The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  By this time Kroyer’s mental health was deteriorating and his marriage to Marie under strain. Moreover, the colony in its entirety was riven with rivalries and smouldering feuds. Soon Marie went to Sicily to escape Krøyer’s dark moods and met the Swedish composer Hugo Alfven, who had long been in love with her, having seen her husband’s depiction of Marie with her dog. It was Marie who seduced Alfven, coming to his room one morning wearing a red satin nightdress, bringing a basket of red roses.

  Learning of the affair from Marie, Kroyer invited Alfven to Skagen, where he stayed in an apartment. Kroyer reasoned that familiarity would exhaust his wife’s passion for the composer, but it was a doomed strategy, and it was Alfven that he painted arm in arm with Marie at the bonfire, a painful acknowledgement that she was lost to him. When she had a child by Alfven, they divorced. Kroyer fell into despair and died in 1909. Marie moved to Sweden, marrying Alfven, who would later leave her for a mistress, and she died in Stockholm in 1940, by which time the artists’ colony had long since disappeared.

  I woke at six, on the morning after my arrival, to commence my assault on the harbour, beginning with the fish auction, which takes place each morning at seven and ten. I had expected disappointment. The great fish auctions of the past, with rows and rows of gargantuan cod, halibut, turbot, tuna, conger eel and haddock, and terrier-like fish merchants with their language of arcane gesturings, are all but gone. And in an arching, hangar-like space, half a dozen men haggled over half a dozen crates of mackerel and a tub of prawns. The whole business was quickly over, the men dispersed, the fish dispatched, and I found myself alone with the sad thought that these might have been the very last of the North Sea. But that wasn’t, or isn’t, the case.

  Courtesy of Maria Groes, I had the telephone number of Willy B. Hansen, the port director of Skagen Harbour. He was, I knew, important, and this was reflected in the size of his office in the harbour control tower, to which I cycled gingerly in anticipation of our meeting. Willy offered coffee, and I offered an apology for the short notice of my request to meet. But he was professionally gracious and, he said, anxious to share the ‘good news’ about Skagen’s development.

  Willy was a short stocky man possessing the apparent agelessness of the managerial caste. He had served in the Danish merchant navy, been a fisheries patrol officer, and headed search and rescue missions in Greenland. Then he had changed sides, joining the Danish Royal Navy and qualifying as a submarine commander. He had served in the Iraq War and later led surveillance operations against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Gulf. ‘My God,’ I said. ‘I never thought Danish submarines might be spying on al-Qaeda in the Gulf.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘We did it quite a lot, actually. It was very exciting.’

  His current remit, he said, was even more ‘exciting’, responsible as he was for increasing the profitability of Skagen and ensuring that the two shipbuilding yards, the fish-processing factory at Skagerrak Pelagics and all the secondary businesses remained competitive and fit for purpose. He talked about investments in the tens of millions of euros and targets that had been met ahead of schedule. Two of his priorities were to ensure that the harbour could accommodate ever-larger fishing vessels and to reduce turnaround times so that the boats could unload their fish more quickly (‘Yes, most of it will be ground into fishmeal’) before setting out to sea again for more. He was also building a cruise-liner terminal to increase visitor numbers and he pointed out of the window at a dredger, busy scouring channels to allow deeper-draughted vessels to enter the harbour.

  Many North Sea and Baltic harbours had simply not understood the need to adapt, and had atrophied. They should have taken a more entrepreneurial approach, he said. That wasn’t universally the case. Peterhead in Scotland was also doing ‘big things’ to maximise its own advantages. Sometimes he went across to keep a eye on developments.

  ‘Spying?’ I asked.

  ‘Of a sort. Yes.’

  ‘Do you go in a submarine?’

  ‘No.’

  Willy’s Skagen, I saw, was not the Skagen of dead artists and dune grasses singing in the breeze; it was the Skagen of economic progress. I asked Willy whether there was any conflict between boosting fishmeal production and harbour dredging and the aims of environmentalists, the tourist industry and those who loved Skagen for its quietness and isolation. He answered with polished tact.

  ‘In the old days,’ he said, by which I took him to mean before he took the post of port director, ‘issues sometimes arose. But the important thing is communication. As long as we – all those who have an interest in Skagen and have it to heart – can share and understand each other’s concerns these kinds of thing can be avoided.’

