Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  I believe the Norwegian expeditions remained for him one of the high spots of his life, to judge from what I remember now of his accounts in the days when we were still talking. There were comrades and good fellowship, a certain amount of expertise and danger, breathtaking landscapes. In those days such parts of Norway were presumably not much travelled except by climbers, probably little more than Iceland was when Auden and MacNeice went there a year or two earlier. There were language problems and discomforts (great stinging clegs) and pleasures (kilos of wild strawberries). Above all, literally, there were mountains. My father returned in states of exaltation: Kolåstind … Vellesaeterhorn … Kvitegga. The mountains.

  Another high spot of his life, like that of many a young man at the time, must have been the war. What other set of circumstances could have turned a recently qualified houseman into a Major in the RAMC and taken him out to India? The Himalayas. It is hard to get details of exactly where he went and for how long, but I remember his accounts of climbing and his face would be transfigured by the images behind it of majestic peaks and snowfields and glaciers of savage and unearthly beauty. He had stood, if not on the very roof of the world (for he was an amateur climber and no Mallory), then at least in an upper storey and from it had gazed eastwards across Tibet to the country of his birth, to where his own father was at the moment racked with typhoid in a Japanese concentration camp. He must also have looked westwards towards where he had left a newly married wife and an infant son.

  Afterwards he was very quiet about it all, becoming more so as I evinced my assertive uninterest in his boring old mountains. But along the way he had secreted his own treasures, strange and beautiful pictures taken with his Zeiss Ikon. One of the earliest, a picture of Smørskredtind taken for Those Kingly Days … he kept framed on the wall of his study for the rest of his life, which for a man of almost painful modesty must have been a token of deep private significance. Perhaps as career and family took their toll he came more and more to recognise the appropriateness of that title. For years I assumed it was a quotation from Shakespeare, a dying Falstaff dreaming of his youth, maybe. It was not until recently that I read the album properly through and on the last page found the stanza from which the quotation comes. It is by G. W. Young, the mountaineering poet and probably the greatest English climber of his generation:

  What if I live no more those kingly days?

  their night sleeps with me still.

  I dream my feet upon the starry ways;

  my heart rests in the hill.

  I may not grudge the little left undone;

  I hold the heights, I keep the dreams I won.

  But at the time all this was wasted on his son. Nor, sadly for him, did I share his passion for ships which in those days pre-dating mass air travel were still invested with a degree of romance quite hard to imagine now. What complex associations ships must have had for any expatriate who necessarily viewed them as instruments which could unite as well as sever families, bearing them laboriously off on journeys across half the globe, each mile of which was truly felt to be travelled. Like many schoolboys then he knew all the shipping lines together with their flags and funnel insignia. He could stand wistfully at Tilbury or Southampton and know merely from its name and livery more or less exactly where each ship was bound, from where it was likely to have come. (It would not be at all the same to stand today at Heathrow and see a Boeing of the British Airways fleet. Not only would destination or provenance remain opaque but the aircraft itself would be identical to that of any other airline, differing only in its paint. My father could say ‘P & O’ or ‘Viceroy of India’ just by glimpsing a silhouette far out to sea.)

  Under those conditions the world was viewed differently and experienced differently. Journeys meant and felt something different, the lands eventually reached were not the same lands reached today because they occupied a different place in the traveller’s imagination. A change in transportation changes the destination. This sounds strange but nevertheless it is so. In a trivial way this was demonstrated one day when I knew enough about the currents off Tiwarik to swim to Sabay, have lunch and swim back. At that moment both places took up different positions in my mind and since then each has felt different. This is a mysterious law and it must have been well known to my father as to countless thousands of mariners and passengers who overlapped with the air age.

