The Sea Inside

FOURTH ESTATE·London

For Cyrus, Max & Lilian

… Even now my heart

Journeys beyond its confines, and my thoughts

Over the sea, across the whale’s domain,

Travel afar the regions of the earth …

‘The Seafarer’, Anglo-Saxon verse

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1. The suburban sea

2. The white sea

3. The inland sea

4. The azure sea

5. The sea of serendipity

6. The southern sea

7. The wandering sea

8. The silent sea

9. The sea in me

Footnote

Acknowledgements

Sources

By the same author

Text and Image Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

The suburban sea

I have lived long enough in the Shire to be

able to afford to go away from it with pleasure.

I suppose this is what homes are for. If one

hadn’t got an anchorage it wouldn’t be

exciting to sail away.

T.H. WHITE, England Have My Bones, 1936

In the years since I have come back to it, the house has grown to become part of me. It is held together by memories, even as it is falling apart. Surrounded by ivy and screened by trees, it has become an enclosed world, left to itself. As I look out from my bedroom window, a blackbird paces out the garage roof, over which a broken willow hangs. Below, tadpoles swim blindly in a slowly leaking pool.

Every day here is the same. I work at the same time, eat my meals at the same time, go out at the same time, go to bed at the same time. I hold fast to my routine, anchoring a life that might otherwise come adrift. But at night the anarchy of my dreams disturbs this self-imposed regime, freefalling till I regain the rituals of the morning.

I’m woken by the cold outside my window, the dark pressing against the glass. I listen to the litany of the forecast, taking me around the coast –

Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay, Trafalgar, FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes

– places I’ll never visit but whose names reassure me with their familiar rhythms, while their remote conditions seem strangely consoling.

Low, losing its identity, mainly fair, moderate or good, falling more slowly, mainly fair in west, occasionally poor in east, good.

I pay attention to the wind direction; not for my boat, but for my bike. A northerly means a chilly but fast ride south, an uphill struggle on my return. A prevailing sou’westerly signals a speedy cycle home, the wind behind my back like a sail. I peer through the curtains for a faint sign that the long night is drawing to a close.

Variable three or less, fog patches at first, becoming mainly good.

Outside, I smell the night-morning air; promising and inviting, or closed-down and denying. I unlock the old brass padlock on the garage door and pull out my bike, feeling for its cable lock like reins.

I follow the same route. I’ve been doing it so long that my bike could steer itself to its destination. Its tyres know every crack in the tarmac, every worn-out white line, every pothole. The urgency of my mission leaves the sleeping houses behind. I ride like my mother walked, at a furious pace, always trying to keep up with myself. As though, if I went fast enough, no one would see me.

It’s December. The colour has yet to seep back into the sky, before the warmth of the night meets the cold of the dawn. My body is geared to the bike. Green lights signal to non-existent cars; I sail through on red. Sodium lamps soak the streets in a Lucozade haze. I ride down the white lines, arms outstretched, reclaiming the road.

Soon I pass out of the suburb’s sprawl, from the land to the sea. Crunching through the shingle, along furrows made on earlier visits, I rumble to a halt at the appointed spot. Leaning my bike against the sea wall, I climb over and – no going back now – lower myself in.

The water is so clear it scares me. Fish leap up as though they’d dropped out of the clouds. Everything is rising to the surface, summoned by the light, slowed to the sea’s heartbeat. The water brims like an overrun bath. I push out through the stillness of the standing tide, my hands creating the only ripples.

I drift out as far as I dare. Borne up by the water, I turn briefly on my back, hips held to the sky, before striking back for the shore. I haul myself out, my body pink and steaming like a wet dog. The scar on my knee is a livid purple; my white T-shirt glows blue in the faint light.

Birds become visible and audible before the sun rises and the world wakes, a netherworld neither dark nor light, out of time. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet of ‘The Wanderer’ had a word for it, ūhta, ‘the hour before dawn’, as he travelled by winter, watching ‘the sea birds bathing, stretching out their wings’.

