by Roger Deakin
The black rubber Bibendum travelled about with me like my shadow. I knew from the outset that I would have to confront the Wetsuit Question and concede that if I were to swim in all seasons and every variety of open water, I would need to wear one from time to time. So I had myself measured for a tailor-made suit by two friends one night in their kitchen in Suffolk. I stood in my swimming trunks before the fire after dinner while they measured me with a cloth tape from the sewing drawer. The wetsuit couturier had sent a list of the required measurements that could hardly have been more thorough had I been going into space: ‘base of throat to top of leg’, ‘neck to shoulder edge’, ‘centre back to base of neck’, and so on, down to the ankle circumference. When we had finished, someone discovered that the tape had shrunk an inch-and-a-quarter, so we had to re-calculate everything. But the suit fitted like a banana skin when it arrived.
The problem about wearing a wetsuit is sensory deprivation; it is a species of whole-body condom. Of course, there are people who like rubber. They enjoy the feel of it; they may even find it aesthetically pleasing. But there is no getting away from the fact that a wetsuit is an anaesthetic to prevent you experiencing the full force of your physical encounter with cold water, and in that sense it is against nature and something of a killjoy. On the other hand, I tell myself each time I struggle into the rubber, not a drop of water ever actually reaches the skin of the otter. Its outer fur traps air in an insulating layer very like a wetsuit, and the inner fur is so fine and tight together that the water never penetrates it. So if otters are allowed what amounts to a drysuit, I reckoned I could permit myself the occasional, judicious use of the wetsuit to bolster my chances of survival. It can make a long swim in cold water bearable, even comfortable, but it cannot approach the sensuality of swimming in your own skin.
At a triathlon meeting nearly everyone wears a wetsuit, and I always find the best place to witness these events is at the point where the contestants come out of the water and hurry comically towards their bikes, peeling themselves out of wet rubber as they go. It is easy to pull a muscle in the Houdini contortions sometimes necessary to escape from your suit. But some of the most useful equipment for the wild swimmer can be a pair of wetsuit boots and gloves. It is your hands and feet that will drive you out of the water before anything else.
More or less alone on the wild side of this innocent island, I felt myself slipping fast into a ‘Coral Island’ state of mind. There was exploring to be done. I set off past the Great Pool, a shallow fresh-water tarn outside the modest Hell Bay Hotel, the only hotel on the island, climbed Gweal Hill and found a ruined Bronze-age chambered tomb, then aimed for the shore at Stinking Porth. A pigtailed islander was repairing a low-slung cottage by the bay, and the last washing line in England was proudly flying the family underwear in the breeze. I walked along the top of the shoreline on well-sprung sea pinks. Banks of rocks and earth protected the island along this Atlantic coast, planted by the islanders with agapanthus. Its tough, adventurous roots bind the earth and rocks together and when it flowers in summer it must create a magnificent pale blue hedge along the sea. It was the first of many plants I encountered growing wild on Bryher that I was used to seeing inside conservatories. I snapped, crackled and popped along the line of dried bladderwrack that probably gave Stinking Porth its name, humming to myself and getting lost in a pleasant daze of walking-blues rhythm. I was stopped in my tracks by a dead porpoise at my feet, tangled in seaweed and oil, baring the hundreds of little saw-teeth serrating its jaw as it began to decompose; the petite, elegant tail curled by the sun as though flipping out of its bonds of black kelp. The greatest excitement of living on islands like these must be the sheer variety and constant surprise of what gets washed up on your local beach or rocks. For one woman, out strolling on the Porth Hellick beach on St Mary’s on 22 October 1707, the surprise was Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Admiral of the Fleet, whose flagship, HMS Association, was wrecked on the Gilstone Rock along with three other ships, and two thousand men were lost. Sir Cloudesley was miraculously still just alive, so she promptly murdered him for his emerald rings.
Spotting the porpoise took me back into the world of the News Chronicle I-SPY books, especially No. 1 in the series, I-SPY at the Seaside. I still have my original collection of I-SPY books, carefully concealed in a secret dossier, improvised from a cigar box, labelled: ‘Private and Confidential – I-SPY Tribe’. I became an active Redskin around the age of seven, and the details of my sightings are carefully filled in with pencil. ‘Going to the sea’, says the introduction, ‘is always exciting. But it’s simply wizard when you are an I-SPY. Such a lot of things to look for – such fun putting them in your record! It’s thrilling to see your score mount up.’
