In peace and wartime, the poet found solace and sensuality in swimming. A new film marking the centenary of his death explores the refuges he sought away from the battlefield
I spent my childhood holidays in Torquay, but I’d forgotten how blue its waters were. Meadfoot beach arcs around the bay, looking out to a single, sharp rock in the distance, angular, as if driven from the sky into the sea. In the years before the first world war, the teenage Wilfred Owen spent his own summers on this beach. He’d always loved the water. His father taught him to swim; Tom Owen was a railway clerk in Shrewsbury, but on his days off he’d dress up as a captain and wander Liverpool’s docks. Once he brought home four Lascars; Wilfred and his brother Harold remembered their bare brown feet beneath the tea table.
Wilfred knew where his future lay. His heroes had been drawn to this turquoise sea: Percy Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde. In the summer of 1911, he made the pilgrimage to nearby Teignmouth, where John Keats had stayed in 1818. “In love with a dead ’un”, he wrote a sonnet to the Romantic poet – “Watery memorials of His mystic doom / Whose Name was writ in Water (saith his tomb) ... / Eternally may sad waves wail his death” – and followed it with his first long poem, a rewriting of “The Little Mermaid”, with Keatsian images of “blunt-snouted whales” and the sense that he had put himself in the place of the mermaid who sacrificed her voice to become a human for her prince.
Related: How we made The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen app for iPad | App story
Once regarded as a minor figure, it took the cold war and Vietnam to turn him into the James Dean of protest poetry
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