The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  What sets the Halligen further apart is that to protect themselves from floods their inhabitants still adhere to an ancient form of defence, their houses being built on mounds of earth called Warften, which rise some six or eight metres above the level of the fields, like the terpen built by their ancestors millennia ago in the Netherlands. If struck by a Sturmflut, or storm-flood, a combination of low pressure, high tides and strong winds, the Halligen are subsumed beneath the North Sea, and their inhabitants both human and animal crowd into the houses and barns on the Warften, each of which becomes an island unto itself until the flood subsides. Forsaking the frankfurter soup, I stayed on deck as the ferry crept out into the Wattenmeer channel. A weak sun pushed through a muslin sky and rippled on the surface of the sea like moonlight. At the edge of the channel, which was marked by nothing more than uprooted saplings orphaned in the ooze, a dozen spoonbills, the first I’d ever seen, took hunched, probing strides in close step with each other, ivory white against the silvered mud. I saw no garland of herring gulls, but a swarm of arctic terns and early swallows, two species whose utterly different trajectories (the one from pole to pole, the other from Europe to Africa) just happen to cross over the North Sea, the swallows dipping for insects, the terns scanning the surface and dropping. And then came a blast of an ancient tongue, the door to the bridge opening, the captain and his mate cracking jokes in guttural smokers’ Frisian.

  The passage to Langeness was tortuously slow, the chain-smoking captain picking his way delicately over the barely submerged flats. As the Hilligenlei approached the landing stage it did so with the tremulous surety of a very ancient tortoise moving towards its mate. Then the clanking, jangling consummation, the climactic reversal of the ship’s engine, the lowering of the gangplank, and vessel and land were coupled.

  Only a dozen people disembarked, I hesitating briefly, watching with a strange kind of pleasure a handful of reunions: a sister clasping a younger sibling, some paternal patting, maternal embraces, the significance of these encounters heightened perhaps by the need for a sea crossing to be realised. I had only the strange bareness of the Hallig to meet me.

  The people of Langeness are distributed between sixteen Warften. Each is anywhere between one half and two kilometres from its nearest neighbour, rises around eight metres above the fields and is home to between one and five houses, including cowsheds and sheep pens. It is said – or at least I heard one person say – that the ancients determined the location of the Warften according to where the Druids divined that they wouldn’t be struck by lightning – and no one could remember a lightning strike in living memory. The church and school, with its sixteen pupils, share one Warft. On another is the Hilligenlei pub (I’m unsure as to whether it gave its name to the ferry or the other way round or neither), and on another again the island’s tiny shop.

  The first interior impression is a kind of deflation. From the sea Langeness was visible only as a low-lying silhouette. But once disembarked it was the horizontal-ness of it that was almost overwhelming, a soft green plane of scudding scents (cow smells, sea smells, clover) and whistling birds and breezes, and in early May great herds of brent geese nibbling and chuckling in every field. And there were cows, Welsh blacks owned by the man who owned the pub and the six Highland cattle brought to the island by the Kaufmann family, who ran the store. I met the Kaufmanns because they occupied Hunnenswarf, an amble of a mile or so from Neuwarf, where I was staying with Mrs Nissen and her husband Fiede, who was both Bürgermeister and ‘boat postman’.

  Language skills are not strong on Langeness. As I walked up the slope to the Warft I passed an old man in a captain’s hat, a giant pair of ship’s binoculars around his neck like the pair possessed by Chris, whom I had met in the Essex marshes. We tried some words but beyond the ubiquitous north German greeting ‘Moin’ found nothing mutually intelligible to say. Still he carried on talking, pointing his stick to the expanse of fields, the skies, the ditch-twinned goose-pocked thread of a road running from one end of the Hallig to the other and beyond to a sparkling ribbon of sea just visible beyond the furthest meadows. And he went on his way, and I went mine.

