‘Remember that if you do that – and I hope I can say when you do that – they’ll get you, just as they got Galileo. He was hauled before the Inquisition and forced under threat of torture to recant. Therefore, be very careful before you use your science, the body of knowledge that we have acquired over millennia, to dismiss the unknown.’
Leo told them that more than 95 per cent of the ocean floor was only beginning to be charted. Scientists had discovered huge and powerful submarine flows, currents that were reshaping the world down there and could power the world up here. They were discovering holes in the ocean floor the size of Yankee Stadium, evidence of giant underwater avalanches that were still going on, creating mountains and sending us tsunamis, storms and sudden waves of the kind that had swept him away.
Why was he telling them this? Because mankind needed to be reminded that this was a water planet. There were six billion people in the world, and soon there would be nine billion. They couldn’t all fly to Mars and find a new life. They had to survive here on this earth, and to do that they would need the oceans around and below us. Water, power and food flowed from our seas. If we didn’t understand that, we might soon be retracing our evolutionary footsteps back to the slime from which we emerged.
He stopped. As usual he felt he had said too much, gone on too long. He looked at the faces in the audience. Tallulah Bonner, the Board and the Dean all looked as if they had sat through one of those overlong, embarrassing wedding speeches by a drunken best man. But his students looked rapt. They couldn’t take their eyes off him.
He’d settle for that.
There was a loud pop as he turned to leave the podium. Margot and Sam appeared at his side with an overflowing bottle of champagne and three glasses. They both kissed him.
A voice from the audience, a voice he recognised as that of Jacob Sylvester, shouted: ‘Mr Kemp! Mr Kemp! If you’re not going to tell us what happened to you, are you going to tell someone? Or write a book about it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Another voice, this time Gunbrit Nielsen. ‘You could call it My Life as a Seal!’
‘Maybe.’ He laughed and waved in a half-salute. ‘Goodbye, and good luck.’
He was about to leave the podium, but he stopped and turned back.
‘One thing I forgot to say. I won’t be teaching here any more, but I would like to say to my students, wherever you go, and whatever you do, I want to hear about the huge mistakes you make and the triumphs you achieve. Trust me, you will do both.’
There was applause as he headed for the door with Margot and Sam. Gunbrit caught up with him, holding out a notebook for him to sign. He thanked her for taking so much trouble over the painting.
Tallulah Bonner would not let him go without a final word. They shook hands, and for the first time in their acquaintance he thought she looked embarrassed as she thanked him and said goodbye.
Margot, Leo and Sam collected Beano and drove to Surf Drive Beach, an old family favourite because it lacked the amenities that brought the crowds and could be reached by a good cycle track, the Shining Path, from Falmouth. They left their shoes in the car and walked barefoot on the sand, Beano bounding ahead of them.
Leo bent down and picked up a piece of dark brown driftwood with an almost perfect crescent shape. ‘Just like a boomerang,’ he said. ‘We were always chucking these things around as kids.’
‘And did they come back?’ asked Margot.
‘Sure. Watch.’
He ran a few steps to the edge of the water and flung the piece of wood as far as he could. It scythed through the air, made as if to turn, then dropped into the sea. He walked back to Margot and Sam as Beano bounded into the waves after it.
Just beyond the wave line, about twenty-five yards from the shore, a pod of seals broke the surface, their heads pointing enquiringly in all directions. Leo stopped and watched them.
They were harbour seals, which had probably chased a shoal of sand eels towards the shore. People on the beach had noticed them, and were pointing them out to each other.
‘Dad, can I swim out there?’ a boy asked his father.
‘No,’ came the firm reply.
Beano bounded out of the water and ran up to them, showering droplets everywhere as he shook himself. Margot and Sam protested, but Leo ignored him and started walking towards the sea.
Margot took a few steps after him, but then noticed the seals and stood still. Leo walked straight into the sea as she watched, mesmerised. Sam was chasing Beano around her but stopped as she noticed her mother staring out to sea. Around them beach life went on as usual, some kids with a ball, a couple sitting on a rug and beginning a picnic, sunbathers, walkers and a few people splashing in the shallows.
The water was now almost up to Leo’s waist. Margot shaded her eyes against the sun, watching him and the group of seals beyond.
The seals were quite close to Leo now. He bent down, and when he straightened up the boomerang was in his hand. He threw it forcefully towards the pod. They vanished from sight as it splashed into the water a few feet away from them.
He came out of the sea in quick strides, took Margot’s outstretched hand, curled his arm around Sam’s waist and walked up the beach.
EPILOGUE
Leo Kemp never resumed his teaching post at Coldharbor. Just before Christmas that year, he, Margot and Sam moved back to Scotland, where he had been offered a senior lectureship in his old department, the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St Andrews University.
He consistently refused all media interviews and offers from publishers to write a book about his experiences.
Margot returned to teaching, taking a job at a school in Dundee. Six months after their return to Scotland she and Leo began divorce proceedings, citing irreconcilable differences.
Sam settled in at her mother’s school. The following year she would do well in her Advanced Higher exams, which secured her a place studying marine biology at St Andrews University.
