The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  Dave, whose nickname is ‘Spanish’ on account of a past life as a mate on trawlers sailing out of Cadiz, has hauled corpses from the sea and set out in hurricanes to rescue foundering boats. He was a powerful-looking man, thickset and black-haired, sovereign of the half-dozen modern weatherboarded houses that accommodate his crew and their families. I found it difficult to find the right questions to ask him – what was it that one wanted to know of a lifeboat coxswain? He was not, I could tell, going to regale me with gory tales from the deep. He talked about operational efficiency and ‘getting the job done’. On a shelf above his desk I saw in a black plastic folder the RNLI Guide to Handling the Media, and I had the sense that he had read it diligently.

  Many of the call-outs that the boat attended, he said, were minor and scarcely called for heroism – like taking a doctor out to a ship, or an engineer, or somebody’s heart tablets. Once a man had set out for the Netherlands in a rubber dinghy with a road map as his only navigational tool. Another time a dachshund had been undecked by a minor swell. But, he said, theirs was not to reason why; only to rectify wrongs, regardless of whether acts of God or human idiocy were to blame. The most difficult thing, he said, was choosing crew members for the station. It was the kind of role for which ‘actually volunteering yourself to do the job ought to be an instant disqualification’.

  On Spurn it had become an established tradition that the crew should have families living with them on the point. That, Dave said, was what made it a community, ‘to my mind, the last true community in the whole of Britain’. So while he received dozens of applications or more, he discarded all but a handful. Finding a family of ordinary, sociable people prepared to be marooned at the end of a spit of land in anticipation of a cataclysmic event that might see its breadwinner thrust into the middle of the North Sea at its most impolite was, he said, ‘challenging’. Further still, the men had to have strategies to deal with their copious downtime. ‘Anglers and model makers who don’t get seasick with well-behaved children, that’s really what we need.’

  I had seen the little bicycles and toys scattered outside the houses and could hear the cackle of television despite sturdy walls and double-glazing. What had once been the school was a dark patch in the car park; now the children relied on villages above the point for their education, taken by their mothers in big cars with capacious boots.

  The families, said Dave, all got on well. He had to ensure that was the case, and that there were plenty of opportunities for socialising but not too many. Sometimes they’d all be partying hard and there’d be an alert. The men would be in their foul-weather gear and off into the North Sea in minutes – and as often as not back within the hour, having accomplished some impossibly dangerous feat and saved a life or two – and then they’d resume where they left off.

  I didn’t ask him about ‘viragoes . . . a disgrace to their sex’, but Dave said that his crew’s wives could resent the authority over their men to which he was entitled by his role. ‘Ha, yes. Other men’s women. Though overall we’re best off with them.’

  I saw one of his crew, standing in his porch, pyjama clad with cigarette poised at wistful lips as he gazed out in the direction from which the next call to action might come. Perhaps, I thought, he’s waiting for some glue to set – or his wife to return from the supermarket.

  Away from this outpost Spurn becomes expansive, almost savagely dishevelled, a labyrinth of bunkers hidden in thickets and stitched by overgrown half-paths and the cut and dash of songbirds. It is in these places that one longs to be a child again, having found the perfect place for adventure and fantastical happenings – like the stranding of a whale.

  Jane, the only woman we met up in the pilots’ tower, said that a large humpback had been washed up on the sands only weeks ago. Indeed, I had seen it reported in newspapers. In her ribbed serge jumper with epaulettes and white shirt and tie, she scarcely came across as a sentimentalist. Perhaps only thirty, she had mastered oil rig service ships in the North Sea and cruise ships in the Pacific. But, she said, she had found the stranded whale deeply upsetting.

  At first there had been attempts to keep it alive. But it’s an almost impossible task with an animal of that kind of size. Without the sea to gently enfold it the whale suffocated under its own weight. Vigils were held. People cried as they gazed into its great leviathan eye and cooled its skin with wet towels. I ventured to try to imagine how this must have seemed to the whale, slowly expiring in an alien element, its last impressions of the planet of strange, bereft beings clutching flowers and candles. All hope being lost, a local vet ‘destroyed’ the whale and the mood changed. For a day and long into the evening people, mostly young men from the surrounding villages and towns but also others from further away drawn by news reports, danced on its corpse, sombre mourning having undergone a kind of bacchanalian pupation.

