Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  And then I see what I have been half-consciously looking for: a smooth curve of hard whitish matter that could at first sight also be taken for driftwood.

  It is a human rib.

  I pick it up and weigh it in my hands: small and delicate, so light I can barely feel its weight. The shape is at once simple and complex, a beautifully modulated arc, like a wind turbine blade. As fit for purpose as a seal’s whisker. Ribs have a head and tail: the thick, blunt cranial end; the sharper caudal end, the morphology of an eel. I try to work out which rib this one is, right or left, higher or lower in the thorax. To imagine it flexing with each breath, caging a pulsing heart, part of a matrix of muscle and ligament and cartilage. And that breath supporting a voice. Language. Song. This brittle white stick was part of a mind-body-soul, deeply encultured and embedded in family, community, parish, lordship. I think of the last time it pushed against the intercostal muscles, expelling the death rattle. I’m picturing it as a woman’s rib, but only because I’m a woman myself.

  I hold the rib against my own abdomen, a best guess, trying it for size between my left breast and my waist, guessing it’s one of the floating ribs, costa fluitans, with its large head and pointy tail. Probably the eleventh, the penultimate one, as the twelfth is smaller. But I’m no osteologist, and I’m struggling to be sure without other ribs to compare it against.

  The last time I was here, there were several skeletons emerging from the striated face of the low cliff, all partial, embedded in the friable red clay. A bowl-like curve of cranium in cross-section. The knobby end of a tibia, coy, half revealed. The bones are deep orangey-yellow when they first come into daylight, not much paler than the soil.

  Today, however, I can’t see anybody in the cliff face. The winter has done a lot of damage to the sea’s margin, scribbling and over-writing, scouring its palimpsest. Tumps of grass overhang my head. Someone – perhaps the county archaeologist, perhaps the farmer – has shored up part of the cliff with sandbags, but they too have been tumbled about by the water. I get closer, always aware of the risk of falling rock. Boulders wobble beneath my feet. The cliff is boldly striped, the top layer nearly black, thick with burned material and shell.

  Still cradling the rib in my hands, I gaze at the stratum below the thick top layer of midden, let my eyes drift out of focus; stop looking; start seeing.

  First one, then a second skeleton. The first is just a femur and fragment of pelvis. The second is even harder to spot, higher up, on the same alignment as the first but too far away to be part of the same individual. I can make out the ridged ripple of a spine and the snapped-off stalks of the true ribs, squashed into the space of an inch or two between flat stones above and below. Impossible for the imagination to reclothe these skewed, compressed bones with flesh. They are becoming entirely mineral, all collagen scoured from their crumbly honeycomb. Little by little they erode, become brittle with light and salt and air, and the sea takes them.

  The Norse cemetery here at Newark was partially excavated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. My PhD supervisor Sid Bradley dug here and told me stories. There was an elderly lady from a nearby farm who used to come and watch them at work. One day he asked her, ‘Have you always lived here?’ ‘Oh no! I only moved here when I married, and I’ve never really settled.’ He was surprised, given her very local accent, and asked where she had come from. She raised her arm, and pointed across the bay. ‘There.’

  When Sid first told me this story, only a few years into my own acquaintance with the islands, it seemed romantic, wild, charming, primitive. I revisit it now, and wonder whether she wasn’t just playing the endlessly amusing game of ‘Wind up the ferry-louper’. I’ve encountered so many anecdotes like this one.

  The Orkney Museum store has many containers of material from this site, the bodies of Newark folk who died in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They could be the ancestors of that old lady. Boxes and bags, some labelled only Norse Baby Bones. These were Christians: the chapel at Newark may be one of the earliest in Viking Orkney. Apart from one jet bracelet and a bone comb there are no grave-goods from the cemetery.

  Mourners do not bury skeletons: they bury people. These bones have never seen the light of day before. When these folk were laid to rest they were decently clothed in their flesh and skin, and wrapped in lengths of undyed linen.