Back at the News Chronicle Wigwam in London, Big Chief I-SPY awarded points for each entry in your record book. For the rarer things you scored more than for those which were easily spotted. It is interesting to compare how rare or common things were perceived to be in the 1950s, compared to our present-day perceptions. In my I-SPY Birds, I find that the linnet and the song thrush score a mere twenty points, level pegging with the starling and the house sparrow. Both birds have suffered big declines in population over the last twenty-five years, and would probably rate more points now. In I-SPY in the Country, a grass snake scored a surprisingly low twelve, not much more than a frog, toad or scarecrow at ten, and less than a cattle grid at fifteen. An otter scored a mere twenty, at the same level as a road sign saying, DANGER THIS ROAD IS SUBJECT TO FLOODING, and only marginally more than a thatched pigsty at fifteen. (I have searched high and low for a thatched pigsty and I still haven’t seen one.) One of the highest-scoring sightings in I-SPY at the Seaside was, in fact, the porpoise or dolphin. Both scored a princely forty, and it was time to open the Tizer if you saw one. The dolphin, according to I-SPY, is ‘a very fast swimmer, and can move through the water quicker than you can scoot along the road on your cycle’. According to the book, I saw my first porpoise swimming in a school off Portrush on 20/4/54. I spotted my lugworm on 17/9/53 at Eastbourne.
Big Chief I-SPY always ended his messages to us Redskins with the coded message ‘Odhu/ntinggo’. If you’re a Paleface, I’m afraid you’ll have to work it out for yourself. I wish I could help, with my copy of I-SPY Secret Codes, but it is Private and Confidential and ‘Redskins are enjoined to keep this book in a safe and secret place.’
Masses of wild flowers grew everywhere in this Bronze-age landscape of ancient tracks, hedges, stone walls and tiny bulb fields, nearly all of which were now abandoned, grazed or cut for hay. None of them was more than a half or quarter of an acre and they were full of celandines, bluebells, wild garlic, violets and daisies, as well as leftover daffodils. The islands’ traditional flower-growing economy was killed off mainly by the Dutch, who now cultivate everything under glass all the year round. Instead, there is tourism, and the wild flowers abound. Sea cabbage and rock campions line the shore, and pennywort grows from the stone walls. A pair of cows in a paddock munched at their plastic bucket beside five hundred lobster pots and an old Rayburn cooker. The blackbirds were trusting and unafraid.
Down at the southern end of the island I swam in Rushy Bay, a delightful sheltered sandy cove which looks across to Samson. It was completely deserted and I crossed from one side of the bay to the other. The intensity of the sky, the white sand, and the rocks that stood up everywhere out of the sea, had a dream-like quality reminiscent of Salvador Dali. Further out, puffs of light breeze squiffed the sea into little Tintin wavelets with kiss-curl tops. Someone had been here earlier; I found a number of elaborate sand and pebble mazes, one with the caption written with a stick: ‘A Scilly Maze’. They too had a distinctly Bronze-age look to them. As I swam out, I pondered the mazes, and a theory John Fowles proposes in the book Islands that a pebble maze across the water on St Agnes was originally constructed by Viking visitors, or even a Phoenician sailor two and a half thousand years ago. Such ancient mazes are quite common in Scandinavia
, but their ritual significance is a mystery. Fowles thinks it may have been connected with the grave, and escape into reincarnation. He also thinks Shakespeare imagined the maze-like Tempest in the Scillies. Drifting ashore again over the seaweed and sand, I wondered how many shipwrecked sailors had landed here, alive or drowned. If there were mermaids anywhere in the world, they must be here.
I walked back past another maze – of tall hedges of escallonia, senecio and pittosporum, a New Zealand immigrant that does well here in the frost-free conditions and provides belts of shelter from the Atlantic storms for the flower crops. Back in the Fraggle Rock Café for dinner, Les, the proprietor, said she and a gang of her friends originally came to Bryher to live twenty years ago as hippies. They weren’t the first. In AD 387, a couple of early Christian bishops called Instantius and Tibericus came to the Scillies and founded a cult of free love well away from the hurly burly of the Dark Ages.
