Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  The otter knows nothing of Cuthbert’s kind of love. She is the embodiment of nurturing, practical emotion, putting the blessings of her body – heat, fur, musk – to immediate good effect. If Cuthbert aspires to be like Christ, then the otter is his comforter, like the woman often identified with Mary Magdalene, who massages Christ’s head with precious ointment, wets his feet with her tears, and dries them with her hair.

  And she makes him laugh. The otter’s concerns are small and petty and animal, and fundamental to all kinds of well-being.

  Reading the poem again, I notice for the first time that in fact Heath-Stubbs does not gender this otter, and I wonder what it says about my own understanding of the relationship between love and service and entitlement that I should always have read her/him/it as female. Cuthbert reminds me here of the little mermaid’s prince, who cannot see the love and dedication right under his nose. If only Cuthbert would just look down, instead of peering into the unresponsive heavens, he could learn so much about love. But if the otter had any sense she wouldn’t be content with him chucking the odd fish-head at her, she’d be streaking back into the sea to do her gambolling and playing with someone who didn’t take her love for granted.

  *

  I was in the sea at 6.30 this morning. The water feels no warmer – very alive, colder and more stimulating than the Moray Firth where I swam twice last week. North-westerly breeze and an incoming tide. Grey grey grey shifting mists and damps, a little rain, the very occasional silver-water gleam from a hidden sun. One grey seal asleep in the shallows – woke up and came closer to check me out, shrugged (‘Oh, it’s only her’) and went back to sleep. Tern, curlew, eider, raven.

  *

  In the Northern Isles winter comes in riding the blast, the snow hurtles through horizontally and while it may adhere to the sides of the buildings it rarely settles, just rattling over the ground before blowing into the sea. My friend Alex, originally from Sweden, is very strict about definitions of snow, and she refuses to accept this Orkney version. ‘It’s not snow, it’s hail. It bounces.’ I maintain it is compacted snow; if you look closely you can see it is not ice, it doesn’t melt fast in the way hail does. We talk about the crystalline structure of snow, the way that each flake forms around a grain of dust, like soothing pearl around the irritant in an oyster. Scandinavians dislike Orkney winters: the ratio of dark to light may be familiar but they miss the crispness, the glitter, the winter activities. Most years Orkney in the winter is grey and brown, bringing acres of mud and flooded fields, and gales that keep children indoors.

  The first two winters we spent in Orkney were seasons of heavy snow across almost the whole of Britain. Even the Northern Isles saw significant snowfall, although when the national press printed satellite photos that showed the whole country like a blank white map they cropped Orkney off because the East Mainland let the side down by remaining obdurately green. But the lochs froze hard, and the hills of Hoy and Rousay and the West Mainland were white for weeks, a tabula rasa. No winter has been like that since. The collective desire of the Orkney Polar Bear Club members to behave like the real Polar Bear and Walrus Clubs we read about in Russia and Finland, breaking the ice to swim and rolling in the snow afterwards, has so far been frustrated. Although we are on the 59th parallel the Gulf Stream coddles our archipelago.

  But it’s cold enough, whether on those winter days when sleet and rain and hail vie for supremacy and they’re all coming in sideways, or those June mornings when the wind shifts to the north and I stand on the Sands of Evie and inhale the air straight from the Arctic, sharp as a whetted blade. The Orkney year is one in which July has been surgically removed, with spring running straight into autumn, and a new nameless month of dark stitched in between December and January. The last primroses flower next to the first purple bells of heather, and summer falls down the gap between.

  Living in Orkney is like living inside the lines of The Wanderer: I thought so when I first got off the ferry aged twenty-one, and I think so still, but it is only now that I am middle-aged that I realize what a profoundly middle-aged rant this poem is.

  It’s a monologue, spoken by a homeless exile, a meditation on loss and grief, written by Anon, some time before the year 1000.

