pondlife

9781408841006 Pondlife (517h).indd vi9781408841006 Pondlife (517h).indd vi 12/11/2012 10:14:2912/11/2012 10:14:29

pondlife

al alvarez

9781408841006 Pondlife (517h).indd iii9781408841006 Pondlife (517h).indd iii 12/11/2012 10:14:2812/11/2012 10:14:28

Preface

I love language and the things you can do with it and I also love the intricate business of getting it right, but sitting at a desk, writing and reading books and staring out of the window is not a discipline that comes easily to an adrenalin addict with itchy feet. The physical world has fascinated me just as much as the world of ideas and I have often used writing to satisfy my need to get out into the weather, do things, go places and try my hand at whatever was on offer.

In my arrogant youth I had made a practice of sticking my neck out – mostly in the mountains, but also in my professional life. My friend Mo Anthoine, who shared the habit, called it ‘feeding the rat’, and I fed mine reck-lessly, convinced I had nothing to lose. I had been born with what looked like cancer; the doctors – my parents too, for all I knew – assumed I would not make it even as far as puberty, and maybe I sensed their fears and thought the same. Whatever the reason, I never really believed in my immortality; I thought of myself as someone

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permanently living on borrowed time, a man for whom three score years and ten were never going to be a problem.

In fact, things started to go wrong soon after my sixti-eth birthday. I had celebrated that ominous event in Italy by repeating a climb I had done ten years earlier and this time I found it easier. I can go on doing this forever, I thought. I was wrong. Back in 1960, some Welsh doctors had set my broken leg at a slightly wrong angle and thirty years of hard use had worn away all the cartilage in the ankle; I could still walk, but only painfully, with bone grinding against bone. For a time, I preferred not to notice, though the next summer in Italy I could scarcely limp to the foot of the climb. I kept up the pretence of climbing for a couple of years on Harrison’s Rocks, a little outcrop south of London, then gave up trying, aged sixty-three. At some point, however, I began to realise that being an old man was not, after all, a posthumous existence; it was merely life of a different kind and I had better make the most of it while it lasted. My body may have been falling apart, but in some ways I had never felt more alive, and the world had never seemed more beauti-ful, more desirable, more poignant. I had been diving into the amber waters of the ponds on Hampstead Heath since I was eleven; now I began to go daily all year round. This is a record of some of those dips.

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2002

Wednesday 27 March. 52°FThe cormorants went a couple of weeks ago, the seagulls soon after. There were never more than half a dozen cormorants, but there were gulls by the hundreds. Occasionally, when I dived in, a great cloud of them would take off, squawking. My routine is to swim quickly to the twenty-fi ve-yard barrier, head in water, doing the crawl, then turn onto my back and drift back more slowly, admiring the sky and the clouds and the weather. And there were the gulls, irritably banking and swerving, kicking up a fuss.

That was last week. Now the gulls have gone, the other birds are all nesting and the swans have taken over. They have made their nest on the far bank but want to keep the whole pond to themselves. Last week, too, the twenty-fi ve-yard barrier was taken down and that changes the game: how long you stay in the water and how far you swim and how cold you want to get – now it’s up to you. The fi rst trick is to swim where the

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2 pondlife

swans are not because they don’t like intruders. There is a pair of Canada geese that have come in from the boat-ing pond next door, maybe to nest, but whenever they drift into the swans’ ken they are spat at and chased away. Likewise the moorhens and coots, which keep well clear.

This morning the geese were on the jetty when I arrived. They waddled resentfully in front of me and half turned at the jetty’s end as though to take a stand. I said, ‘Fuck off’ and kept on coming. They fl opped into the water, then drifted close in, waiting for me to go away. When I dived in after them, they fl ed.

Thursday 28 March. 52°FUntil now, whenever I walk down the slope from the car to the pond gate, a cold blast of air hits me just about when I reach the three great beech trees. Maybe it’s because there is a string of four ponds – the Men’s Pond, the Boating Pond, the Women’s Pond, the over-grown pond where herons nest– and they generate a corridor of cold air. But not today. For the fi rst time this year the air on my face felt warm. And because they mowed the slope yesterday, everything smelt of cut grass; it was like diving into a bell of sweet-smelling greenness.

