by Gil McNeil
During my competition years I was lucky enough to be involved with Surfers Against Sewage, a charity set up by Chris Hines and a few other surfers who were fed up going surfing in filthy waters, coming out with sore throats and bad stomachs. Their aim is to clean up our seas to benefit all water users, and for four years I went on the tour bus they organised, travelling around Great Britain to a different place each day, with press calls and other media activities, school talks and fundraisers, and we met some great people along the way.
And now for the first time in my life I don’t want to run away to other shores. I’ve set up a surf school with my partner, based at Saunton Sands where I learnt to surf, and I’ve got a whole new perspective; I’m not just surfing for myself any more. When you start teaching something, you have to learn yourself again. Everything you have been doing instinctively for the last fifteen years has now got to be explained in great detail, and it gets fairly technical in parts. But it’s been fantastic introducing so many people to the sport, and it’s even better when you get to see their big smiles when they stand up for the first time and ride a wave into the shore. It gives me huge satisfaction. And last summer I was involved in a girls-only coaching club, and as word got around we had thirty local girls out there, loving every minute of it, which was brilliant. The club was free, and the idea was to get more women involved in the sport. We’d help coach them and give them advice on boards and other tips along the way, and it was a huge success, and most of the girls are regulars in the water to this day, which is great to see. Surfing has taken me all over the world, and now it feels like it’s brought me home again.
COUNTERWORLD
RUSSELL CELYN JONES
SCENTS THAT BELONG to the wild are appallingly sad when incarcerated, and when such a spoor her voice came spinning out, following him through the marina to where he had left his yacht. Now the only way to stop her voice carolling inside his head was to sail out to meet a storm in progress.
As he left the mainland behind, a great bank of violet cloud amassed in the sky. The wind hardened and his sails grew taut as skin over bone. As night fell it began to rain in sheets, blanketing the surface of the water. He brought the yacht down to storm canvas as seas lashed the deck and he heard the first crash of breaking crockery from below. On the crests he saw merchant ships running for cover. In the wave troughs he saw nothing at all. The going was claustrophobic and dark; the storm jib spilled the wind, the canvas flopped and mooned. Leaks appeared in the coach roof and between seals in the windows. His only home was structurally insecure. Yet the way she answered the lightest touch of the helm gave him pleasure. Through the darkness he saw the three white flashes every fifteen seconds of the Smalls Light, turning to red as he drifted into the explosives dumping ground off Hats and Barrels.
He was on the fringes of the storm now. A mile ahead the sea smoked blue and yellow. A tearing ebb tide meeting the wind carved huge escarpments in front of his eyes, waves that stood up on end like brick edifices. They slowed in speed but increased in height. The only light that could be had was from the phosphorescence on breaking crests and in their fiery wakes. The sea kept crashing onto his deck like something trying again and again to take possession. Sheets of water hitting him in the face, in the chest and knocking him down became routine. He was shivering inside his oilskins. Salt lined his mouth and burned his eyes.
This was as close as he could get to the point of no return. Sailing any further into the storm would be an act of self-destruction. He bore away with the boat hard down on its rail.
He’d gone ashore to buy a stern gland for the engine when he’d run into that scent escaping from a florist’s door, reminding him so lethally of Laura and all the things she used to say. It had caught him off guard and then his heart began to ache.
They had met over twenty years ago at the age of thirty-three, and so confident of their love they wanted the world to know. But the world then was in bad shape, at least through their eyes. With an innocence it staggers him to think of now, they believed the world would improve if only it could be infected by their love. Everywhere they looked they saw the machinations of a police state, a repressive anti-working-class establishment. Out of love they shared a great indignation and held out the prospect of a better world that would be worthy of them. It took them a little while to find the right party to join, whose members talked in similar utopian undertones about fashioning a new future. Followers of Trotsky, this party had cadres all over the country, in industry, universities and unions. And as soon as they became active within its ranks, Travis and Laura discovered it was also an entrist organisation, infiltrating the Labour Party from top to bottom, from the National Executive to the Young Socialists. But by then it was too late to reassess their commitment to the revolution. They knew too much for the party ever to consider releasing them. In time, the party became a sort of family without children, and the secrecy of the movement added to their sense of cohesion. Its siege-like mentality enfranchised them.
For ten years they kept their faith, kept on course for a more just future, in which military generals, admirals, senior civil servants, police chiefs, judges would be sacked and the systems they once represented replaced by a socialist state. There would be an end to unemployment, wasteful advertising, the monarchy, the House of Lords. Science and medicine would reach their full potential and eradicate illness, pollution, poverty and wars. Capitalism was on the brink of collapse, or so they believed. They waited for Britain to teeter on the verge of social anarchy and then their organisation would assume the leadership of the Labour Party and turn Britain into a socialist state.
But the revolution never happened. A new order did evolve and it was the order of money. Currency is made from the wood of the primal forest and appeals to baser instincts than theirs. So they had squandered ten years of their lives on a lost cause. Something that started out of love now turned against that love and they began inflicting wounds on one another.
