Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  They will pursue a grey whale and her newborn at such a pace that the calf cannot stop to feed, and finally eat the baby when it is starving and exhausted. In Argentina they intentionally strand themselves to pluck sea lion pups from beaches. Off San Francisco a solo female orca took down a great white shark: rammed it in the gills to stun it, flipped it over into tonic immobility, ate its liver, left the rest for the swarming gulls. They’ll kill a sperm whale, and only eat its tongue. Do I really want to enter these creatures’ realm?

  This is not a book about overcoming fear of predators, or cold water, or the dark – or death, which is the shapeless thing that lurks behind all these masks. The word with which I am grappling is reclaiming, as land is reclaimed from the sea. Awareness of death cannot and should not be overcome, and I am learning as I voyage on through middle age that I don’t want to overcome it. What I want to do is map it, colonize it, rename it, make it my own. That dark thread, the panic, the sense of the scree slipping beneath my feet, the lurch, the visceral tug, the undertow; these are utterly woven into the fabric of self. I do not want a map that is all rich pasture and well-watered uplands, bright expanses of sand and sunlit shallows. I need access to the shady side of the valley, the crevasse, the depths where light never reaches, where monsters lurk. Reciting the names of the levels of the sea reclaims them for me, makes them into a meditative technique for taking consciousness down into the depths:

  Sunlit zone.

  Twilight zone.

  Midnight zone.

  Abyss.

  And, underlying the abyss, there are the deep-sea trenches, the hadal zone, named for Hades, lord of the underworld, the god who stole Persephone/Proserpine and conned her into giving up her freedom in return for six seeds of pomegranate, until her mother the earth goddess Demeter came and haggled successfully for Persephone to live half her year in the sun, half in the darkness. Our technical, scientific language has potent myth lurking just under the skin, like the fine fan of facial muscles that underpins and gives power to human expression.

  Reclaiming. Giving myself something to stand on. Gaining an understanding of why, every time a loving friend tells me I am strong, clever, confident, beautiful, I lurch and stagger internally. Over the years the pressure of trying to achieve the expected standards – both external and (much more dangerous) the hopelessly high ones I set myself – has become impossible. I am never aware of what I manage to do, only of the yawning gap between vision and reality, and I live in permanent terror that someone will notice. The strain of maintaining the façade: scaffolding and pit props holding the stucco and sash windows in place while behind all is rubble, fly-tipping and fireweed. My relationship with reality has become ever more tenuous: going into cold water shocks me back into myself and what really exists, here and now. What really matters.

  This is not a book about overcoming the fear of the dark. This is a book about meeting that nightmare face to face in the waking world, looking it in the eye and naming it, saying, I know you.

  *

  Cloudless lapis-lazuli morning for the Feast of the Assumption, slight breeze. Air temp 10 degrees C. The water was very still, a reticulation of golden light flickering over the sandy sea floor. One hermit crab trundling along in a top shell from which most of the surface had rubbed away so it was a nacreous, iridescent shimmer of movement. One white crab smaller than my big toe. Terns perched on the buoys, calling to each other. Female eiders bobbing in the distance. A grey seal asleep in the shallows, sometimes rocking gently, nose to the sky; sometimes asleep on his belly with head and back out of the water. I could hear him breathing – swam quite close but either he didn’t notice me or was too blissed-out to care.

  *

  Quite soon, the Saturday-morning swims stop being enough. I wake every dawn with the salt water tugging at my consciousness while I’m still drifting up from the midnight zone of dream. The craving for what the water provides – shock, numbness, struggle – has become as pervasive as gravity or magnetism, incessant as heartbeat. Days without a swim are like withdrawal, real pain.

  The Polar Bears only meet once a week, though; and I can’t make every Saturday. My daughter is in proper school now, and weekends have become ever more precious. I have deadlines to meet. And I know there’s a duty I’m dodging: I should be making time for my husband, finding a way to bridge this gulf between his island and mine.

  But none of these voices shouts louder than the call of the sea.