  Among the browny-yellow fragments visible in the soil is a made thing: a slim bone spike, whittled to a point, like one of a set of Victorian spillikins. I’ve seen things like this before: it’s a shroud pin. I reach out a fingertip to it, my other hand still holding the rib. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t prise the pin out of the clay and take it home? It’s already almost fully exposed, another heavy rainfall or a southerly whipping up the waves, and it will be gone. But I don’t, and maybe I can’t. Partly because I’ve internalized the rules about not interfering with archaeological sites. And partly because these days something stroppy in me resists the urge to cling on to and categorize and over-analyse every facet of the past. Why can’t we just let things go?

  Also, I am assailed by emotion. It takes a moment to trace it back to source. My dear friend Anne, who worked at the museum in Kirkwall, was writing a doctoral thesis on early medieval bone and antler tools, a project her untimely death left unfinished. She used to pass me little objects like this and gently prod me into really looking at them: to notice the organic structure; the marks that indicated which tools had been used in their manufacture, and how; the evidence of wear. I couldn’t go to her funeral because it clashed with my father’s cremation in London, but The Orcadian reported that St Magnus Cathedral was full to overflowing.

  I have a sudden image of competent, short-nailed fingers pinching the layered linen of the shroud together above the hidden face, the beloved face, and stabbing the fabric in place, a swift in-and-out-and-in, with this little pin. There’s no sign of wear that I can see: it was made for this purpose.

  One careful owner.

  Another, much older memory assails me as I peer hard at the cliff face, still feeling Anne’s approving presence. The pin looks smooth as first, but the sun shifting out from behind a cloud gleams on the shaved facets, and I have a sudden, multi-sensory vision of a baking-hot day nearly forty years ago. Our parents have thrown us in the back of the white Ford Cortina and taken us to Olorgesailie, in the Rift Valley, a couple of hours’ drive south-west of our home in Nairobi. It’s my first visit to this site, which for a palaeontology-obsessed child like me is up there with Olduvai (where I have also recently been), and Neandertal, and Sterkfontein, as a place of legend. Olorgesailie isn’t that old, not compared to Olduvai: it was in use from around a million years ago to around 500 thousand. So it’s just Homo erectus here, not the much earlier australopithecines who are my real love. It’s 1977. Donald Johanson’s discovery of a half-complete Australopithecus skeleton, Lucy, at Hadar in Ethiopia is very recent. Johanson and my god and hero Richard Leakey are fighting a macho public war over human origins. I have Leakey’s autograph, in a copy of his book Origins – it’s smudged where I stroked it while the ink was still wet. He was Director of the National Museum in Nairobi, where my mother was a volunteer guide – guardian of the stuffed elephant, the racks of Joy Adamson’s watercolour portraits of Kenyan tribal people, all those skulls of erectus and habilis as well as the australopithecines.

  But even if Olorgesailie is only Lower Pleistocene, it’s still amazing. It’s known as the ‘tool factory’. We wander the walkways over the site, looking at the thick scatter of Acheulean hand-axes lying apparently in situ everywhere, embedded in the yellow-grey soil. We are shown the bones of familiar species, baboon and zebra, with the cut marks of ancient butchery visible to the trained eye. Our guide explains how the site is dated, the layers of volcanic ash coming from Mount Olorgesailie, and the more distant craters of Suswa and Longonot. He tells us how it was found and excavated by Richard’s mother, Mary Leakey, in 1942, with the drafted labour of Italian prisoners of war. This i
s exciting too. I know about the prisoners of war: they built the tiny stone chapel on the road down into the Rift Valley; we pass it often on the way to Lake Naivasha, just north of here, where we keep that little motorboat.

  Olorgesailie fills me with a desperate longing. So many hand-axes: do they really need them all? I know that to take even one would be a sin and a crime, but the temptation is terrible. I am still young enough to think that having things matters, that ownership is permanent and makes a difference to who you are. I have not yet learned that possession weighs us down. I am ten years old and my ego spans the horizons: I do not understand the folly of thinking that I could own, however illicitly, an object which is already nearly a million years older than me. On the way back to the museum I pick up a faceted lump of stone from under an acacia bush and show it to our guide. He has already been laughing at me, and I am not sure whether he is annoyed by my incessant questions. ‘It’s not a tool,’ he says, still laughing. And then he relents. ‘But it is worked, look, see the strike marks. Well spotted!’ I preen. It’s a core, from which many small sharp flakes have been knapped away. ‘Keep it,’ he says, shrugging and smiling. A core, I think, like an apple core. It fits my hand.