Chris Ruoco the tailor brought my new lovat-green corduroys with him and gave me a fi tting after we’d


2002 3

swum. A proper fi tting: him kneeling with a mouth full of pins, cocking his head critically, pursing his lips, making adjustments. All very professional, except that we’re in an open-air, concrete-fl oored, corrugated iron enclosure of a swimming pond on Hampstead Heath.

Friday 29 March. 52°FAnother cloudless, shining day. At the top of the slope, the blossoms of the horse chestnut are still all green, but they are beginning to uncurl their fi ngers. So are the three big trees in the middle of the slope: little catkins on the (female) beech, sticky fi ngertips on the copper beeches. A week ago, they were still tightly curled bumps on the end of the twigs. The water temperature is the same but its surface is like glass, so I swim further out and dawdle back. In the area everyone is lounging around, soaking up the sun, and the nude enclosure next door seems already crowded. It’s Good Friday and no one is in a hurry. Anne has come with me. While I swim she walks briskly to the top of Parliament Hill, then circles back to meet me on the causeway between the ponds. She is pink-cheeked, bright-eyed and full of purpose, rattling a stick at a swan that has comman-deered a coot’s nest. It sits there preening, while the two coots bicker indignantly. When the coots try to reclaim their property, the swan uncoils its elegant neck and hisses at them.


4 pondlife

Saturday 30 March. 52°FA perfect spring day, the air soft and delectable. At 10 a.m. the Heath is oddly deserted – maybe because it’s the Easter holiday weekend and everyone is sleeping late. I swam almost to the outer barrier, the water still chilly, the air warm. It was beautiful. Then Anne and I ate a big breakfast at the Italian-run workmen’s café. They recog-nise me there now and greet me as though I were a more regular customer than I am. The portions are huge, the tomatoes especially delicious, the staff are easy-going and it costs almost nothing. Much nicer than the rather preten-tious and always packed Café Mozart along the road.

Sunday 31 March. 52°FAll week it’s felt like May; now it’s March again – over-cast, trying to rain, cold wind. I sat in the car with a poker hangover – the kind you get when you know you’ve played badly. Or, rather, I started playing well and winning, then got careless or foolhardy or tired – all three, probably – and ended up losing badly. No one to blame but myself, which I do. And there I was last week, congratulating myself on my professional attitude. That’s not how the pros play. Afterwards, I had a drink with Adam and Ben, both of whom I like. The feeling is clearly mutual, but that didn’t stop them patronising me as an old buffer. And I went along with it, full of jokes and good cheer, but inwardly seething with resentment.


2002 5

I swam even further than yesterday and the water felt almost warm. So did the air when I came out. But the wind got me fast, I dressed as quickly as I could and drove home with the heater on. The pond seems curiously empty without the seagulls. The swans and the geese were off at the edges, leaving the water to the ducks, moorhens and coots.

Tuesday 2 April. 52°FThe air and the water stay chilly: as the man says, ‘Spring comes slowly up this way’. Again the geese are occupying the jetty and I have to drive them in front of me and wait till they clear off before I dive in. One of them showed what he thought of me by shitting prodigiously as I hit the water, so I had to twist in mid-air in order to avoid his smear of spreading, sinking white. Jeff arrives while I’m drying myself and brings me up to date on the latest Late Night Poker results.

Wednesday 10 April. 52°/53°FA week away in Italy. The only thing paradisical in Paradiso was the wisteria, its fl owers in full bloom and no leaves, the whole house hung with pale mauve blos-som, like an outrageous wedding cake, and all the bees in the Garfagnana gathered in it, drunkenly celebrating. But the cloud was down, the wind was cold and most of the


6 pondlife

time it rained. We did what had to be done – fi red one cleaner, hired another and sorted out the house – then huddled in front of the fi re and read. It was a relief to get back to London and central heating.

