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It was with enormous sadness that I heard the news that Roger Deakin had left us. I had been up to see him at his home in Suffolk a week before he died, and while prematurely aged as a result of his illness his eyes still twinkled. As he sat up in his armchair eating watercress soup I kept thinking that he might yet make a miracle recovery. After all, only two weeks before that he had been swimming in his local pond. The illness when it took grip, however, did so with terrible speed, taking away from us one of the most vital and life-embracing men I have ever met.
To know Roger was to love him. His enthusiasm, curiosity, generosity and humour were unbounded. And the free spiritedness with which he led his life – outdoor swimming in the depths of winter, building his own home, sleeping al fresco wherever and whenever – was an inspiration. Moreover, he was a writer of great and original talent, combining memoir, history, literature and nature writing in his classic first book Waterlog and in the manuscript of Wildwood, delivered some months before he died, which we will publish at Hamish Hamilton in June 2007. It is indescribably sad to think that there will be no more words to come from Roger, who still had so much ahead of him, having started book-writing relatively late in life.
In the meantime, we must be grateful for the words we do have – and for the memories of Roger recounted by his many friends. You can find some of them in the obituaries and appreciations below, including those of his great friends and fellow-writers Terence Blacker and Robert Macfarlane. If anyone else would like to add to this archive, please do e-mail me c/o hamish@hamishhamilton.co.uk
- Simon Prosser
Publishing Director, Hamish Hamilton
I only met Roger once at a course he was leading last year at Schumacher College in Dartington on writing and woods and water. It was a marvellous week of icy swimming in rivers, rooting around in woods, building yurts and wide-ranging conversations with a kind, humorous and passionately enthusiastic man.
I liked him a great deal and admired his writing, his radio pieces and his work with Common Ground. I was hoping earlier this year to be able to arrange an event up here in Cumbria at which he and Robert would be able to talk about both of their new writing projects when news arrived of his illness. I was looking forward so much to knowing Roger better and to reading more from him that I don't know that I've ever felt that I've lost as much through a writer's death before.
None of which is really reflected in the following poem I wrote during that week in Dartington I'm afraid but I hope it might stand as some sort of oblique tribute to the creative experience of being with him and how he helped us notice and be interested in the world again. I read just this morning that interest has its roots in words meaning 'being among or between'. Being interested in the world – up to your neck in it – seems about right for how any good ecologist or writer or just good human being should be.
Birthday Haibun
For Roger
The river's quieter now. So I can hear it. Before, further upstream where the river rushed over
and around boulders and down falls, the sound seemed to fill my head completely – the
whole landscape too. Now, because I can hear other things, like the thin calls of some
goldcrests and the occasional piping of a wagtail, I can also hear the river.
to the wagtail
the river sounds like
the front door swinging open
A dipper would fit that better but I haven't seen one yet. I know one must be out there
somewhere – it's perfect territory for one – but I'd somehow feel dishonest using one
without having seen it first. I'm told there are otters along this river too.
to the otter
the river sounds like
an ordnance survey map unfolding
Of course, I haven't seen an otter either – ever in fact – but I'm starting to relax. I've just
been swimming. It was painfully cold and even when my breathing returned to normal after a
couple of minutes in the water much of my body, especially my ankles, still ached with the
cold. But sitting on the bank of the river now the air is beautifully warm and I'm enjoying
the flood of endorphins coupled with the secret pleasure of not wearing any pants under my
jeans. I'm forty four today and I don't have to write a poem. I don't have to do anything.
The river is slow and clear and brown as the tea in a teapot. Little islands of froth float by on
the surface of the water and water-boatmen manoeuvre jerkily between them. On the far
bank there's a yellow wagtail fidgeting. I wonder why it is that they wag their tails and then
notice that they don't. It's tapping it up and down. I've known smokers tap their cigarettes like
that – constantly so that the ash doesn't get the chance to accumulate.
- Jeremy Over
It took almost a month for the terrible news of Roger Deakin's death to reach us here at the island at the end of the earth, and I would like to add my tribute to the extraordinary life of an extraordinary man.
Roger was my house guest when he visited Tasmania, and a more charming, edudite and, yes, challenging house guest one could never hope to find. Together we walked, climbed and swam through, over and in a good sample of this most diverse of islands. Well, Roger swam – he actually emerged from a dip in the waters of D'Entrecasteaux Channell, an elongated strip of water that separates the knucklebone-shaped Bruny Island from 'mainland' Tasmania, and pronounced it one of the coldest swims of a wild swimmer's long career.
I have what we Tasmanians call a 'shack' (necessarily humble, but not necessarily the dilapidated structure that the American deployment of that term connotes) on Bruny Island. Roger spent many reflective and discursive days there, often sitting out in the sun, red wine in hand, looking out over the bluest of waters through a frame of dry eucalpyt forest. He spoke much of the Wildwood project, and he was content. And so was I. He was, nevertheless, dismayed and angered by the blind thoughtless – and, yes, the rapacity; even venality – that characterises the out-of-control forest industry here. He was intending to include observation upon the same in Wildwood, and I hope he has done so.
Roger met and engaged in animated interchange with much of the island's lively literary community. He made firm friends quickly, and though his time here was short, he leaves behind many friends, now in collective mourning.
