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.
I trapped myself in silence, calling it courage. Nobody knew about the frustration, the weeping, the pain. Life now was all about my daughter, and she was wonderful. There was no time to swim, no time to write. It didn’t matter. I didn’t matter. We went to a Steiner toddler group; I was great at breastfeeding; we used cloth nappies; I spent time with other middle-aged, over-educated, high-achieving first-time mothers. We were all in shock, in our different ways. Few of us were brave enough to admit it.
I am capable, now, of asking the obvious questions about undiagnosed post-natal depression. But at the time I lied to everyone. I didn’t think of it as lying, of course. It was coping, muddling through, putting a brave face on things. Anything less would be an admission of failure, and I’ve never been good at that. ‘Stop being such a perfectionist,’ my mother said to me when I was revising for my A Levels. ‘I’m not a perfectionist,’ I snapped. ‘Everything I do is crap.’ She pulled out a chair and sat down next to me. ‘Darling, what do you think perfectionism is?’
What response did I anticipate if I confessed that I wasn’t coping? The same things I’d heard from older women all my life. Don’t be so picky. You’ll never get married at this rate. Lower your expectations. Welcome to the real world. Making a rod for your own back. Never, in those words, from my own mother, but she was one of a tough, war-baby generation. Besides, she was dead by then.
Then came the move to our converted stable in Orkney, in 2008. Nothing changed, except I was now stuck in the country and had no friends nearby. My husband was still working on his doctorate, so he had the attic – the old hayloft – containing the desk and the books for his workspace, and I wrote, when I could, on a corner of the table in the living room. I hobbled around, limping the half-mile to the Harray Stores for milk, walking wincingly from car park to church for Mass on Sunday. I was moving less and less, getting stiffer and heavier and less happy by the day. It was a glimpse into the abyss: if this was life in my early forties, old age was going to be unbearable.
At last I admitted to myself that this was not normal, that it was not tolerable, that I needed help. After ticking me off for not coming sooner, the nice foot specialist at the Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall explained what he called ‘the cumulative effect of repetitive microtrauma’. All those years of walking to the library in frivolous sandals, slap-slap-slap on the hard, flat surfaces, a heavy bag of books slung lop-sided from my shoulder: my feet had been in no state to cope with the extra burden of pregnancy. He described the plantar fascia as wound too tight, like blinds around rollers in the balls and heels of my feet. If I had left it much longer, he said, the swollen collagen would have started to calcify, forming lumps of bone within the soft tissue of the heel. That would have meant an operation, one with a poor record of success. He prescribed exercises, and handed me rolls of adhesive tape with which to strap up my feet every morning, to give the support which the plantar fascia were not providing. He told me not to stand, not to walk, not to run. I smiled and ducked my head in acquiescence, thinking, So easy with a toddler. I was not to wear flip-flops or Birkenstocks, nothing I needed to grip with my toes.
He said, ‘This is going to take a while.’
The white strapping turned grey within hours, stuck to my socks, looked hideous in sandals. The tacky residue it left on my skin meant I could no longer walk barefoot on the beach unless I was prepared to spend hours afterwards picking at my harled and sandblasted feet. Swimming in the pool was fine, but I needed to bind my feet again straight away afterwards, so that I could hobble to the car. I stretched out my Achilles tendons with the religious fervour that I could never quite muster for the rosary my husband wanted us to say daily. The doctor was right; it did take a while.
Years.
But in the end the burn and ache began to ebb. I can walk again, and I can even run, though I’m wary: the tissue of my soles is printed through with the memory of pain, like the words in a stick of rock.
*
The air temperature at the beach was 4 degrees C; the water probably twice that. The sea as still as I have ever known it, the tide far out, the sand sludgy with weed. No seals, but one low-flying heavy-winged heron. Land dark, sky bright with the last of the sunset. Cows booming from their byres on both sides of Eynhallow Sound.
*
In Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’, the nameless heroine renounces her ability to swim in return for life on land and a chance – no more than that – at love. She also has her tongue taken away, and although she can walk on her alien legs every step is agony. Her feet bleed.
I taught a course on children’s literature to trainee primary school teachers a couple of years before we moved to Orkney, in which the students and I traced stories back not to source – that’s impossible – but back up the flow, looking at their shifting forms and patterns, how they reflected changing social norms and expectations. There are fifty students: forty-nine of them are female. All the students have seen Disney’s Little Mermaid; none of them has read a translation of Andersen’s ‘Den lille havfrue’, although Andersen is on their cultural radar. They have no knowledge of the history of fairy tales, and very little awareness that stories come in alternative versions, few of which have what we might call a fairy-tale ending. Most of them are startled enough by learning that Cendrillon goes to three balls not one, never mind about the mutilated feet and pecked-out eyes of Aschenputtel’s stepsisters. They are shocked by Red Riding Hood eating her grandmother’s flesh and drinking her blood, and by the wolf’s demand that she strip herself naked; unnerved by the prince’s casual rape of the still-sleeping beauty, who wakes to find herself pregnant.
It is the unfamiliar, un-Disney ending of Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ that perturbs them initially, the idea that the right girl fails to win the prince. Being rewarded by transformation into a daughter of the air with a chance at virtue and Christian salvation seems a poor substitute. The idea of an immortal soul, and heaven, is culturally alien to most of the students. The bloodiness of the little mermaid’s tongue being severed and the agony in her feet appal them, as does the prince treating her as a household pet, and the way she smiles and dances for him, concealing her pain.
They note – and I agree – that the ending of the story feels tacked on. It’s as if Andersen had flinched away from the tragedy his narrative demanded at the last moment. They nod and sigh when I tell them that the moralizing idea that the daughters of the air will suffer less or more d
epending on whether children are good or bad was a later revision. Andersen isn’t technically a ‘Victorian’, he’s too early and too Danish, but it’s the word the students use. They view the story’s muddling of sex and religion with distaste; I suspect them of wanting to give Andersen a smack.
It’s a great class.
Ten years after teaching ‘The Little Mermaid’, I am reading it again, no longer shocked by her pain and self-sacrifice in the way that I was as a young woman teaching younger women. It seems to me now that these things come with the territory. I ponder the resonances between the little mermaid’s terrestrial experience and my own: the choice of silence, the painful steps, the smiling-smiling-smiling. The damage that women are capable of doing to themselves.
How are you? How’s marriage? How’s motherhood?
Fine, fine. Everything’s fine.
(A storyteller and therapist friend once told me that FINE is an acronym for Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Exhausted.)
Andersen’s story also makes me think about my own marriage, the clash of worlds it embodied. When we met, I wanted so desperately to believe that this person could provide that which I lacked, and I suspect he felt the same. Our worlds seemed to intersect in so many meaningful ways. We were both happy to spend every weekend poking round old churches. His knowledge of medieval theology and liturgy was an inexhaustible source of inspiration when I was writing my first novel, The Bone Thief, with its sweet, shy, introspective clerical hero. A year after our marriage I was received into the Catholic Church, in a move that shocked many of my friends. New and exciting, a tough moral universe, none of the well-meaning Anglican compromise. It also provided a fascinating insight into a different kind of history of England, a narrative of persecution in which Elizabeth I was a villain and poor silly Mary Queen of Scots a kind of saint. I thought if I just worked hard enough I could create a garden, a walled and secluded fertile space, in which we both could flourish.
Swimming with Seals Page 3
