Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Not with the well-mannered galley laboured he;

  Him not the star of storms, nor sudden sweep

  Of wind with all his years hath smitten and bent,

  But in his hut of reeds he fell asleep,

  As fades a lamp when all the oil is spent:

  This tomb nor wife nor children raised, but we

  His fellow-toilers, fishers of the sea.

  I was shocked when I first learned this – more than shocked: outraged, as though Rendall had somehow cheated me, offering a tempting morsel of Orcadian authenticity only to snatch it away with a mocking laugh. Pulling a fast one, winding up the wide-eyed, gullible ferry-louper.

  However, the more I reread the two poems, the more re-enchanted I become. In his reinvention of Leonidas, Rendall gives Jeems o’Quoys a classical dignity as well as his home-grown heroism. ‘The Fisherman’ also encapsulates another of those hard truths about Orkney, people and landscape alike. There’s more going on than you think. Pay attention, ferry-loupers, tourists, journalists. Don’t be deceived by that surface simplicity, that reticence. The dislike of bigsiness means that this open, apparently guileless, green landscape conceals a myriad of secrets. That quiet-faced, boiler-suited farmer, with his musical vowels and homespun wisdom? He has degrees in Chinese and Arabic and once worked as a consultant to the Sultan of Brunei, but chances are he’ll never tell you, though if you’re here for long enough one of his neighbours might. A poem which seems to have been born effortlessly from the foam of Eynhallow Sound conceals a lifetime of learning, observation and skill.

  *

  I was in the sea around 6.30. Mist just coming in, sunrise still some way off. Yesterday’s brisk southerly has dropped, and the water was still in the lee of the breakwater, but retaining enough energy to be breaking on the sand with a greedy lap and slurp. Several seals coming and going, some lingering and curious. One cheerful little shag cruising and diving and pretending to be the Loch Ness Monster. Curlews, ringed plovers, lots of rooks on the beach. Air temp 10, water temp 12. I felt great swimming but probably spent too long in the water – hard to get warm afterwards.

  *

  If I’ve learned one thing over nearly a decade living in Orkney it’s that these islands are no more timeless or unaffected by the modern world than anywhere else; and furthermore that the very idea of untouched wilderness is not only romantic but potentially dangerous. Powerful outsiders – lairds, ecologists, journalists, ferry-loupers – come with their myth of pristine Nature, and try to impose their vision on the indigenes. It’s a common enough narrative. As a child in Kenya I was in love with the visions of writers like Joy and George Adamson, Karen Blixen, Louis Leakey, Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, with their narratives of the wild bundu, the kindly, modernizing colonists and administrators, coffee plantations, of white children growing up learning bushcraft at the knee of wise Kikuyu servants, of lions forever free, cheetahs and elephants living in a world that ought to be untainted by humanity and modernity. But so much of that is fantasy, Eden-myth, an interpretive framework that relegates or even ignores the local people, their needs, their history and their trauma. If the Mau Mau resistance fighters were ever mentioned in my reading, they were demonized.

  We moved to Kenya because of my father’s work. His thing was Systems Management, Time and Motion Studies, the streamlining of inefficient bureaucracy and paperwork. He was a senior manager at British Rail when a request came through for someone to be seconded to Nairobi, to support Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in their development of national rail networks. Exciting times. But my father’s not sure he’s the right man. My mother’s career is taking off; she’s just published her first book, The Group Process as a Helping Technique. They’ve only recently finished refurbishing the early-Victorian house in the Islington square. Their daughters are tiny. His only previous experience of travel outside Europe had come in the spring and summer of 1945, as a twenty-year-old radar operative on a ship repatriating ANZAC soldiers. But when he tells my mother of the offer her face lights up.

  Because she’s been there before. Kenya is a little golden thread that weaves through her family’s story. Her father was stationed there in the 1920s, and she has a revolting relic, a silver picture frame containing a studio photograph of him in his Royal Artillery uniform. The frame is circular, and the base incorporates two gleaming tusks, curved like the crescent moon, each about six inches long. ‘They’re from the first warthog he ever shot,’ my mother tells me, and then adds hastily, ‘Granny had the frame made, not my father. Not his sort of thing.’ We look at the photo together, and I notice she is smiling. My grandfather looks very young, with large, dark eyes and a sensitive mouth that belie the upright pose and the uniform. He died of cancer more than a decade before I was born, but I know he was her bookish parent, the dreamer, the one who encouraged her to go to university. My mother says, ‘He always has his hat on in photos. Dreadfully self-conscious about going bald so young.’

