The Sea Inside

Yet with all this self-imposed torture comes an intense, capillary clarity. Perhaps it’s just the blood pumping back to my brain, but I feel as if something had been wiped clean. I’m ready to start again. I feel in the world, not just of it, even though sometimes, in the mist, I think I must be still dreaming.

Winter is a lonely season. That’s why I like it. It’s easier to be alone; there’s no one there to notice. In the silence that ascends and descends at either end of the abbreviated day, there’s room to feel alive. The absence makes space for something else. I must keep faith with the sea. Swimming before dawn, it is so dark that I have to leave my bike light on so I can see where I left my clothes. Once the waves washed them clean away, leaving me to wade after them.

The sea doesn’t care, it can take or give. Ports are places of grief. Sailors declined to learn to swim, since to be lost overboard – even within sight of the shore – and to fight the waves would only extend the agony. You can only ever be alone out there.

People have died here, in these suburban waters. In the cemetery of Netley’s military hospital, planted as an arboretum to blunt the edges of death, there’s a gravestone carved in solid Cyrillic characters, a memorial to three Russian sailors from the frigate Prince Pojarsky, who drowned here in 1873. In the nearby pub, an outbuilding once stood as a temporary morgue for bodies pulled from the water by the coastguard, their corpses laid out on tables while next door people drank their pints of beer. My elder brother, working on a trawler off the Isle of Wight, once watched as the net pulled up a body, one of two men who’d decided to strip off at midnight and go for a swim. The fishermen kept the bloated corpse netted off their bow until the police arrived; it is bad luck to have a body aboard a boat. Like those unswimming sailors, I can’t reconcile my love with my terror. I know full well what lies beneath me as I push out from the wall and into the water; and yet I still fear what it might contain.

One day, with the sea swollen by a near-full moon, I get the feeling I’m not alone. I’ve just turned back from my farthest point when I’m startled by a sudden whoosh. Directly behind me, barely a yard away, is a huge head with shiny dog-like eyes: a large grey seal, fat and full-grown.

I back off, shocked at the sight. I knew there was a seal colony just along the Solent – I’d seen grey and harbour seals there, lounging on the mud flats, so blubbery and lazy that algae grew on their backs where they spent all their time basking in the sun, raising their hind flippers in the air to keep them warm on chillier days. From a distance, they look quite cute. But coming face to face with one in the water was another matter. Weighing up to eight hundred pounds, grey seals have sharp claws and teeth that can cause a serious infection, Mycobacterium marinum, otherwise known as seal finger, which may result in the loss of affected digits.

The seal and I regard each other, equally surprised. He’s twice my size, clearly a mature male. He raises his grizzly head, lugubriously. I’m not sure what he intends to do, but I’m not going to wait to find out. Kicking out with my feet to persuade the animal to keep its distance, I make for the shore – only to discover that the great beast has followed me, swimming beneath the surface. Scrambling onto the safety of the sea wall and reaching for my clothes, I look down at it.

I was right to be apprehensive. Up close, it is even bigger, almost magnified by the clear water. It looks more like a manatee as it hangs there, puffing away quite quizzically, all whiskers and wrinkles, trying to work out what I am, this pale, unsealish creature. I hurry to dress, keeping one eye on my marine companion. His curiosity satisfied, he turns towards the open water and sets off, popping up at intervals as he works his way upstream, before finally moving out of sight.

Back home, I walk around the house in the dark. I know its rooms as well as I know my own body. I catch myself in the mirror on the landing, hung so that my mother could check her make-up before coming downstairs, her necklace in place, just as my father always wore a tie. Now I look in it and wonder who I am.

I step outside, under the frost-sharpened sky, and a watery array: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricornus, Delphinus, and Cetus the whale; a starry bestiary (as if infinity wasn’t frightening enough already) of ancient patterns created by minds yet to be overwhelmed by the images that fill our waking day. They fall in slow motion – Orion’s brilliant grid, Betelgeuse’s dying watch-jewel, the Pleiades’ nebulous cloud – seen in the astronomer’s averted vision, as if too big to look at directly. They seem unchanging, but they represent cataclysmic explosions, speeding into oblivion, collapsing into themselves.