  The Wanderer breaks my heart these days in ways that my eighteen-year-old self could barely have imagined. She didn’t know what it was to like to hear the voices of dead friends in the cries of the gulls, or to dream about hugging and kissing the dead, sitting at their feet and resting head and hand on their knees. She hadn’t been made redundant from a job she loved, sent off to wander the paths of exile. It is a poem of bitter experience. I am not yet quite fifty, but I have no one left of an older generation: grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles all gone. ‘Always they swim away,’ as the poem says, no matter how I call after them. ‘No one wins this wisdom before he has achieved his share of winters in the world.’

  For a long time, The Wanderer was thought to be a composite: a true warrior-pagan core that some later monkish critic had bracketed with pious mouthings. More recent scholarship sees it as a unity, a wholly Christian narrative about regret and rumination and pilgrimage, full of passionate juxtaposition that makes the reader work hard. I agree, but there is still no easy glossing over that abrupt transition at the end, from the bleak and honest recognition of transience that governs most of the poem – ‘Here wealth is on loan, friends are on loan, here man is on loan, kinsmen on loan, all the substance of this earth falls into the void’ – to the trite one-sentence solution: ‘It’s well for him who seeks mercy, comfort from his Father in heaven, where for us all security lies.’ The poet hasn’t prepared us for the glibness at the end: we are still adrift on the paths of exile, dreaming of the dead when – voilà! – he pulls the rabbit of salvation out of his hat with a sudden flourish. How are we supposed to trust him in that final line, when he insists that there is a permanent home, after he has spent the preceding 114 lines undermining the idea?

  He has thought this dark life through, he tells us, and there is no consolation to be found in any of the things with which we attempt to shore up our sense of self. He doesn’t mention sex or the companionship of women: his is a wholly masculine universe, in which physical intimacy consists only of homosocial bonding. It’s not that this was an inevitable point of view for Anglo-Saxon men, even avowedly Christian ones. He had options. There’s a tenth-century sermon which describes the joys of Paradise – the sun shines every day, the streams flow with honey, and ‘you’ll have a new bride every night’, says the preacher wistfully, ‘and she as beautiful as Juno’. But I can’t see the Wanderer-poet falling for this Club 18–30 vision. And he would have had little patience with cold-water swimming: in his world, as for Cuthbert, the sea is the locus of fear and struggle, not comfort. Images of the natural landscape, the weather, the birds, the buildings and the bodies of men flow in and out of one another, effortlessly shifting scale. For all the wild weather, the storm and hail, it is a desperately claustrophobic poem. ‘Taken under the helmet of night,’ he laments, all the joy, ‘as though it had never been.’ Nihthelm, night-helmet, is a word found only in this poem, an imagist condensation: the shadow falling across each face, across the whole world.

  *

  Serene winter swim, last before I head south for nearly three weeks away from the sea – sky a uniform silver, sea a pale green-grey-blue that has no name in English (but in Gaelic it would be glas). Surface calm, windless, but still a big swell. Shags, plovers and geese but no seals. Yesterday’s and tomorrow’s storms equally unimaginable in this floating world.

  *

  What follows is not exactly a translation of The Wanderer (though you’ll find one in the Appendix, on page 277), but rather a gloss, an update, an answer. My attempt at picking a fight with a poet who has been dead for over a thousand years.

  The Wanderer: A Response

  Only the lonely put up with God’s mercy.

  Why do we take it from Him, the Measurer
-of-grief?

  I run, fleeing over the ice,

  Fighting waves hand to hand.

  He drives me out, yet He won’t leave me alone.

  There’s no escape.

  Or so says the one who is running,

  Mind-crammed with hard memories,

  Dragged down by blood, anger, loss.

  Cold light before dawn. Alone. Every day.

  Perforce. Compulsion. I must voice pain.

  But there’s no one to hear me, no one alive.

  (Nis. Is-not. Why have we lost this word?)

  I don’t dare speak my mind.

  Oh, yes, I know. Keep your mouth shut.

  Careless talk costs lives.

  Officer class.

  Suck it up, buttercup.

  But I’m tired of this, the crap He keeps throwing at me.

  My heart’s too troubled to help other people.

  This is wrong.

  I’ve spent too long worrying what they’ll say about me,

  Keeping my lip zipped, my heart likewise.

  Someone like me can’t confess to wretchedness.