  And then her sister’s family had lived in Kenya in the early 1960s, just before independence. One of my cousins was born there, and my mother had been out to visit, as had my grandmother Stella, widowed by then. I have my grandmother’s diary of her trip, sailing from Rotterdam on 28 January 1961 on the Deutsche-Africa Line, through the Mediterranean and Suez, putting in at Djibouti and Aden, and finally docking in Mombasa on 24 February. Once in Nairobi her days were a social whirl of visits to friends on coffee plantations and lunch in hotels. She is unselfconscious in her daily entries, referring to fuzzy-wuzzies, commenting adversely on native hygiene and disorganization. She made a tapestry chair-seat to commemorate her visit: a warthog, a lioness, zebras, giraffes browsing acacia trees, the flamingos of Nakuru, a couple of Kikuyu huts and in the centre a black woman in a blue dress, carrying a load of firewood bigger than herself.

  At the end of the travel diary, however, my grandmother becomes reflective:

  Impressions

  Overworked African women. Europeans not all first class by any means. Indians the main shopkeepers. No Africans in Cathedral choir and only 1 Deacon – very few Africans at Easter service. Is it right to try and Europeanise the Africans? Is our education what is needed? European children allowed to be very overbearing with the ‘boys’. Could there not be a new title for ‘boy’? Glorious flowers and sunshine. Too many unemployed and physically handicapped people reduced to begging. The Africans have great sense of humour – much giggling goes on amongst themselves.

  I read this with a sick tightness in my abdomen. I don’t think my sister and I were ‘overbearing with the “boys”’, but we thought nothing of referring to adult men with families in those terms. Kimoho and Timona were ‘the houseboys’; Joseph was the ‘garden boy’. Live-in staff were a way of life, although ours was small – no ayah, no driver, no askari with his cap and rifle. And other things – I had been playing in the garden with a cuckoo clock and left it there, and later I spotted it in the window of a room in the servants’ quarters. I went furious to my father but in an uncharacteristically quiet voice he told me to leave it. ‘They have so little.’ My parents gave Kimoho a radio, and he was pulled in by the police and charged with stealing it – how else would he have such a thing? When I was taken to hospital with earache it was taken for granted that as a mzungu I would be seen straight away, despite the waiting room full of Kenyans.

  When we arrived in 1972 Kenya had been independent for less than a decade. That’s an eternity when you’re five: it seems like the blink of an eye now. We celebrated the national holidays of Uhuru and Jamhuri, we even called an independent-minded tortoise Jamhuri (freedom) because of the way he would bolt for the bushes, but I never stopped to think much about what it all meant.

  When the white men first brought their colonial project to Kenya and Tanzania at the end of the nineteenth century, and set eyes on the vast savannahs, the teeming herds of game, they believed they had stumbled on an unfallen paradise, that the East African grasslands had always been like this.
In fact what they were looking at was the aftermath of a rinderpest epidemic. The disease first hit in the 1880s and laid waste the cattle, sheep and goats of the indigenous herding peoples, leading to a devastating famine exacerbated by smallpox. Wild animals died too, in vast numbers, but their populations recovered faster than the human. The rinderpest outbreak had itself been a colonial by-product, first brought in with imported cattle from an eastern port in Egypt or India. Two-thirds of the Tanzanian Maasai people died, a far worse death toll than the Black Death of the European Middle Ages. But that illusory sense of a pristine, unpeopled Eden went on to fuel so much of what followed.

  The Kenya–Tanzania border, drawn up in the aftermath of the famine, cuts the lands of the nomadic Maasai in half. The treaty which created it was agreed by British and German diplomats, and the boundary runs in a dead straight line except for a little kink in the middle. It’s said that the Kaiser was upset at the prospect of Queen Victoria having two equatorial snow-capped mountains, Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro, and he none, so the cartographers made the line bend slightly to accommodate his whim. The needs of the Maasai didn’t enter the discussion. Thinking about this, the sick clench in my abdomen begins to relax, just a little. At least my grandmother saw the people in the landscape, putting that sturdy, smiling Kikuyu woman at the centre of her tapestry vision.