  What’s more, although I am coping with, even enjoying, the social aspects of being a Polar Bear, I find I want to swim alone. I need to take private ownership of this astonishing experience, this new relationship between my body and the sea. I look at the strand and the waves with different eyes now, proprietorial ones: there is nothing to stop me claiming the water for my own, whatever the time of year, the Beaufort scale, the temperature.

  I’m afraid to, though, and I can’t work out why. It’s not the thought of the seals, or even the orcas. I’ve been an Orkney Polar Bear in all four seasons now. I’ve swum enough around these shores to have a repertoire: to know which beaches, like Evie, are safe, as long as you pay attention; which bays, like Skaill, have rocks which are concealed at high tide; which headlands, like the Point of Ness, have strong currents. I have a better tolerance of cold water, and a good understanding of my body’s response.

  I am learning how to get warm again.

  Nonetheless, I am reluctant. Too shy even to propose midweek swims to others, I wait until Helen or Yvonne or Anne suggests it, and then happily go along. But left to myself I look at the sea longingly, imagining the passionate shock, the buoyancy, the briny sting; and yet at the same time my breath shortens, and my shoulders tighten and hunch, as though something or someone is compressing me into an ever-smaller space. It’s like being back at a school disco, gazing at those who are brave enough to dance, finding it impossible even to imagine peeling myself away from the wall and crossing the gulf to join them.

  I don’t understand this fear. It’s different from the reluctance to put a warm body in a cold sea which we all still feel at times. I remember being with Anne at the Point of Ness in Stromness one wild wintry day, looking at the waves dragging the shingle, the pewter sky and the distant trails of snow showers across Scapa Flow, and the tearing current only a little way out. Oh God, I thought, do I have to? She caught my eye, read my mind, and smiled complicitly. There was a glorious, giddy schoolgirl moment of sheer naughtiness, evading the inner monitor, the vision of bunking off, the possibility of getting away with it. We don’t have to do this… I won’t tell if you don’t.

  But peer pressure is a very powerful force, even in absentia. We screwed our courage to the sticking-place, and swam anyway; and it was wonderful, a rollercoaster romp, letting the current carry us round the point and then wrestling it to get back to the beach. The seals were enjoying it as much as we were, only a few yards further out but in the full force of the tidal stream that gives Stromness its name, letting it whirl them along, then swimming forcefully back to do it all over again.

  This anxiety I feel about swimming on my own is quite other, as powerful in calm mild midday as in a dusk of gales and rattling rain. Something else is going on: this is about my inner ecosystem, not the outer world.

  I’m such a good girl. I’ve been brought up to be such a very good girl.

  For, firstly, my mother was born in 1927 to a dynasty of career soldiers and empire-builders, and thus her life was shaped by war and rumours of war. Utility boarding school, mother in London driving an ambulance, father an officer in the Egyptian desert. She looked after her little sister; she made do and mended. She was presented at court in May 1945, at Queen Charlotte’s Ball, where – we used to pester her for the story – the ranks of white-clad debutantes curtsy to an enormous cake that represents the queen. After all the years of rationing the sight of the shimmering, white-glazed confection was almost more than the massed eighteen-year-olds could bear. On rising from their cur
tsies, however, they saw a lady-in-waiting opening a little door in the side to take out plates of dry sponge made with powdered egg. The cake was made of cardboard.

  But she already knew how to live with disappointment. At the age of three she had been chosen to present a bunch of flowers to Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s last surviving child, on the terrace of Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. Little girls’ expectations of princesses – even in those just-pre-Disney days – were high. But, on seeing her, my mother exclaimed loudly, ‘That’s not a princess, it’s an old lady in a black dress.’ I’ve a newspaper clipping showing a mass of dark looming adults, a white-clad, bemused-looking toddler centre stage.

  Lower your expectations. Bite back your real thoughts. Do what you’re told. Keep smiling.

  For, secondly, I am also an older sister, my place in the sun always under threat from a bright, beautiful, adventurous usurper coming up fast in the inside lane.

  For, thirdly, childhood in Kenya was constrained by the knowledge that this was not our home (though it felt like home, and London fast became entrancingly alien, with its grey skies and red buses); that we were guests (I typed gusts by mistake just there – blow-ins, ferry-loupers); that all British people would be judged by our behaviour.

