Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  I shake my head. When I look down again, it is just a mark on the polyp, nothing more. I put the camera away in my backpack and continue scrambling along the rocks until my route is blocked once more by a sheer-faced boulder that marks the cove’s end. I consider my options. Even to reach this perhaps unsurmountable rock, I would have to slide on my hands and knees down a sloped piece of blue elvan, whose furthest edge disappears down into the sea. Once at the very edge of this natural diving board, I would either have to spring into the air and claw myself up the side of the cliff or, if unable to make my leap, would somehow have to climb back up the blue elvan slide. Alternatively, I could give up now and return all the way around both coves to rejoin the conventional path with my tail between my legs. No, I can’t go back yet. While slightly alarmed as to how quickly I have got myself into this perilous situation, it is moments such as these that a city dweller like myself, whose childhood was cushioned with asphalt, relishes. In ‘The Romaunt of the Rose’, Chaucer coined the term ‘misway’. I like that it is a word of its own, as if a wrong way were itself a direction, a route one may choose to take through the world.

  Scanning the cliffs for a potential other option that might save me from my rock and a hard place, I notice that the grass gets thick and stands in clumps above the rocks and that further up there is the vague sign of human activity: parts of bushes that look as if they may have been trampled down by adventurous feet, and a dark hole that might lead to another path parallel to the waterline. This could be my misway. Standing on tiptoe, I grab a hold of the grassy tufts above the rocks and hoist myself onto the soft grass above the rock, relieved to feel a more permanent and forgiving surface beneath my feet.

  Up close, the way through to higher ground I saw amongst the thickets above me looks denser and I have to cover my head and force my way through. I feel the limbs of savage blackthorn bushes latch onto my clothes, piercing through my thick jeans and lacerating my ankles and hands. Midway through thrashing against these violent branches, I lose my footing and start to slide back down towards the cliff. The sea’s bellowing seems to reach up over the top of the cliffs ready to embrace me into its open mouth. Just as my left foot slips right over the edge of the land, I spot a thin length of faded orange rope tied between two trees like a handrail. Flailing, I manage to grasp it with the tips of my fingers and pull myself back up onto the grass. Hot and sweaty now, I look out at the seething waters below, sending out immense gratitude towards the unknown human who tied the rope there, perhaps long ago. Then I force myself back through the tangled thicket in search of a path.

  The dense wood with its heavy aroma acts as a sound wall to the sea. Its angry cries disappear, replaced by the buzzing of flies and occasional rustling in the bracken to my right. The many layers of complex green seem to flatten out like an intricate wallpaper design that tricks the eye into thinking it is animated, leaves curling, fronds gently stroking at my sides and insects crawling over stems. I stumble with my back hunched right over through a claustrophobia-inducing path that looks as if it has not been traversed for many years. I decide to continue upwards, looking in vain for another way in. The brambles, heather and brown gorse become more matted, growing thicker and taller as I pull myself through it, eventually coming right up to my neck, so that it begins to feel like swimming through mud. Soon the ceiling of vines and branches blocks out the bright sunshine from earlier. Where the light does break through, it comes through in thin slants, as though the sun is being cast through a cheese grater. That impeccable observer of the natural world, Gerard Manley Hopkins, termed this phenomenon shivelight, an amalgamation of the Middle English word schive, meaning slice, and light, or as Hopkins himself explained it, ‘the lances of sunshine that pierce the canopy of a wood’.