  Being a wretch.

  How did I get here? This isn’t home.

  No habitus, no ethnos, no cognates or agnates:

  Their absence ties my hands.

  Bosses aren’t for burying, but mine,

  Shiny though she was, is lost to me

  (It seems years ago now); and

  I don’t know what to do without a leader.

  It’s cold outside, and I’m on thin ice.

  I know there are other jobs,

  But I’m on the outside, looking in

  (I was Beowulf; now I’m Grendel)

  At the shop-talk, the comfort, the friends, the laughter,

  The raised glasses. Cheers!

  Things you only know if you’ve been there;

  Things you only miss once you’ve lost them.

  Parents, workmates, friends, lovers.

  Sense of humour.

  Do you remember the fun we used to have?

  I don’t.

  Not till I drift off at last in the small hours

  And wake in tears from a dream of your embrace.

  The hard, warm body, your hands, your knees, the very smell of you.

  Waking is a plunge in cold water:

  Salt-sea drying on my cheeks,

  And your face morphs into mist.

  Your voice the cry of gulls,

  The rattling mockery of hail,

  And it hurts more than it did.

  I won’t do that again.

  Fight it. Fight it:

  The sense of my body decaying,

  Knowing we’re all doomed

  (You can’t say that in a serious voice),

  That we’re killing our middle-earth.

  Why am I still sane?

  Things you think you know when you’re young…

  … but you don’t.

  I’ve learned to shut up, the hard way.

  No more hot heart, or glibness,

  Or slithering out of commitments.

  Don’t feel too much.

  Don’t ask for anything.

  Don’t expect credit for anything you do.

  Don’t expect promises to be kept.

  Why bother?

  We’re all doomed.

  Who’ll give a toss in a hundred years?

  There’s a post-apocalyptic pornographic pleasure

  In imagining the roofs off the offices,

  Tumbleweed,

  Frost on the filing cabinets,

  Spreadsheets flapping in the wind.

  Look around you, workmates:

  Who’s for the heart attack?

  Who for cancer?

  Dementia, or

  Death by a thousand strokes?

  It’s His fault, God’s I mean.

  The Shaper, He’s done it before.

  He’ll do it again.

  Free will? Don’t make me laugh.

  This dark life: think it through

  And see if you’re still laughing.

  It’s your turn next to

  Put on the helmet of night.

  How many graves do you visit?

  Count them. Go on.

  There’s as much meaning in death as there is

  In the sound of the sea battering the cliffs,

  The clatter of hail, the north wind

  When it goes hunting and whining round the eaves,

  Scratching for entrance.

  We’re all dooooooooomed!

  What will last? Money?

  No. Mates? No.

  Me, my family? Don’t make me laugh.

  It hurts.

  You think I’m a smart-arse? A Cassandra?

  I’ll take my tray over here, to this table,

  The one where no one is sitting.

  Keep my lip zipped.

  Suck it up.

  At least until I figure out the answer.

  Jam tomorrow, always jam to-fucking-morrow?

  Don’t give me cosy platitudes,

  Come on, Wanderer-poet.

  You and I, we both know you can do better than that.

  *

  Got down to the beach at 16.30, well after sunset. Everything segueing fast through green and blue and purple to charcoal-grey. Sky and sea very quiet, little waves breaking on the beach, the roar of surf from Eynhallow. No birds on the sea, the peeping of plovers and curlews from the shore. One heron heavy-flapping eastward, one shag low over the water heading west, one seal cruising past, a black dot in a leaden sea. Fade to black.

  *

  There are other beaches in Orkney besides my familiar curve of sand at Aikerness in Evie. Many, many other beaches, and each one has its own ecosystem and microclimate, its own riff on the blend of sand and slab and shingle, its distinctive combination of shells and flotsam, its soundscape. They may share an underlying grammar, speak a common language, but the message each one conveys is unique.