  I can visualise my father most clearly now not with his camera, with which he was so accomplished, but with his battered and treasured pair of binoculars. I think the reason is that whenever I glimpsed him with his eye pressed to his camera’s viewfinder I knew that what he saw at that moment we would later see ourselves and feel obliged to admire. But when I glanced sideways and saw his face concentrated into the eyepieces of his binoculars I knew he was somewhere else and seeing things nobody would ever be privy to except when he elected to share them. One holiday when I was very young I walked with him to the top of a cliff somewhere on the southern coast of England. Down below was a small port and outside this in the roads a warship of sorts lay at anchor. My father became excited.

  ‘By golly, look, it’s the Matapan,’ he said and trained his binoculars on it to confirm his certainty. He then handed me the glasses, taught me how to focus the individual eyepieces and then the entire instrument, and spent some time on his stomach in the grass next to me pointing out details of the ship below. I now remember only its grey paint, its small size, the circular all-weather clearview windows set in the raked panes of the bridge and, above all, its name. Matapan. For quite thirty years this name had associations of something sweet and bitter: ‘marzipan’ and ‘pa’, probably. Then after I had first visited the Philippines I had a vivid dream about the ship which seemed to come out of nowhere, out of the depths of memory. The ship itself wore my father’s face: its face and hair were grey and it seemed to be snarling as if in terrible rage. I awoke in the grip of infantile fear. The source of this dream was one thing, but I puzzled for days to find what had made it take that particular shape. Then I thought of the new language I was learning. In Tagalog matápang means ‘strong’ and ‘courageous’ with, in the case of alcoholic drink, connotations of ‘fiery’ and ‘fierce’. It was quite precisely my father’s rages I had feared. Living with him in the school holidays had been like walking across mined territory. One never understood quite why a particular step had been false beyond the fact that it had blown one up. The explosions were terrible.

  A vignette from yet another holiday is imbued for me with a piercing melancholy. I have no idea now what we were doing there but we were at a place called Allhallows in the Thames Estuary, just downstream from Tilbury. It was probably mid-September, late tea-time. The afternoon was thick with mist. I recall only a damp marshy place at the edge of a waveless stretch of disappearing water. In this half-light my father was standing, sweeping with his binoculars the bank of fog which had rolled in from the North Sea. From somewhere within this fog came a deep bass hooting which gave everything an atmosphere of utter doom. After a while he said: ‘I think it’s the old Burma Star. Quick’ and handed me the binoculars. Somewhere in the grey I caught a glimpse of a greyer bulk out there before the fog swallowed it up. It might have been some prodigious mammal heading seawards to its secret burial ground. Then from behind that glooming opacity the heavy sound of a ship’s engines rolled across the water. ‘Yes,’ said my father in satisfaction, ‘that’ll be the old Star. Ohh.’ He gave a great sigh. ‘Think of it: Marseilles, Genoa, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Rangoon …’ His litany made me want to cry.

  The last memory I have of him with his binoculars did involve real tears. It was our last holiday together. I had just left Canterbury and was about to go to Oxford. I was miserably in love, crotchety, not wanting to be on a family holiday at all, not really wanting to be anywhere. My father now had less than a year to live. To this day I do not know whether he knew it. Doctors are as good as everybody else at concealing truths from themselves. We were in the south of F
rance, had been to Avignon, had seen Arles, had passed north of Marseilles to rejoin the coast below Fréjus. At some point well inland, it might have been near Draguignan or even as far east as Grasse, we picnicked on high ground. My father trained his binoculars on the horizon. Glowering at some pâté I was only half-aware of a sound he made. Then looking up I could see from my position slightly behind and to one side of him an eye brimming with tears. I was shocked. It had not been a good day so far, nor an easy holiday. Horrid late-adolescent egotist that I was I chose to interpret his tears as disappointment with his son. Full of self-pity I slumped further.