Bryher has a wonderfully relaxed approach to tourism, with little children’s stalls outside some of the low garden walls offering painted stones or big pink and purple sea urchin shells for sale for pence left in a Tupperware box. There is an all-pervading sense of a Whole Earth Catalogue culture of improvisation and mixed economics. I recognised it straight away and warmed to it. It reminded me of a time, not long ago, when money was not the main topic of conversation. The Bryher lobster pots, I noticed, are built on a foundation of a steel boot-scraper doormat, with a tented framework of half-inch blue alkathene water-pipe covered in netting, and a funnel entrance improvised from a plastic flowerpot.
The looting of wrecks continues to be an important component of the island economy. There are people who can get you almost anything, depending on the nature of the latest cargo to be washed ashore or upended on the rocks. The current treasure trove was a container ship called Cita, wrecked off St Mary’s and something of a floating department store for the jubilant islanders. Suddenly every household had a brand-new car battery, plastic toothbrush-holder (a choice of yellow, pink or blue), new stainless-steel sink, several bottles of Jack Daniel’s, and a mahogany front door. This information suddenly made sense of the abundance of mahogany front doors lying about in front gardens, slightly frayed at the corners from their adventures at sea, some already installed incongruously in cottage doorways, garden sheds and extension conservatories. All of this, of course, was in strict contravention of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995, Part ix, Section 236, which obliges you to report any cargo you find from a wrecked vessel to the Receiver of Wreck. Forms for the purpose are available from Falmouth, just a two-day journey away on the ferry.
The delight of Bryher is that nowhere on an island a mile and a half long is more than half an hour’s walk away. I went over Shipman Head Down to the cliffs above Hell Bay to watch the Atlantic sunset. There were convenient plump cushions of sea pinks on every ledge, and I watched the rocks gradually surfacing like bared teeth as the tide fell. I find sunset more dramatic than dawn because you know the spectacle is going to improve as it reaches a climax. The sun dropped like a billiard ball over the rim of the known world in due splendour, and I was watching from the front row.
I was piped awake early by the oystercatchers next morning, and set off along one of the sandy island paths to Green Bay, facing east towards the island of Tresco. It is more sheltered here, and there were boats pulled up on chocks for repair, and a boatbuilder’s shed. Around it, near the shore, was a dazzling semi-natural colony of plants that must have originated in the tropical gardens at Tresco: dark blue aechium (which can grow nearly a foot a week), bright yellow aeolium, banks of blue agapanthus, and creeping masses of the colourful succulent osteospermum.
I went down to the beach for a swim in the Bronze-age fields. The Scilly Isles are the last outcrop of a ridge of volcanic granite that forms the backbone of Cornwall and they were, until about 4,000 years ago, the high points of one big island called Ennor. But the melting of the polar ice caps that began after the last Ice Age meant that Ennor’s lowland valleys and fields were gradually submerged by the rising sea.
I donned the wetsuit, mask and snorkel, and swam out into the shallow sandy bay. It was high tide and about thirty yards off the shore I looked down at a pair of stone walls meeting at a right angle, and a circle of stones that must once have been a sheep pen. With seaweed hedges growing from the stones, these are the patterns and remains of the patchwork of old fields that once stretched all the way across the valley to Tresco. They are really just a continuation of the remaining field boundaries on shore. This may be why some stretches of water around the Scillies still have names from Before the Flood that are literally outlandish, like Garden of the Maiden Bower, or Appletree Bay.
As I swam back and forth across the bay, face-down in the clear salt water, searching out the diagonals of more old field walls, lulled by the rhythm of my own breathing amplified in the snorkel, I felt myself sinking deeper into the unconscious world of the sea, deeper into history. I was going back 4,000 years, soaring above the ancient landscape like some slow bird, and it reminded me how like the sea a field can be; how, on a windy day, silver waves run through young corn, and how a combine harvester can move through barley like an ungainly sailing vessel. I imagined ploughmen with seagulls in their wake tilling these fields, and their first flooding by a spring-tide storm, the crops ruined and the earth poisoned by the salt. The relation between the remaining fields and these that were submerged is an intimate one. Much of the island topsoil is composed of centuries of seaweed, forked into carts at low tide and flung about as a mulch. The molluscs, of course, were all quite at home on the stones of the sunken walls, and the winkles could have been so many land snails.
