THERE are so many memories for Mike and Jenny Roper of their vibrant daughter Lynne, whose life was cut short by a brain tumour at the age of 55.

The couple’s home in Yelverton is decorated with Lynne’s artwork, including a sculpture made of driftwood with a shoal of fish swimming through it. It seems a fitting homage to the last chapter in Lynne’s passionately-lived life, when she became a wild swimmer in Westcountry rivers and pools.

Lynne’s book Wild Woman Swimming has provided another more public memorial to this warm, funny and fearless woman who died in August 2016.

The book was published by Tanya Shadrick of The Selkie Press who met Lynne for the one and only time at St Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth where Lynne spent the last six and a half weeks of her life.

Tanya made Lynne a promise that she would publish her writing which captures the freedom Lynne found in the water, swimming with her labradoodle Honey. Tanya kept her promise and two years later she published the book.

‘I was delighted with it; it couldn’t have been better really, she had made a marvellous job of it,’ said Lynne’s dad Mike, who only learned of Lynne’s most daring exploits when he read the book based on Lynne’s online blog.

‘It is a lovely tribute for Lynne and it has raised a lot of money for St Luke’s,’ said mum Jenny.

Lynne’s parents recently donated £1,000 to St Luke’s Hospice, their share of the royalties so far, which was Lynne’s dying wish. They went back to the hospice recently to present staff with the cheque.

‘The care there was amazing, out of this world,’ said Mike.

‘It laid a lot of ghosts to rest for us, going back,’ said Jenny.

Accompanying them to St Luke’s was Lynne’s close friend Sophie Pierce, who first met Lynne in the water beneath a rock arch off the coast near Torquay. ‘We shrieked and whooped as the swell bounced us up and down and I felt an instant connection with this woman who was to become a great friend and fellow adventurer,’ Sophie wrote in the preface to Lynne’s book.

The book, which was longlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Book Prize, contains contributions from Lynne’s wild swimming friends. When she was diagnosed with a brain tumour six months before she died, they knitted a blanket for her, embellished with shells and stitching, which her parents have kept.

‘They are very creative,’ said Jenny. ‘That and the wild swimming seems to go together.’

Lynne, born and raised in Devon, had been many things in her life — seeing service in the first Gulf War with the RAF and then taking a degree in film studies at Stirling University in Scotland and staying on to teach.

‘She got a bit disillusioned with university life, came home to us and became a paramedic,’ said Mike. ‘She loved going to the country ambulance stations and got big jobs with the air ambulance.’

Lynne was a paramedic in the Tavistock and Okehampton areas. After surgery for breast cancer five years before she died she took up wild swimming as therapy. She had had to leave the ambulance service when the symptoms of the turmour first appeared and before the diagnosis worked at the Tavistock Times as a proofreader.

Home was a cottage in Mary Tavy where she painted the walls turquoise and the woodwork in bright colours.

‘She decided to try wild swimming after she had the double mastectomy,’ said Mike. ‘She hoped it would be liberating, and it was.

‘Lynne joined the Wild Swimming Society and became their press officer. She just loved swimming wild. We lived at Princetown then and she used to swim at Foggintor and in the sea. It became really big in her life.’

Lynne’s love of the water comes through in descriptions of swims at spots like Spitchwick and Sharrah on the Dart. Her writing is a funny and poetic record of her rendezvous with wild swimming friends, travelling in her camper van fitted out in customary colourful style.

‘She would go on these “moon gazey swims” which were swims when the full moon was out,’ remembered mum Jenny. ‘Wembury was another favourite of hers. She would say of swimming ‘my soul swims wild’. And she wants people to carry on, to carry on swimming wild.’