  I am now sure my father’s tears were for nothing so immediate or prosaic. Most likely they came at one of those moments when anyone of a certain age can sit amid the ruins of a picnic and be suddenly unable to look through a pair of binoculars without seeing something besides what is merely imaged. Maybe from the perspective of an anxious and complicated life he was looking across eighty miles of shimmering French clarity at the southernmost tip of the Alps and feeling once more with a panging rush what mountains were to him, had always been, at a former uncontaminated vision which his every turning since had seemed only to muddy. Perhaps he knew, perhaps not, how little time he had left; but at forty-six and at his professional eminence he would have known he could never again find the time or fitness to set foot on a glacier or brew tea with meltwater from Annapurna. For that matter nor would fate once more afford him such blissful circumstance that he could be invited to sit in the pilot’s seat of an RAF DC-3 and, completely unqualified, fly thirty officers and men for a quarter of an hour high above Burma. In their way those, too, had been kingly days.

  *

  What is he to me now? I am at last old enough and temperate enough to be able to see what I have inherited from him. A physical likeness, certainly. Now and again I surprise a look on my face like the one he wore for his television appearance as a neurological expert in the series ‘Your Life In Their Hands’: part wistful, part stuffed. We are still opposites in much that I was determined we should be, but more and more I catch my own voice as out of nowhere saying ‘He would have liked that,’ or ‘If only he could see this.’ There was, finally, a part of him which escaped his parental family’s urge to do good. It escaped his own doctoring and his begetting and his breadwinning, it undercut his yearning for respectable stability and could be caught gazing through binoculars at distant ranges where such things were of no account. In short there must have been times when that part of him wished me dead.

  I am immeasurably cheered by this. It is a liberating realisation for a son to have because it frees him from any obligation to reciprocate that messy parental turmoil which masquerades as a simple and straightforward love. Instead I can meet him on that other level about which he could not speak and I would not have listened. For the first time I feel a certain closeness to him. Given how father and son hardly knew one another and scarcely ever talked it is strange this feeling I have that of all people it is he who would most readily understand what it is I am doing in the forests of Kansulay and among the reefs of Tiwarik, although he would have been as diffident about attempting to put it into words as I am ultimately unable. This reflection serves partly to remind me that I have no son with whom to share an experience, any more than my own father had.

  Now, far too late, I miss him. He is long gone.

  *

  The cordillera opposite has stilled. Behind it the dawn is coming and the strengthening light has frozen its black outline in mid-skip. The stars are dimming and night is leaving in a great turquoise sigh. I get stiffly to my feet and stretch. Down there beneath the sea across whose face the dawn wind skitters the parrotfish will be slipping out of the mucus sleeping-bags they made themselves for the night. Among the corals shifts are changing: the predators of darkness are giving place to the predators of day. Between them are a suspended twenty minutes or so of near-inactivity, a general pause as if the attention of all creatures were preempted by the daily miracle of growing light.

  I walk down to the shore. The hermit crabs have gone; nothing moves. I cup my hand and drink several mouthfuls. It is harsh, sweet, alive. Naked I swim out and slide down the blue gulfs.

  9

  Something has happened to the weather. Maybe it is a foretaste of the habagat, the south-west monsoon. The days are comparatively windless but the moon, perhaps, is dragging the water into fretful heaps at nightfall when the tide drops unusually low. It is the season. The tops of corals emerge, whole stretches of level shelf broken by crevasses. In the water one is lurched into jags and spines: rocks approach and bang one suddenly leaving a shoulder bleeding while tensed against the receding suck. The water itself is cloudy, the agitation of the upper layer reaching down to involve pockets of silt long ago washed off the land. The tides are full of plankton and diatoms. Night fishing is no longer worthwhile, visibility being so reduced that one is diving blind into a black soupsown with the mines of sea-urchins.

  I cross in my boat from Tiwarik and visit friends on the lower slopes of the mountain behind Sabay. All among the coconuts and steep red fields of baked clods are the bleached heads of fishermen, temporarily deserting the sea to work the land. Their flexibility surprises me. At Kansulay farmers and fishermen tend to remain separate and do not swap rôles when the weather does not suit them. They sit indoors and drink instead, one occupation in which both feel at ease.

  The top of one field is bounded by a low cliff whose volcanic face is pitted with various-sized holes. Arman and I walk past, instinctively and at the same moment slightly stooping to see beneath an eyebrow of rock which protects a socket of unknown depth. We notice each other at once and laugh in recognition: two displaced hunters looking for fish on dry land.