The nearness of the sea opens up the sky. I hold my binoculars shakily to a three-quarter moon, its cold face forever turned away; to Sylvia Plath, it seemed to drag the sea after it ‘like a dark crime’. Once, out in the garden late at night, I watched an unusually bright meteor flashing orange, red and white. As it fell to the horizon, its tail streaming behind like a medieval illumination, I heard it hiss and fizz.

Far off in the city centre a clock tower chimes. Inside the house, things shift and fall. Floorboards creak like a ship. It ticks with the ebbing heat as it falls asleep. I lie in my narrow bed, listening to the sound of the dark. A vague rumbling drifts over from the docks, godless, twenty-four-hour places where the black water ripples with sodium traces. Turning off my bedside light, I hear someone call my name, as if the night won’t leave me alone. Evenings I once spent drinking and dancing and taking drugs are now filled with a heady emptiness. Late at night, I think there’s some animal stirring in one of the rooms, a bear cub being licked into shape. And sometimes I wake in the early hours to hear my mother washing up downstairs, even though she died six years ago.

The house has its own history, plastered over, extended, reduced, rising and falling with fashion like the hemlines of a woman’s skirt. The lawn where I lay as a teenager, reading King Lear on a hot midsummer’s afternoon although I’d rather have been listening to Ziggy Stardust on my cassette recorder, has long been overtaken by meadow grass. Somewhere deep in the bushes is the chain-link fence that first marked these plots parcelled out on the heath by a 1920s developer. If you can age a hedgerow by the number of species in a given stretch, you can date a street by its styles and details. Things here were once more empty: open coal fires rather than central heating, a hot-water geyser that exploded into blue life over the old enamel bath, and a bare electric fire hung even more dangerously overhead. No telephone, no fitted carpet, no double glazing; children spilled out of doors.

Then the view was open to what lay ahead, and a shop stood on each corner of the crossroads: a grocer’s and post office combined, where you could buy postal orders while your luncheon meat was sliced; a butcher’s shop with tiles and sawdust and bloody lumps of offal; a hairdresser’s with its oval helmets that made their occupants look like astronauts, preserved in permanent lotion; and a brown-painted cubby-hole of a shop run by a lone elderly lady which sold only sweets and was rarely if ever open. All gone now. Here, as elsewhere, suburbia has disappointed its utopian dreams. Bramble finds its way into every crack.

At the bottom of the garden – beyond the summer house whose interior is festooned with ancient spiders’ webs, each dangling white drop holding a mummified fly – is a crumbling potting shed. Recently, a sudden hailstorm caught me out in the garden, and I dived into the shed for shelter.

It was the first time I’d set foot inside the place for months, maybe even years. The roof was rotten and yawning to the skies in two places, as though a bomb had hit it; everything was decaying with lost summers and long-dead flowers. A pair of deflated bikes stood stacked against the tilting walls. Plant pots tottered in towers. Bamboo canes which once guided sweet peas to the sun gathered in the corner, the twine still wound around their knotty rings. The entire edifice was slowly decomposing. As I stood there, still in the silence save for the rattle on what was left of the roof, the hailstones poured in through the holes like sand in an egg timer, threatening to fill the interior with granulated ice.

Behind the shed a high privet hedge, blowsy like green clouds, hides an alleyway where my brothers would collect grass snakes, slithering in a bucket. Hedgehogs still shuffle out of it at night, leaving paths in the grass. At the end of the cutway, across the road, lies what is left of the common, a narrow, tree-filled valley dipping down to a stream, from where I hear the call of a tawny owl at night, drifting over the roofs, as if it might be caught by a satellite dish.

One afternoon my father, working on his much-manured vegetable patch, called to us to see a slow worm on the lawn; it must have slithered out from the compost heap. For some reason, I picked up a spade and drove it down on the lizard, slicing it in half. I remember being surprised by the blood that oozed out of the bisected reptile.

What had I expected? Did I think it was one of my rubber toys? Fascinated and horrified by what I’d done, I stood there, staring stupidly. I still regret it. On only two other occasions have I been personally responsible for the death of an animal. One was a hedgehog that I once found with a growth on its eye like a bloated pale pea. I drowned it in a bucket of water, holding it down, feeling its tight-balled body open and close, briefly. The last was rather more recent.

I first saw it out of the corner of my eye, a white blur on the beach. After I’d swum I saw that the bird was still there.

