SWIMMING WITH SEALS
Victoria Whitworth
Victoria Whitworth began to write this beautiful, powerful book after she joined a group of intrepid sea swimmers. Gaining courage with every swim, Victoria came to rely increasingly on the healing therapy of the water, rediscovering her own power and femininity in the company of seals, gulls and orcas, soothed by the limitless beauty of sea and sky.
Swimming with Seals blends elegy – an exploration of change and loss in the face of death – with discursive memoir, tracing these themes from childhood to the present day. It is also a treasure chest of history and myth, local folklore and archaeological clues which give us tantalising glimpses of Pictish and Viking women, of the rulers and farmers and saints whose long-hidden secrets are occasionally yielded up by the land and sea.
Victoria describes this book as a love letter, and so it is: passionate, generous and, above all, exquisitely written.
For Kristin and Seamus, Archie and all the cats.
You know why.
‘You never enjoy the world aright,
till the Sea itself floweth in your veins’
—THOMAS TRAHERNE, Centuries of Meditations
Cover
Welcome Page
About Swimming With Seals
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Map
Swimming With Seals
Appendix
Glossary
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Cover Painting
Preview
About Victoria Whitworth
Also by Victoria Whitworth
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
This book had its origins in Facebook posts. I got into the habit of composing them while swimming almost daily over several years at the Sands of Evie in the West Mainland of Orkney, constructing little prose-poems, paying attention to details of weather and tide and wildlife, enjoying the challenge of describing the same activity in the same place in language that was just fresh and different enough, day after day, year after year.
Reading the responses to these posts from friends both within and outwith Orkney made me realize that I was falling into the trap of taking Orkney for granted. This enchanted archipelago had become my new normal. Having the beach to which I so arrogantly refer as ‘mine’ in these pages reflected back to me in my friends’ eyes also showed me anew the extraordinary riches of this little patch of land, sky and sea.
Although the narrative has as its backbone the experience of swimming repeatedly – obsessively – at the one beach in Orkney, it also draws on my experiences of childhood in North London and Kenya; of looking after my ageing parents in London, and my mother’s death; and my marriage, pregnancy and early motherhood in York: all of which happened before we moved to Orkney.
A word about structure. There is little chronological linearity, and this is intentional: memories are raw, messy things, triggered by stray associations of smell and touch; often disconnected; always fallible. In my mind’s eye I see this book in the form of a necklace of beads of varying age, shape, size, colour and raw material – the kind of necklace the Viking Age woman buried at Westness on Rousay wore to the grave she shared with her baby. The narrative, the string holding my beads together, is an account of a single swim, which took place at dawn in late January 2016. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in the last weeks of my familiar life. Along that linking string, the chapters are laid out, each with its own story to tell. Some of the original Facebook posts separate the chapters, like smaller beads. I have taken the dates off them but otherwise there has been no editing: they were written between 2012 and 2016, and in every season, but reading them now they seem like postcards from a dreamlike time and space, detached from the conventional calendar.
In the copy-editing process, my attention was drawn to the way that the book varies between metric and imperial measurements. On examination, there is a consistency to this variation: I find I naturally use imperial in personal, subjective contexts and metric in scientific, objective ones. Intrigued by this, I asked friends what their experience was, and found this kind of ‘bilingual’ practice to be universal, with some people adding other examples, that they think in Fahrenheit for high temperatures and Centigrade for low ones, or that they normally cook with metric weights but always bake in pounds and ounces. Given that the unstable and embedded nature of knowledge is one of the themes of the book, I have decided to retain my original usage.
More than anything, this book is a love letter addressed to Eynhallow Sound, the land around it, and the creatures who live in it. Especially the seals.
Some swims are harder to put into words than others. This one was liminal; grey veils; the boundaries thin between worlds. Air 10 C, motionless, mizzly-drizzly. Last night’s full moon made for a low, low tide at 3.30 this afternoon, no sign of yesterday’s swell but a flat grey surface merging imperceptibly with mist and smirr and sky. Rousay and Eynhallow barely visible. Few birds around, the occasional peep of oystercatcher and ululation of curlew. One hoodie crow hopping jerkily about the ebb, pecking at the middens of kelp. The water feels cold. It is so still and quiet that I do what I rarely do alone in winter dusk, and swim out to the nearer of the two buoys that mark the lobster creels. A curlew flies in great loops overhead, crying continuously, and I think of the souls of the dead in The Wanderer, coming back as seabirds. I spend a lot of time underwater, staying down as long as I have air, in a deep green world. The shallows are littered with scallop shells, and I dive for them repeatedly, gathering half a dozen to take home. Badges of Santiago: they suit my pilgrim mood.
*
I have a routine, winter and summer alike, one which I find deeply comforting. I park outside the grey-harled loo-block, leaving the car unlocked and the key in the ignition (it’s only polite when parking in spaces that a tractor might need to negotiate to leave the keys in so the farmer can shift your car if necessary). I go into the Ladies’ in my flip-flops and robe, and I leave them there. I make a little mat from paper towels so I can stand on it when I come out of the water later and strip off – I don’t want to leave a wet sandy mess behind me. Then, wearing only my swimming costume, I walk down to the beach.
