The reader has a delightful image of the writer’s splendid, bald profile cleaving the freezing waters like the masthead of an old-time icebreaker.

Nor does Alvarez shrink before the intimidating bird population, unlike his unfortunate fellow swimmers. To hear him tell it, they are buzzed and eyeballed and interdicted. The birds believe the ponds belong to them. This is On the Waterfront, with swans and gulls as teamsters and longshoremen.

But Alvarez exults in their company, and in the changing colours of the trees. Pondlife is a welcome addition to a growing library of titles about the solace and balm of the natural world. The poet’s eye is undimmed — a kingfisher is “a sapphire shot from a rifle” — and he finds comfort in the sodality of the swimmers, Hampstead’s hardy lawyers and screenwriters. But, Alvarez admits, “what began as a swimming diary is turning into a chronicle of ageing”. His daily routine — the shock of diving in, followed by the deliciousness of drying off again — becomes a threnody against the dying of the light.

The book darkens. Alvarez has a stroke and becomes bedbound, landbound. Instead of the life aquatic, he has what he calls a “submarine life”. Only the kindness of friends and family gets him back in the water again — that and his own fortitude. We leave him beating on against the current, so to speak, in a magnificent act of resistance.

Stephen Smith is culture correspondent for BBC Newsnight

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