It’s over all too quickly. A frail sun appears over the trees, milky-lemon pale, more like the moon. The morning begins. My body suffers but my spirit soars at having stolen a march on the day; having been rewarded as well as punished. I’ve forgotten my gloves. I stuff one hand, then the other, in my pockets. A skein of geese fly low over the mud. Curlew call out their names – curl-you, curl-you – whistling through their arched bills. Gulls clamour.

Cloud layers over cloud, plum, purple and navy, cocoa, khaki and grey. The cold surrounds me, almost comforting. The light lifts and falls. I smell the iodine of the shore and an intimation of drizzle in the air as the birds’ noise rises in a crescendo, an orchestrated start to the day. The docks rumble into action. A brightly-lit liner sails up the estuary, silent yet so full of people, a distant glimpse of glamour.

The night fades away. I race the ship back to port, flushing a lone and indignant duck from the freshwater pond that has gathered at the mouth of a shingle stream. Somewhere in the woods a woodpecker hammers. The dawn is replaced by ordinary day; the emptiness soon filled by the commonplace. I can see my hands once more. Everything seems to pause in these final moments, as though the performance were put on hold, even as it begins again.

The beach isn’t much of a beach. It’s really all that’s left behind by the slow-moving estuary, more a kind of watery cul-de-sac, fed by two converging rivers. One is filtered through chalk downland to the north-east, flowing through watercress and filled with swerving trout, slowly widening and losing its virginity until it reaches a carved-out bay in the semi-industrial arse-end of the city. Its outer curve, bulwarked by great heaps of rusting cars, is strewn with every imaginable item of litter, deposited by the tidal flow. Its fellow river emerges from the far side of the city, broadening through reed-seeded marshes into the shadow of the docks – a forbidden land where giant cranes stalk like wading birds, and where shiny new cars begin a journey which will end in the same kind of dump in the same kind of city. Yet somehow, somewhere, all this is forgotten in the conjunction of tide and shingle: something quietly miraculous, perpetually renewed.

The sea defines us, connects us, separates us. Most of us experience only its edges, our available wilderness on a crowded island – it’s why we call our coastal towns ‘resorts’, despite their air of decay. And although it seems constant, it is never the same. One day the shore will be swept clean, the next covered by weed; the shingle itself rises and falls. Perpetually renewing and destroying, the sea proposes a beginning and an ending, an alternative to our landlocked state, an existence to which we are tethered when we might rather be set free.

I say it isn’t much of a beach, but that doesn’t do it justice, since it has a beauty all its own – more so for being seldom visited out of season except by dog-walkers and anglers. It is set at the end of a shallow bay that marks the south-eastern limits of the city. To reach it, I ride along a waterfront set with desultory concrete shelters and backed by common land to which are chained half a dozen horses. Behind stands a post-war housing estate, one-quarter of whose population live in poverty.

The path ahead passes through a stand of trees, then gives way to the beach, bordered by a waist-high sea wall with a narrow ledge, just wide enough for a person to walk along. To the landward is a sweep of grass and an avenue of oaks and pines. Gnarled and bowed, they mark an old carriageway that leads, with a grandeur out of all expectation, to a Tudor fort and a Cistercian abbey that once dominated this eastern bank of the estuary. Now the abbey lies in ruins, surrounded by scrubby woods and stagnant stewponds, while the fort, built out of stone robbed from the dissolved abbey, became a grand Victorian pile, recently extended in a replica of itself as a series of expensive apartments.

In this interzone, the modern world has yet to wipe out the past. Although the city is in sight, this place can seem haunted on a winter’s afternoon, with its bare trees bent back by the prevailing sou’westerlies, and its rotting wooden piles, the remains of long-decayed jetties. The yacht club’s boats stand unattended in their pound, the wind rattling nylon lines against aluminium masts in a continual tattoo.