  For, fourthly, my father’s weapon was cold anger. He liked his daughters amenable. There was no margin for error. I could see that my sister was the pretty one, so I had to be the clever one. My mother thought their having met through Mensa was a huge joke, if faintly embarrassing, whereas my father took it with deadly seriousness. He had a red book full of brain-teasers and he would pull it out and test us – Who can count backwards from twenty, rotate the shape to match the example, spell antidisestablishmentarianism – setting us against each other, never mind that my sister was two years younger. The humilation, when she won, was appalling, the bottom fell out of my world. (I never stopped to think what it was like for her.) I had to hide the ways in which I was less than perfect because of the withdrawal of approval, the way his blue eyes would go hard and very pale when he was disappointed in me. I grew to hate having my photograph taken, not from vanity – or not only from vanity – but because it showed me all the ways in which I fell so far short of any ideal.

  For, fifthly, I get my notions out of books.

  At a conference once I heard someone give a paper on the experiences of nuns in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the ways in which the novices were educated, and how they internalized the demands of their confining lifestyle. One anecdote in particular has stuck with me. The speaker described the layout of a convent, completely enclosed by a high wall. The only way in or out was via a massive gatehouse, which was built over a long tunnel (in my mind it stretches to infinity) with gates at each end, like an airlock on a spacecraft. The nuns spun, wove and embroidered fine linen; tradesmen and farmers brought supplies. The nuns put their handiwork into the tunnel, and closed the inner gate again: the merchants opened the far gate to collect the goods and take them to market. The farmers brought bags of flour, carrots, salt, through the outer gate and left them in the tunnel; when they had gone the nuns came out and collected their food. There was no need for the nuns ever to go beyond the tunnel into the town, or the townsfolk to enter the mysterious bounds of the convent. More than merely the breaking of a house rule: to have allowed such trespass would have been a sin.

  And then one night the convent caught fire. The townspeople flung the gates open, shouting for the nuns to escape through the tunnel. But the women couldn’t bring themselves to do so. Their fear of infringing their code was stronger than their fear of fire. They all died.

  I would like to think that I remembered the episode wrongly; or that the speaker had misread the historical records; or that the records lied. That maybe one young novice who had not yet had the survival instinct beaten out of her, or some wise old sister who had reserved a corner of her conscience for herself, overcame the conditioning and bolted for freedom.

  I try to fool myself that I would have been the nun who survived.

  I wonder about the sisters’ motives, and their feelings. Did some of them try to enter the tunnel, and others hold them back? Did they all try, but feel an unseen power block their way? Were they brainwashed, or truly devout? Did they fear for their dignity? Were they too proud to be seen singed and screaming by the townspeople?

  Am I allowed to do this, to take these steps across the sand and heaps of storm-torn daberlack and walk into this water, alone, in the gale, in the cold, in the dark? Am I letting the side down? Who’s going to be angry with me?

  What’s the worst that could happen?

  There’s only one way to find out.

  *

  Beautiful serene swim this morning, no seals, but shags and plovers and oystercatchers and curlews under a pink and blue pre-sunrise sky, and half a bright-silver moon, big rolling swell, and I found a lovely sea-worn piece of Victorian china with a transfer print of green weeping willows.

  *

  I’m standing half in the water, half in the air, a hybrid, a mermaid, a tiny node on a vast nexus of forces, visible and invisible. Wind. Tide. Current. Neap. Ebb. Slack water. Air pressure. Swell. Moon phase. Water temperature. Over the last few years these words have become like a litany, new helpmates that shove the old patron saints aside.

  In what airt is the wind?

  Still south-easterly, so the Sands of Evie are comparatively sheltered.

  How much further out will the tide go?

  Far – it is the dark of the moon.

  Which way is the current tugging?

  From west to east, to judge from the angle of the rope tethering the nearest buoy.

  I read the signs, looking for the parameters of safety and danger, in the way a Roman augur might have looked for meaning in the flight patterns of birds.