My bare feet curl away from each cold surface in turn: first the chilly tarmac of the little car park, recently resurfaced by Orkney Islands Council; then the ruts and puddles of the grassy track that leads from the car park, bending to the right, around the dilapidated hut long abandoned by fishermen and down to the beach; and finally the sand itself. Depending on the state of the tide, this walk from car to sea, which I do almost daily, and sometimes more than daily, can be fifty or a hundred yards. On a fine summer’s day, it’s effortless pleasure. In a howling January gale, it’s a battle worthy of epic.
Today is January, but there’s no gale. We have had a week of blasting south-easterlies, bringing endless rain, but a lull has arrived at last. There are breaks in the cloud, and no more than a stiff breeze. The sun has not yet risen, but the slow winter dawn of the 59th parallel means that light has been seeping from the south-east for a couple of hours already, and the sky is a lumpy, uneven grey, with shifting hints of the blue beyond. To my right, to the east, where the waters of Eynhallow Sound are cluttered with more islands – Egilsay, Wyre, a glimpse of Eday – there is a vaporous blur of peach and apricot cloud.
Over the last few years this beach has become my world. Revisiting it in all weathers and seasons is a compulsion, one I can only struggle to understand. Partly, I come here because of the compressed riches of its archaeology and wildlife, its visual beauty and the overwhelming sensory stimulation: the stench of rotting seaweed, the shrieking of the gulls, the wind cold on wet skin, the bitter-salt brine in throat and sinuses. It’s my bolthole: where I come to escape the pressures of work, the domestic grind, all my aches and pains, and the slow-motion misery of a failing marriage.
The Sands of Evie lie at the heart of a bowl of hills and islands, in the parish of Evie, on the northern shore of Orkney’s West Mainland. To the uninitiated eye the vista is barren, treeless, sparsely inhabited, raw, wild, as though time and humanity have had no effect here. Orkney has a powerful minimalist appeal in our clutter-obsessed culture, an allure which I felt profoundly when I first came here, nearly thirty years ago, and which I have learned only slowly to see beyond. The truth is that the landscape in front of me has been written and overwritten many times across thousands of years, scraped back by forces of geology and weather as well as human activity, revised and inscribed again. Standing here, shivering slightly, bracing myself for the water, I am overlooked by Neolithic and Iron Age sites; cemeteries where Picts and Vikings buried their dead; the ruins of twelfth-century churches and chapels; an island where a saint was martyred; another with a castle built by a giant; a third which was said to belong to the supernatural Fin-folk, a sinister Orcadian twist on mer-people, one of whom snatched a human woman from this very stretch of sand where I am standing now, while her husband’s back was turned. The hills are thick with peat laid down in the Bronze Age, divided by drystone dykes built with rocks the crofters cleared as they carved out their livelihood, those fields drained and regularized by the improving, imperious Victorian lairds. Along the skyline the latest in turbine technology turns in the same wind that is making me shiver. Viewshed is a concept popular in archaeology, a way of understanding the landscape phenomenologically, experientially, from the perspective of the people using it. A viewshed consists not of what is there, but what can be seen. The viewshed from this beach encapsulates the whole of Orkney in microcosm.
But there is more to this space than that which can be perceived directly. Whole worlds lie hidden underground, under sand and under sea. Robert Rendall, poet, scientist and Kirkwall draper, knew this beach better than anyone. In his 1960 memoir Orkney Shore he compares standing on the foreshore and gazing at the sea to being ‘in flight over Europe, looking down over a cloud mass that spreads out to the entire compass of the horizon, there is little to remind one of the varied terrain that lies beneath – sandy dunes, rough hillside, rich alluvial soil, wide forest lands, each with its own flora and fauna…’ He reminds me of the complexity of even a small patch of shore. Where I swim, the shells that turn up most are limpets, top shells and winkles, occasional scallops, sometimes little cowries. But the other end of the Sands of Evie, the easterly end, is a very different ecosystem from my familiar west, although only a few hundred yards and a stretch of rocky shore divide them. It’s much shallower: you have to wade a long way out before it’s deep enough to swim, and the flat sands are thick with razor, trough and auger shells, all rarities up this end. It’s dislocating to think of that parallel molluscan world. Rendall thought so too: ‘At the back of my mind, whenever I walked across a sandy beach, came the thought that beneath my feet was a dense unseen population living its own life undisturbed by the world of air and only becoming active when the tide was up.’ Rendall specialized in molluscs, and their hidden lives, but there are other creatures to contend with as well, bigger and more obvious but equally mysterious. Thousands of birds, resident and migratory. The seals that haul out on the Eynhallow skerries, whose singing comes wavering across the water. Cetaceans – Orkney waters have been particularly busy over the last few days: a school of herring has swum into Scapa Flow, and two humpback whales and a minke have arrived in its wake, glutting themselves in the inshore shallows. A pod of orcas has joined them, rare visitors in the winter.