  Little of the North Sea suits big whales; its waters are too shallow, tricky and tidal. Why such reputedly intelligent beasts, with their ancient fugues and chansons imputed to be rich with sea lore and myth, make such basic navigational errors is difficult to fathom, but often the stranded whales are young and thought to have taken a wrong turn in the North Atlantic, or they’re risk takers, chasing herring shoals south, miscalculating the chances of a successful exit.

  In 1893 a whale ‘about 50 foot long, its mouth nine foot wide’ was captured trying to leave the Humber – it sold for thirty pounds in the marketplace at Hull the following week. The previous year the coxswain of the Spurn lifeboat, Mr Winson, captured what was reported to be an immense Greenland whale, which ‘knocked about violently’ before becoming exhausted from loss of blood. The lifeboat crew killed the whale by stopping its blowhole with mud and seaweed. A steam tug towed the cadaver to Cleethorpes Beach, where it became a hit for crowds of sandflies, day trippers and vendors of seaside delights.

  And on 3 October 1879 it was reported,

  Seven whales have been caught off Spurn head. Two men, while walking along the shore, noticed a large number of huge fish floundering in shallow water. The men at once obtained a boat and went out, when they found seven whales, three of which were disabled, apparently by gunshot wounds. The other four were easily dispatched, one with a crowbar, and the remainder with a large knife. After some difficulty the monsters were got ashore at Hull where they are being exhibited.

  My daughter and I, standing on the sea side of the peninsula, watched and saw no whales, but spotted the leathery black back of a porpoise trawling for bass – to the chagrin of anglers, who themselves were having no luck. We listened for the big ships coming in and out of the river, their rumbling propellers audible a good mile away from the point. And we waited to witness another of Spurn’s tricks.

  By dint of the narrowness of Spurn, in the last minutes of the day the point itself is reduced to insignificance, a fading sickle curving into the play of light until the moment the sunlight strikes the dunes at an angle so perfectly calibrated that for five heart-stopping minutes its entire length from base to tip shines like a blade of hammered gold, and everything contained within those moments is glorious and hopeful before the sun dips and Spurn fades again.

  The autumn after my first visit I felt compelled to return. London had become too urgent and enclosing; Spurn could be the place to draw its venom. There was another reason. I had heard that everything was changing at the lifeboat station. Since my previous trip the road to the mainland had been made impassable by blown sands on at least a half-dozen occasions, and the decision had been made to withdraw the lifeboat families to nearby villages where they would no longer be at the mercy of a possible breach.

  Dave wasn’t there when I called in; there was a new coxswain, Martin, who was welcoming when I told him about my acquaintance with his predecessor. Martin lacked Dave’s saturnine edge and the swarthiness which, I suspect, had contributed to his nickname. He had close-cut hair and wore gold rings in his ears, which he’d acquired in his first calling as a fisherman, beach-launching fr
om one of the small villages just to the north. But the same guide to handling the media sat on the same shelf above the same desk.

  The change, he said, was no bad thing. Many of the children were now adolescents. Spurn had been the perfect childhood playground, but as they grew older they had wanted to be less estranged from their peers. A shift system made it easier for the crews, most of whom had stayed in their jobs, although two had left because their wives hadn’t liked the change. That afternoon, he said, they’d be taking out a new boy, a former bank clerk. He could see that in the future they might become ‘a bit like the French Foreign Legion, where people come to escape the past . . . We’ll have ’em. As long as they can rub along with the crew and they don’t get seasick.’

  This time I arranged to stay on the point itself, at the bird observatory, a little bungalow hidden in thickets – a sacred space for the cabal of twitchers that descends from October onwards. Spurn is their Mecca because of the migrants that make their first landfall here, exhausted after North Sea crossings. Some of these tiny navigators apparently time their Kierkegaardian leaps with a kind of preternatural understanding of meteorology. Others are caught by forces beyond their control and dumped on Spurn without ceremony, possibly hundreds of miles from where they ‘ought’ to be. And others still, making their passage south towards Africa, are funnelled down the peninsula before making the leap across the mouth of the Humber.

