The Sea Inside
As they emerge from their dives, I realise that there are half a dozen birds patrolling, moving into their winter haunts. From their own level, in the water, I feel accepted, or at least tolerated – any bird will have seen you long before you see it. I’m too far away to see the grebe’s blood-red eyes, although there’s a suggestion, even at this distance, of the outrageous ruffs which once supplied Edwardian society with stolen plumage. But then, grebe parents will pluck out their own feathers to feed their chicks, lining their young stomachs against fish bones.
The tide ebbs, and the birds assemble, as if someone had laid the table and called them in to dinner. Gulls and geese are already working the shoreline, as are the oyster-catchers, in their white winter ‘scarves’. They’re one of my favourite birds: familiar, stalwart, forever looking out to sea.
Untrue to its name, imported from its American cousin, the Eurasian oystercatcher eats mostly mussels and cockles teased from the shore, using its greatest asset: a bone-strengthened bill, part hammer, part chisel, able to prise open the biggest bivalves. Delicately coloured carrot-red to toucan-yellow – it might be made of porcelain – it is a surprisingly sensitive probe. At its tip are specialised Herbst corpuscles that allow the bird to sense its prey by touch as well as sight; an oystercatcher can forage as well by night as by day. Perpetually prospecting the beach, it stabs and pecks or ‘sows’ and ‘ploughs’, altering its methods to suit its prey. It can even change the shape of its bill – the fastest-growing of any bird – morphing from blunt mussel-blade to fine worm-teaser in a matter of days.
Living and dying by its wits, the oystercatcher has evolved to take advantage of its environment. It has been present on Southampton Water for centuries, if not millennia: graffiti’d into the sixteenth-century plaster wall of the port’s oldest house is an oystercatcher, a scratchy Tudor cartoon of an animal familiar from the nearby shore. In 1758, Linnaeus classified it as Haematopus ostralegus – blood-footed oyster-picker – but in Britain, where it was prized as a dish, it was called sea pie and was reduced to near-extinction in some southern sites. In modern times the birds were seen as threats to cockle beds: from 1956 to 1969, some sixteen thousand were shot in Morecambe Bay alone.
My oystercatchers, if you’ll forgive the proprietary tone, may feed and roost here, but they nest as far away as Belgium and Norway. They’d do well to steer clear of France, where hunters still shoot two thousand of them every year for recreation, sometimes ten times that many. These monogamous animals have complex social structures and can reach forty years or more, the longest-living wading bird. And they always return here, where they feel most at home. Their peeping calls drift over the water as they fly in low formation, wings emblazoned with white streaks. They settle to forage on the tideline, occasionally breaking into indignant arguments.
I raise my binoculars. I spy on them, they spy on me, one eye always on the stranger. As I watch, they’re joined by ringed plovers. The skittish newcomers bank in synchronised circles, suddenly swerving as if they’d hit some unseen current, then performing a deft communal turn to land. As they do so a gull takes off clumsily, lurching into their flight path and causing them to scatter. Rapid wings rev into reverse. All of a sudden, they’re on the ground, camouflaged bodies merging into the mud.
As timid as they are, the plovers are unfazed by the ever-present carrion crows that have established themselves here, a black-flapping backdrop in the car park. Overnight they’ll empty the bins like delinquent dustmen, leaving the tarmac strewn with the guilty evidence of their scavenging. Surveying the drifting fish-and-chip wrappers, they avert their eyes as if to say, ‘It wasn’t us.’ Although my books tell me that they’re solitary animals, they gather here in a great fluid flock of two hundred or more. Perhaps they’re evolving into aquatic birds, just as the gulls have moved inland to rubbish tips and shopping precincts.
There are other worlds of communication going on here, unknown orchestrations of action. Every so often the crows will rise up in waves, bird-shaped holes in the sky. They’re a lustrous lack of colour, denuded of detail; a fluttering negation, as dark as the night. Ted Hughes, who made a new myth of the crow, saw the bird as suffering everything even as it suffers nothing. Encouraged by its ugly name, we indict its assemblies as ‘murders’; yet crows mark the passing of one of their number in funereal demonstrations, cawing their grief in the way elephants and whales mourn their dead.
