Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Women probably accumulated beads over a lifetime. They strung them across their breasts, on strings hooked to the lumpy oval brooches used to fasten their pinafore dresses at the collarbone. I like to think of mothers and grandmothers letting curious babies gum the hard, smooth surfaces, telling toddlers not to tug too hard, answering children’s questions.

  Mama, tell me a story…

  She sighs, and bats away a grubby little paw.

  Well… This plain stone disc at the back is the first bead I was ever given, when I was only a little bit older than you. I made this one myself, whittled it from whalebone. Bjarni gave me this red and yellow one when he came back from Norway, the summer before he was drowned. Those amber ones were my mother’s; she came from Gotland. The blue glass? I bought it from a trader with dark, smiling eyes who put into our harbour the same year that the dun cow had twins…

  Of course, we don’t know if the woman buried at Westness with her baby left older children behind.

  Among the other furnished graves at Westness, there were two men buried in boats: both vessels were færings, the ancestor of the clinker-built four-oared boats used in the Northern Isles for a millennium, like the yole used by Jeems o’Quoys in Robert Rendall’s poem. One of the boats still had a rowlock and a fishing-line runner, both carved from deer antler, in situ. The men bristled with weapons, but they had farming tools as well, and the runner, the vadbein, suggests they were also deep-water fishermen. Analysis of their bones bears this out: the women were sourcing their food on the land; the men were getting much of their protein from the sea.

  Over on this side of the water, maybe a generation later, another woman was buried in the ramparts of the Broch of Gurness, her flagstone-lined grave covered with a low mound. She was buried near a farmstead, and presumably she lived there. Water had seeped into the grave, destroying most of the organic material including most of the bone, except for her skull. Still, we can tell she was wearing a dress of finely woven wool, as the bronze of her brooches had corroded around the fabric before the wool itself rotted away, leaving a perfect impression of the weave in the metal. Around her neck she wore an iron ring with pendants, including an amuletic hammer, which we usually call a ‘Thor’s hammer’.

  I wonder about the relationship between these two women from Westness and Gurness: they could easily have known each other, their lives overlapping in time and space, their homes practically intervisible. A clinker-built boat buries its prow in the shelving sand of Evie; the young man and woman who farm at Aikerness come down to meet their middle-aged neighbour. He’s crossed the dangerous rosts to ask them to a funeral: They were both doing so well, but then she sickened with a fever. We tried the baby on cow’s milk but they died on the same day. The young bride at Aikerness keeps a solemn face. Every older woman she knows has a corner of the farm where some of her children are buried. She has no children herself; she’s only been married since Yule. And yet at the same time she has a flash of malicious satisfaction. That bitch, always lording it over me, flashing her jewellery. Much good may it do her now.

  There’s a beautiful Ministry of Works pen-and-ink drawing of the Gurness woman’s burial in excavation, by J. S. Richardson, dated 15–16 August 1939. It shows the stone-lined grave from above, and in section, from the side and from the foot. Her skull has fallen to the right, and though the other bones are gone apart from a scrap of tibia, a length of femur, her possessions still map out the shape of her body: oval brooches above her breasts, her sickle at her waist. Richardson has added little details that vividly evoke the setting: the short grass growing around the excavation, cross-hatching on the stone slabs. Looking at the drawing, I can hear the terns shriek in the mid-August sky. It’s the time of the County Show; the puffins will be leaving their burrows and heading back to the haaf; winter is just around the corner.

  Thor’s hammers are seen as blazoning paganism. But they only become popular when Scandinavia is teetering on the brink of conversion to Christianity, and maybe they develop as a backlash, an assertion against the talismanic power of the cross. Overwhelmingly, they turn up in women’s graves. There is a comic poem from the Edda, about how Thor’s hammer was stolen from his bedside by a giant whose outrageous ransom demand is the hand in marriage of Freyja, goddess of sex, gold and war. But without the hammer the gods will not be able to fight against the forces of darkness in the battle at the end of time. So Thor dresses up as Freyja, with a thick veil to hide his beard, and goes off to the wedding. When the phallic hammer is brought in and placed on his lap to hallow the bride, he seizes it and attacks the giants, with predictable results. So it’s not only a weapon, it’s a fertility symbol. Thor means thunder. The woman buried at the Broch of Gurness may have been given the Thor’s hammer amulet at her own wedding, for rain at the right time, good crops and healthy babies.

