Swimming with My Father is a piercingly honest account of growing up in the convention-bound 1950s. Tim Jeal spent his childhood torn between a worldly mother and a father who was a Christian mystic, conscientious objector, and devoted swimmer of England's rivers.From his own embarrassing schoolboy meeting with T. S. Eliot, to his father's rapt involvement with the natural world, this beautifully nuanced memoir is by turns lyrical, poignant and gloriously funny. Part tribute to a remarkable man, part portrait of a vanished Britain, its underlying theme is what makes us who we are and how time can shift the roles of child and parent. At once understated and illuminating, Tim Jeal's exploration of the past evokes those universal feelings of love and anguish that make us most human.