It’s cold here, too, but at least the sky is clear. Spring has come on fast in a week. The trees are putting on their leaves and the grass is vivid green. This is the time when everything starts over again and I go around thinking of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde:

‘Oh yonge, fresshe folke, hee and shee . . .’The lifeguards have taken up the coconut matting on

the jetty, the mating birds are busy on their nests and the pond seems empty. The wind makes small, quick waves and the sunlight makes them shine. Everything is on the move and dazzling. It’s like diving into champagne. This is what I miss most in Italy. The ponds on the Heath have been part of my life since I was eleven and they have become increasingly important. The early morning swim in their amber water kept me going when my fi rst marriage was coming apart; I was swimming in the Mixed Pond with Anne Sutton when Ursula stormed up and the marriage ended. They keep me going again now when walking on the Heath is beyond me. All that endless, footloose travelling and insatiable need just to go, to look, to see places and meet strangers and try things, now I’m back where I started. I was six months old when my parents left Bloomsbury and moved to Hampstead, and I’ve never really left it.


2002 7

Thursday 11 April. 52°FCold east wind and a pale sun. The water is delectable. One of the swans was on its nest on the far bank, the other patrolled up and down twenty yards out. I swam further out than yesterday, but not far enough to interest him. The geese were waddling around on the left bank, annoying a fi sherman, so, apart from a couple of ducks, the swan and I had the pond to ourselves.

Saturday 13 April. 52°FStrange weather: the green thickens on the trees, there are faint dabs of colour on some of the hawthorns, the daffo-dils have been dancing for weeks, and the bluebells are beginning to show their heads. But it feels like winter; the sky is overcast, the wind north-easterly and arctic. It’s colder out of the water than in.

Last summer Danny, one of the lifeguards, showed me a short story he’d written about something he saw in the jungle in Thailand. Danny is tough and fi t; he runs, he boxes, he works out. Who would ever have dreamed he wanted to write? Now a Thai mentor friend of his has printed it, nicely bound in blue paper covers. He showed it to me with great pride.

‘I know I’ve got a lot to learn,’ he said. ‘But at least it’s a start.’

The lifeguards are a great group. All of them are fi tness freaks. Les, who bought my old Saab, works out on the


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punchbag and swims like a demon. Steve runs and has recently caught the climbing bug. (I gave him a copy of Feeding the Rat and he’s been quoting Mo’s jokes back at me ever since.) Terry, the boss, is ex-army, tattooed and overweight, and he keeps the summer crowds in line with great authority. His wife has a degree in English from the Open University and he knows everything about the Heath’s wildlife, trees and fl owers. He is astonishingly sweet with children, like a loving uncle, and looks after us regulars with a kind of bluff tenderness. Particularly us oldies. He is always on the watch when I’m in the water, making sure I don’t stay in too long when the water is very cold. If they have to pull us out, they get a bonus of £5.80p; that is now a standing joke between us. All of them seem to like me not because they occasionally see my face on TV, or read something I’ve written in the papers, but because I’m an ex-athlete like them. The limp is bad luck; they don’t hold it against me.

‘I don’t worry about you in the water,’ Terry says. ‘I’m just afraid you’re going to fall off the bloody jetty’.

The ponds are like the best sort of club, friendly but never intrusive, everyone joined by a beloved common interest; far better than the Beefsteak and with no annual subscription.

Sunday 14 April. 52°FSunday, so Anne went for a walk while I swam. The green is getting steadily greener, but the sky is overcast


2002 9

and the same cold wind blows. Then the clouds broke as I came out of the water and I dried lazily in what felt like real spring weather. The Canada geese were sunbathing again on the jetty. This time, instead of marching before me indignantly, then fl opping in, they merely stirred enough for me to squeeze past and hissed without conviction.

Today the London Marathon was run. We got up late, so it was over by the time I arrived at the pond. The life-guards and the regular Sunday runners were full of it: the winning male runner had broken the world record and done it 2:05.48, and an English girl had won the women’s event in 2:18.56. This for twenty-six-plus miles, which averages about 4.5 mph. I was at Oxford when Roger Bannister ran the fi rst four-minute mile. How times and fi tness have changed. I swam a bit further than usual, just to show that even oldies care.