There’s change over time to comprehend too. First the Picts built their houses and then the Vikings buried their dead over there at Gurness, in the collapsed ramparts of the Iron Age broch tower. Across the water on Eynhallow, I can see a house first built as an Arts and Crafts holiday cottage, now a base for the University of Aberdeen’s long-term study of fulmars. South along the shore from that there’s a medieval stone ruin around which Victorian crofters constructed their now-vanished houses. The earliest accurate map of Orkney, part of an atlas of Scotland published in Amsterdam in 1654, shows many of the landmarks I can see now: the hill of Cofta, looming darkly to my left; Alhallow, the heart-shaped island between Mainland and Rousay which I know as Eynhallow; and the headlands of Akernefs and West Nefs. These names are Scandinavian, though, not Scots; and they were already seven or eight centuries old when the Dutch printers first pinned them to the map.
Some things we do not know, and never will. What names the Picts used for these same landmarks, before the Norse-speaking Vikings arrived in the ninth century and renamed everything, is anyone’s guess. The Iron Age dwellers in the broch towers must have called their structures something but it wasn’t broch: the word may look Celtic (like loch) but it’s ultimately Norse, the same as borg, a fortress.
The sand slopes away from me, at first a dry jumbled palimpsest of old boot- and paw-prints, then a fine smooth surface made largely of crushed shell, today thickly strewn with lumps of ravaged kelp scattered across the beach like bodies in the aftermath of a battle. Woven in among them is the wreck of a lobster creel, a mass of rusty iron and tattered net. I step awkwardly on my now-freezing soles from patch to patch of exposed sand. In among the slithery tangles of kelp are hundreds of limpets and top shells, fragments of red and purple sea urchin exoskeleton and shed crab shell, little white lumps of coral. The tide is low and ebbing, the breakwater exposed, and there is a steady suck and drip of water from the massed seaweeds growing on it, as the waves lap and splash around the margin. Half a dozen oystercatchers take off in peeping protest as I come closer. Further down the beach, towards the Knowe of Stenso, a solitary heron ignores me. I pause, just where the dark trace of the last wave is soaking back into the sand. Two hundred years ago this beach was an industrial workspace for the processing of kelp into potash, a backbreaking enterprise in which seaweed was burned in slow fires, polluting the air with arsenic-rich smoke, tended by the crofters for the profit of the lairds. Today it’s a place of recreation, dog walking, sandcastles in the summer. But for me it’s also still a place for processing, for emotional and spiritual alchemy.
This sea and these islands, the wind pimpling my skin, the spray on my right cheek, these are palpable presences in the here and now, transforming me physically. They also reach far back in human and pre-human time. But more than that, they extend sideways into parallel universes, counterfactuals: making me ask how history might have been different; how my own life might have taken other paths. And the sea and islands are also metaphors, scientific, religious and literary, forcing me to think about the nature of knowledge, how the past was understood in the past, the relevance of theories about what it means to be human. Swimming here makes me question everything I have known, in the face of time, danger, loss and death. The quest to find the right words to encapsulate this place is taking me on a long and winding journey.
I walk to the edge of the water, and hesitate.
The display on my car’s dashboard has told me that the air temperature today is two degrees Celsius, and I’m guessing the water is about six. I don’t have any way of verifying this: I dropped and broke my thermometer in the loos a few days ago, and the new one I have ordered online hasn’t arrived yet. But after several years of swimming through all seasons I am learning to judge the water by other means than the mechanical. The speed with which the blood leaves my hands and feet. The force of the gasp expelled from my lungs when I launch out. The strength of the icy grip on the back of my neck. The shock of cold on my scalp and face, indistinguishable from pain.
This is the hard bit, the forcing myself into the sea, with the wind-chill wicking the heat fast from my shivering skin, in the face of the knowledge that the water will steal my warmth up to twenty-five times more quickly. I must project my imagination up and over this barrier, anticipating the thrill of swimming, which I know will come, even if I cannot now feel or believe it. Delayed gratification: Freud’s reality principle in action. To keep walking into the water now is an act of faith in the most literal sense: a formula to which one can resort when belief is being tested, or in the face of temptation; an express and willing assent to a truth which transcends immediate experience.
I am an academic specializing in the history, art and archaeology of north-west Europe in the early Middle Ages; I am also a terminally flawed and failed Catholic, married to a very devout one; and my mother was a psychotherapist, specializing in the dynamics of large groups in her earlier work, and later becoming a hospice-based counsellor working with the dying and their families. She was not quite a Freudian; and I am certainly not one; but we talked about Freud a lot, and I find him a useful point of reference, even when I disagree profoundly with both his working and his conclusions. Therefore, thinking in a mishmash of these cultural references comes naturally to me. And yet at the same time I know they are metaphors; that our knowledge of the past (including our knowledge of our own pasts) is unstable; and that psychoanalysis turns faith inside out, exposing how we use it to bolster ourselves against fear and neurosis. I have grown away from faith, as a hermit crab outgrows its borrowed shell; but like the hermit crab who’s not yet found a better option I still lug it around, clinging to the illusion of protection it affords me.