That spring Leo, Margot and Sam returned to Cape Cod for the wedding of Sandy Rowan and Jenny Hathaway. The ceremony took place in Sandy’s vineyard, by special dispensation.
Sandy gave a speech in which he said that the only man happier than he that day was the bookseller in Orleans to whom he had sold over 50,000 second-hand books for a ridiculously low price. A man could make no greater sacrifice, he said, than to lay down his library for his bride.
In June that year Leo led an expedition to North Ronaldsay in the Orkneys to study the many seal colonies on the northern tip of the island. He took three senior students from the marine biology department with him. They were equipped with the latest hydrophones and recording equipment, and they camped beside a small bay at Dennis Head, near the Old Beacon lighthouse. A number of harbour and grey seal rookeries were close by. Unusually for those remote islands in the North Sea, the weather that year was very good. On the long summer evenings there were only a few hours of twilight around midnight. In those hours the night sky was lit up as the Aurora Borealis threw long phosphorescent sheets of pink, blue and green light over the northern horizon.
Leo spent most days with his team on the water, working from two rigid inflatable rubber dinghies. Technical advances now meant that small hydrophones, each carrying a large number of sensors, enabled communications between seals to be recorded over greater distances and at greater depths than had previously been possible. The Orkneys were prime territory for this kind of research. The water was clear and clean and the local seal population was frequently increased by visitors.
Leo and his team were able to plot the underwater positions of seals and listen in to communications between them at a depth of 80 to 100 feet. The calm seas and long sunlit days meant that they were able to gather an unusually large amount of data. In the evenings they analysed that day’s recordings and mapped the movement of the seals. Leo told them the story of the war-winning intelligence that Roosevelt and Churchill derived from the code-breakers at Bletchley Park in Buckingh
amshire during the Second World War, and said that this was the Bletchley Park moment of his career.
After three weeks he wrote a detailed handwritten report claiming a breakthrough in understanding the nature and meaning of seal communication. The long, rumbling underwater signals that flowed between the seals at the northern tip of Ronaldsay and other rookeries many miles distant were beginning to reveal their secrets.
The Aurora Borealis, or ‘Merry Dancers’ as the lights were called by the islanders, was unusually brilliant on the final night of the expedition. Leo told his team they were a celestial celebration in tribute to their research. The four of them lay back on the heather, watching the heavenly fireworks, drinking Orkney’s Highland Park malt whisky and working out what they would do after they won the Nobel Prize. One of the students said later that he had never seen Leo Kemp looking so happy.
As the light faded after midnight Leo left the camp, telling the students he was going to make a short boat trip around the headland to check the position of some hydrophone marker buoys. The sea was calm, and shimmered in a ghostly half-light. He took a two-way radio with him.
At around 12.30 a.m. Leo radioed back to say he had retrieved two sets of hydrophones, and was approaching a crowded seal colony about a mile from the lighthouse. It was the last signal his colleagues received from him. He never returned to camp. Radio calls the next morning went unanswered. The empty dinghy was found that afternoon floating on a calm sea.
Despite extensive searches on sea and land, Leo Kemp’s body was never found.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the following for the help and support they have given me in the making of this book. Needless to say I take full responsibility for the facts drawn from my research into marine science which forms the backdrop to much of the narrative.
Peter Tyack, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Cape Cod.
Mike Fedak, Professor at the Marine Mammal Research Unit, St Andrews University.
Dr Susan Whiten, senior lecturer in the Bute Medical School, St Andrews University, where she spends much of her spare time diving in the chilly waters of the Firth of Forth in the company of seals.
Tecumseh Fitch, Professor of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna.
Peter Corkeron, Visiting Fellow at the Bioacoustics Research Program, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and Sophie van Parijs, leader of the Large Whale Group at the North East Fisheries Science Centre, Woods Hole. Peter and Sophie are a husband and wife team who live in Woods Hole, Cape Cod, and who very generously shared their time and knowledge with me during my research there in the spring of 2007.
Dr Martin Scurr of London, who helped me to understand how Leo Kemp survived for such a long period on the fruits of the Cape Cod foreshore.
David and Susan Balderstone, who are both old friends from my days as a Middle East correspondent based in Beirut and who now live in Melbourne. They gave me invaluable background into Leo Kemp’s life as a young boy growing up in Mornington.
The Editor of the Cape Cod Times, Paul Pronovost, who patiently answered by seemingly endless queries about life and times on the Cape today.
Jo Fitzbak, who took me out to view the seal population off Chatham harbour and talked with great insight into the problems of the fishing industry.
Robert Lacey of HarperCollins kindly read the manuscript first and suggested many changes which were hugely helpful.
Clare Hey, who as my editor at HarperCollins came up with all the right ideas and patiently dealt with my occasional objections to them.
Caroline Johnston, who helped as ever with tea and sympathy when the darkness descended.
Above all to my agent Sophie Hicks, who loved this book from the start and made sure that I finished it. I could not have written it without her help and encouragement.