Tuesday 16 April. 52°FBrilliant, cloudless day, all the trees in bloom – cherry, apple, etc (though not mayfl ower: that high-up burst of white I saw the other day is something else entirely). I dumped the car at the foot of West Hill for the Kosovans to wash, then crept uphill through the traffi c jam to the pond. I felt awful; my ankle ached, my legs ached, my head ached. (My ankle, a frequent visitor in the following pages, continues to give me severe pain due to the


10 pondlife

gradual erosion of cartilage in the joint. This was initially caused by a climbing accident in 1960.) I was playing poker at the Vic last night and lost, then decided to read myself asleep instead of taking a pill; naturally, I slept hardly at all. Losing is always a downer, but this down was exacerbated by sitting next to Ron, a wild Afro-Caribbean gambler. Usually, he’s just what you want at the table because he throws his money around like confetti; this time he got lucky against me in a couple of expensive hands and thereafter treated me as a foolish old man – in fact, kept calling me ‘old man’. I got my revenge on him eventually – let him keep betting into me when I had a straight fl ush – but I ended up losing and knew I deserved to; it was a hard game and I was playing too loosely.

So old man is how I felt – battered, beaten, depressed – as I limped my way uphill. Then I turned off onto Millfi eld Lane, left the traffi c fuming behind me, and suddenly it was a shining spring day: everything in bloom, the birds going crazy, the water sparkling. I swam almost to the far edge, then dried myself slowly and soaked up the sun. This is as perfect as it gets – the water still chilly, the sun hot. The lifeguards have set up canvas chairs in front of their hut; they lounge there, contentedly taking the sun. Theirs has to be one of the pleasantest jobs in London.


2002 11

Wednesday 17 April. 52°FAnother exquisite day: chilly water, hot sun. I swam out to the far barrier, then came back lazily, admiring the cloudless sky. The noisy clouds of seagulls are long gone and pigeons have taken over; they fl y in pairs, urgently, as if on important business. A Virgin jet climbs majesti-cally from Heathrow; its wings and fuselage are shining, its big tailplane is vivid red. Because my ears are under water it seems to move as silently as the birds.

Thursday 18 April. 52°FThe air is colder today. At 10 am, when I swim, the sky is lightly brushed with high clouds which build steadily all morning until they begin to threaten rain. A new set of large blue sacks fi lled with barley straw have been set up around the perimeter to protect the pond from blue algae. You can smell them when you swim close; they smell of decay.

Saturday 20 April. 52°FFinally, a perfect spring day: the air warm and soft and delectable, everything in bloom. The water temperature hasn’t changed – yet – but that makes the swim even better. Curiously, there wasn’t a single bird on the water. One of the swans was moving around on the shore off to the left, a couple of ducks arrived after I fi nished, but I


12 pondlife

had the pond wholly to myself while I swam. This is as good as it gets (perhaps made even better by having won back last night most of the money I lost on Monday!).

Sunday 21 April. 52°FIt’s probably because I’m getting old and my ankle is daily ever more troublesome, but this year I just can’t get over the sheer lavishness of spring. Blossom everywhere, on the streets and the cars as well as the trees; it does its thing so fast – coming before you’re ready, gone almost before you’ve taken it in; you come out in the morning and half the trees’ burden is already spoiled or shed over-night. Then there’s the brightness of the new green – either bright and transparent, as though the leaf were simply a fi lter for sunlight, or a rich and sticky bright-ness, as if it had just been dipped in shining water. Today the only birds on the water were a pair of grebes (newcom-ers?), but over on the far edge was my old friend the heron, the fi rst time I’ve seen him this year. Maybe he’s been drawn back by the stink from the sacks of barley straw. I swam right out towards him, then rolled over onto my back and stared at him. He stared back disdain-fully for a while, then slowly, wearily, as if he was either very bored or very arthritic, he stretched his neck and fl apped his wings and fl ew away, as Hardy wrote, ‘with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters’.


Praise for Al Alvarez

The Writer’s Voice (2005)

‘An impressive performance by a poet who allows nothing to come between him and the literature he loves. It should not be neglected by anybody with a serious interest in modern literature and literary criticism’ Frank Kermode

‘Eloquent essays, rich in anecdote, from the hand of a true and lifelong servant of poetry’ J. M. Coetzee

Where Did it All Go Right? (1999)

‘A gem ... it cuts an irreverent path through seventy glorious and inglorious years of women, poker, adventuring, writing and wondering’ John le Carré

‘A fascinating account of life led in the crowded margins of contemporary literature’ Observer

‘An exhilarating story of redemption’ Daily Telegraph

Night (1995)

‘A perceptive, instructive, at times beautiful and always entertaining study of our nocturnal lives’ John Banville

