Downstream

races were added. Demelza
Blick grew up in Wargrave
and took part in the regatta as
a child: ‘in between I would
splash and swim. It has
become too big an event now,
but I felt a strange pull to the
river and so I found other
ways for me to swim. There
are stretches further up that
feel like my childhood river.’
Her father retired when she
was eight and in the late
1980s, during long hot