  How pagan were these people? Hard to tell: the evidence of cult practice and ritual centre, the big buildings, the huge burial mounds, the evidence of sacrifice found in Norway, Sweden and Denmark is largely absent from Orkney’s archaeological record. If the colonists brought other gods with them, such as Freyja and Odin, they did so in fugitive materials such as wood, textile and leather, and in their minds. For an understanding of their world-view we have to turn to Iceland’s medieval literature. The pagan world-view constructed by Old Norse poetry is brutal, relentless. The best death is the death in battle, and the chosen warrior will live on in Odin’s Slaughter-Hall, Valhalla, only to fight again and lose in that last battle of gods against giants, when all creation goes down into darkness. Winter in The Wanderer is a sign that our true home is elsewhere than on this earth: the Norse pagans thought the end of the world would be heralded by fimbulwinter. Their world is every bit as fickle as the Wanderer-poet’s, but their afterlife only offers ultimate defeat. There is a deep suspicion about human motives, the petty and self-seeking impulses that govern action. No one is given the benefit of the doubt.

  Harshness, ruthlessness and pragmatism govern the conversion of the Norse world to Christianity, too. The only recorded miracle of Olaf the Holy, Norway’s patron saint, was to turn bread into stone. When King Olaf Tryggvason required Jarl Sigurd of Orkney to convert in 995, the only other option offered was death. If you refuse, I’ll have you killed on the spot, and I swear that I’ll ravage every island with fire and steel.

  In Hávamál, a poem of Odinic wisdom which survives in a thirteenth-century Icelandic anthology of old poetry, there are many unforgiving nuggets of advice, including:

  Cattle die, and kinsmen die,

  And so one dies one’s self;

  But a noble name will never die,

  If good renown one gets.

  Cattle die, and kinsmen die,

  And so one dies one’s self;

  One thing now that never dies,

  The fame of a dead man’s deeds.

  The Old Norse refrain, ‘Deyr fé, deyja frændr, deyr sjálfr it sama’ is very close to the Wanderer-poet’s Old English: ‘Her bið feoh læne, her bið freond læne, her bið mon læne…’ ‘Here cattle/wealth are on loan, here friends are on loan, here mon is on loan…’ Old English mon is tricky to translate here – yes, it means man but it also means gender-neutral human being and can be used as the impersonal pronoun one (as in German). Here, I’m tempted to translate mon as oneself – you don’t own yourself, you’re on loan, but from what? God, family, the cosmos…

  There’s a common currency shared by the Old English and Old Norse poems, as revealed by the pairing of transient friend and fee (which means both cattle and money); a shared cultural tradition, and yet such a different conclusion. For the Christian Anglo-Saxons, the transience of the world is a perverse, paradoxical guarantee of the permanence of heaven. For the pagan Norse, you only live as long as others choose to remember you. The two snatches of poem are so close, and yet the slippage of meaning creates a yawning gap between.

  Historians talk about conversion and Christianization as though these are finit
e processes. I’ve just been writing glibly about the Christian Picts and Anglo-Saxons, the pagan Norse. But the truth – as any priest will tell you – is that every human soul is a battlefield, and conversion begins again in every generation. Early medieval historians debate whether Orkney was converted to Christianity under the Picts, or the Norse; but in the summer of 1797 the visiting evangelist James Haldane observed that ‘The islands of Orkney, by what we actually witnessed, have been as much in need of the true Gospel of Jesus Christ, so far as respects the preaching of it, as any of the islands of the Pacific Ocean.’ This was less than twenty years after Cook first set eyes on Hawai’i and exactly twelve centuries after the death of St Columba.

