I’m drawn like a zombie’: novelist Meg Rosoff on the joys of night-swimming – Telegraph.co.uk

I blame Steven Spielberg for temporarily ruining my lifelong addiction to night swimming. His tagline for the film Jaws, Youll never go in the water again, proved uncannily accurate, destroying the pastime for a whole generation of ocean swimmers back in the mid-1970s. What made it worse was that Jaws was shot on Marthas Vineyard, where I happened to be working (my first summer job) when the film crew moved in. It was a place Id spent many a happy summer swimming under the sun and stars until Spielbergs gigantic white shark started dragging unsuspecting swimmers to their deaths.

In the years immediately following Jaws, I continued to swim at night, but I didnt enjoy it much. Gone, the innocent joy of surfing dark Atlantic swells, replaced by the DUM-dum DUM-dum DUM-dum of the films pneumatically powered dumdum shark, the one Id seen day after day beached in Edgartown harbour, dead-eyed, indifferent, awaiting its next close-up.

I lived and worked in New York City through the 1980s and, like many other underpaid singletons, paid for a tiny share of a rented house on Fire Island to escape the heat of summer in the city. Every third weekend, I joined the Friday scramble, arriving at a house crowded with 20-somethings, near a pretty beach, next to a suspiciously brown sea. In 1988, the summer before I moved back to London, a load of medical waste washed up on the shore. At the height of the Aids epidemic, every new tide deposited vials of contaminated blood and used syringes on to the sand. I didnt swim at night that year. I barely swam at all.

And thence to London, my home since 1989, and my subsequent discovery of the Suffolk Coast, where the ancestors of old Cape Cod and Marthas Vineyard families still live. The landscape and the place names of Suffolk transported me home to Massachusetts Ipswich, Harwich, Chelmsford, Sudbury, Yarmouth. In 1602, Englishman Bartholomew Gosnold left his family home near Ipswich and sailed across the Atlantic to the hook-shaped peninsula he named Cape Cod, for its super abundant supply of fish. In characteristic colonialist style, he then paid a visit to an idyllic island seven miles off Cape Cod, named Noepe by its resident Wampanoag tribes, rechristened Marthas Vineyard for Gosnolds deceased infant daughter.

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I'm drawn like a zombie': novelist Meg Rosoff on the joys of night-swimming - Telegraph.co.uk