It was nothing unusual: a black-headed gull. As I walked towards it, it ran off rather than took to the air. Then I saw its wing tip hanging, obviously and dramatically broken. Had a dog or a fox done that? Every now and then it tucked its head round to the injured site, pecking at the disconnected bones, unable to understand. Why couldn’t it do what it usually did? It could not comprehend the malfunction. I could, but I ignored it, and cycled home, thinking determinedly about lunch instead.

A year or so before, I’d been cycling along the beach when I saw a pair of mute swans, a common enough sight here, running their belisha-beacon beaks through the shallows. The Nordic historian Olaus Magnus wrote in 1555: ‘The swan, as everyone certainly knows, is a placid, good-natured bird.’ He noted that it derives its name, Cygnus, from its singing, sounding sweetly from its long, curving neck, although he added that in old age, it sings with one wing over its head, its swansong ‘as it departs from life. Plato says that it sings not from sadness but from joy as its end draws near.’ Like the ermine, said to prefer to die rather than soil its white winter coat, the swan is pledged to maintain its whiteness, as immaculate as the newly laundered shirt of an African schoolchild.

But one of these swans was not preening itself. It was tugging with its wings at a near-invisible thread: a micro-filament of discarded fishing line which threatened to trap the bird till it was trussed up in its own panic.

A man with a weather-beaten face was also looking on, concerned. I suggested we try and do something. We waded out towards the pair, but they moved off, out of reach. My comrade, as I now regarded him, made a suggestion. He owned a rib, and would fetch it from the pound. Moments later we were in the boat, in pursuit of a swan. The powerful outboard motor took us out into the channel. Our prey, meanwhile, was doing its best to evade us. Circling to cut off its escape route, we drew close to the entangled bird. Ignoring what I’d been told – how a swan can break a human limb with its wings – I leaned over and gathered it up in my arms.

I felt its whiteness in my embrace, sturdy and warm and downy. It didn’t struggle at all. Indeed, it seemed quite at home, although that may have been merely fear: captured animals will play dead, as a last resort. It was like holding a living musical instrument – or, perhaps, putting one’s arm around a ballerina. Its head swivelled to face me indignantly. I thought of Alice’s flamingo mallet as I gripped the slender, muscular neck. My fellow rescuer pulled out his penknife and cut the line. It was all over. I opened my arms and felt the bird’s tension release and the life return to its body. It swam off for a few yards, stretched its wings, turned, and honked.

Only later, reading Tag Barnes’s Waterside Companions, would I see another side of the story. Barnes, an angler since he was a boy, wrote his book in 1963 to enlighten fellow fishermen about the creatures they might see around them. Moorhens, cormorants and grebes all get their admiring page or two; even water voles, toads and coypu are given their due. But when it comes to the swan, Barnes appears to lose his temper: ‘I simply bristle with annoyance when one moves into my swim.’ He certainly does not agree with Plato’s lyrical tales. Swans, he says, are ‘the most aggressive, persistent and arrogant birds we have and can be extremely dangerous’.

It was refreshing to read natural history from the predator’s point of view; in Barnes’s words the mute animal becomes almost malevolent. No amount of stone-throwing or shooing would deter these waterborne thugs, he says. ‘They will often hiss back at the “shooer” and sometimes threaten him with violence.’ He suggests that dirty water might be thrown over the miscreants – perhaps on the basis that these vain creatures would be humbled by their besmirched plumage. His other remedy is to ‘cast a line over their backs’. Is that what happened to ‘my’ bird? Barnes convicts himself in his final blast, as deliberate as the second discharge from a twelve-bore. Having admitted that swans eat only aquatic plants, he concludes: ‘I can recommend the cygnet as being a really tasty dish!’

Faced with the plight of the gull and its broken wing, I returned to the beach that afternoon. I’d last seen the bird running into the bushes, seeking shelter from predators; I’d watched other injured birds retreat into the same undergrowth, as though they were choosing a place to die. But now it was back on the shore. Dumbly, it declined to accept its fate. For a moment I thought that somehow its wing had repaired itself, miraculously snapping back into place like a dislocated shoulder. But it hadn’t, and it was clear that I had to do something.