  We have such a powerful need to believe that our real home is elsewhere, whether we look ahead to heaven or an island hermitage, or back to an earthly paradise from which we have been expelled. Kenya remains mine, not the real crowded chaotic nation of 2016, or even the more stable Kenya of the 1970s, but a never-never land of childhood, of outrageous racial privilege which I barely noticed, of infinite possibility and adventure. Perhaps the sense of a personal lost paradise has got something to do with leaving at adolescence, that door forever barred. I can never recapture that grotesque innocence, and mostly I don’t want to.

  My mother’s equivalent lost world was the Isle of Wight, and more specifically Osborne House, the Italianate palazzo in East Cowes which Prince Albert had helped to design as a summer retreat for the royal family. She was told to give that bunch of flowers to Princess Beatrice because my great-grandfather, Commandant of the Royal Army Medical College and Honorary Surgeon to the King, oversaw the home for convalescent officers which Osborne had become after Queen Victoria’s death. Even after he retired, my mother and her sister Barbara had the run of the terraces and the beaches, in what they remembered as the endless summers of the 1930s. Then war broke out, and she turned thirteen, and her grandfather died; and childhood was over. I have a little balloon-backed chair, carved with flowers, upholstered in now-very-tatty green velvet. ‘It came from Osborne,’ my mother said when she asked me if I’d like it. ‘Queen Victoria gave it to your great-grandfather.’

  *

  Morning swim: wrap-around sunshine, sea like oiled silk. Lots of seals, so close and the air and water so still that I could hear them snort when they broke the surface. Little auk, pomerine skua, as well as the usual avian dramatis personae. Evening swim – grey and windy, water felt cold going in but soon warmed up – I stayed in for a good half-hour. Ebbing tide and wind combining for a strong westerly pull and quite choppy – great fun. One very curious little seal swimming round in circles.

  *

  The Orkney Polar Bear Club has been on the go for around five years now, and according to Facebook we have just over two hundred members (though many of these are scattered across the planet). We have English Bears and Scots, Norwegian, Belgian, Polish, South African. Some people come regularly to Orkney and swim with us while they’re here. Others have never yet been, but it’s on their wish list. Messages pop up on Facebook from visitors, asking for advice, hoping for company. But the core group includes Helen and Barbara; Peter the GP, sea-kayaker and marathon-runner; Anne from Norfolk who calls herself a grumpy old dyke, a care-worker and tour-guide who knows more about the natural world than almost anyone I’ve ever met, whose sole concession to cold water is to wear two woolly hats rather than just one; Donna, a dedicated rock-climber from Aberdeenshire; Yvonne, the poet who has spent this summer swimming north of the Arctic Circle to raise money for an autism charity. Becky, Orkney-born to English parents, bright-eyed and insightful, researching the relationships between the incomers who work in renewable energy and the local community, with their much richer knowledge of the local forces of wind and water.

  Everyone’s welcome.

  I’m finding it hard writing about my fellow Bears. If I did this in an academic context I would have to draw up a research framework with a robust ethics component, get it approved by the relevant university committees, design consent forms covering every eventuality, make sure my subjects approve my use of their data, their voices, their experience. As a novelist I can redesign and contort my characters into the shapes I need (though they’re always welcome to fight back). This is different: these people are real. Hey, I post on the Facebook page, I’m writing about you, just a little – do you mind? But nobody seems to. So I’m allowed to say how beautiful I think Helen is with her dark eyes and hair; and how much I value Yvonne’s infectious smile, and Lotty’s sense of adventure; and that I think Anne should wear sparkly silver eyeshadow more often.

  It’s worth noting that we have very few Orcadians among the Polar Bears. Not none, but few.

  Something here, something I’m groping after, about indigenous and incomer attitudes to the sea.