‘We’re not here to find answers,’ I tell my students every year. ‘We’re here to ask better questions. There’s no such thing as a historical fact.’
As well as an academic, I am also a writer of archaeological fiction. Note, not historical fiction, not really, although that is where my novels are usually pigeonholed. But they are set in the ninth and tenth centuries, and they deal with times and places, settings and circumstances and types of people for whom there is almost no conventional historical evidence. Most of my characters are reconstructed not from chronicles and letters but from the coins minted by a Viking king, from skeletal remains, from carved stones, or bronze or silver-gilt brooches. I’m interested in the minor characters, the spear-carriers, the ones who merit only the briefest mention, or who slip entirely between the gaps in history’s floorboards.
So, what choice do I have here and now, looking at the landscape in front of me filtered through all the different overlays I carry in my mind, but to do the same thing, to try and find the stories of the people who lived here? I’m listening for their voices, whether they speak in Orcadian or Scots or English, Norn or Old Norse, in Pictish, or Latin, or something else entirely. These hills and shores echo with words uttered in languages known and unknown. I’m listening extra hard for the women’s voices, always more elusive than the men’s.
The voices I carry in my head are persistent, too. My own ever-remorseful conscience; fragments of poetry and fairy tale; the constant imaginary conversations with people both living and dead. In the Old English poem, The Wanderer, the poet describes how in his sleep he has visions of those he has loved, now lost to him; he wakes in confusion to see the wintry waves and the birds; he talks about the fleotendra ferð, the floating spirits, and how they always elude him, swimming on their way. He describes them in words that elide birds and memories of the dead, the dreaming and the waking worlds. I first translated that poem when I was eighteen; and I have written undergraduate essays about it, used it to bolster arguments in academic publications, learned it by heart in Old English, chanted it as I walk or run or drive as a way of scaring off the feelings I don’t want to have. The first time I ever came to Orkney I thought, This is The Wanderer made into landscape – the wind, the cliffs, the ruins, the restless waves, although the poem survives in Exeter, almost as far from Orkney as you can be and still remain within the UK’s borders: the book which preserves it was bequeathed to Exeter Cathedral library by Bishop Leofric in 1072, and it’s been there ever since. I think about The Wanderer a lot when I’m swimming here at the Sands of Evie, the floating spirits of my own dead calling in the voices of the wind and the birds.
I pause again, knee-deep now, the breaking surf buffering my planted legs and rocking me slightly, and I stretch my senses outwards, checking for birds and seals, looking for clues to today’s mood. I may come here every day, but I have never yet come to the same place twice.
Of course the sea is always, everywhere, moving, but in Orkney this eternal verity is compounded. It’s not just the water, but the restless air as well: they conspire in endless movement. The wind governs life here in ways a ferry-louper, an incomer, like me can only slowly begin to comprehend. It shapes my body just as it does the land: makes me more Orcadian. Year on year I cut my hair shorter, and my leg muscles get sturdier from ploughing into the gale, step by dogged step. I’ve given up cycling, exhausted by having to push the bike downhill into a headwind. Every conversation about gardening starts with, Well, what shelter do you have? A couple of years ago, one of my MLitt students wrote her dissertation on the role of wind in local politics: it proved a fertile subject, touching everything from the management of AWOL wheelie bins to the placement of wind turbines. After a big gale, the fields are strewn with the corpses of bent trampolines and contorted polytunnels.
Feng shui, the Chinese philosophical system designed to harmonize humanity and environment, means wind-water; and Orkney’s feng shui is potent, perennially visible in the flutter of grass, the tearing spindrift and the drama of the sky. I spent most of my childhood in Kenya, and the shifting play of light here reminds me of the shadows of clouds chasing each other endlessly across the East African savannah. The colours too – Orkney’s salt-burned, wind-scorched foliage gives the winter hills and fields a brown, brittle edge, like Kenya in the dry season.