These ignored birds – whose ubiquity only makes them less visible – display the fascinating behaviour of their family. Broad-shouldered males swagger from one leg to another. Using their thick, oiled-ebony beaks, they peck over stones so much more dexterously than a wader or a gull. There’s a determined, discretionary air to their epicene foraging, although actually they’ll eat almost anything. They seem surprised if you stop and look at them, as though no one had bothered to do so before. They stare back briefly, abashed, then turn away, unable to believe that anyone other than their own might find them interesting. Or perhaps there is disdainful pride in that sideways glance, assuming the reverse: that they are the most intelligent of all birds.
As indeed they are. Raptors may be more majestic, songbirds sing more sweetly, waders are more elegantly poised, but corvids such as crows and ravens exceed them all in matters of the mind.
You can see it in their body language. They’re full of character, with their grizzled, quizzical stances; individuals, possessed of particular attributes. Their eyes glitter and their heads swivel with curiosity, ever alert to what is going on around them. Bold and twitchy, timid and territorial, their restlessness is a sure sign that something is going on in their heads. Singly or en masse, they react to every sound and movement. They’re always aware of what the others are doing: fighting, preening, competing, conspiring, minding each other’s business to see if it can be outdone. If a fight breaks out between two of them, the others will swoop in from the trees around to see what’s going on, like children in the playground chanting Fight, fight, fight. They’re irredeemably nosy, socially-adjusted birds.
Crows appear crafty to our eyes, since we seem to find intelligence in any other species than our own suspicious (I write all this down in my policeman’s notebook, as if I were about to arrest one of the avian young offenders). They’re an alternative community over our heads; gypsy birds, a mysterious race with their own hinterland. They live on the periphery in the way that all animals do, existing on the same plane as we do but inhabiting another time and space. They even have their own voices, resembling the patterns of human speech: captive corvids can be taught to speak as well as, if not better than parrots; it is one reason why they were said to be carriers of dead men’s souls. Acting in loose unison, at some unspoken signal they will fly out of the woods and onto the shore, as if they were the spirits of the monks evicted from their dissolved abbey. No one really knows what they do or how they think. Perhaps theirs is just a convenient congregation, only motivated by food and sex. But then, you might say the same about us. As a species, we are unable to resist the temptation to impose our own failings on animals; it’s almost an act of transference, and I’m as guilty as anyone else.
When the water has fallen back far enough, the crows will swoop on shellfish, rising up to drop them on a stone from a perfectly judged height. All the while they keep one eye on their fellow birds, ever ready to steal from friends or passing squirrels. They’re a disputatious, bullying, larcenous lot, forever finding fault with one another. They’ll tumble two-against-one in aerial combat, before falling to the mud to scrap over a mussel, the soon-to-be-loser on its back, eyes glaring, claws defensive, determined not to let go of its hard-won bivalve. Then, as suddenly as it started, it’s all over. A moment later and the same birds are strutting alongside each other perfectly amicably.
They may be vermin to most people, but I’ve come to love carrion crows. Sleek and knowing and iridescent, they could be in disguise for all I know, glossy agents sent to spy on us. If I were to die here on the beach, it would be the crows who picked my bones clean.
Even on this nondescript stretch of water the colonisation continues: the annual invasion arriving over here, and the annual exodus leaving for over there. Around now the dark-bellied brent geese appear from Siberia; one-tenth of the world population winters along this coast. For them, Southampton Water is one big runway. Travelling three thousand miles in six weeks, they’re long-haul flyers, built to purpose with compact bodies, sturdy ringed necks and neat dark heads. I hear their rolling honk as they pick their moment to settle, their voices eliding and trilling like the chorus from a minimalist opera. Even their name sounds northern: ‘brant’ is Norse for burnt. As the tide flows, they will ride the surf like little ships, proud of their survival, joining the herring and black-headed gulls hunkering to the swell; at this time of year, the air is colder than the sea.
This international, modest gathering of birds – constant and ever-changing, unremarkable and exquisite – are united only in their search for sustenance. I have to remind myself that they’re not here for my entertainment. They choose this part of the shore because it is a fertile patch, fed by a freshwater stream that oozes from the woods, turning brackish in a holding pond before running clear to the sea, and with it the nutrients that feed whatever the birds feed on.