Further down the shore, after an interruption of small shops and terraced houses, is a country park, the site of a huge military hospital. It exerted its own influence for a century or more, but it too has been demolished, absorbed into the turf, leaving only a nuclear shadow and its chapel dome poking through the trees. One day those tower blocks on the shore will be romantic ruins, too, relics of the work of giants.

If the weather is good, I’ll cycle past the park to a far beach, overshadowed by holm oaks rooted in a low bank of gravelly, gorse- and bracken-clad cliffs, where southern England is slowly collapsing into the sea. As I ride, my route parallels the forest on the other side of the estuary. There may be barely three miles between me and its purple heath, but they might as well mark a continental divide. Not only because we are separated by water, but by virtue of what stands on the distant shore and now dominates the entire waterline, a triumvirate of new, industrial installations: oil refinery, chemical plant, and power station.

In the changing light, this cluster of cryptic structures could be anything. Tapering spires for a new place of worship; circular tanks as giant igloos, pale green with rusty streaks; silos like newly-landed space ships; tripod gantries ready to fire salvos of secret missiles. At dawn or dusk, the whole place might be a martial Manhattan, replicating every day, sprouting out of the shore, an alternative new forest of steel. There’s no human scale to this petropolis; it has a curiously temporary feel, although it has been here for half a century. It might be disassembled in a day and imported to some other shore on the other side of the world. Stripped down, utilitarian, it makes no apologies to its surroundings. It has only one function: to make the fuel that confirms its existence. It is brutal, practical, inevitable.

Like the nearby docks, this great complex, which employs more than two thousand workers, is sealed from public access. My own uncle worked there after his wartime service in Kenya, although I couldn’t tell you what he did – any more than I know what he was doing in the middle of Africa in 1943, beyond the photographs of him in khaki shorts and a pith helmet, along with aerogrammes sent out by his family and kept carefully preserved in a Senior Service cigarette tin.

I’ve grown up with this place, which is only just older than me; I have no memory of the virgin shore before the coming of the towers, now imprinted on my view of the shore. Their stacks occasionally burst into life like huge Bunsen burners, as though the whole thing were some gigantic experiment, or a memorial to an unknown warrior. First lit in 1951, these flares commemorate an age of energy and industry, power and destruction. Their function is to burn ‘excess gases’, but as their orange-red tongues lick the sky, they could be drawing directly from the molten depths of the earth, rather than the crude oil from the Middle East which is pumped from tankers that line the mile-long terminal, five abreast like petro-cows waiting to be milked, their bridges branded with slogans, NO SMOKING and PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT.

To process its daily quota of three hundred thousand barrels of oil, Fawley sucks three hundred thousand tonnes of water from the sea, claiming to return it cleaner than it was before. (In fact, many living organisms are drawn in too: fish are caught in screens and often die, while smaller fry are sent through the factory’s cycle as though through a washing machine, a process which few survive.)

Indeed, the word ‘refinery’ itself is deceptive, since its end products have precisely the opposite effect on the world into which they are released. And while the site is declared to be perfectly safe, its neighbours live in the knowledge that in the event of an emergency, they would be evacuated from their homes, just as the islanders of Tristan da Cunha were evacuated from theirs during the volcanic eruption of 1961, and were brought to a military camp here, in the shadow of the neighbouring power station, close to where their descendants still live. Its cylindrical chimney, an enormous ship’s funnel on a concrete liner fading into pale blue, marks the end of the estuary and the beginning of the sea. Beyond is the tantalising outline of the Isle of Wight and its fields and downs. In the winter, when the trees lack leaves, I can see it from my window, its pairs of red points blinking like landing lights, foreshortening the distance between me and the sea, making it seem suddenly nearer.

Despite its industrial installations and historic layers, this is an unspectacular, unremarkable landscape. You could easily drive by and take away nothing from this place. Many do. No one writes books about this shore. No one who does not live here knows anything much about it, and even those who do would be at pains to report anything noteworthy about the place they see every day.