  The observatory – The Warren – is a fug-bound, brown-carpeted common room smelling of old boots and stale men, and a mouldering reliquary of bird-focused images: a decades-old acrylic painting of an eider, identification charts to help distinguish between near-identical species of gulls, a mistle thrush with kapok for innards peering beadily between the cracks of its glass prison, a sofa donated by a well-wisher or recovered from landfill. And the holy of holies: the log of All Birds Seen At Spurn Since Records Began.

  Its seasoned inhabitants resemble nothing less than a ragtag Chechen militia band, clad in camouflage jackets and woolly hats, clanking with telescopes and cameras and talking about ‘getting’ rarities known to be in the vicinity – a yellow-browed warbler that by rights ought to be in Andhra Pradesh but finds itself in the East Riding, the bearded tits taking up fleeting residence in a nearby scrape . . .

  With a dainty pair of fold-up Zeiss binoculars and wearing mostly navy-coloured clothes, I felt self-consciously dandyish and insufficiently khaki among them. But this is a broad church, many of whose parishioners are misunderstood by their families and peers. Indeed, mutual acceptance is perhaps the greatest part of the attraction of birdwatching. They tell self-deprecating anecdotes, such as that related by a (big burly) panel beater from York concerning a trip to Bridlington, where he and some friends ‘were crowded onto beach ogling purple sandpiper –’ a bird no less rare in the town than the definite article ‘– and big burly fishermen looked at us like we was fookin’ nootters’.

  There’s also, and perhaps this applies to most or all of the things that men love best, ambivalence around their fluttering objects of desire. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ a man demanded of a small flock of meadow pipits which he could hear but not see, though this could hardly be representative of how he felt about birds in general or meadow pipits in particular. His companions believed this red-skinned man, with his thick white bristles and wolfish eyes, to be without peer for his unerring ability to untangle the chaotic twittering of several species simultaneously in song.

  At this juncture, he and I and two other men (for to a man, we were men) were stood as we had been standing since the sun had first begun to rise above the North Sea, in the lee of a wooden windbreak, bemoaning a fog which gathered, dispersed and gathered again. Cold, I stamped off into the mist. Other delights had tempered the keenness of ornithological zeal. The sun had risen behind a North Sea mist, or fret, that conferred upon the world a radiant sense of it being on the brink of some wonderful and revelatory moment. I heard the barks of deer and saw their white tails dissolving in the vapour, and from the Humber came the mournful lowing of a ship edging blindly out of harbour. And when the fret began to give way, I saw that the grasses growing up to the cliff-edge path were spangled by dew-bejewelled spider’s webs cradled like snowflakes.

  Later I strolled towards the beach with my eyes on the lookout for attractive stones. Before leaving Spurn I had a spectacle to see on the Humber side – a great gathering building to a climactic, flickering explosion of feathers and dabbling.

  In almost invisible increments, a fleet of shelduck began to emerge. First there was a handful, then scarcely perceptibly more, and soon an armada, waiting out the hour before the ebbing tide disrobed the mudflats. Two – perhaps three – thousand inky black heads were tucked beneath tan wings, the flotilla stretching in a great curve, a mile in length, its little ships not sleeping but saving their energies for the feast of worms that lay wriggling in the yet-to-be-stripped-bare mud.

  They were not the only ones biding their time. Hidden in the foreshore vegetation was a division of waders, chucking, dozing, huddling, with more camped out in nearby meres, scrapes and meadows. Each inch-fall of the Humber (sucked back, as it were, into its source) sent a tremor through these anxious armies of birds. The shelducks began to take flight, to jockey and regroup, and the waders to shake off their semi-somnambulant state, and their calls like ululations grew shrill as a kettle rising to the boil.