They’re always waiting for the tide to go out; I’m always waiting for it to come in. Time may move faster for them – a day to them is a month to me; they live ten lives to mine – but they’ve been here for generations. This is their refuge. They feel safe here, despite the bait-diggers who disturb their foraging and the heavy metals and organochlorines that pollute their food and threaten their fertility. They remain loyal to these blackened flats; northern animals, like me; philopatric-, home lovers. They were here before Jane Austen came to visit the abbey’s ruins, and before the Romans rowed up the river to establish their own colony.
We should pay attention to birds, says Caspar Henderson; ‘being mindful of them, is being mindful of life itself’. They have always surrounded us; our movements mirror theirs. For humans, this too is a place of migration and emigration: from the tribes who came here when the sea was still a river, to the post-war ‘ten-pound Poms’ sailing for Australia – among them my school friends, never to be seen again – to the Filipinos, Poles and Bangladeshis who constitute the city’s latest arrivals.
What if all the vessels that ever sailed this water rose up from this much-dredged ditch? Celtic coracle, Roman galley, Norse longship, Tudor barge, Victorian merchantman, interwar liner, twenty-first-century ferry, all tumbled together like Paul Nash’s painting of dumped war planes, Totes Meer, Dead Sea. Sometimes the trawlers spit out fragments. I’ve found rusting revolvers brought back by wartime troops and chucked overboard when they were forbidden to import their souvenirs. Two thousand years before, their Celtic counterparts cast offerings to the water gods, and Roman centurions tossed tokens to Ancasta, the river deity who lived in this estuary. It all lies there, entire worlds of marine archaeology awaiting excavation; crockery and weapons and bones piled in a watery midden.
Out of the calm there’s a sudden surge as if some invisible vessel had passed by, followed by a reluctant riffling, running over stones as waves first set in motion thousands of miles away spend themselves on the shore. The sea plays its own tricks here. For two hours or more, its height and weight is suspended in a delayed action produced by the Atlantic pulse, although I must admit that the logistics of this mechanism somewhat mystify me.
If I understand it correctly, the tide runs from west to east and back again, courtesy of the pull of the moon, rocking up and down the Channel like a seesaw. Set at its midpoint, Southampton’s tide bounces back up its estuary. But added to this are local complications. The stopper of the Isle of Wight creates further oscillations, as the water enters and leaves from either side. The result is a unique selling point for the port. For centuries this double tide has been a boon to marine traffic, making Southampton ‘a seaport without the sea’s terrors, an ocean approach within the threshold of the land’, according to one nineteenth-century account. Its downside is what it leaves behind, an intractable stretch of mud, scattered with debris.
This is a place with its own rules. Its performers enter and leave the stage left and right, from wading birds pecking at the mud to slow-moving tankers pulling into the refinery to be suckled dry of their tarry cargo, and flat barges bearing turbine blades on their backs like sleek grey cetaceans. But they’re all dwarfed by the estuary’s most evident yet oddly ignored actors: container ships and car carriers.
Registered in Kobe, Panama or Monrovia, their names aspire to a Western status – Lake Michigan, Austria, Heritage Leader – while their sides are proprietarily stamped Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, or with the anonymous initials – nyk, eucc, cma–cga – of commercial states. Apart from the fact that they float, there’s little to associate these giants with the romantic notion of a vessel. Rather than roaming the seas, they’re locked into rigid routes. They accomplish in days journeys that James Cook took years to traverse. They’re standardised to the width of the Panama Canal: ships made to fit a world made to fit them. They might as well have been chopped off the production line. Their cantilevered prows look down on everything else, but their square sterns appear wrinkled, as if they were papered-over hardboard.
No one rhapsodises over these maritime pantechnicons as they come and go on their migrations. No one celebrates their arrival after heroic journeys to and from the other side of the world. They are filled. They are emptied. They move in between. No one stands on the quayside to wave them off. There are no Royal Marine bands to see them on their way. No bunting, no ceremony, no joy or sadness, just a slipping away. They embody a shrinking world. Half as big again as Titanic, they sail down the same waterway with bland indifference, lateral tower blocks so huge that, as one waterside inhabitant tells me, they cut off all electronic signals as they pass by. Their sides dribble with rust; the sea will get them in the end. They are ghost ships, devoid of life, save for shadowy figures seen through letterbox slots let into their flanks.