  Wind and water may have become my new spirit guides, but they have not quite displaced the human saints of this landscape. If we listen for the voices of the past around Orkney’s shores, the saints’ are among the loudest, even if echoed and distorted in complex acts of ventriloquism. Their narratives tug at me in part because so many of the early saints of Britain and Ireland were on a quest like mine, to find their perfect island hermitage. The stories also appeal because so often there is a touch of humour, affection – a groundedness.

  Three monks from Ireland, two old and one young, set out to the north in their tiny wicker-framed boat to find an island. They took little with them, but the young one could not bear to leave his cat. After some days sailing they spotted a rocky outcrop among the waves; they moored their coracle, and clambered out to pray for a sign that would indicate whether this was indeed to be their hermitage. The two older men were focused on their devotions, but after a while the young monk glanced at his cat. ‘Look, brothers, my cat is fishing! Surely this is a sign from God?’ But the older monks said, ‘It is in the nature of cats to fish,’ and went on praying. A little more time passed, and the young monk looked around again. ‘Brothers, my cat has caught a fish! This must be a sign.’ But, ‘It is in the nature of cats to catch fish. Return to your prayers.’ A few more minutes went by, and the young monk was distracted by a delicious smell. He turned once more to see that his cat had gutted and spitted the fish and was now roasting it on a fire. And by this even his hard-hearted brethren were convinced.

  I spend my working life trying to decode the texts and objects, the stone carvings and the archaeological footprints left by these people: not just the saints but the folk who made them saints, the kings and queens, the bishops and nuns and farmers and housewives and dairymaids. My research centres on death and burial: how corpses were treated; how the survivors used ritual and monument; what they imagined happened to body and soul at death, and afterwards; and how they turned these ideas and practices into art and literature. It’s all about transformation, change, loss, coping.

  But the saints are so much more than dead bodie
s or old stories or distant holy figures: they are intensely rooted in place, bound up with identity and everyday need. In the twelfth century, a Norwegian servant girl prayed to St Olaf, King and patron of Norway, but our St Magnus, only newly martyred and relatively unknown, appeared to her instead. She stared at him in bafflement. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘Olaf’s too busy just now with all the other folk calling on him, but I’m Magnus of Orkney, I’ll help.’ A micro-narrative, medieval flash fiction, that gives us a hint of how the bishops and earls of high medieval Orkney might have used the cult of St Magnus to extend their influence over areas of Norway whose residents felt their own overlords were neglecting them.

  A Catholic litany starts with the big ones, the universal saints: Holy Mary, the angels, the disciples, martyrs and popes, bishops and confessors and doctors of the Church, monks and hermits and – finally – other women, the tortured virgins like Lucy and Agatha; descending at last to the little, and the local. If I were to come up with a litany for the Sands of Evie there are four names it would have to include: St Columba, St Tredwell, St Magnus and St Rognvald.

  And I’ll add St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne to that list. Cuthbert never came to Orkney, but like the earliest churches in Orkney his monastery was a daughter house of Columba’s Iona, he knew all about islands, and like me he forced himself into the cold North Sea. The eider ducks which coo and tut along the Evie shoreline are known south, in Northumberland, as cuddy ducks, St Cuthbert’s ducks.

  If I were looking for an early church in which to chant my litany I’d sail across to Eynhallow, the Holy Island. The stone building just visible on the left side of the island is a ruined Romanesque church, from Orkney’s great age of church-building in the twelfth century, maybe a monastery – surely holy enough to merit the island gaining such a label. The island has a Norse name (of course): Eynhallow comes from Eyin Helga, meaning the Holy Island, a name it shares with Lindisfarne and Iona. But there’s an oddity: although the words are Norse, their order – noun-adjective, island-the-holy – is Celtic, providing one of the very few linguistic hints that the incoming Vikings may have spoken to the Picts while they were taking over their land and renaming everything. The Norse word order would have given us Helgay. And that in fascinates me, the Norse definite article – eyin, the island, not just ey. The Holy Island, not just any old holy island. Chances are good that there’s a seventh-century Pictish monastery lurking somewhere on the island, though there’s no material sign of it: maybe it underlies the twelfth-century Norse ruin.