Every wind has its own personality, affecting the house in different ways: I’ve started thinking of an easterly as the cat-flap wind – and installing a cat-flap is a classic ferry-louper mistake – while a south-westerly, which makes an unearthly high-and-low whistling in our windows, is the trowie wind, named for the fair-folk, the little people, the mound-dwellers. One of the skills a new postie needs to learn in Orkney is how to park at each address depending on the airt of the day’s wind: get the angle wrong in the tunnel between shed and house and the van door could be wrenched right off, the letters and parcels carried to Norway on a prevailing westerly. It’s a longstanding problem: in the earliest survey of Orkney farmland, from about 1500, we hear farmers protesting that they can’t pay their taxes because all their topsoil has been ‘blawne to Bergen…’
The wind makes for uncanny weather sometimes, not just wild. A dry fine spell in summer comes to an end – almost always – with a shift in the wind to the east, and the first fingers of fog creeping in, following the contours of the land. The summer fog – the haar – can last for day after day after day, a white blank wall across the whole archipelago, the hill roads unusable, the usually huge skies and horizons brought down to a few feet from your face, the air clammy and palpable. Headlights on full beam at noon. And the wind, which you’d think would blow the haar away, just keeps creating more, as the warmer air passes over the cold waters of the North Sea. It brings on cabin fever; I’ve heard it called suicide weather. One friend calls it Auntie Mary weather: Auntie Mary arrived for her first visit to Orkney on the day the haar come down, she stayed for a week and it did too, only lifting after her ferry had blundered back to Scotland. She never came back.
Orkney’s restlessness inheres in the geology and the folklore as well as the air and the water. Across Eynhallow Sound, on the island of Rousay, there’s a standing stone, the Yetnasteen, which is said to lumber down to the loch to drink every Hogmanay. Over to my right, on the head-land of Aikerness, there is an outcrop of aeolianite, named for Aeolus, classical god of the wind, where wind-dropped sand is slowly turning to stone, cemented by the calcium carbonate of dissolving shells. The haunting tales about the selkies, the seal-folk who can come on shore in human form, dramatize transformation and exile and irrevocable loss.
This very restlessness had been a powerful attractor in luring me back to Orkney, year on year, before we took the plunge and moved here, experimentally at first – We’ll give it a year, we said to friends and family, and see what happens.
Where’s Orkney?
Isn’t it very remote?
Is that in the Hebrides?
Will you have to learn Gaelic?
Do they have roads?
Do they have broadband?
What on earth will you do?
And, always, But isn’t it very dark in the winter?
I have learned to bite back some of the more sarcastic answers, and respond with patience.
Go to the top of Scotland and get a ferry.
When you’re here it’s London that’s remote, irrelevant; Edinburgh marginally less so (but only marginally).
Orkney is north, not west.
It’s never been Gaelic-speaking.
The roads are excellent.
And the broadband is better than
much of rural mainland Britain.
I’ll write and I’ll teach, just as
I always have done.
As for the winter darkness, it’s mitigated by the brilliance of the Milky Way, and the aurora borealis.
No one has ever said, But isn’t it very light in the summer?
Yet I find the summer nights as exotic, and as challenging, as the winter days. For someone raised on the equator, Orkney’s rollercoaster of light and dark is intoxicating. By August I have become drunk and giddy on light, longing for twilight, the gleam of stars in a purpling sky. There comes an evening, around the time of the County Show, when I find I have to switch on the car headlights in darkness (rather than in haar) for the first time in months, and that little twist of a lever brings a sense of relief, changing pace, Greenwich Mean Time looming on the horizon. A deep inbreath after the long outbreath of summer. The ice cream parlour closes; the B & B owners put their feet up; the islands take off the mask they wear for tourists and settle in to the serious business of harvest homes, muckle suppers, ploughing matches; concerts and knitting circles and reading groups.
County Show, they tell you, then winter… It’s true, too. After mid-August the sense of being sucked down into the vortex of the dark comes on at speed.
On this particular winter day the dawn tide is ebbing fast. My habitual beach is in the embrace of a sickle-shaped bay, open to the north-west, and within the bay the currents are contained and gentle, usually running parallel to the shore. The old stone breakwater that points north like a compass needle takes some of the immediate force out of the wind-whisked sea. Beyond the headland of Aikerness, however, I can see thick white and dark fast-moving lines and swirls on the sea’s surface: even I’m not so stupid as to go into the water from there. Although the gale of the last week has now slackened the wind is still stiff enough to spur little white horses, flickering across from right to left, slapping against and occasionally cresting over the breakwater.
I first came to Orkney in 1988, the summer after I turned twenty-one, after the final exams for my first degree.
I was at a loose end. It was an accident.
I cannot quite believe, looking back to that first of many visits, that I had never heard of these islands – I had been studying the thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas as part of my degree, and Orkneyinga Saga must surely have already crossed my radar – but my erratic, expatriate sense of British geography gave me little purchase on the map. My archaeology tutor had laughed at me only months earlier for confusing Leicestershire, Lancashire and Lincolnshire. Ignorant and irritable, I got on a train, and then another. A third in Perth, heading north through Cairngorm. Although I’d been to the Lake District, once, briefly, the idea that Britain encompassed such wild, empty landscapes was new to me. I’d never heard of the Highland Clearances. A fourth train in Inverness. Works on the line meant we were booted off at Dingwall, loaded on to a bus to reboard the train at Brora. I watched the names of the stations switching between Gaelic and Norse, gradually more of the latter. The train finally spat me out at the harbour town of Thurso, clinging to the surf-battered margin between Caithness and the Pentland Firth. I wandered down to the edge of town, wondering what the hell I was doing there, looked north across the water, and saw islands.