A life at sea? Their ill-paid crews might as well have signed up to a sweatshop. Since the decks are too dangerous to walk, the men remain within the metal hulks, themselves contained. Yet these ships carry almost everything we consume. Top-heavy, stacked with blocks like toy bricks, fifteen thousand tonnes of steel, four hundred metres long, sixty metres above the surface and another ten below, they ride high in times of unequal exchange. As one captain says, ‘We take air to the East.’ In better circumstances they sit lower in the sea, a plimsoll line of the global economy. At the end of their journey they will be unloaded by bestriding cranes onto railway trucks. In turn, others take on shiny new vehicles shelved in multi-storey stacks like factory-farmed chickens, from which they are driven into the bellies of the floating car parks and out the other side to Singapore.
But then, this is a city of the sea, built on reclaimed land; even its railway station platform is composed of cement and shingle embedded with shells. Meanwhile those same ships bring back invasive species on befouled hulls or in their ballast, Japanese seaweeds and Manila clams; to marine biologists, this is probably the most ‘alien’ estuary in Britain, with new organisms arriving every year.
In the nearby National Oceanographic Centre – an oddly industrial-looking complex itself, mounted with telecommunication masts, and flanked by long refrigerated sheds that contain sample cores of the earth’s archival depths, every three metres representing one hundred million years – I study the Admiralty Navigation Charts of these commercial waters. Pulling great plasticised sheets from chest-high cabinets, I pore over maps that have turned the world around to show the importance of the sea to the land, rather than the other way about. Atlases display the waters around our coast as blank blue expanses, but here all the contours and depths are laid out, along with their utility to men and women at sea.
The shore from which I swim, for instance, is labelled, unappealingly, ‘East Mud’. Nearby is a ‘Swinging Ground’, along with a ‘Hovercraft Testing Area’ and ‘M.O.D. Moorings’. Buildings, houses and roads have vanished, to be replaced by sites selected only for their relevance to the sea. Church spires and ‘Tall Buildings’ become landmarks, identified by bald details: ‘House (red roof)’. Through Southampton Water and into the Solent and the Channel beyond, a martial arena is mapped out: from the benign ‘Dolphin Bank’ to the treacherous shallows of ‘The Shingles’; from ‘Radar Scanning’ and ‘Foul Area’ to ‘Firing Practice Area’, ‘Submarine Exercise Area’, ‘Explosives Dumping Area’, and ‘US Base’; the reverberations of seismic global conflict brought to placid inshore waters. They are designated training grounds for the closed installations scattered along this coast, like the military port at Marchwood, busy sending ships laden with materiel to foreign wars and bringing back the broken remains. After the Falklands war, the bodies of eighty men were stored in its cargo shed.
One afternoon, after sitting on the sea wall watching the birds, I was about to ride home when I saw a strange shape moving down the water. It sat low on the surface, matt black, absorbing the light around it. Escorted by three tugs, the nuclear submarine – HMS Tireless, a ‘hunter-killer’ here on a ‘friendly visit’ – glided slowly south, powered by invisible force. I could see figures on its conning tower, and others walking the length of the vessel. They looked precarious to me, moving down its rounded back with no restraining railings to stop them rolling off; they might as well have been strolling on the back of a whale. As I watched, two of the crew reached its high tail fin and from the vessel’s stern pulled out a white flagpole that stood there, as though it were a parade ground. It was being prepared for its descent.
Soon, somewhere off the Isle of Wight, it would submerge into the English Channel, and travel six thousand miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic to the Falklands. Nuclear submarines are so efficient that they can stay below for three years or more. In Scotland, a taxi driver told us how he’d worked in Faslane, at the submarine base. He said that the submariners’ mail was habitually screened for any possible bad news from their families which might cause them upset. Even if their loved ones had died, there would be nothing they could do about it – there’d be no return to shore.