  There was no immediately obvious sign of life on Hunnenswarf itself. The small shop was closed up. I stood on the lip of the Warft watching an angry squall venting its rage on the east of the island, while in the west the clouds had given way to vigorous blue. It seemed fine just to stay and wait for somebody to show up, and before long a figure emerged from between two farm buildings. Being, I guessed, eighteen or twenty, I thought that he might speak a little English. But we found ourselves enjoying the same conversation as the one I had just had with the elderly man, though with less pointing and fewer words. And then, just as I was beginning to feel quite far from home, less in space than in time, a young woman asked, in silk-steel Home Counties tones, if she might be of help.

  Absolutely, I said. I was writing about the islands but hadn’t bargained on a deficit of spoken English, Germans tending to be obliging in that respect. She said that it was for that reason she had come to work as an au pair on Langeness prior to reading German at Oxford. It had for the most part been a total immersion, with the added benefit of a heavy dose of Plattdeutsch.

  Largish boned, heavily tanned and with a thick head of black hair, Angela (as I think she said she was called) ventured beyond a small gate into a garden strewn with children’s toys, opened the door to the house beyond with its dark thatch like a fringe drooping below the eyes and shouted into the darkness of a corridor. I picked up an odour that was domestic, rural, old-fashioned. There was some shouting back, and she told me to come back at five o’clock; the Kaufmanns would see me then.

  Nobody knows exactly how ancient the Warften are. By some guesses, enhanced with a little archaeological conjecture, the oldest could be over two thousand years. Even the doughtiest houses are much more recent, dating back to the early 1700s, a period representing an economic springboard for the Halligers. It was a fortuitous boom. The King of France having placed a veto on Basques working in the Dutch whaling industry, Amsterdam looked to Frisians to man its boats, and the call to harpoon was eagerly taken up by the Halligers. They subsequently returned from Arctic seas with cash, cosmopolitanism and crates of Delft tiles, with which they set about building convincingly bourgeois houses on their Warften.

  The habit of travelling beyond the islands for employment endured long after the whales had been as good as hunted out. In the early 1920s W. M. Davis wrote in the Geographical Journal, ‘It has long been the custom . . . for those who intended to become sailors to gather at a town on one of the larger islands in the early spring and sail thence to Holland, especially to Amsterdam, where they hire out for summer cruises; but they habitually return for winter. The returning sailors seek wives from among their own people, and a moderate excess of feeble-minded offspring appears to result from close intermarriage.’

  I returned at five. Neither Irina Kaufmann nor Angela was visible, but the same not-so-bright youth with whom I had not successfully conversed earlier was leaning without obvious purpose against some relic of farm machinery, watching a small glinting grey car, which he managed to convey to me belonged to Mrs Kaufmann. It traversed the Hallig, went past the Warft and back again, having no hills or corners to disappear around or beyond.

  Davis again: ‘It may well be imagined that life on a Hallig consists of a simple round of duties. The women are good housewives and keep the living rooms clean and neat in spite of their being under the same roof with the cow stable and sheep pen. The days of summer are busy; many of the men being then at sea, the home members of the family must gather the hay crop and tend the cattle.’

  Gradually the car snaked back, crept up the slope and came to a stop. Mrs Kaufmann opened the door and said, ‘You might think,’ as if paraphrasing Davis, ‘that it is simple living here. But we are always busy. Especially in the summer.’ That afternoon, she said, she had picked up her son from school, driven her daughter to the Hilligenl
ei pub, where she worked shifts behind the bar, delivered some straw to a neighbouring Warft, where a cow was in labour, and taken delivery of some stores for the shop.

  From somewhere her husband Hanni emerged. Perhaps in his mid-forties, he wore an islander’s unkempt beard and a little woollen cap. In Plattdeutsch he said, ‘I’m not going to stay to talk. I’m the rudest man in the world. I’m very busy, and I’ve got a pain in my gut,’ and turned and left. Irina watched him fondly as he ambled towards the fields clutching his belly.