Finally heartfelt thanks to my wife Amanda without whom this book would not have been written and to Emily, Elizabeth and Nicholas for urging me to tell them endless bedtime stories all those years ago.
AUTHOR NOTE
This book arose from a fantasy that has entertained me from childhood, a dream of escape into the sea that remains with me to this day. The dream took shape when I was a young boy in the early 1950s. Very few people in Britain went abroad for holidays at that time and, like almost everyone we knew, our family would spend three weeks of the summer in a series of delightful but all too often chilly and rainy seaside resorts – Thorpeness and Aldeburgh in Suffolk, Bembridge in the Isle of Wight and West Wittering in Sussex being the favourites.
The things that delighted my brothers and I when small – crabbing, sandcastles and eating sugary clouds of candyfloss – did not really appeal as we grew into teenagers. We could not follow our father into the pub where he spent much of his time nor did we share his passion for sailing. Dad was frankly dangerous in a dinghy and we always seemed to end up in the water. At least twice I can recall being hauled from Bosham Harbour by the lifeboat.
As the annual seaside holiday lost its magic, and teenage angst took the form of rebellion against everything my parents stood for, I began to dream of escape. I would walk into the waves, swim towards the rim of the sea and magically become a seal, ever more to roam the oceans, sliding through the waves, impervious to storms and a playful spectator of passing ships.
Always in that dream I would look back at the distant shore to see my parents and brothers on the beach and feel no sense of loss at all. Indeed, it was an essential part of the fantasy to turn my back on the world I had known and swim over the horizon to whatever awaited me there.
We never saw seals on our summer holidays but visits to London Zoo had shown me sea lions, extraordinary creatures with whiskery faces, sleek wet-leather skin and big dark eyes. Above all it was the way they moved that appealed to a young imagination. They had bodies like Plasticine, bending, twisting and turning as they dived for the keeper’s fish and swam back to the large rock that former the centrepiece of the old seal enclosure. The sea lions were from California, naturally enough, and much in demand in zoos and circuses because of their ability to perform tricks such balancing balls on their snouts. Sea lions and seals are from related, but different, species but that didn’t matter to me. The sea lions of London Zoo imprinted themselves on my mind and from an early age they became my means of escape. I clung to that dream as some children to a favourite blanket or soft toy.
When I decided to turn this childhood dream into a story and create fiction from fantasy, the obvious starting point for the research was St Andrews in Scotland, which hosts the Sea Mammal Research Unit, a major centre in Britain for the study of seals and other marine creatures. It also happens to be my old university. At St Andrews, Professor Mike Fedak and Dr Tecumseh Fitch, both experts in the behaviour and history of seals (among much else I should say), gave me three crucial pieces of intelligence which shaped this book:
Firstly the high intelligence of seals has enabled them to develop a language of trills, clicks, grunts and bell like tones by which they communicate underwater with their own species across many miles of ocean. Seals are highly vocal creatures and their jaw structure is such that in at least one famous case they can mimic human speech.
Secondly, Professor Fedak explained how the history of these creatures is interwoven with that of homo-sapiens in a long, cruel relationship from which mankind benefited enormously. When early man moved north from the African landmass into the colder climes of what is now northern Europe 60,000 years ago, it was seals that made the migration possible. They were easy prey for the club-wielding hunters and provided blubber from which to make candles, skins for clothing, and musky flesh for high protein food. This is why seals figure prominently on cave drawings that can still be seen today in Scandinavia. From that time the killing of seals never stopped and by the nineteenth century it had become a major industry in Europe and America. The killing goes on today carried out by the Canadians and various Scandinavians countries driven by
commerce and with the dubious justification of conserving fish stocks.
Finally, I learnt that evolution is not something that happened a long time ago. It continues to transform our own racial characteristics and those of the animals around us. Brown bears scooping salmon from the estuaries and rivers of North America are following the same path to the sea that seals took millions of years ago. The ancestors of seals roamed the land as small dog like creatures some 30 million years ago before man had evolved from his ancestors, the chimpanzee and orang-utan. They sought their food from the rich stocks of fish along river banks and coastal waters and over millions of years evolved into aquatic creatures like small otters, equally at home in land or water. Then a mere six million years ago, evolution led to them to became sea marine mammals with webbed feet and a thick coat of blubber. Seals had become the sea animals we know today about the same time that early man descended from tree life in the forests and stood upright on the African savannah. But unlike the whales, whose ancestors left land 100 million years ago, seals never fully became marine mammals. They still had to bear their young on land or, more usually, the icepack. That incomplete evolutionary cycle proved a bounteous gift to homo-sapiens as he moved north from the savannah.
What struck me most about my research in Scotland was the evidence that seals were highly complicated and intelligent creatures with almost human characteristics. Tecumseh Fitch, whose first names derives from his great, great, great grandfather, the celebrated American Civil War General, William Tecumseh Sherman (who himself was named after a famous Indian chief), believes the language of seals creates music much as humpback whales do with their singing. As with whales, the challenge is to decode the lyrical submarine conversations with which seal colonies communicate deep under the ocean.
On the Broken Shore Page 22