What explains the lure of islands? Remote, wild, integral: hard to get to but infinitely beautiful and desirable – islands are their own places. Just to step off the ferry is to achieve something exciting. I’ve never wanted to give in to John Donne’s hectoring ‘no man is an island’; and even if he’s right it needn’t apply to woman.
It was July, grey, wet, cold. The summer ferry from John o’Groats across to Burwick at the southernmost tip of South Ronaldsay was running. There was a bus to Kirkwall, the capital.
I stayed for a week, as long as I could afford. It was like walking through a portal into the Anglo-Saxon and Norse texts with which I’d been stuffing my head for the last three years. Njál’s Saga, The Wanderer and The Seafarer, and Beowulf and Snorri’s Edda. I saw the sea beating the storm-cliffs, and the ruins of churches and halls and wartime huts; I exulted in decoding the Norse place-names – Stenness and Stromness, Scapa and Sandwick – and I stood at the Ring of Brodgar and thought about the eald enta geweorc, the ancient work of giants. In David Spence’s newsagents in the shadow of St Magnus Cathedral I came across Magnus by George Mackay Brown, and was blown away not only by the lyrical prose but by the way the novel shatters time in its analysis of power and its abuses, mashing up the twelfth century and the twentieth, mapping the landscape of Orkney on to that of the Nazi concentration camps. I took the ferry out to Egilsay to see for myself where St Magnus had been martyred. The sun and rain came and went; the wind was a constant.
I fell in love, and not only because I had found a world that brought the early medieval North alive for me at last. For the first time since my family had moved away from Kenya I was encountering a landscape that felt familiar. The cloud-shadows hurtled across the hills. The past lurked just under the epidermis of the present. At the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae it felt as though the original inhabitants had only just left. I sheltered from horizontal rain in the lee of one of the standing stones at Stenness and shared local oatcakes and soft sour Grimbister farm cheese with another tourist, a young Frenchman who pointed out the dark shapes lying in the water of the brackish loch across the road. ‘Phoques!’ I stared at him, not understanding, startled by what sounded like a sudden obscenity. And then I saw them. Phoques. Seals.
*
Yesterday the Shipping Forecast website showed Force 10–12 in every single sea area. Today those blasting southerlies have gone, to be replaced by a light but nipping northerly. Air temp 4. Water stiller than it’s been for weeks. One shag, one grey seal, both very close – the shag oblivious, the seal fascinated, lingering, popping up and down, giving me the full effect of his deep, liquid gaze. The water feels colder – I didn’t take the temperature but I would guess 7. Stayed in for about 15 minutes, lots of time under the water.
*
Where do you start a story? In medias res, in the middle of things, like Homer; or introducing the theme with a fanfare flourish as Virgil does, kicking off The Aeneid – ‘Of arms and the man I sing’. Maybe a neat little portrait, with just a tinge of what we might read as irony, or maybe malice: ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’ Or a simple statement of beginning: ‘I was born in the year 1632, in the City of York.’ Take that a step further, and open the book with an account of the main character’s conception: ‘I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me…’ The right beginning encapsulates the narrative: the whole pattern present in a fragment.
Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing.
Maybe this one starts with an ending. My mother fell ill back when I was in my early thirties; I had just finished my doctorate on early medieval death and burial, and was looking for a job in universities in the United States as my then partner was American. My mother’s illness and death stopped all that; stopped the person I used to be; put me in a different place; in a cloud, a haar, a darkness.
I have read that you should never make a huge, life-changing decision when recently bereaved, or pregnant. I did both, marrying when bereft and buying a house in Orkney when pregnant, and I regret neither, though there is a lot of unpicking and restitching to do. When you are lost in fog you use your senses differently. It’s not just sight that’s muffled; sound is also estranged; the dampness of the air and the way the beadlets of moisture cling to your skin make the direction of the wind hard to assess, and if you have no compass then the very concept of direction is also redefined. There’s no seeing the sun in haar. The patch of hillside beneath and around your feet is the only thing in colour, and the particularity of each purple bell of heather, each grey-green dendrite of sphagnum moss becomes hugely significant. It’s a balancing act: you’re newly alive to the micro-terrain, every tiny rise and fall, the sound of each step; teetering on the edge of a peat bank, stumbling into bog. You are utterly alienated from the familiar. Sense of scale is lost. That roar could be the surf at the bottom of the cliff, or just the beating of your own heart.
When the fog lifts at last, you see the old world with new eyes. It has never looked so beautiful, and so uncanny. How did I get here? This isn’t where I was when the haar came in. This isn’t where I’d planned to be.
The decisions you make while lost in fog have their own coherence; they make sense at the time based on the information available.
Hindsight, as we all know, is a wonderful thing.
