Born to be wild

The train that carried Roger Deakin from London to his Suffolk farmhouse passed his four small fields before stopping at Diss station, five miles north.

With his advertising executive’s gift for persuasion, Roger persuaded the driver to slow down on the fast straight outside his home, so he could hop off at his own personal request stop.

Like so many of his generation, Roger made the most of his freedoms. He is best known today for Waterlog, an entrancing account of swimming via rivers, lakes and lidos through Britain, beginning in the spring-fed ‘moat’ beside his house.

Published in 1999, it has become a nature-writing classic, and a compelling assertion of the individual’s freedom to swim in Britain’s (often private) rivers.

Roger would’ve been 80 this year; he died of a brain tumour in 2006. He was a notable member of a memorable generation who missed national service by months, came of age just when the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles invented sex, and then enjoyed postwar prosperity, affordable property and accessible global travel.

What fortune! What freedom! But Roger’s life shows how liberty had to be fought for.

Unlike today’s specialists, Roger was a generalist in an era when it seemed possible for anyone (at least those with ‘acceptable’ accents or skin colour) to turn their hand to anything.

The one constant in his life was a notebook in which he jotted poetry and philosophy. On visiting the wealthy family of one ’60s girlfriend, he observed of the ‘Churchillian’ father, ‘My God – what a huge difference between our two generations – complete chasm!’

Looking back, I think his generation could be the most distinctive that ever lived. In retrospect, the social and cultural transformations they engineered appear inevitable, but at the time there was no guarantee of success. It’s never easy to shrug off decades of ossified ways of doing things.

Roger was born in Watford, the bright, only child of a railway clerk and a secretary. With London on one side of his modest bungalow and countryside on the other, he ran wild through fields and copses. He hated confinement. Even so, he had to run home for tea when his mother stood in the garden and rang a bell.

The state paid for a scholarship to Haberdashers’ which led to Cambridge and then to copywriting in Soho just as London swung. Plenty of voices still demanded conformity to old norms, but Roger embraced the new rebellion, growing his hair long and rejecting suburbia and the traditional family. He set up home with an extended ‘family’ of friends in a cheap rented flat in thenshabby Queen’s Gardens.

Roger could’ve stuck with a conventional advertising career but there were so many other freedoms to enjoy.

He moonlighted by scouring rural auction houses for stripped pine, and imported pottery from La Bisbal in Spain, whither he sped on fun-filled adventures in his open-topped Morgan.

He inveigled flatmates into helping him upcycle kitchen chairs into rocking chairs, selling them to the ‘trendies’ on Portobello Road market. His notebooks record one sale to Judi Dench.

There was sexual freedom, too. The pill was ‘the greatest invention of modern science – along with penicillin!’ enthused 24-year-old Rog in a 1967 notebook. He married (and had a son) but his freedom- seeking didn’t stop, and an affair ended his marriage.

While his freedom-seeking made for glorious beginnings to relationships, his refusal to countenance constraints – or compromise – created romantic turmoil. Freedom had its cost.

In 1972, Roger devised the National Coal Board’s ‘Come Home to a Real Fire’ campaign (a slogan gleefully adopted by second-home-scorching Welsh nationalists of the day).

But he remained a maverick, who illicitly kept live chicks in his agency’s basement screening room and swanned off to his Suffolk farmhouse when he should’ve been at work.

Like many of his generation, he seized the opportunities provided by cheap property, restoring the ruined 16thcentury house he’d spied in the summer of ’69 and persuading the farmer to sell for £2,000.

After dabbling in self-sufficiency, he became an English teacher at the local grammar school. He played Joni Mitchell in lessons, organised classroom ceilidhs and, on discovering his sixth-formers couldn’t identify an elm, while teaching Howards End, spirited them out of school to admire one.

When school became too stifling, he became an early freelancer, devising Save the Whale! concerts for Friends of the Earth and co-founding a charity, Common Ground, which championed the local nature of hedgerows and orchards.

Later on, he made films and became a music impresario, bringing folk and rock to Benjamin Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival.

While researching Roger’s biography, I was inspired by meeting so many of his generation. It wasn’t simply age that liberated them to speak so honestly about the joy and pain of life alongside him.

Openness has become a habit of a lifetime. At 80, many of Roger’s friends are as vital, cussed, questing and freedom-seeking as they have ever been. They are worth celebrating.

More timid subsequent generations might learn something from them, too.

Bruce Beresford mourns his friend Barry Humphries. Cartoon by Nick Garland