  I had lunch at one of the wine-coloured wooden shacks in the harbour where, sitting on an outside bench, you can eat delicious fiskefrikadellen (cod hamburgers) and other piscatorial delights. September is when Skagen tries to keep tourist numbers from slumping by celebrating the ‘blue time’, the late evenings when the light possesses its most haunting qualities – which the Skagen artists endeavoured to capture in their landscape paintings and portrayals of fishermen.

  Perhaps the tourist board oversells the blue time, encouraging shops to mount blue window displays, promoting ‘blue markets’ and blues nights in the wine bars. Nature’s subtlest gifts die, a little, in the throats of the public into which they have been rammed. Still (and the day had yet to sufficiently decline that the effect was at its peak) there was no denying the extraordinary quality of the light, absent of haze and beneath which the water of the harbour basin was as reflective as highly polished glass.

  Emboldened by Willy and the cod burgers, I put in a call to Tage Rishøj, managing director of Carstensens Shipyard. I could see its main building across the harbour, and in its dock was a ship. Willy thought Carstensens one of Skagen’s greatest assets. Mr Rishøj would see me too. Without ado he bade me don a hard hat. From a shelf in the lobby we tried to find the smallest. Still, my head rattled inside it like a walnut.

  Carstensens employs 250 people and generates any number of secondary jobs and contracts for local businesses. It is one of only a few shipyards left in Denmark, but it was booming. It specialises in building for the pelagic fishing industry, boats catching the species that swim close to the surface of the water, particularly herring and mackerel. Each year the boats become bigger, more technically advanced and luxurious. Carstensens’s clients, both trawler-owning companies and skipper-owners, come from all over northern Europe: Norway, Ireland, the Shetlands and the Scottish ports.

  In the harbour shipyard sat two brand-new boats days away from delivery, and we squeezed past workmen busying up and down gangplanks with the urgency that attends a project nearly finished. Tage nodded towards a man very ordinary in appearance – youngish, not obviously rich or brawny but wholly anonymous, no tattoos visible. ‘He will be the skipper. And the owner.’ I asked if it would be OK for me to introduce myself. ‘Bad timing,’ Tage said. ‘He’s just about to sign the final paperwork.’ And transfer the final instalment of some twenty million euros into Carstensens’s bank account. It was probably best that he wasn’t put off his stroke.

  A distinctive smell of ‘new-ness’ pervaded the bridge. The teak was immaculate, the instruments shiny, many of them still sheathed in protective plastic. An L-shaped leather sofa faced a wide-screen television that disappeared into a sideboard at the flick of a switch. Almost every aspect of the fishing operation could be handled from a tiny console at the rear of the bridge: the nets lifted, emptied, fish pumped into cool water to keep them in optimum condition. Down below Tage showed me the crew cabins. Not large, but not shared and equipped with built-in TVs, Internet access and en-suite showers. ‘It’s been like this for twenty years. Fishermen don’t have to rough it anymore.’

  Environmentalists rage against these extraordinary machines, which pillage the North Sea and beyond, but perhaps their greatest victims are the fishing communities. This boat, said Tage, had the cap
acity of the entire fleet of 300 boats that decades ago sat in Skagen harbour. On the other hand, the boats are more adaptable: they can switch between trawling, purse-seining and drifting at the flick of a switch, and many of the old evils of fishing – young novices cooped up with alcoholic old-timers in unsavoury conditions and bearing the brunt of big seas armed with little more than a set of oilskins – have been thankfully erased.

  In the harbour there remained, picture perfect in that honest but hallucinatory light, a dozen or so traditional Danish trawlers, among the world’s most enduring and endearing vessels, their rounded sterns and baby-blue hulls archetypally recognisable. Some are half a century old, but still, if in ever-decreasing numbers, continue to plough their foredecks into the North Sea regardless of weather. Only aboard one of these sea-scarred warrior boats was anyone home: Jacob Hammer, a large man, dark-haired, broad- chested, moustached, standing at the door of his tiny bridge with one foot on the gunwale, shooting the breeze and drinking beer with a few friends who seemed to arrive by foot, bicycle and mobility scooter. I sidled up sheepishly on my rented sit-up-and-beg, like a schoolboy trying to join the gang. ‘Have a beer!’ said Jacob, and he handed me a can of Slots Classic. Like that new boy, I beamed with the glow of acceptance.