  That core was a talisman for years, but somewhere in the many moves between houses and cities and countries and continents it got lost, and I became less obsessed with human origins.

  People laboured at Olorgesailie for half a million years, but they didn’t live there or die there. It wasn’t until 2003 that the first hominid remains were found at Olorgesailie: parts of a small Homo erectus cranium, gnawed by carnivores. It’s not the presence of skeletons or even the rawness of the archaeology here at Newark that reminds me of the lithic core from the Rift Valley, but something as slight and transient as that sheen on the facets of the bone shroud pin. Two objects, linked only by me, and my desire for possession. The shroud pin has triggered a tactile memory, somehow encoded in my brain, my nerves, my fingertips, although the intervening nearly forty years will have seen almost every atom of me renewed.

  I feel as though I know these people, pinned into their shrouds at Newark nine or ten centuries ago. Under my breath I mutter fragments of the rites that accompanied them into the ground, the Latin prose-poetry of high medieval funerary ceremony: ‘Non ei dominentur umbrae mortis… Non tegat eam chaos et caligo tenebrarum… In paradisum deducant eam angeli.’

  May the shadows of death not lord it over her… May chaos and the fog of the dark not touch her…

  May the angels lead her into paradise.

  These people are contemporaries of St Magnus, and his nephew Rognvald Kali, as well as the anonymous author of Orkneyinga Saga. It was Kali who lifted Magnus’s bones from their shrine in the old cathedral at Birsay and moved them to the new Romanesque church. The person whose rib I have in my hands could have been in the crowd, holding her breath, her ribcage a cradle of longing for the saint. Magnus’s bones are still in the cathedral though no longer formally enshrined: they are hidden away, in an ossuary cavity within the pillar to the south-west of the crossing, hidden behind a wall of pale red stone. They came to light and were photographed in the early twentieth century, the gash made by the cook’s axe still riving the jarl’s skull. And then the bones were replaced within the pillar.

  A skull thought to be Kali’s was also discovered immured in St Magnus Cathedral, in the north-west pillar, opposite his uncle’s: it is assumed that the ossuary cavities in the thirteenth-century pillars were made in the mid-sixteenth century, in some haste, when the old Catholic saints were ousted from the new, reformed, saint-free kirk.

  Kali’s skull and Magnus’s bones have not been seen since 1919, although forensic analysis on the basis of the century-old photographs suggests that both sets of remains are compatible with what we know of the men’s appearance and life-story. Uncle and nephew have survived both the ravages of the Reformation and the scientific curiosity of the modern age. Nonetheless, some people think the bones in the south-west pillar are not those of Magnus at all.

  We could hoick Magnus and Kali’s skulls out of their pillars, subject them to DNA and Carbon-14 and isotope analysis. But I’d rather we didn’t: I don’t want to know how short Kali really was, or the sorry state of his teeth. Let’s hang on to the possibility that Magnus was a real saint, Kali a real hero, both superhuman. Let the mystery remain in the dark of the cathedral as well as here, on this sunny beach at Newark.

  This rib that I hold now had near-magical power without any need for imagined sanctity. It’s one of the few bones that continue to make red blood cells in the adult body. The only bone that can regenerate: if a rib is taken out of its periosteum during surgery a new rib will form. No wonder this bone was chosen for the making of Eve. The costal cartilage continues to harden in adult life, and is therefore one of the more reliable ways of judging the age of a skeleton, though not the sex. Biological miracles. Forensic miracles.

  These bones fray out of the cliff, without the police or the county archaeologist or Historic Environment Scotland recording their presence or their absence. Local people, including several archaeologists, keep an eye, but there are so many eroding coastal sites in Orkney. They can’t all be saved. If there’s a watching brief here at Newark, or a preservation order, it isn’t having much effect. Instead there’s just a silent slippage back into constituent atoms. I imagine each molecule of calcium phosphate uttering a little sigh as it emerges finally into the light after a millennium of dark, bursting like a bubble as it goes back to join the main.