  I decide to go back up the coast to Kansulay for a few days and let the sea recover from its struggle with the moon.

  *

  Kansulay at dawn. The crowing of Sising’s cock below is relayed to other cocks hidden among the palms, taken up and passed on, some cracked and flawed and some archetypally true of note, like calls to prayer from leafy minarets fading distantly down to the village. I am up and admiring the bustling activity in the air, the grass, the bushes. Everything shines: the gloss of dew and natural oils blazes off the pale midribs of banana leaves whose elegant droops balance themselves in the gently rising air. From day to day it is precisely the same while like all dawns suggesting it is the first in the history of the world. The birds are particularly riotous. It is sound which is a part of the scene as much as anything, the part I most miss when living in Italy. For there, while the house commands an astonishing view and while the sense of isolation in rough hill-country with its great sighing forests faithfully conveys the sight of the seasons in their turning, the place is aurally a desert. That disease of being unable to see a living creature without wanting to kill it at once, preferably with an automatic shotgun, has achieved a general muteness broken mainly by the sound of gunfire. Another of my landscapes. Over a quarter-century ago Rachel Carson foresaw a silent spring; in my part of Tuscany it has finally happened. Only for a month or two may one lie in the shade of the vines and hear that extraordinary sound of swifts’ wings cutting the air at seventy miles an hour, a tearing rush like a glider’s aerofoils at times so sudden and so close it raises gooseflesh as from some primordial terror of gigantic raptors.

  In Kansulay the aerial sounds of wings come principally from the ragged-tipped crows, not unlike their English counterparts, as they flap low over the ridge looking for chicks following their mothers through the undergrowth with one eye always on the sky. Another characteristic sound is of the wings of wren-like birds, lustrous brown with delicate curved beaks like carpet needles. As they hover around the lumboy trees they produce an explosive whir of beaten air not unlike that of humming-bird hawk moths sipping nectar at dusk. Thirdly, the crispness of tight and powerful wings clatters down from golden orioles when chasing each other aerobatically or mobbing a crow back to its
own territory.

  The golden oriole is the Philippines’ National Bird, a very handsome animal not much larger than an English blackbird but slimmer, more powerful and with a heavy pink bill. Its plumage is a dazzling yellow and black and against the green ribs of the coconut fronds up whose spires it climbs and twirls it glows like an exuberant jewel. On this particular morning there is one hanging from a string around the waist of Kado, Sising’s nine-year-old son, who emerges an hour or two later into the clearing with a couple of friends. They walk towards me, smiling, competent. Little hunters, their teeth sparkle in the sun. They are all carrying catapults, all have strings from which dangle small birds by their feet, some still fluttering feebly against their shorts. I congratulate them on their skill.

  ‘Pulutan lamang,’ said Kado disparagingly. ‘Just snacks.’ But they are clearly proud. One of the boys sights at something in a nearby tree. There is a brisk snap of elastic and a stone claps against wood and hums away over the valley. The boy shakes his head and laughs. I laugh too, feeling an admiration which would be jealousy were I not myself a spear-fisherman. Anyone who can bring down the National Bird with a catapult at twenty paces knows how to live in this world. Kado now takes the splendid corpse from his game larder. Its saffron breast is streaked with crimson for its head is smashed and one eye knocked clean out. Exemplary shooting.

  ‘Pretty,’ he says, laying it out on the ground on its stomach and spreading its wings as if it were still flying high above an endless plain. One of his companions adds other little birds from the collection at his waist, finches mostly. The struggles of the living have tightened the nooses around their feet so he has difficulty in undoing the knots. He pulls impatiently and their twittering becomes strident; a bit harder and it becomes a thin tiny screaming. Their feet come off entirely like twigs and the child adds these forcible amputees to the row on the ground where they beat their wings in the dust. ‘Seven,’ he says. ‘Very good roasted.’