After that first visit to Orkney the cold, wet summer I was twenty-one, I was hooked, baited, trapped in a net of longing. I kept coming back through my twenties and thirties, with friends or partners, or on my own. It became a litmus test for relationships: I knew I had no future with someone who didn’t feel the lure of the islands, their peculiar blend of Scottish present and Norse past, the volatile sky, the ever-present sea. Life took me elsewhere for a long time, York for postgraduate study, London and Oxford and Leeds for the slog of academic apprenticeships. My mother fell ill. The walls started closing in.
I met the man who was to become my husband less than a year after my mother died, in March 2003, at a party I didn’t quite feel up to. We first came to Orkney in late October, when we were still new to each other. I was keen to show him my special places, like the Broch of Gurness. From above, the broch, neatly excavated and presented, looks as though someone has dropped a pebble into green water: concentric ripples of wall and rampart.
‘It’s right on the sea now, but when the tower was first built in around 400 BC, the shoreline was possibly as much as forty metres further out. No one really knows what the brochs were for: they’re massive drystone structures, often compared to the cooling towers of old power stations. Brochs were architecturally complex, their double-skinned walls allowing height without too much weight, a stairway winding between the inner and outer layer of the wall. Look, the ground floor is internally subdivided and there are hearths, so people clearly lived here. No windows. Defence? But it would have been easy to wall people up and starve them out. And there are so many of them. From here at Gurness you can see ten more. Up and down the Evie shore alone we have Costa, Burgar, Grugar, Stenso and Ritten as well as Gurness. Elite residences? Communal winter quarters? Look over to Rousay – there’s the one at Midhowe…’
I can hear my excited voice, chattering away to him, happy and alive with possibility. We sat down to eat our sandwiches in a sheltered corner of the ramparts, looking out across choppy Eynhallow Sound to the Rousay shore. I remember him saying, ‘If we lived here we could come here every Sunday afternoon.’
Significantly younger than me, he was a committed Catholic who had recently left a monastery and was about to embark on his own PhD on English literature. I was entranced by his intelligence, his range of interests, his sincerity. I think he was still buoyed up by the courage it had taken to quit the monastery; looking back now I can see how flattened I was, monochrome, two-dimensional in grief. Our energies were closer when we met than at any time since. We were engaged within a few months of our first meeting, and married the following spring. There was a lot I didn’t ask, and a lot he didn’t tell me. He would probably say much the same about me. But this isn’t his story.
When I was four months pregnant we came up to Orkney for a New Year holiday, the first time I’d ever been here in the deep dark of winter. Lying on the sofa in a cottage near Skara Brae, listening to the wind and the sleet, I felt my baby kick for the first time, little burping frog-leaps, like no sensation I’d ever experienced. At the same moment, I felt a pang of bitter grief that my mother, five years dead, would never know my child. That same week we bought a converted stable in the centre of the West Mainland, although we knew it would be a year or two before we could move in to it. That impulsive moment has shaped everything since.
*
Last night was clear, frosty and windless. This morning the south-easterly had brought the haar, and the thermometer had risen by 10 degrees C. The wind and the swell cancelled each other out, the sea was wild and choppy yet strangely flat – still smacking me in the face, filling my nostrils with brine, the wind wicking the heat out of my wet head. One little seal bobbing up and down in the shallows, playing tag with me. Hundreds of swooping gulls.
*
I cannot remember learning how to swim. Just swimming anecdotes, vignettes. The time in France when I was a cheeky four-year-old bobbing in the pool and my fully dressed father, standing on the brink, thought it would be funny to put his foot on my head, and fell in with a swamping splash. I have a vivid memory of the dripping banknotes from his wallet pegged to the line, but I could have made that up.
Another summer: standing with him sideways-on to the waves in Cornwall, holding his hands and jumping as each wavelet came rushing in.
The old open-air pool on London’s Highbury Fields, with the creaky wooden half-doors of the changing cubicles that gave directly on to the poolside and the cold, chemical water.
Swimming was always a joy, but when I was pregnant it became a drug for the first time. A side-effect of the closing months of my pregnancy was plantar fasciitis, one of those conditions you never hear of till it strikes home. The plantar fascia are the flat bands of collagen on which you tread, and if they go, everything goes. By week thirty-six I couldn’t walk to the end of the street. I didn’t know, then, what was happening. It would pass after the baby arrived, surely. Surely? My husband knew, vaguely, that my legs hurt, but I told neither the GP nor the midwife. I didn’t want to make a fuss, and the tongue-clicking and gloom that seem to be the inevitable fate of women who put off their first baby till they’re forty had already pissed me right off. I was aiming for a drug-free home birth: complaining about anything might jeopardize my chances.
Instead I swam in the York council pool daily, endlessly: seventy, eighty, a hundred lengths, simultaneously rejoicing in freedom and dreading the return of gravity and impact. This, I thought bitterly as I hauled my waterlogged and chlorinated carcass up the metal ladder, is either a demonstration that God is not only male but a sadist, or – more likely – the proof of Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape theory: no biped would ever evolve this mode of pregnancy on land. No competent civil engineer would come up with this blueprint. All the stresses are in the wrong places for efficiency.