  There’s an analogy with the old croft houses. They are perfect little structures, a central doorway dividing two rooms, one for receiving visitors, the other more private. Each room has a window and a chimney, so the result is an eye-sweet symmetry, with an apparently instinctive ratio governing the size of the window relative to the height and thickness of the wall. Roof tiles chipped from sandstone march in a steady progression from large ones at the eaves to small ones up by the load-bearing ridgepole. Local stone and home-grown craftsmanship.

  But if you’d grown up in one of those houses, unrestored, poky, the flagstones set directly into the dirt, rooms chilly within their metre-thick walls, those flags exuding moisture when pressure changes before a gale, the wooden furniture rotting from the feet up where it stands on the damp stone, you’d understand the allure of a snugly insulated and double-glazed little breeze-block box. It’s we incomers who look at modern Orkney houses – often cheek-by-jowl with the picturesque ruin of a croft, in accordance with the council’s one-for-one replacement policy – only to lament their ugliness. It’s we who buy the old croft houses to do them up, realizing too late that once you’ve lined them with plasterboard you’ve made small rooms into tiny ones; if you leave the stone walls unlined there’s nowhere to hide the pipes or the wiring; that the windows are like tunnels; that a long narrow house means no room for a corridor, so the rooms have to lead one into the other.

  Traditional Orkney architecture, obeying the laws of the local feng shui, the wind-water, turns its face away from the sea. The low cottages tuck themselves into what shelter they can find, and the deep-set windows in those thick stone walls look inland, and often eastward, away from the prevailing Atlantic westerlies. Until very recently, with the advent of heavy-duty insulation and double-glazing, it was only the lairds, like Balfour and Traill Burroughs, and other incomers who hadn’t yet learned what the weather can chuck at you, who built houses that took advantage of the view. If you go back five thousand years you find the people of Neolithic Skara Brae constructing a network of windowless houses connected by tunnels like a rabbit warren, within a rubbish dump that was already old. The Iron Age brochs were windowless, as were the Pictish houses, which were planned like marigolds: circular rooms, like petals, surrounding a central hearth-space. The outside world was to be endured, not enjoyed.

  Even now the shiny new leisure centre in Kirkwall has something of this philosophy about it: the pool with its water-spouts and currents, heated and brightly lit, hides behind a vast wall of rainbow-striped g
lass – a chlorinated, over-heated parody of the cold sunshine cut with horizontal showers outside, and the squally waters of Kirkwall Bay only a few hundred yards away. The leisure complex is the Pickaquoy Centre, named for the field in which it was built. Quoy, as we have seen, is a common Orkney place-name element, and Picka probably invokes the Picts. The term picty-hoose was commonly used to refer to anything old – even the famous Neolithic village on the Bay of Skaill was first published, in 1931, as Skara Brae: A Pictish Village in Orkney – and so it seems probable somewhere underneath the fantasy palace of the sports, entertainment and cinema complex there is an ancient stone building, Neolithic, maybe, or Iron Age, or even really Pictish, which also turned its face away from the sea.

  I could stay here for the rest of my life, but I will never be Orcadian, nor will my daughter, who was fourteen months old when we moved here from York. Seven generations in the kirkyard: that’s what they say you need before you’re accepted. The first time I met my dear and much-missed Orcadian friend Anne Brundle, at a conference in England, she told me she worked at Tankerness House Museum in Kirkwall. I asked her if she had always lived in Orkney. She paused, and looked at me twinkling and slightly sideways, before saying, ‘We moved from the East Mainland to the West in the middle of the sixteenth century, but we’ve been where we are ever since.’ If you put together two Orcadians who haven’t previously met the real shock will come if they can’t find the family connection. One of my friends reckons he must have around three hundred first and second cousins in Orkney.

  Few people break into those inner circles. When I first moved here and went along to parent-and-toddler groups no one truly local ever made conversation with me. The Orkney-born people to whom I found myself drawn were invariably those whose parents were incomers, lured here for much the same reasons as me but a generation earlier. The other mothers were perfectly friendly, but they were all much younger and had been to school together; and if they weren’t blood-kin they were acquainted in detail with each other’s extended families. It was the same among the children: incomers gravitated to incomers, Orcadians to Orcadians, even if they were barely old enough to talk.