  My trousers are now soaked through, my hands riddled with cuts. I barely notice the thorns any longer, whose long fingers pull at my backpack and jumper, urging me to return the way I came. At last, I find a slight break in the undergrowth and beyond it a clearing where I might sit and catch my breath. Along the edges of the clearing are a series of trees sprouting from the hedgerow and frozen into petrified wind-blown shapes. Each of their trunks is so twisted and bent towards the south that even on the stillest of days they would lean right out, tricking walkers just for a second into believing they are in the midst of a terrific gale. It is only when I have almost reached the clearing that I see the green hammock stretched across two trees. I stop moving. Staring intently at the hammock, I fancy I can see the outline of a body filling it up. Unbidden, my mind begins to build an image of this person, undisturbed by any other human for years, who each evening uses his faded orange rope to scale down to the sea to catch themselves a few mackerel to cook on a fire. At any second, the figure will leap up and attack this trespasser, before they have a chance to reveal their hiding place to the world. I imagine a face coated and cracked with mud, their eyes, which have not met with another human for many months, wild and raging.

  I take two cautious steps backwards, then turn on my heels and run, not allowing myself to look back for a second to check if there really is a body there. All rationality long departed, I sprint back through the hedgerow with its violent thorns and lower myself back down into the cove. The sea has crept in closer and most of the rocks are now wholly submerged. The sing of the shore screams of the danger facing any human left in its way. For a moment, with my energy spent, I think I might just let it take me. And then, with the cry of a seagull, sense floods back, I accept that my only option is to admit defeat and return the way I have come.

  The route back passes swiftly, as if the coast is hurrying to expel me. Once back up on the sandy cliff path, which is shotgunned with rabbit holes, I overtake multiple groups of slow-moving walkers and try to give off an air of insouciance whilst horribly aware that my trousers are ripped and sticky wet. I feel my face: there are hard patches of mud stuck above my eyes and twigs sticking out of my hair.

  I look down far below where the undergrowth grows dense. How many other people might be hidden in woods along the Cornish coast, I wonder: those who have escaped humanity among the entangled thickets above the sea cliffs. I return to the notes on my phone, adding ‘not true’ to the bottom of my original brazen statement and giving the note the title ‘Misway’.

  When I have not spoken to my parents for a while, I send them roughly drawn-up accounts of my adventures to reassure them that I am still alive. Unsurprisingly, considering my ability to lose myself along the simplest of paths, these tend to have the adverse effect. A few hours after sending my parents an account of my walk to Land’s End, my father rings me as I am walking along Newlyn prom.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about that story you wrote.’

  My mother, evidently standing just behind him, calls into the phone: ‘Can you tell her that what she did was incredibly dangerous?’

  ‘Your mother says she wants you to know that she thinks what you did was incredibly dangerous—’

  ‘And stupid,’ my mother interrupts.

  ‘And stupid.’ Dad diligently echoes.

  ‘Does she realise that the sea is not a laughing matter?’

  ‘She says, you know the sea is not a big joke—’

  I say: ‘I don’t think…’

  ‘She doesn’t think…’ my dad reports back.

  ‘Well, that much is obvious,’ I hear Mum say. ‘Was she really wearing no-grip trainers?’

  I watch a small girl in school uniform poking at a blue-frilled polyp washed up beside a plastic bottle on the beach below Newlyn prom. Her mother, seeing her daughter’s close proximity to the alien creature, scoops her up in her arms and back to the safety of the pavement.

  Eventually, I say something like: ‘Look, if you just rang up to lecture me, then—’

  ‘I rang you up because I know that story,’ my father responds, leaving a mysterious silence to hang in the air.

  When my father was five, just a few years after his own father had left the
family, my grandmother decided to take him and my aunt to a Cornish cove during the Easter holidays. While there, almost exactly the same thing that I narrated in my story happened to them, he says. After our phone call, he sends me the typewritten transcript of the monologue his mother wrote about the experience, headlined ‘September 1957, Woman’s Hour, BBC: “The Murderous Innocence of the Sea”’, which she read out on Radio 4 sixty years ago.

  I know very little of my grandmother, Patricia Ash. She died when I was an infant, but from what I can remember and have garnered from my father, she was an austere, enterprising woman who lived alone for most of her life in the coastal hamlet of Shingle Street, Suffolk. Reading her transcript is the closest I have ever felt to her.