I just happen to live here. I didn’t choose to; it chose me. I might have found a more picturesque place, wild and romantic or urban and exciting; the kind of places people pass through here to reach. A port city relies on its relationship to elsewhere. Perhaps that’s why I like it so well, since it does not impose any identity on me. I came back here from habit as much as choice, like the birds that migrate to and from its non-descript shores.

You assume you know your home. It’s only when you return that you realise how strange it is. I first saw this beach half a century ago, but all those years have made it seem less rather than more familiar. I’ve taken it for granted. But now, as I look out over its expanse, it occurs to me that what I thought I knew, I didn’t really know at all.

The first recorded settlement here was Roman – the port of Clausentum – followed by Anglo-Saxon Hamwic; Southampton translates out of Old English as ‘south home town’. Sholing, where I live, barely existed until modern times: its name is a contraction of ‘Shore Land’; its neighbour, Netley, means ‘wet wood’. Until the nineteenth century, this was common land, coursed by a Roman road and scattered with tumuli and cottages; an oddly isolated area, separated from the rest of Hampshire on three sides by rivers and the sea. Troops trained here; shanty towns of huts were set up for navigators working on the railway line and the sprawling military hospital. Their presence may have been why this place became known as Spike Island, a slur on its itinerant population of travellers and horse-traders, and a wry reference to a notorious penal colony of the same name in Ireland’s Cork Harbour, Inis Pich. There was a wildness to this heathland. One corner was named Botany Bay, after the destination of the transportees who were held there – as their Irish counterparts were in Cork Harbour – before being shipped out to the ends of the earth.

Even now, this eastern side of Southampton Water can feel insular, outcast. A place through which to pass, rather than to stop at for its own sake. There’s a sense that anything could happen here and already has, caught up in the flow of changing tides and people and animals and beginnings and endings, the obscure currents of history.

Recently, I flew home after spending some days on the banks of a Scottish sea-loch. The north had been dramatic, monumental, with rivers of mist running down granite valleys, falling like dry ice into the still, deep water from which the mountains rose on the other side, blue-purple and faintly oppressive. The skies were overcast by the damp Gulf Stream and second-hand winds from the Caribbean. Flying back south, I felt an immense lifting of the atmosphere as the sun broke through the clouds and the plane banked over Southampton.

In those few minutes I saw the past and present unroll beneath me, as in a camera obscura. The horizon had vanished, to be replaced by a careering view, as chaotic as it was ordered. The plexiglass porthole filtered the light like a prism, and gave the scene a watery air. I might have been looking out from the side of a ship or even from a submarine.

Down there, somewhere, was my house, sheltered by trees and shrubs. To the south lay the sea, a broad strip of blue-green bordered by yellow shingle. As the plane flew over the beach I knew so well, but could hardly recognise from this angle, it turned back from the forest and into the heart of the docks, passing monumental cranes and ocean liners lined up like bath toys, swimming pools shimmering in the sun. Then it flew over the bridge that connects one side of the city to the other, over the school I first attended more than four decades ago.

The afternoon sun lent it all a glowing sheen, highlighting every reflective surface. Even the scrapyard and its defunct cars reduced to metal screes acquired an allure, shining like piles of iron filings. Seeing all this laid before me, even after only a few days away, made me intensely happy and profoundly sad, its streets and shores so familiar that they seemed extensions of my own body. Finally, descending to the airport, we touched down on southern soil once more.

This suburban sea is a living thing, ever shifting as it is contained. Everything seems open to the light, some subtle combination that has never been seen before and will never be seen again: the sun forced from under a bank of cloud, a pure white egret like a flapping appar-ition, a pair of mute swans gliding close to shore. Even on the dreariest days, the most forlorn afternoons, it’s never not beautiful here. The slow surging waves seem to be suppressed by the mist, yet every sense is heightened. I can smell the forest across the water. Sound behaves differently; with no buildings to bounce from, it spreads over the surface and soaks back into the sea.