  Now we sat at a small garden table in the dappled shade of a rare tree. Angela joined us with coffee and Apfelkuchen and some children tumbled about on the lawn. Irina, who was originally from Stuttgart, understood English well but turned to Angela to help her with speaking. Angela had been with the Kaufmann family for almost nine months; her English was getting rusty, she said. I saw that there was a strong bond between the two women, who spoke to each other easily and with evident affection. Both of them, and Hanni and the tumbling children, looked extraordinarily healthy, which Irina ascribed to unstinting exposure to the sky and their outdoors life. ‘When people come here from the city they always look so . . . so . . . blass . . .’

  Blass means pale – possibly deficient in exposure to the sun.

  Coming from the Swabian heartlands, she’d had to adjust not only to the semi-unintelligible Plattdeutsch, but to a wholly different regional character. ‘Everything else was easy.’ She said that, unlike Swabians, Halligers aren’t talkers but tend to be morose and lack a sense of humour. (Davis: ‘They have no games, no songs. Indeed, among the elders singing is seen as a sign of tipsiness.’) On the other hand, she said, Swabians are hardly relaxed, always fretting about money and domestic order. ‘I know when a Swabian has been staying because the room is tidier than it was before they arrived.’

  Irina had been on Langeness long enough not to feel like an incomer. In some ways, things had been turned on their heads. For the island’s men the local government provided work maintaining the stone sea defences, which didn’t prevent flooding but did stop the Hallig being washed away. But for women there was nothing to do, bar the kind of activities Davis had outlined ninety years ago. Typically, after attending college on the mainland they sought their fortunes elsewhere in Schleswig-Holstein or even beyond. This meant that the men who stayed to maintain their jobs and property needed to look further afield for wives – to Swabia for example.

  In the early years of their marriage Hanni and Irina had lived with his grandmother, who had known Langeness long before the introduction of mains water and electricity. Hanni’s grandmother was formidable but had imparted to Irina a kind of understanding as to what kind of travails an islander ought to be capable of facing. In her girlhood, for example, before the road was built, getting from one part of the Hallig to the other was so laborious that community ties beyond the closest of the Warften were not as strong – you were less likely to know the people living at the other end of Langeness than you were now. Nor, given the previous reliance of each Warft on its inhabitants’ ability to collect rainwater, could the old lady abide the sight of anybody wasting it. Indeed, it exercised her almost as much as hearing that one of her neighbours had failed to be diligent in their persecution of water voles.

  ‘Why should they kill the water voles?’ I asked.

  ‘Because the voles dig into the banks of the Warften and damage them, making them weaker each time the Sturmflut comes.’

  Irina had taken over that particular baton. She pointed to the nearest Warft, Peterswarft, where I could make out a man tending his lawn. He was a perfectly nice man, she said, but a weekender who might not execute his duties as a Halliger, or kill the voles, as diligently as he ought.

  What, I asked her, about the Sturmflut and Landunter (literally, ‘Land under’): wasn’t it a terrifying experience, coming so close to drowning on a regular basis?

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful!’ And described the excitement and anticipation of watching the approach of a storm flood, stocking up on supplies, bringing the livestock up onto the Warft, checking its banks for vole holes. ‘It’s kind of like Christmas.’

  While the Warften settlements look like houses on hummocks, their construction is finely calibrated to deal with the onslaught of a flood. The incline of the banks is such that it weakens the assault of the waves, absorbing its force, much in the manner of Hauke Haien’s dyke as described by Theodor Storm. The walls of the houses are strongest on the west, facing the sea, for it is from the west that the storm rails the strongest, while posts within the houses hold up the roofs, in case the waves should succeed in battering down the walls. In effect the houses play a kind of architectural brinkmanship with the waters of the North Sea, which often come to within half a metre or less of the lip of the bank. From the great flood of 1962, during which 6,000 buildings were destroyed and 347 people drowned, Langeness emerged almost in splinters, but unbowed.

  Usually, the waters subside after a couple of days. But it isn’t unknown for the conditions to be so bad that the ferry can’t dock, ‘and of course, the Löre is submerged. Have you seen our Löre yet?’ Not yet, I said. I was looking forward to it. I would do so before I left for Hooge the next day . . . The conversation paused to give me time to gather my thoughts and gobble down some apple cake. Irina reflected a little further: ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘Christmas is only once a year, which is a godsend.’