  Newark is in the wild east of Mainland, in the parish of Deerness, almost as far from our house in Evie as it is possible to get. One’s perception of time and distance changes after living for a while on a small island. Places more than twenty minutes’ drive away become challenging, adventurous, and alien. Kirkwall, the archipelagic capital (population 9,000), re-emerges in this altered consciousness as metropolitan, corrupt, teeming with strangers. To reach Newark I have to drive into Kirkwall and out the other side, past Grimsetter Airport, through the unfamiliar territories of St Andrew’s and Toab, and over the last parish boundary into Deerness. But the journey is not yet over. The peninsula of Deerness narrows into a hairline isthmus bracketed by beaches, St Peter’s Pool on one side and Dingieshowe on the other, separated by dunes, the road, and a tiny car park and loo-block. A terse sign says Toilets.

  This isthmus is a low, liminal zone, shifting sand and water. A little sea-level rise, one big storm, and you feel it could be swept away entirely. But it’s been here for a long time. This site was used in the Neolithic. The howe of Dingieshowe is a broch mound from around 300 BC, and the name suggests that later it became a Norse meeting site, a thing-howe, long centuries after the broch had gone out of use. It is also a trowie place, a fairy mound from which Tam Bichan’s fiddle can still be heard on those days when the sun stands still and the membrane between the worlds is grown thin. Tam went into the mound to play for the trows, as so many did, emerging in the summer solstice dawn to find a generation had passed and his yamils were now old men while he was still young. He never settled, and in the end he knocked on the mound, fiddle in hand, and the trows took him back again. They say a witch was burned at the howe, and though her charred remains were cleared away her skull keeps reappearing in the dunes. St Peter’s Pool, on one side of the road, is a creepy place, sedimentary, like a miniature Morecambe Bay at the southern tip of an enclosed, north-facing firth: a shining expanse of silt streaked with great mounds and banks of cockle shells. The fine, soft sand doesn’t abrade the sh
ards of broken glass and china found here, they retain their sharp edges: be careful if you go barefoot.

  This isthmus is two-faced, like Janus, looking forward and back. Some fifty yards to the south, across the road and over the mountainous dunes, Dingieshowe Bay is open to the North Sea, wild and exposed. Little glass or ceramic here: instead we find fragments of fishermen’s multi-coloured twine, tiny grains and crumbs of wave-pulverized plastic. The dunes that separate the two beaches are always on the move: the cubicles in the loo-block can be knee-deep in windblown sand.

  When you meet someone who lives in Deerness, it’s the first thing you ask: Which side of the toilets do you live?

  You’re not in real Deerness until you’ve gone beyond the toilets.

  I drive beyond the toilets.

  Deep Deerness widens out again. This almost-island is rich in the remains of Norse Orkney: an ancient church; an aristocratic stronghold on a near-inaccessible sea-stack; burial grounds from the tenth to twelfth centuries. I rarely venture this far from home outside the summer months: and in my mind Newark Bay is a place of endless sun and sparkling sea. Sometimes the water is even warm. The south-facing bay embraces shallow sand. At the western end there is a concrete pier and a picnic table. But it is the eastern end that interests me.

  The sand tails away into shingle and the slabs of old red sandstone, jutting in steps and platforms like the decks of an Art Deco ocean liner. Some are patterned with ripples made in the Devonian lakebed, others with fossil mud cracks mimicking the reticulations of a giraffe, others still spattered with the marks of ancient raindrops: fleeting interactions of water, air and silt preserved for four hundred million years. Behind the beach there is a cliff some ten feet high: a thick deposit of soil, undercut and overhanging, with rocks the size of footballs embedded in the earth and threatening to tumble. Down to the right the rubble and scree show how often this threat is fulfilled, helped by the force of the gale-driven breakers. Today, though, the sea is keeping within its bounds, a steady southerly driving the water into the embrace of the bay. It is spring, nearly summer, though I need my thick coat. I walk along for a few minutes, always aware of the toppling, precarious soil and rubble to my left, the slick surface of wet flagstone under my soles, the hard rocks below. The sea laps and sucks – clapotis – and out in the surf a shag bobs. Among the crevices of the rocks are the stems of kelp, water-smoothed limpet shells, ravels of colourful nylon rope, the occasional sun-bleached cartridge case, the pale forms of bark-stripped driftwood.