We will miss him
- Pete Hay
I was shocked and saddened to hear of Roger Deakin's recent death. While he was a staunch parochialist, and a champion of the particular, the ripples of his life and death will nonetheless reach far beyond Suffolk and England. As they have reached me here in Tasmania, Australia's wild island, the former van Diemen's Land of convict infamy. It was here that I met Roger while he was researching Wildwood. Tasmania fascinated him both as a place where apples are synonymous with the island – many still call it "the Apple Isle" – and as a place where wild forests are under dire threat from human action.
I took Roger into the wilds of the Tasmanian highlands, to a place called Pine Valley. It was wonderful to share this special wild place with someone so passionate about and attuned to the natural world. I recall his sense of wonder as we walked out of typical Australian eucalypt forest into an altogether more ancient forest. "Like walking through a door into old Gondwana," I explained as we exulted in the mossy green darkness of a rare coniferous rainforest whose nearest relations are in Patagonia and Fiordland. After we reached the basic hut that was to be our base for the next few days, Roger made it his duty to keep the coal-fired stove alight. He excelled to the extent that the little iron stove glowed red-hot, and fellow lodgers had to peel layers or exit sleeping bags to prevent overheating.
The next day we went higher into the mountains, to the lake-studded, 1400m-high plateau known as The Labyrinth. There we ambled between tarns, at one stage sitting at a viewing point high above some of the remotest wilderness in Tasmania. Our 360 degree view took in everything for many miles around. Yet there was not one single road; no cleared land; no man-made structures; no smoke, town, city or building: nothing but wild lands for mile after mile. He was amazed that such wildness still existed in the "civilized" world. I sensed he may have even struggled with the concept that the management of this place has as much to do with leaving it be as it does with "improving" it. That English urge came out in his occasional farmerly suggestions about track maintenance or tree pruning. We had a good-natured debate about that human desire to intervene in nature.
But what a privilege for me, as a then unpublished nature writer, to have had such a companion for three uninterrupted days. Roger spoke wisely and helpfully about writing, and encouragingly about my efforts at it. His enthusiasm and generosity continued as we kept in touch via email. He provided me with some wonderful suggestions in the nature writing field, and in turn took up a few suggestions I passed his way. As a huge fan of Waterlog ‐ a book I had read before I knew Roger – it is his final watery exploits in Tasmania that will remain in my memory. On a cool spring day, with melting snow still lying around on The Labyrinth, Roger couldn't resist the urge to plunge into one of the highland tarns and swim an icy lap. He emerged grinning, refreshed and ready for more mischief. So at the end of our walk, as we waited for the ferry to return us to our car, he repeated the dose in beautiful Lake St Clair. Although we were at a much lower altitude, the lake is Australia's deepest, and it can scarcely have been any warmer. (And for the record, at the former he was informal, at the latter he wore his swimming suit!)
Later, as the ferry brought us into the jetty, I pointed out a snow-clad peak named Mt Rufus. Roger's eyes lit up, and he asked if I could take a photograph of it in honour of his son Rufus. That tiny glimpse of fatherly tenderness made me esteem even more a man, a writer and an activist about whom there was already so much to admire. And now I will return to Roger's work with a sorrow-tinged enthusiasm, just as I will join the queue of those longing to read his last book as soon as it is published.
- Peter Grant
Roger, standing in the hall of the Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, his long tweed overcoat itself exhaling a whiff of lake, seemed the very Water Rat. He was off for a jaunt, and looking for a companion.
My old car ground its way up the fell in search of Keskerdale. We both had heard of this fragment of ancient oak wood near Derwent Water. I knew it as a seed source for our Scottish Borders Wildwood project. Roger had his own Wildwood reasons for finding it. The thin, undulating strip of irregular trees surprised him, used as he was to the comfortable maiden trees of Suffolk. But he recalled Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor and recognized some the same shagginess. As he sat on a fallen stump exploring the world of the wood with his eyes, he melded with it. Water Rat became wood spirit. I was captivated.
Roger’s generosity saw our friendship blossom, through emails mostly. He was the perfect recipient of observations of the natural world, always responsive, frequently adding his own sightings and recollections. We met too seldom but when we did the rapport was real. So were the tramps around his patch. He showed me Burgate Wood in high spring, the leaves cascading into leaf and flowers rocketing up on the damp rides: bugle, campion, wintergreen, early purple orchids. To his special delight, just where he was hoping for it, we found a variety of lungwort that lacked spots on its leaves. The wood encloses a manor site, beside which had been a medieval marketplace. Roger’s theory was that the lungwort was a relic from a stall selling nostrums. Clean leaves on the plant would suggest clean lungs for a sufferer.
Was he right? Who knows? He was, as ever, making interesting connections. Now there is his last seam of rich connections to mine in Wildwood. How unbearable it is to think that there will be no more. Nor will the Walnut Tree Farm moat again see the grizzled head of the Water Rat bob up, save in the eyes of the many who delight in remembering him.
- Fiona Martynoga
Wildwood by Roger Deakin will be published by Hamish Hamilton in June 2007.
Read more:
Terence Blacker in The Independent
Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian
Obituary in The Guardian
Obituary in The Telegraph
Obituary in The Times
You can also listen to Jane Little in conversation with Terence Blacker and Robert Macfarlane on BBC Radio 4's The Last Word here
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