  ‘There we were, scrambling, slipping over the low rocks guarding the edge of the bay and discovering smooth white sea-sticks, and better and better pools left by the tide,’ she explains. ‘The safe beach was out of sight – and out of mind too – and here was a stretch of rugged coast to take your sense away.’ I recognise that desire at once: the need to reach the most desolate lines of coast, where you might obliterate your sense of self and be transported away from the known world.

  But, as I did too all those years later, Patricia fails to notice the dangers of the route she has chosen and the changing of the tide. Below another yawn of cliffs on another piece of the Cornish coast, she is faced with a similar choice: ‘Stay on those sharp cold rocks above tide level for 6 or 7 hours (why didn’t I know the times of tides). Scale that leaning mass of rock to the beach where I couldn’t even see first foot-holds. Or wade through the tunnel, where the water would be up to the children’s waists and the force of the waves looked formidable. Up above, the green of growing things and the sunlit crest of the cliff looked the most inviting and possible – so I thought.’ When I think back to my own foolish adventure I am no longer alone but see the two of us in parallel desperately trying to scale the same cliff, my aunt and father as young children following anxiously behind. I want to shout across to them: ‘Go back! Don’t do what I have done!’

  ‘Occasionally,’ my grandmother continues, ‘the beauty and wildness of the scene did flash through my mind, and it was made more vivid because of the peculiar angle of the vision – and the horror. It seemed as though we might have died already.’ Whatever danger it promises, to us the sea remains beguiling, almost enticing.

  As they scrabble up the cliffs, the route gets more and more treacherous, while the tired, little bodies pulling themselves up behind travel ever more slowly. Her other options now gone, she decides to leave her children on the cliff and continue alone to get help. ‘It will be all right, don’t move an inch, don’t look down,’ she tells them, ‘I’ll be back’ – and scrambled away out of sight torn by their cries of ‘Mummy, Mummy’ mingling with the gulls screaming and the pounding of the waves below.

  Once over the clifftop, she races along the road, crying out for help along the empty track. Some way ahead, she spots a young fisherman and dashes over to him, gasping as she tries to explain her plight: the two children she has left on the cliff. They sprint back together; the fisherman nimbly clambers down the cliffs and retrieves first one and then the other of her children, who are now very cold and quiet. Thanking the man, who scolds her for the idiocy of her high-tide excursion, she takes her children firmly by the hand back to their cottage, murmuring apologies to them all the way home.

  My grandmother describes how for the rest of the holiday, whenever her children felt frightened at night by the memories of their cliff-face escapade, she could only say: ‘I know it was horrible, but it need never happen again. You can learn about tides and understand and watch the sea. The sea has a pattern.’

  ‘So many of us seem to be out of touch with patterns of nature,’ she concludes. ‘The sea is just a summer playground and the cliffs a beautiful backcloth.’

  Newlyners tell countless stories of naive tourists who have been stranded by the tide and have had to be rescued. In Mike Buttery’s history of Mousehole, he writes of one time he and another fisherman saved a young girl trapped below Penlee Point: they found her ‘only wearing a bikini and her body was “cut to rags” by brambles’. A Cornishman article from 1927 similarly describes how two Newlyn men risked their lives in order to rescue a ten-year-old boy from drowning: ‘instantly people began to flock to the spot, drawn apparently by that mysterious influence that attracts to a scene of danger’. My own fateful adventure on that savage stretch of coastline between Newlyn and Lamorna was my first true facing of the sea. It betrayed a foolishness which, once I had begun to go out on fishing boats, and once I started to know the sea even a little, I would never allow to happen again.

  11

  FISH WITHIN FISH

  You feel your whole body at sea. Its rhythms force you to notice the way you hold yourself, making minute readjustments every few seconds to keep yourself balanced as the boat rocks. There are six degrees of freedom on a ship that dictate the ways in which it can move: pitch (a port–starboard movement from side to side), roll (the back-and-forth tilt from bow to stern) and yaw (the boat’s rotation). Every muscle learns to tense and relax in time with these motions in order just to keep yourself upright.