After sailing all day and through the night, he saw the low-lying Scilly Isles shimmering on the horizon. They didn’t look solid forms at all and the separate islands split from the pack at the pace he approached, slowly gaining pigment and shape. Razorbills, gannets glided over the water in front of him. The wind had backed to the south-west by the time he got among the islands, on course for St Agnes. Soon he was struggling against the tide to keep two landmarks in transit so as not to collide with the Spanish Ledges, where he changed course again, sliding up past Cuckold’s Ledge. He made his entry into Porth Conger between the Calf and Cow rocks, weaving through lobster-pot buoys and power-cable lines. With little more than a four-metre clearance, he motor-sailed onto a mooring, pulled up its rope on the hook and tied onto the bow cleat.
On such islands, where there is an absence of mechanical hectoring, the silence can itself be tangible. The air was pure and greening, cast by the hues of the ocean. This was where Laura lived. In all these years he’d known where to find her, but had avoided the place, like he avoided all memories of her, and now he was here he couldn’t decide whether to go ashore or not.
Two fishermen in identical yellow oilskins were moving around near the quay; Siamese flames burning oxygen out of the air, their skin wrecked by the same sun, full heads of grey hair, several days’ beard and impenetrable eyes. They didn’t acknowledge his presence, declined even to look at him, and that further disorientated him, made him doubt his bearings. Maybe he’d slept without realising it, missed the Scillies completely and landed in the acoustically dead Zone of Silence off Vancouver Island, where no bells or sirens penetrate. He went below and brought his log up to date, an old routine that suddenly felt entirely pointless to him. It was obvious what he had to do. He changed out of oilskins and shaved in cold water, ate some water biscuits and cold baked beans. When he had nourished himself, made himself presentable, he lowered the tender off the side.
Bordering the path were fields of bright red and orange flowers. Garden walls vanished under
cascading yellow blooms. Proteas pushed through outcrops of rocks. Out of this colour and bloom a woman appeared in the corner of his vision, pruning her wallflowers and dropping the foliage into a wheelbarrow. She was side on, her hair hiding her face. But as he closed in on her she disappeared inside her whitewashed cottage; a subtle but deliberate move by one person to avoid an encounter with a stranger, an island vicissitude. An after-image of her peach sweater and lemon ankle-length skirt remained.
The cottage door was ajar. Travis knocked gently, then stepped across the threshold, lowering his head to clear the door frame, and entered a small kitchen that was busy with earthenware pots stuffed with cut flowers. Shelves were stacked with dried herbs, cans of powdered milk, baked beans . . . the kind of supplies he kept on board. Carrots, beetroots and potatoes filled a wicker basket sitting on the flagstone floor. The scrubbed wooden table was buckled with deep grooves, and supported more flowers in vases.
The smell of flowers acted like a narcotic upon him. The mixed heavy scent of bridal-white trumpets, scarlet bells and orange daisies numbed him to her entrance. She emerged from the lounge and stood in the kitchen for several seconds before he could mumble an explanation. ‘The door was open,’ he said.
‘I was just wondering whether I should believe my eyes.’
Her face was gently folded like water, the strong eyes surrounded by ripples of loose flesh. Her fair hair had acquired grey dusty streaks. She had the look of someone who has run from one thing and into something else she hadn’t accounted for. Laura was a woman in the country, but the country was not in her. She was dressed in clothes that would be suitable to sleep in – an old Indian cotton shift and peach sweatshirt covering heavy breasts. He felt attracted immediately and checked it. Cradled in her arms was a large bunch of long-stemmed white narcissi.
‘May I ask, is this pure coincidence?’
Travis smiled awkwardly but said nothing. She didn’t smile at all. The space between them was as much a work of the imagination to fill as of memory.
The platitudes continued a while, which neither he nor Laura would be able to recall. So overwhelmed nothing they said could stick. Words flying out of their mouths dispersed like smoke. That they’d once had a relationship that began over twenty years ago seemed more like an unconfirmed rumour. Their former intimacy was on a shelf too high to reach. The only agreement they could make was to take a walk outside.
Strolling in the direction of the disused lighthouse she asked, ‘How did you get here? The ferry’s not running yet.’ He heard the torn fabric of her voice.
‘I sailed.’
‘You have a yacht?’
‘In Porth Conger.’
‘If the wind changes you’re going to have to move it. To Killier or Periglis.’
‘Depends on how long I stay.’
‘What does that depend on?’
Travis didn’t reply, didn’t know how to reply. That decision was too far in the future. He continued looking at her, through her. He had to play this one out for as long as it felt right to do so. The silence stretched between them, matched by the silence around them.
He tried to imagine her living on this salt-blasted rock, sleeping through its harsh winters in a cell of a cottage. If she’d transformed the emptiness he felt there into an elevated state of being, he couldn’t tell by looking at her. He didn’t know who she was any more. The former political activist had become something other. Yet he was keen to discover her secret for combating emptiness. It might help him combat his own. But such questions were beyond his ability to compose. To understand her, her emotions, even her morality, he was just going to have to read the stones, the gorse and the flowers in this Zen garden in the sea.