  A friend of mine, a girl on the edge of adolescence, one of the youngest Polar Bears, a brilliant musician and talented athlete, an aspiring cosmonaut and one of the most life-enhancing people I know, is suffering existential anxiety. It’s not so much that she will die: what eats away at her is that she will be forgotten. Her mother and I have no words of consolation. Yes, sweetheart, you will be forgotten. And even the tiny minority of us who are remembered at all survive only as symbols, distorted reflections in the riddling mirror, empty shells, the puppets of history, verbal tics, fossils. We still say mesmerize but who remembers Mesmer? Rich lives are reduced to mute ornaments of bronze in a glass case, mirrors on which later generations can speculate. At times like this the consolation offered by Christianity seems most alluring: not just eternal life, but eternally being valued. Every quirk of my individual personality, every perceived flickering fragment of Now, all filed away and curated – cared for – in God’s moth- and rust-free museum.

  My mother’s younger sister Barbara outlived her by over a decade. She was an observant artist and poet and my godmother as well as my aunt, and she moved in to a nursing home towards the end of her life. While she is sorting and discarding, preparatory to the move, she says to me, ‘There’s something upstairs I’d like you to have.’ We go up, her on the stairlift and me keeping pace on my legs, and in the spare bedroom she shows me a little chair, balloon-backed, under a faded and frayed cover with a pattern of fruit. The purple upholstery fabric below is pristine. ‘This is very special,’ she confides. ‘It came from Osborne House. Queen Victoria gave it to your great-grandfather.’

  Where is the truth? I look back across the chasm to my mother and my aunt on the other side. Down into the widening crack between us there sifts a continuous dust of memories, conversations, ephemera, worm-riddled wood, powdery rust, half-remembered gestures, the inflection of a familiar, beloved voice. My mother wore Chanel No. 5, and so did I, for years, until I finally acknowledged it didn’t suit me. But a whiff of it bridges the chasm, throwing me back into the safe warm space of her lap. When I hear her voice on an old recording I’m astonished by her clipped, fronted vowels – her accent is beginning to sound archaic to me, a ghost from a vanished world. Sometimes the floating spirits are so close, sometimes so very far away.

  I leaf through the old photo albums, two little girls in monochrome building sandcastles on a beach – are they me and my sister on Diani in 1974, or my mother and my aunt on the Isle of Wight in 1932, or my grandmother and my great-aunt at Margate or Whitstable in 1904? My grandmother died just before we moved to Kenya: if she had still been alive my mother would never have felt able to leave the UK. I remember little more than a presence, a capacious lap (but I was very small), her voice reading Beatrix Potter. Have I imagined the smell of talc? In photographs she is a formidable figure: upright, broad-shouldered and strong-jawed, staring the camera down whether in white satin and feathers for Court or sturdy shoes and tweed on Scottish grouse moors, or in uniform as a senior figure in the Girl Guides. But there was more to her. ‘Ma always regretted not having driven in the Paris–Dakar rally,’ my mother said once. And my aunt wrote this:

  My widowed mother

  skied down the Parsenne run

  aged sixty. Drove alone

  in a wonky car through the Masai Mara

  wearing her drip-dry blouse

  from Marks and Spencer. Took

  a donkey to the rose-red city,

  a camel to Samarkand. A magic

  carpet to a far horizon,

  and then came home again.

  What did you see, Mother? we asked her

  So much, she said.

  So much to tell your father.

  What are people for? Friends die, kinsmen die, a woman dies herself, our names die too, in the end, despite the contrary assertion of Hávamál, and there is no heavenly foundation. Hold your beloved dead close. People are for each other, and that’s all there is.

  *

  Tide and surf high, moon low, westering and golden. Lightning flashing against blue-black clouds in the southern sky. Big swell crashing over the breakwater, hard to keep my footing, smack in the face, rolling over, salt water rush through the sinuses. Waves in such high peaks and low troughs that the seals – many seals – and I couldn’t see each other until we were almost on top of each other. Last swim for a week – glad it was such a sensational one.

  *

  Seal Lullaby (Rudyard Kipling)

  Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,

  And black are the waters that sparkled so green.