The driver spoke in a matter-of-fact manner of men going mad at sea, losing their sanity in the confines of a metal tube where they might not even have their own bunks, but be forced to share beds in sequence with their mates. He said one man had appeared in his civilian clothes, carrying a bag, saying he was ready to go home now.
One morning I arrive at the beach to an extraordinary sight, so unexpected it causes me to screech on my brakes. The water has disappeared, to be replaced by mud flats. It’s as though the plug has been pulled on the estuary, and an entirely new landscape has appeared. In the extreme spring tide, the channel has been reduced to its absolute minimum, so narrow you might almost stroll across to the forest.
Posts rise out of the mud like dead men’s fingers, ready to pull me down as I try, unsuccessfully, to walk out to this new world. The birds have it all to themselves. Even the crows have turned their backs on the human world in which they scavenge and are off in the distance, bathing with the waders.
The tide itself is weather. The weak sun tries to burn off the mist, but it only gets colder. There are astonishing effects in the sky, reflecting the sealessness below. It’s like being in an eclipse. Perhaps the river Solent is about to return to its antediluvian state, or perhaps this is the precursor of a freak tsunami. Or maybe the sea has relocated to the sky, as it was once thought there was another ocean over our heads. One medieval chronicler related how a congregation came out of church to find an anchor snagged on a gravestone. Its line ran taut to the clouds, from which a man descended, only to be suffocated by the dense air as if he were drowning.
Huge yellow buoys which normally float from chains that anchor them to the sea bed lie slumped like giant beach balls, left behind after a day’s play. At the dockhead, ships’ flanks are indecently exposed, as though someone were looking up their skirts; unsupported by the water, they might fall over at any moment. But the withdrawal must stop at some point. Soon normality will resume, and the earth and the moon will go on turning, tugging the sea between them. Some days, in late autumn, the fog is so thick that the sea and sky merge into one. There may be hundreds of birds around me, but I only hear their squawks and peeps. Unseen ships moan like lost whales.
Winter closes in, sweeping the mist away with Arctic winds. The air is so cold it seems to crack the tarmac. My fingers turn raw and crab-like; the colour of summer has long since faded, leaving brown islands on the back of my hands. It’s time to start wearing two hats, as well as two pairs of gloves. Shoulders hunched, I push my bike along the beach, knowing full well that the water will be even colder. At this nadir of the year, people ponder the wisdom, or not, of getting out of their cars. For me it’s all a question of getting in.
I stand over the water, and wonder why anyone would want to enter it. The surface is pressed flat by the cold. Slow and viscous, it wrinkles like setting jam. An oily sheen spreads over it. Rafts of usually active herring gulls float as if frozen into place. Everything has slowed to a glacial pace. Later the sea will ice up at the tideline, like the salt around the rim of a good margarita. In the summer, the water expands with the warmth; now it physically shrinks with the cold. Checking the coast is clear, I pull off my boots and my clothes and wade in without thinking.
I push through the waves with ice-cold hands. From above, I must look like a clockwork frog. My animal heat retreats with each forward stroke; I reach out as if to warm up the water. In summer, my body settles in comfortably; now everything is taut, demanding the conservation of its core.
I line up to the distant markers where cormorants perch. I’ve reached my limit. I turn back to the beach, scrabbling like a goose to find my depth once more. Naked on the sea wall, I give a little dance, singing to myself. If ‘ecstasy’ means to stand outside yourself, then I feel happier than I have ever been. Everything stripped away; everything renewed. Just me and the sea.
In the wan light the sun is diluted and dumbed. I struggle to put on my clothes, shivering as if the whole world were shaking, rather than me. My feet leave suspended puddles on the concrete, each toeprint in three dimensions. There are red threads from my towel caught in the cracks from earlier visits. I tug on my socks. Back home, I’ll shake out the sand and weed as evidence of my folly.
The cold becomes a kind of warmth. My fingers burn as the feeling returns, like they did when I was a boy, home from school and holding my hands too near the gas fire; by winter’s end my knuckles will be cracked and bleeding. With my heightened senses, I smell the lanolin in my woolly gloves. When I manage to scrawl in my notebook, its pages held down with an elastic band, my nose drips onto the ink, turning it into Rorschach blobs. My body complains of the lack of sleep. The prospect of tea and toast and a warm house never seemed so alluring.