‘A most enlightening and enjoyable rumination on the subject of darkness, dreams and night-dwellers animal and human, hallucinatory and real’ Philip Roth

‘The combination he offers, of brilliant insight and eloquent prose, is something quite extraordinary’ Robert Stone

Feeding the Rat: A Climber’s Life on the Edge (1989)

‘The wild side of mountaineering ... this is writing of power and originality’ Guardian

‘The vicarious fear was powerful that I had to hold on to the arm of the sofa … The writing is as beautiful as it is thrilling’ The Times

The Biggest Game in Town (1983)

‘A marvellous book ... picturesque, funny and dramatic’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Probably the best book on poker ever written’ Evening Standard

‘An engrossing, shimmeringly well-written account of the world poker knockout championship’ Sunday Express

‘Smashing study of the gamblers’ arts’ Financial Times

‘A new classic on gambling … quite brilliant’ Time Out

The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1972)

‘To write about suicide … to transform the subject into something beautiful – this is the forbidding task that Alvarez has set for himself … he has succeeded’ New York Times

‘Widely admired ... Alvarez does what Levi says: he writes what the politeness and prevarications of speech might have defeated’ Guardian

From the author of The Savage God, a unique memoir of growing old, and a lesson in how not to go gently into that good night

Hardback | £14.999781408841006

288pp | 198 x 129mm

eBook | £14.999781408841013

A Swimmer’s Journal

Here’s the paradox: your body becomes steadily more troublesome just at that point when the world, which you are soon to leave, becomes sweeter, more poignant, more beautiful, more desirable…

14 February 2013

The ponds of Hampstead Heath are small oases; fragments of wild nature nestled in the heart of north-west London. For the best part of his life Al Alvarez – poet, critic, novelist, rock-climber and poker player – has swum in them almost daily.

An athlete in his youth, Alvarez, now in his eighties, chronicles what it is to grow old with humour and � erce honesty. As he swims in the ponds he considers how it feels when you begin to miss that person you used to be – to miss yourself. Swimming is his own private form of protest against the onslaught of time; proof to others, and himself, that he’s not yet beaten.

By turns funny, poetic and indignant, Pondlife is a meditation on love, the importance of life’s small pleasures and, above all, a lesson in not going gently into that good night.

Al Alvarez is a poet, novelist, literary critic, anthologist, and author of many highly praised non-� ction books on topics ranging from suicide, divorce, and dreams – The Savage God, Life After Marriage, Night – to poker and mountaineering – The Biggest Game in Town and Feeding The Rat. His most recent books are Where Did It All Go Right?, The Writer’s Voice and Risky Business. He lives in north-west London.

Al Alvarez

• For fans of Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill, Just Me by Shelia Hancock, Water Log by Roger Deakin, The Music Room by William Fiennes and Wild Swim by Dominick Tyler

• Famous poetry editor and critic, and longtime friend of Sylvia Plath, Alvarez was awarded the A.C. Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature in 2010

by the same author

The Shaping Spirit (1958)The School of Donne (1961)

The New Poetry (ed and introduction, 1962)Under Pressure (1965)

Beyond All This Fiddle (1968)Lost (1968)

Penguin Modern Poets No18 (1970)Apparition (1971)

The Savage God (1971)Beckett (1973)

Hers (1974)Hunt (1978)

Autumn to Autumn and Selected Poems (1978)Life After Marriage (1982)

The Biggest Game in Town (1983)Offshore (1986)

Feeding the Rat (1988)Rainforest (1988)

Day of Atonement (1991)The Faber Book of Modern European Poetry (ed and intro-

duction, 1992)Night (1995)

Where Did It All Go Right? (1999)Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats (2001)

New and Selected Poems (2002)The Writer’s Voice (2005)

Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books (2007)

9781408841006 Pondlife (517h).indd ii9781408841006 Pondlife (517h).indd ii 12/11/2012 10:14:2812/11/2012 10:14:28

First published in Great Britain 2013

Copyright © 2013 by Al Alvarez

The moral right of the author has been asserted

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the

case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc50 Bedford Square

LondonWC1B 3DP

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and SydneyA CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 4100 6

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, EdinburghPrinted and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

9781408841006 Pondlife (517h).indd iv9781408841006 Pondlife (517h).indd iv 12/11/2012 10:14:2812/11/2012 10:14:28