  To see the Löre was almost worth the visit to Langeness in itself. At the eastern end of the Hallig there begins a narrow-gauge rail track, which tapers into the sea, although its first stop is the tiny single-Warft Hallig of Oland a few kilometres distant. There is no rail service per se, rather each family owns a Lilliputian carriage, the length of a saloon car and propelled by a petrol-driven engine. These are fantasy vehicles, sides and interior furnishings built of scrap plywood and old cushions according to whim.

  I watched one family cram in five children, some sleeping bags and a dog. They were off on a holiday, they said, and I promised myself not to tell my son about their carriage on my return home because it would make him insanely jealous. It was navy blue with three white-framed windows like portholes. The engine started up, and the Löre trundled off into the blurring distance.

  Whether the Hallig will boast a Löre in a decade’s time is uncertain. Some predict it will become one of the first victims of Landunter, which until recently was sufficiently infrequent to retain a kind of specialness, occurring perhaps only three or four times between the equinoctial autumn storms and turbulent early spring. But in the past year alone it had happened thirty times, more often than in any other recorded twelve-month period. No one I spoke to dared mention climate change by name. The climate was evidently changing, but whether this was because of global carbon emissions, who knew?

  Most of the Wattenmeer, and the Halligen, are protected as a UNESCO world heritage site because of the area’s environmental importance as ‘one of the last remaining natural, large-scale, intertidal ecosystems where natural processes continue to function largely undisturbed’. It is the single largest nursery in the North Sea for fish, the scientists say, and there is said to be as much biodiversity in its shoals, dunes, mussel beds, tidal channels and estuaries as exists in the Amazon rainforest. So the area’s human inhabitants receive economic sweeteners from the local government, and also from powerful NGOs such as UNESCO and the WWF, to persuade them not to undertake activities thought to be damaging to the ecosystem and to take up positive and sustainable methods in their stead. Thus, the complex interplay of land and sea is mirrored in the almost equally intricate relations between natives and outsiders.

  On Langeness, for example, few of the locals own cows any longer but lease their fields to farmers on the mainland: the cows arrive around April and return on the Hilligenlei in October. Cattle are essential to keep the habitat in a fit state for the myriad birds spending winters and summers on the Halligen. They compete with the omnipresent brent geese,
but the farmers receive compensation for the pasture that the geese are estimated to devour.

  There are on each of the Halligen and on the other islands in the Wattenmeer information centres extolling the virtues of UNESCO’s stewardship, with detailed diagrams explaining tidal cycles and the impact of floods. Invariably there’s a fish tank replete with starfish, hermit crabs, blennies and other local denizens. These centres have become part of the landscape. They also provide a year of opportunity for the school leavers who run them, living in dormitories and generally having an extremely enjoyable time at the German taxpayers’ expense.

  Relations with the locals can be brittle, for the Halligers perceive the impertinent mooncalves as emissaries from the world of pontificating experts, who periodically arrive from elsewhere – sometimes abroad – and tell them how to run their Hallig and generally live their lives. Hanni’s grandmother would not be best pleased. Not all the experts from abroad leave. Indeed I soon felt that were I to stay longer than a week or so, the siren song of wind, birds and an uninterrupted view, even if of nothing in particular, would conspire against my ever boarding the Hilligenlei again.

  Connoisseurs of the Halligen like to say that no one is like another. Like Texel’s boast of being ‘Something for everyone’ this is perhaps far-fetched. They are uniformly flat and their houses are all built in the heavy-roofed Frisian style. But the meat of the claim, I suppose, lies in nuance: each is ever so slightly different, and the merest change in detail becomes hugely exaggerated by big skies and the sprawling presence of the sea.

  Hooge is less elongated than Langeness and its population only eighty. But by contrast a couple of its Warften are almost sizeable: on Backenswarft there are four cafés, two museums, a fish-and-chip shop and a town hall clustered around the Fething, an ancient rainwater repository now reduced to a duck pond. The entire Warft probably occupies an area comparable to that of three tennis courts cheek by jowl.