There is a growing corpus of scientific evidence about the adaptation of the human body to water, exploring both our extraordinary evolutionary capabilities and the ways in which time spent in water is beneficial not only for mental and spiritual well-being, and for injuries, but also for many chronic ailments, even for dementia. Of all the great apes, we are the only ones adapted to life in another medium. Is this merely one more aspect of our nature as opportunistic, niche-exploiting, fiddling monkeys, or does it tell us some deep truths about human origins?
Ever since I first encountered Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape hypothesis, in my teens, I have been enchanted by it. Her books, The Descent of Woman, The Aquatic Ape and The Scars of Evolution, revived the fascination I’d developed with human origins growing up in Kenya in the 1970s. Morgan’s theory suggests that our hairless bodies, our subcutaneous fat, our prominent noses, our upright gait, ability to dive deep, sweating and weeping, even male-pattern baldness – all unique among our nearest relations – stem from the ancestral hominid going through a semi-aquatic stage before returning to the land. Scholars of early hominid evolution say there is no direct evidence; that the theory attempts to explain away too many of the unusual aspects of the human package; that these quirks have other good evolutionary explanations.
But they don’t, not really: most of the ‘other explanations’ have just as little basis in evidence, or are hopelessly mired in cultural specificity, or gender prejudice. Bipedalism emerged because a male needed his hands free to carry the provisions he brought to his female and their young, rewarded in his turn by the female’s devoted monogamy. Well, maybe. This sounds more like a nostalgic vision of the 1950s than a serious attempt (in 2010) to explain the evolution of forest-dwelling Ardipithecus ramidus. Did we really lose our fur as a way of keeping cool, either in the forest or on the savannah, and then develop fat that clings to the underside of our skin as a way of heating up again? Other animals with blubber need it to keep themselves warm in the water.
Part of the allure of Morgan’s work is that, as well as exploring the idea that we are a semi-marine mammal, she also puts mothers and children in the middle of the story. As she says acerbically, the survival of the baby is at the heart of evolution. What possible advantage, she asked, could a primate gain from losing her body fur, that natural climbing frame for her baby? Why do only marine mammals have plump, buoyant breasts? (And she nailed the ludicrous idea that women evolved breasts because men would fancy them – talk about confusing cause and effect.) Move over, man the mighty hunter, in favour of mamma the mighty gatherer, baby clinging to her back and the thick hair of her head as she stands upright supported by the warm shallow waters off the East African coast, bracing one leg as the agile toes of her other foot pluck up edible shellfish. A new species coming to birth, with the sea as midwife.
I wrote to Elaine Morgan when I was eighteen, a gushing incoherent tribute to the first challenger I’d ever encountered to the idea that men drive evolution and women just come along for the ride. She replied almost by return of post, a friendly handwritten letter in which she said that I – as a fellow student of Eng. Lit. – would understand the obstacles she had encountered in her quest for recognition by the scientific community. How dare a mere creative writer claim that accepted scientific dogma is ‘demonstrably nonsense’?
There is a wonderful illustration in The Aquatic Ape that shows land animals on the left and their water-dwelling equivalent on the right: lumbering, hairy, quadrupedal, morphing into sleek hydrodynamic silhouettes. On the left something half-bear, half-weasel; on the right a seal. On the left a chimp; on the right a woman powering through the waves. She looks like me; white, with shoulder-length hair, solid muscle, a functional swimming costume. The aquatic theory is dismissed by some within the field as pseudo-science; I badly want it to be true. More than that: I want to reclaim it as an origin myth, with the sea as my Garden of Eden. I assert kinship with hippos, walruses, manatees, seals, orcas, polar bears: all the other land mammals who have gone some or all of the way back to the water.
As it turned out, the only difference giving birth made to my health was that my own needs slipped even further down the agenda.
Every morning came with burning, aching feet, especially the heels. The pain ebbed during the day, if I moved cautiously, but walking any distance brought it back. I was trapped, longing to get out of the echo chamber of the house, climbing the walls, weeping as I sat there with a sleeping baby on my lap, my computer just beyond arm’s reach, the book I needed in the next room. Being unable to write felt like being gagged. No, worse: as though I had opened my mouth and screamed as loudly as I could, only for no sound to emerge.
‘… you must give this voice to me. I will take the very best thing that you have…’
‘But if you take my voice,’ said the little mermaid, ‘what will be left to me?’
‘… have you lost your courage? Stick out your little tongue and I shall cut it off.’
If I did go out I clung to the pram like a Zimmer frame, limping from bench to bench, all the way across York to the Starbucks tucked in the back of the big bookshop to meet a friend, my soles on fire, skewers stabbing up my shins. Smile, latte, fine, fine, all fine. And then back again.
Every footstep felt as if she were walking on the blades and points of sharp knives, just as the witch had foretold, but she gladly endured it. She moved as lightly as a bubble as she walked beside the Prince. He and all who saw her marvelled at the grace of her gliding walk.
’’