I crept up on the gull and cornered it against the sea wall, then threw my swimming shorts over its head and grabbed its flapping body. Like the swan, it made surprisingly little resistance, only a pathetic attempt to peck my fingers.

It was odd to see something so familiar at such close quarters: the slim elegance of its beak, long and crimson and curved to a point; the sharpness of its dusty black-brown hood defined against the whiteness of its body. It was one of the most common wild animals around, yet close to, it appeared a miracle of perfection; a perfection now irrevocably marred by the snapped bones I could feel as I examined its wing. It would never fly again, although its beady eyes looked up to the sky.

I unzipped my backpack, slipped the gull inside, and zipped it back up.

I couldn’t take it home. The ride would take too long, and I feared for the bird’s well-being in my bag. I cycled to the nearby country park. As I rode down the village street, I could feel the gull moving about on my back. Every now and again, it would let out a feeble squawk. Concerned it might suffocate in its nylon pouch, I stopped to unzip the bag a little, half wondering, half hoping that it might have passed away. But the faint scrabbling movements told me it hadn’t given up yet.

At the park office, there was little to be done. No one was interested in the bird’s plight. Someone said I was ‘too soft’ and that gulls were ‘ten-a-penny’; a rarer animal might be worth saving, not this beach rat.

I wanted to hold up its head and show them its beautiful beak, as if it might sing its own defence. But the bird just lay there, helplessly. We were each as useless as each other. I rang the rspca, and was told to take it to a vet, but the journey there would just mean more stress, for us both, only delaying the inevitable. My friend, a park ranger, was working in the nearby yard.

I unzipped the bag for the last time. Richard reached in, tenderly gathering up the bird in his big brown hands as its life passed from my hands to his. ‘It’s been shot by an air gun,’ he said quietly, then took it around the corner to wring its neck.

As I rode home, it seemed every gull on the beach turned its back to me, resolutely looking away. I imagined their reprimands as I passed, muttering ‘Murderer’; they too were once persecuted and eaten, and their eggs gathered in their thousands. When I unzipped my bag again, back on the shore, I found a slick of slimy guano, and the stain of brown blood on my shorts. A single piece of down lay at the bottom. The wind whisked it out of my bag and into the waves.

I pushed out, among rafts of floating green weed, watching the ferries pass each other way off shore. In the mid-distance, a frenzy of gulls fought over an agreed, invisible point, feeding greedily on what lay below.

After a storm, when the waves roll in as if exhausted, the sea spits out strange things: huge lengths of wood which could be railway sleepers or bulwarks from ancient ships; cupboard doors and plastic seats; snaking bristles of indeterminate origin; entangled ropes covered with weed. Sometimes the scene resembles the aftermath of a battle: the unaccountable head and neck of a herring gull, floppy like a glove puppet. Bright shop-bought flowers, commemorating some unknown loss. An empty box which once contained human ashes. Above the wrack line, the charred remains of a bonfire smoulder, ringed with empty lager cans.

As a boy, I used to think what a terrible punishment it would be to have to count every pebble on the shore. Or what it would be like to lose something precious there and never be able to find it. Now, every day, I look for a stone with a hole in it. I align it to a particular point as a viewfinder; the light bursts through like a little sun, the world seen through a prehistoric telescope. They’re powerful talismans, these holy or hag stones. Back home they tumble out of my pockets and over shelves and window-sills as calendars of my days; my grandmother, who lived on the edge of the New Forest, kept one in her glass cabinet, next to the rows of china spaniels.

In another glass case, in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, there are similar stones collected from other beaches, each with a handwritten label. William Twizel, a Victorian fisherman of Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, Northumberland, arranged them around the doors of his house, an echo of his inheritance and of a people whose blue eyes were said to be the colour of the sea in front of their cottages. Next to William’s stone is another example collected from Augustus Pitt-Rivers’ Wiltshire estate, where it was fixed to the beam of a cottage to keep witches away.

Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers – whose full name sounds more like a geographic location – was a Crimean veteran, a Darwinist, and a pioneer of British archaeology. He ordered his collections according to type and use, rather than date and provenance. Now they lie crammed in table-top and wall-cases, with fossils and fans, fetishes and tribal masks all jumbled together in a dark galleried hall resembling a particularly gloomy department store.