I was struggling out of the wetsuit on the beach when I noticed a bumblebee fly straight out over the sea towards Tresco. Three more took the same line of flight and I tracked them well out along the three-quarter-mile journey to the next island. Tresco has some famous gardens which would be highly attractive to bees, but Bryher was hardly short of flowers. Was this, I wondered, some ancient flight path used by bees 4,000 years ago and somehow imprinted in the collective bee memory? Or had some ambitious forager scented flowers on Tresco and blazed the trail? Along the tide-mark were thousands of the most beautiful miniature shells, all much the same snail design but coloured russet, orange, peach, white, speckled, grey and silver. Each of them might have represented one of the drowned sailors whose spirits crowd the seabed of the Scillies.
Next afternoon I boarded the Scillonian and rode the Atlantic swell back to Penzance. A party of men with deep tans, pony-tails and expensive manly footwear with miles of bootlace, dotted themselves about the deck, bagging all the suntraps, and sat with their backs to the funnel or a life-raft, eyes shut, heads back, wearing beatific expressions. (They were met later at Penzance by waving women in jodhpurs and Range Rovers.) I sat against my rucksack, gazed down the snowy wake, and entered my own reverie.
One of my most vivid images from childhood is of the six Pullman camping coaches silhouetted against the sea at dawn, seen through the window of the night-sleeper from Paddington to Penzance. To stay in one of them, with the beach on the doorstep, would have been my idea of the perfect holiday. We never did, and I had always meant to take a closer look at these chocolate-pudding objects of desire in their faded brown, cream and gold livery. Back on the mainland, this is where I bent my steps the following morning, with breakfast Thermos flask, currant bun, newspaper and swimming kit. The coaches were still there, now shockingly dilapidated, halfway along the beach from Penzance by the old, disused Marazion station, and looking across to St Michael’s Mount. The railway companies had the excellent idea during the 1930s of putting their old rolling stock to good use by converting it to accommodation as camping coaches, and shunting them into sidings in the countryside or at the seaside all over Britain.
The brown and cream was flaking, and the ornate gold-leaf circus signwriting of the names the Pullman company gave to each carriage was only just di
scernible: Mimosa, Alicante, Flora, Calais, Juno and Aurora. The range of the associations told you how well-travelled these retired old ladies were. They belonged to an era when holidays in France or the Mediterranean were the province of the well-to-do; when travel was a dignified affair involving porters, trunks, and station-masters with fob watches. Ordinary folk didn’t even dream of travelling to such places for their holidays. The Cornish Riviera was heaven enough for them and the Pullman camping coaches must have looked like luxury, even if the reality was more spartan. They had water and electricity laid on, and you entered your coach via a roofed balcony at one end with a rail to hang out the towels after your early-morning dip. Ironically, it was the railways, and these Pullman coaches, which helped pioneer access to the very Mediterranean resorts that were eventually to seduce the British away from their native swimming holes and to the decadent delights of tepid bathing. Buckets and spades went out of fashion. Water-skis, windsurfers and wetsuits took their place.
I stood on a wheel and climbed up the rusting iron chassis of Alicante. The vandals had long ago won the struggle for access and it was heartbreaking to see the beauty and craftsmanship that had been all but destroyed by neglect and wanton spite. Oval bevelled mirrors in the living room all smashed, panelling and light fittings torn off, and carriage windows, with their rounded corners, boarded up with ugly chipboard. I walked through the tiny kitchen, oblong living room, and down a corridor past two little bedrooms, the bathroom and WC. Floor level was almost five feet off the ground. The standards of craft and the materials used in the railway carriage works in Derby or Hexham were unusually high. Some of the ceilings had been ripped to reveal that the boarded carriage roofs were supported on curving vaults of solid oak.