  And then there was just a hand’s depth of water, and next a mere knuckle, and the clouds of dunlin, knot and redshank rose from their redoubts in hovering whorls, each bird negotiating landing rights with its neighbours before alighting on the mud to gorge on morsels of protein – lugworm, little crabs and stranded fry.

  This was the melee I had come to see and I had feasted. Battalions of birdwatchers were arriving in busloads in their khakis and greens, lugging the optical materiel they used to prosecute their funny kind of love and war upon their prey. The autumn sun shone on them brightly, but the birds seemed unperturbed. With a head full of feathers and pockets rattling with rough agates and pretty pebbles, I took my leave of Spurn, its beach of shapes and shingle and its ceaseless changes.

  6

  Last Resorts – Being Beside the Seaside

  We cannot compete with Continental resorts for sunshine so it seems pointless to lay too great a stress on this commodity . . .

  English Tourist Board report, 1974

  I’m in Whitby in high summer. A rain shower has just passed and slowly, dutifully, furtively (in case they should be caught out again), the loosely arranged crowds re-embark upon the beach. The sand is hard, cold and clammy like drying cement. And the sea is confrontational, putting up its fists. It growls back at a spaniel that runs to the edge of the surf offering a bouquet of barks before retreating.

  Towels are spread. Whole families cluster behind candy-striped windbreaks. This time is precious. It is necessary to take advantage of even the scantiest break in the cloud.

  It is ironic that a regular visitor to the Mediterranean or Bahamas might consider a summer spent cadging seaside pleasures from a beach upon the northern coasts of England a kind of ersatz equivalent of the joys of sun and sea. But, unpredictable and cliché-pickled as they may be, to these sands every lolling, sun-seeking, airport-novel-reading, tanned and cavorting pleasure seeker in Nice, Phuket and Mauritius owes a debt. Regardless of the weather, a North Sea seaside holiday, c’est la vrai chose – a return to the source.

  Some time in the mid-eighteenth century the North Sea sloughed its wholly utilitarian aspect and revelled in its hitherto undisclosed and glamorous possibilities, social, sexual and recuperative. In the late 1600s, as Alain Corbin writes in the masterful Lure of the Sea, anything ‘vast’ was regarded as ‘incompatible with beauty because it inspired horror’. The sea represented the antithesis of the Garden of Eden, a place where the pleasant song of birds gives way to the seagulls’ harsh cry. To the classically minded and well-ordered citizen of the early 1700s, all that the beac
h was able to offer was ‘the negation of harmony, testifying to the invasion of diluvian chaos’ and a ‘barren landscape that mankind can neither arrange nor endow with moral significance’.

  Two things appear to have happened to that abhorrence. The first was that the sensations of awe, terror and dread evoked by the sea remained but were re-identified as sublime and to be savoured, just as one might come to enjoy the sensation of riding a rollercoaster.

  Thence musing onward to the sounding shore,

  The lone enthusiast oft would take his way,

  Listing with pleasing dread to the deep roar

  Of the wide-weltering waves

  wrote James Beattie, describing the progress of his Minstrel, the subject of a long Ossianic poem richly soaked in appreciation of the sublime. The other was that the cult of the spa, assiduously embraced in Cheltenham and Bath and across Europe, migrated to the sea, where it was discovered full immersion in the water was preferable even to the ingestion of foul-tasting ‘minerals’.

  A bathing machine, a device not unlike a Gypsy caravan but permitting the bather to enter the sea in safety and with a degree of privacy, was first recorded on a beach in Scarborough in 1735. Soon afterwards a Quaker called Benjamin Beale introduced a new, improved machine that became the rage at Lowestoft, Margate and Ostend.

  The diametric opposition between the wild beach and the ordered garden that had inspired horror became its very attraction; now the beach represented Eden before the Fall, self-knowledge, sexual guilt and fig leaves. In 1813 a Punch cartoon showed a giggling gouty gaggle of men a-goggle at the girls sporting in the waves, using every state-of-the-art optical device to magnify their delights. This was, perhaps, a forerunner of the saucy postcard. And by no means was voyeurism solely a male prerogative. In 1840 the following letter was published in Keble’s Gazette.