Sixty-eight years ago tomorrow, almost a human life-span, Virgina Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse. Every morning the train takes me along the Ouse valley, with Rodmell, where she and Leonard lived, on the far side. I often wonder where she entered the water. I have never swum in this section of the river. The best swimming is to be had to the north of Lewes.
There was a place on the Cam, Dead Man's Corner, just where Grantchester Meadows proper starts. I would swim to it with my father from the university sheds, which he thought was about half a mile. Who was the dead man? Another suicide?