Black-headed gulls, barely more than pale smears, splash their heads and wings. Unresolved shapes drift by. Everything coalesces, caught in a dreamy, half-hallucinatory loop. There are shadows under the water as it withdraws over weed and rusty outfall pipes. A distant yacht becomes a silent white smudge. A fall of black crows scatter in the murk. The saturated greens and browns of grass and leaves turn the colour balance awry, in the way that reds and greens take on an eerie vividness before a storm, when the pressure appears to affect the light itself.

My time is determined by the ebb and flow. At low tide, the beach is an indecent expanse laid bare by retreat, more like farmland than anything of the sea: an inundated field, almost peaty with sediment, as much charcoal as it is sludge.

Bait-diggers leave little piles by their sides like slumped sandcastles. With their buckets and spades, they might as well be burying as disinterring, these sextons of the shore. Standing over them is an outfall marker in the shape of an X, which has turned to become a cross. In the uncertain light, the mud takes on new colours, from black to taupe and even a kind of rubbed silver.

As I say, it is never not beautiful here.

Behind me, bare oaks and beeches lie as cracks against the sky, evoking a peculiarly English landscape. In the late eighteenth century, Turner drew the abbey’s ruins in his sketchbook, tracing out the trees that had grown up around the crumbling gothic arches. In 1816 John Constable stayed at Netley on his honeymoon, and painted its scudding clouds and billowing greenery. Theirs were records of a Romantic setting, an alternative reality of sensation and emotion. Hanging over the shore, the gnarled, enamelled branches are made darker by the reflected light of the sea and the stretch of bright shingle. My shortening eyesight renders it all abstract, blurring the scene like Turner’s evocations of nothingness, with their vague shapes that might be waves or whales or slaves tossed overboard, rising and falling in foam with ‘a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it’, as Ishmael says in Moby-Dick, ‘until you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant’.

That fixity of sea and sky is a supreme deception. Over it lies what Herman Melville called the ocean’s skin – a permeable membrane, one-sixteenth of a millimetre thick, fertile with particles and micro-organisms and contaminants; a fantastically fragile yet vast division. The horizon is only an invention of our eyes and brains as we seek to make sense of that immensity and locate our selves within it. The sea solicits such illusions. It takes its colour from the clouds, becomes a sky fallen to the earth; it only suggests what it might or might not contain. Little wonder that people once thought the sun sank into the sea, just as the moon rose out of it.

Not many artists come here now to see the sun set or the moon rise. Netley’s beach is hardly thronged with easels, and Turner and Constable left long before the refinery turned the shore spiky with petro-chemical romance. Perhaps the strangest thing about this massed industry is its absence of sound, at least at this distance, both innocent and ominous at the same time, although occasionally the plant emits a dull indefinable roar, like a giant stirring in its sleep.

This is a place both dead and alive. Being here, in or by the water, at either end of such a cold, closed-down day makes me physically part of it. A crested grebe pops up, charting the shallows for its prey. It arches its neck to dive again, as I swim towards it. A jumpy, almost nervous plunge, a little leap forward, then it’s gone.

As with so many things about birds, you have to take a lot on trust; to discern what is real, and what they want you to believe. The pattern of a duck’s feathers, for instance, breaks up the surface, blurring its body between water and sky, an effect that prompted the American artist Abbott Thayer to suggest eye-dazzling camouflage for First World War soldiers and ships, mimicking natural cover in an industrial war. A grebe’s markings, intensely detailed against the grey of the sea, may seem darkly obvious to us, but from below, its white throat and breast renders it invisible, able to deal death with its stiletto bill. Thayer called this disguise ‘counter-shading’; it lends animals from birds to whales a flat deception in the overhead sun, making them seem insubstantial rather than solid things.