Near the western reach of the island, she showed off the field where she grew various breeds of narcissi. Most of the flowers had been harvested, yet he could still smell a powerful scent from the path. The bi-coloured Soleil D’Or was her main crop. Other blooms included the Scilly White, obtained by the monks of St Nicholas from France and the Grand Monarch, which came from China. There were Primo, Avalance, King Alfred and Fortune trumpets growing in the field, surrounded with escallonia hedges as a windbreak. She explained how she parboiled the bulbs in warm water to accelerate growth, with a dash of formalin to destroy eel-worm, and heated the soil with propane gas.
It was aversion-talk and they both knew it.
A whole orchestra was playing in the sky. It was the migratory season and different species of birds were singing their regrets. She said how every night for the past two weeks birds had been fluttering around the lighthouse on Bishop’s Rock, creating a blizzard effect in the rotating beams. In the morning hundreds of dead birds that had flown too hard at the light lay at the base of the lighthouse.
Now he did ask her what it was like to live on a tiny island, what isolation felt like to her. ‘I have friends . . . farmers and fishermen and their wives. I know people on Tresco and on Bryher. Not so many from St Mary’s. They’re all Tories there.’ She darted him a sly look that connected to the past.
The wind was still pouring in from the south-west, fresh and stiffening. He kept one eye on the clouds forming over Fastnet and the other on the coastal path along which they progressed in single file. Walking behind him, she pulled on his sleeve as they passed a chambered entrance under a granite slab. ‘They found a skeleton inside there a few years ago, sitting up and begging. Some old hero who came here to die. Did you know King Arthur’s buried in the Scillies?’
‘Arthur’s got about six hundred burial sites,’ he said.
‘Everyone tries to claim him as theirs, but only Scilly has the real man.’
He was wondering how a dialectical materialist becomes a mythologist, when she continued: ‘Some of the outlying islands were inhabited by women only. Imagine that, Travis.’
‘Maybe they lured Arthur onto the rocks.’
By now they were sitting on a bench. He wondered if she’d come here to die, too, along with all the holy men and heroes who’d hoped to find immortality in a mild climate. Certainly there was a feel of death all around, emanating from the Western Rocks that pierced the sea like rows of broken teeth. They too were burial grounds, but for men who’d not chosen to die. For African slaves who’d not even chosen to sail. Ten thousand men were incarcerated out there – two thousand from the same naval fleet of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who escaped the wreck of his flagship with his treasure chest and pet greyhound until an island woman found him and slit his throat for his emerald ring.
This was a lethal place Travis had sailed into. ‘You have a fearsome reputation,’ he said after they’d been silent some minutes. ‘I felt a little nervous coming in.’
She broke into his thoughts faster than he could form a defence. ‘The Vikings came here for the tin. The Romans used it as a penal colony. The Spanish eyed up the place as a launching pad for their English offensive. No man comes here just for fun. So why have you come, Travis?’
He turned away from her to the spinal Western Rocks, an image for the end of all journeys. He had no answers to give about lost futures, lost love, and wandered away from her down the path to where the sea stirred like a hunchback in its sleep, shifting around its underwater freight. It moaned, gurgled and sighed. The sea that produced all sorts of noises, including the sound of asphyxia, was now the foundation for his own nomadic life, with limpets, crabs, snails and bloodsuckers as his neighbours. It was a single mass of mindless energy, a shifting desert, a killing floor.
She caught up with him on the path where he was standing staring out to sea. ‘I think I’m going mad,’ he said.
Laura started to laugh, covering her mouth with her hand and spilling apologies through her cracked fingers. It wasn’t funny, but he laughed anyway, despite himself, his seriousness, and it brought him momentarily back to life. With that sensation came a stirring of a historic sexual attraction.
They walked back past the primary school Margaret Thatcher had visited near the end of her
reign, after being betrayed by her cabinet on her return from a Paris summit. They’d asked her to resign and she came out here. ‘Of course, the old girl chose to come on Saturday, when the school was closed,’ Laura said. ‘The kids turned out anyway and watched the Grand National with her on TV. She was charmed, apparently. It is quite idyllic, I suppose. Children walk to school and pick wild flowers on the way home. No cars, no perverts hiding in bushes.’
Every year Laura went to the mainland before harvesting began in October; every moment she spent on the mainland was a moment lost, she said. On this point Travis agreed; the rituals of mainland Britain were alien to him, too. The car-infested towns, the monotonous suburbs, the constant catcalls about where to go, what to do when you get there, what to wear.
‘That’s why I live on an island too, all boats are islands.’
‘Our ancestors built temples to their gods,’ she said, ‘and we build shopping malls. Don’t tell me the world’s progressed.’
‘There was a time when we wanted to progress it . . . by force.’
She wasn’t drawn by the personal code in this statement and said instead how baffling it was that the British had prevailed against organised Marxist-Leninist movements while allowing themselves to be colonised in the Tory southern heartlands by hordes of Eastern European refugees, many from USSR satellite nations.