  And I stand here on Devonian sandstone, peering in at them, intruding on their privacy for the first time in a thousand years, newly aware of the bone-on-bone articulation of my own spine, the jut of pelvis, the flex of rib. In-breath and out-breath, in-wave and out-wave. The bowl of my skull feels as fragile and evanescent as the foam that continually bubbles and fades on the sea below.

  I bend down and tuck the rib back into the crevice where I found it.

  *

  Evie was white with snow almost down to sea level when I woke but it’s mostly gone now. Lots of very puzzled lambs. The sea was like gin and tonic. And, oh, the swallows. I feel they have come straight from Kenya with news of the long rains, and I can smell the wet murram earth in their vapour trail... The puffins are back, too. Now I am waiting for the Arctic terns to arrive.

  *

  I need to come out of the water. My hands and feet are numb. I’m not shivering, not yet, but I know my core temperature will fall even faster once I’m out of the sea and into the wind. It’s what cold-water swimmers call ‘the afterdrop’, and needs to be taken seriously. I’m beginning to lose focus. I swim back into the shallower water, in the lee of the breakwater, and stand, looking around me one last time, hoping, always hoping, for another glimpse of a companionable seal.

  The sand stretches away from me. The winter sun is lifting slowly clear of the hills to the south, and the sand gleams silver-gilt. Although I know I should get warm and out of what wind there is, I can’t bear to leave.

  As I linger my way up the beach, my eye is caught repeatedly by iridescent flashes. The gently ebbing tide has left a treasure trove of little shells in roughly parallel undulating lines, the fossil footprints of each last wave as the sea drew slowly back into itself. There are limpets of every size from baby’s fingernails to old men’s kneecaps; brown and yellow periwinkles; whelks. It’s the top shells that are giving off that shimmer in the oblique light, their outer layer abraded to reveal the mother-of-pearl underneath. I don’t know any beach round here that treats its shells more lovingly than the Sands of Evie, the coarse calcareous sand gently taking off the outer layer and leaving the inner shell intact. They prompt memories of my mother at the dining table with a rag and a jar of silver polish, cleaning the tarnish off the Georgian silver spoons in which she traded at antique fairs.

  There are three kinds of top shells: the largest are the painted ones, beautifully conical and mottled pink. They often lose the ti
ps of their cones, leading to the revelation of their inner spiral, that perfect Fibonacci geometry which underpins all our ideas of what makes for ideal proportion; Robert Rendall saw these ordered progressions as clear proof of ‘a Creative Intelligence… a divinely implanted correspondence between the constitution of man’s mind and the structure of the universe’. I’m less sure. We are pareidolic animals after all, imposing meaning on random patterns: it’s not such a big jump from seeing faces in clouds to seeing the Hand of God in the spiral of a shell. Why should one association be more valid than another? When intact and viewed from above the pinkly painted top shells remind me, irresistibly, of nipples.

  Then there are the grey and the purple ones, more squat and bulbous, like navels (and the Latin name of the purple top shell is Gibbula umbilicalis), both with tiger stripes. They’re all grazers, living on tiny algae. It astonishes me, every time I pick up one of these beauties, to think that the shell is exuded by the body of the little animal that lives inside. I know it’s no different, really, from my own endoskeleton, but it still seems extraordinary that these molluscs should have two kinds of shell-producing cell in their mantle, one for the outer and one for the nacreous inner. The nacre protects their delicate flesh from parasites and irritating grit: it entombs the irritants in successive layers of calcium carbonate crystals, woven together with silk-like proteins. Suffering and experience and memory are all charted and frozen within those luminous layers.

  The zigzags of the outer layer of the top shell are complex in the way that a knitting pattern is, or the cards of a Jacquard loom, and it’s been suggested that they perform a similar function for molluscs: a set of instructions. If the shell is damaged the animal can ‘read’ the pattern by sensing it with its mantle, and work out where to begin the repair. You’d think the top shells’ mother-of-pearl would all be the same, but as I walk along the line of the ebb I pick up shells whose rubbed sheen is variously purple, blue, green, silver-grey. All the cool colours of the rainbow. Palette of sea and sky and hill.