Some stones come from Craig and Ballymena in Northern Ireland or Carnac in Brittany, and were used to protect cows, tied to their tethering stake or between their horns to prevent pixies stealing their milk. Horses, too, were hung with hag stones to stop witches riding them during the night, and on Dartmoor stones were worn around human necks or nailed to bed-posts to defend against nocturnal demons. The seventeenth-century Brahan Seer of the Scottish Highlands was said to have had such a stone through which he could see into the other world, although he was burned in a spiked barrel of tar on the beach at Chanonry Point for his trouble.

In a 1906 essay on ‘Witched Fishing Boats in Dorset’, Dr Henry Colley March observed that Dorset fishermen would tie holy stones to the bows and thread their start-ropes through them; it was also the custom in the same county to attach the key of a house to a holed beach-stone for luck, he noted. The learned Dr March went on – in the antiquarian tradition of his peers such as Pitt-Rivers, M.R. James and James Frazer – to discern an association with the megaliths of ritual land-scapes in southern England, Orkney and Brittany; half-natural, half-constructed objects charged with the power of the past. ‘It is impossible not to see a like motive for the ancient practice of dragging a sick or epileptic child through a hole in a large “druidical” stone.’ They might as well be threaded with sacrifices to unknown gods, although to my eyes they resemble little modernist sculptures.

But you can’t keep a beach in your house, despite the teetering piles on my shelves, a terminal moraine of memory, accumulating dust composed of the decomposing me. Deformed oyster shells grown around odd pebbles, smooth grey wooden shapes with knots for eyes, sand-blasted shards of Victorian glass, chunks of marmalade pots, soft stems of clay pipes once sucked between moustached lips and discarded like cigarette butts, and bits of blue willow-pattern plates awaiting ceramic resurrection; all of them tumbled together by the tides. As a boy I listened to the rushing noise inside shells; the same sound has been in my ears for years now, a perpetual ocean in my head.

In Iris Murdoch’s strange novel The Sea, The Sea, published in 1978, the celebrated actor Charles Arrowby retreats from London to write his memoirs. He lives alone in a ramshackle house on an unidentified English coast, having come to the sea in search of ‘monastic mysticism’. The events that follow – a series of impossible coincidences and fantastical happenings played out in a Shakespearean manner, with Arrowby as a kind of Prospero – take place over one summer. They occur in an indefinably apocalyptic time and place, as if society were on the verge of disintegration – as indeed it seemed to be at the time – although ostensibly all is normal in the world beyond Arrowby’s coastal retreat.

As he relishes his solitude and the splendour of its setting – swimming off the rocky shore, ordered by its tides or the way he gets in and out of the water via a rope – Arrowby’s idyll is broken one morning by what he imagines or perhaps actually sees: a maned and toothed leviathan. ‘I saw a monster rising from the waves,’ twenty or thirty feet high, coiled and spiny, its head crested and with sharp teeth and a pink mouth. ‘I could see the sky through the coils.’ Although Arrowby puts this terrifying vision down to an acid flashback, a legacy of his misspent youth, the beast is an omen of all that happens afterwards as his former lovers and enemies come back to haunt him. Nor was it coincidence that this unsettling apparition is an echo of a scene in Racine’s Phaedra in which a sea monster appears, so fearsome that it infects the air and causes Hippolytus’ horses to drag their master to his watery doom.

Throughout Murdoch’s tragi-comic drama, the ever-changing sea abides, a character in itself, a mindful reminder of her hero’s impotence to change his fate and manipulate his friends, despite his deluded attempts to do so. He seems locked into what is happening, all the while documenting each oddly concocted meal, even at moments of great crisis. He eats: tinned macaroni cheese ‘jazzed up’ with cold courgettes, ‘Battenburg roll and prunes’, ‘boiled onions served with bran’, ‘poached egg on nettles’, ‘a little cold jellied consommé straight out of the tin’, all washed down with Spanish wine bought from the nearby Raven Hotel. Such details serve only to make the story more bizarre. Having abducted the woman whom he had loved as a boy, and who, by extraordinary circumstance, he suddenly discovers to be living nearby, the book ends with Arrowby – who has nearly drowned, violently, in the sea in typically mysterious circumstances – experiencing an epiphany in the shape of four seals bobbing in the water, ‘their wet doggy faces looking curiously upward … And as I watched their play, I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me.’