  Once back down below, in my tiny bunk on the Filadelfia, it is a relief not to fight against these axes of motion any longer. The engine’s bellowing softens to a croon and my body is gently lifted and dropped by the sea in a rhythm that is not regular but feels natural within the womb-like space of the cabin. I fall asleep in minutes, resting easy in the knowledge that there is always someone on watch, guarding our vessel as it carries us over the seas.

  With my seasickness decisively over by Tuesday evening, I take no pills before bed that night and wake at six with a clear head in time to catch the sunrise on deck. My first sight of the day comes through the bathroom porthole (out of which window Don and Andrew, practical jokers both, like to stick their hands and grab my ankles as I stand outside taking photos). It always gives a foretaste of what will confront me as soon as I climb up into the wheelhouse, like looking through a kinetoscope and seeing a world in motion behind its round hole.

  The view out of the porthole is still black this morning, but I can feel the day just waiting to spark. I take my toothbrush from where it is tucked at an angle through a wire running down the side of the bathroom wall with the other brushes and, to save time in case I miss the sunrise, simultaneously run my arms and legs under the burning hot showerhead, banging against one and then the other side of the wall as the boat lurches. And all the while I look out through the circle of window, waiting for the sky to arrive.

  The only mirror on board the Filadelfia hangs spit- and toothpaste-stained in the bathroom. I don’t like to check my reflection in it often and delight in the novelty of not having to bother with how I look out here. In cities, it is impossible to avoid the sight of your own face – it leers out at you from every polished car and shop front. There is not a moment when you are allowed to forget how you are seen, your appearance reified behind glass. Today I am taken aback by the wildness that greets me. There are flecks of cuttlefish juice across my face like black moles that intermingle with scattered sequins of flaking fish scales. My skin is a wind-burned red, my eyes somehow darker or deeper than usual, and my hair caked with guts and pieces of fish bone. The reflection returns a lopsided grin to me as I pull a fat glob of fish blood from my hair.

  I hurry upstairs, shout ‘Morning!’ at Stevie, who is on watch, and throw open the wheelhouse door. It is all out there – not just a patch of sky framed by the interstices of skyscrapers; this is what the whole sky looks like, boundless in all directions. The sight still surprises me every time as if during the night my mind has unwrapped the sea’s clasp from my memory. Sometimes I wake to find us in a flat, cool desert; other days amongst yawning black waves like caves; others still to arctic scenes, the entirety of the sea white, as if overexposed, and the sky revealing further snowcaps.

 
; Today’s pre-dawn blue is not a soft shade but an oppressive block of colour that seems to rush all the way up to our boat and slam against the deck, so vivid is its blueness. A heavy line of clouds has settled above the sea. Sandwiched between several blue tinted clouds, an expanse of golden light casts itself upwards and outwards. The light spreads across the line between water and sky, turning both a rich navy, the lapidary pattern carved out across the waves accentuated by the way the light falls on them. Horizon watching is the routine that steadies me on the Filadelfia, my fishing equivalent to reading the papers or listening to the radio over breakfast or watching television. And yet it is more than all those: all possible news expressed in a curve of blue. It makes me think of Newlyn, how this weather will blow back to them, and it makes me think of home.

  Once I’ve had my fix, I make a coffee for myself and Stevie before settling in my seat beside the skipper’s chair to wait for the first haul of the day. At 6.30 the ‘booking out’ system is broadcast over the VHF radio. One by one, in alphabetical order, every Stevenson’s boat at sea calls to check in. The company brought this system in several years ago after one of their trawlers went missing. No one even knew anything had happened until two days after the ship had gone down. Now, each morning, whoever is on watch speaks the name of their boat back to those listening on land. In a firm voice the Filadelfia promises: It’s all right. We’re still out here.