  The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward tofind us,

  At rest in the hollows that rustle between.

  Where billow meets billow, then soft be thy pillow,

  Oh weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!

  The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,

  Asleep in the arms of the slow swinging seas!

  The events of the last few years have forced me to reframe and reclaim the concept of depression. I had internalized the idea that it is an illness, a chemical imbalance, that you cannot blame the person who is depressed, to the point that that I had become incapable of seeing how this is only part of the story. It is my kind and wise GP who tells me that everyone is different, that there is a spectrum, a complex interdigitation of personality (‘call it chemistry if you want to’), experience and environment. ‘I’m not depressed,’ I said to him. ‘I can’t be. I’m a happy person. I’m strong, full of positive energy. Maybe I’m a bad wife but I’m a good mother. My sister calls me a force of nature. I cope. I’m creative. Yes, I’m stressed, but who isn’t? I deal with it, meet deadlines, speak in public. I eat well, exercise, box, run, swim...’

  He just looked at me, this rangy man in blue shirt and chinos, who has been announcing his intention to retire as long as we have been in Orkney, and yet somehow is still here today to meet my eyes and call me out on the crying, the not-sleeping, the erratic behaviour, the hair-trigger temper, the longing to swim out into the dark and drift, let the cold take me, go into that happy place where the endolphins swim in my bloodstream and welcome me home, where my orca comes to find me, and none of it matters any more.

  ‘Do you ever think about harming yourself?’

  I nod, and put on my listening face, and reach for the form he offers me. It’s a way of deflecting attention. He wants me to talk, not listen, but I’m reticent.

  A lot of what he is saying makes sense.

  Nonetheless I reject his diagnosis. Leaving the surgery, coming out into Orkney air, the fierce joy of the sun and wind on my face, a packet of pills in my hand, I can’t accept this as depression. And even if it is, I am wary of medicalizing powerful emotion. But he’s the man in the white coat, metaphorically if not literally, and I’m the good girl who tries to please. I read the list of possible and probable side-effects.

  Nausea – sea-sickness. What about sea-wellness, instead?

  Sleeplessness, headaches. I’ve got those already, thanks.

  Loss of libido. I do not want a drug that will take the edge off pleasure as well as pain.

  Can you get swimming on prescription? It would have to come with a warning of the dangers of addiction.

  It occurs to me that I do not know anyone
who has started sea swimming and then given it up.

  Whatever it is I am feeling, it is like the weather – powerful, external, sweeping over me. However hard it is to face, I don’t want to cower indoors in my duvet. I want to ride the blast.

  I think of my father, diagnosed with depression and prescribed SSRIs because his grief, two years after my mother’s death, was still so acute, and the various health professionals who took an interest – GP, district nurse, social worker – didn’t know what else to do with him. No one listened when I said angrily that my mother had been an extraordinary woman, that two years of grief seemed the least tribute my father could offer her. He was bereft, homeless, treading the paths of exile. Outside in the overgrown Islington garden the lilac and lavatera were in bloom but for him, as for the Wanderer-poet, the night-shadow thickened from the north, sending harsh hail to men on earth. All was wretched there.

  He tried to kill himself, putting a plastic bag over his head and fastening it with a belt. He was found by his cleaner, Mary, as I learned when a call from the paramedics summoned me out of a seminar I was giving at Birkbeck on the Lindisfarne Gospels. When he was asked why, he said he’d been feeling lonely and fed-up. His discharge summary calls him eloquent, frail… His consultant noted, ‘Apparently suicide was a rational decision.’ Seven more years of steady deterioration followed, the insults of stroke after little stroke, progressively degenerating maculae leading to near-blindness, repeated bouts of pneumonia putting him in hospital, repeated courses of ever-more obscure antibiotics hauling him back from the brink. Food and drink were banned, and he was fed by gastric tube, enduring the further indignity of nappies. They used to call pneumonia the old man’s friend, because it put a swift end to the struggle, but not any more. This was my father’s fimbulwinter, his year after year of winter which could only end in defeat and darkness.