  Jacob’s accent was as distinctly un-Danish as any I’d ever heard. Danish friends had warned me that the way the inhabitants of northern Jutland spoke was incomprehensible: ‘They sort of gobble up the end of their words.’ But this wasn’t that.

  ‘You’re not Danish?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really. I came from Torshavn in the Faroes in 1968.’ And yet his voice had a certain twang, on account of which, had he said he’d arrived from Central America I would have been less surprised.

  Jacob had done well out of fishing. He pointed to an enormous vessel standing proudly out of its element in the dry dock. He’d owned a half-share in that once and sold it profitably. Now he was devoted to Sarah, the prettiest and smallest boat in Skagen. Most days, weather permitting, he set out to trawl for sole.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said. ‘The last few years the sole fishing has been no good. No fish at all. And now they’re back. Millions of them. It’s almost taken the fun out of it. I just go out, throw out the nets, haul them in. A few tonnes of sole. The trouble is, the price of sole is nothing. That’s always how it is.’ He laughed. ‘Difficult to get everything exactly right: lots of fish and good prices. Sometimes it happens.’ He crushed his empty Slots Classic tin in a hand like a giant starfish and handed himself a full one.

  I hung around with my new friends for a while, nodding sagely as old fishermen swapped stories in a language of which I had not the slightest grasp. They came and went, these sea dogs, enjoying their Slots. ‘Aah,’ said Jacob. ‘Life is gooood.’

  Presently we were joined by a man whose brow appeared more furrowed. Tall and thin, white-bearded and grave, he looked like, the perfect foil to Jacob. Hooked onto the handlebars of his bicycle was a plastic bag containing a cardboard box. It smelt fine. And soon Jacob and Jens invited me to join them for lunch in Jacob’s boatshed. This was a large airy building crammed with boat tackle, but more surprisingly paintings of the harbour and fishing boats adorned its walls, executed with craftsmanlike and meticulous precision.

  ‘He’s like Leonardo, eh?’ said Jacob, and he nodded towards Jens.

  ‘You did these?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like to paint. When I have some time.’

  Jens hadn’t retired – couldn’t afford to, he said, although he was past seventy. He kept busy as a carpenter and decorator, but like Willy the port director had spent much of his working life in Greenland during the boom of the 1970s and 80s, when builders had been in demand. He had even taught at the territory’s only navigational school, although, he said, that had been a bit of a disaster – the literacy and numeracy of the Greenlanders were so poor it was fruitless to try to use them as bedrock for training in the art of using sextant, chart and protractor. But still. It was an experience, and it had inspired him. Had I heard of the MS Hans Hedtoft, the ‘Danish Titanic’?

  Slowly and between mouthfuls of breaded plaice, Jens told me the story of how, in late January 1959, the Hedtoft had set out from Julianehaab in Greenland for Copenhagen with a cargo of frozen fish and a complement of forty crew and fifty-five passengers. She was of the very latest design, and the outward trip to Greenland had been her maiden voyage.

  ‘On 30 January,’ said Jens, ‘she issued a distress call to say that she had hit an iceberg sixty kilometres south of Greenland. Two German trawlers responded to the call and headed towards her location. Two hours later she radioed that she was sinking. But the weather was bad, and rescue planes were unable to fly. For a week ships and planes searched for the Hedtoft, but there was nothing to be seen, no wreckage. Nothing. The only clue ever to emerge was a lifebelt washed ashore almost a year later.’

  We pushed aside our paper plates and contemplated the awfulness of all those deaths at sea, the waiting for assistance, the slow lurching beneath the cold waves, the inevitability of drowning.

  ‘But –’ Jens broke the silence almost brightly ‘– I think I now know where she sank. I have done the calculations – remember I used to be a navigational instructor – and I am certain that I know where the Hedtoft can be found.’ On the other hand, he added gloomily, nobody, these days, was bothered enough to look for it.

  I spent the next morning walking and cycling on the Baltic side, past the royal villa which is now a retreat for ‘artists and scholars’ built in the year that the Great War began and painted in the town’s colours. For Skagen, where most things appear approachable, it looked forbidding. There were signs: NO ADMITTANCE and PRIVATE. I could see no scholars or artists. They were indoors, I surmised, rendering the landscape in pen or paint. But a French window had been left tantalisingly ajar, and on the sill of a first-storey window stood a bottle of wine.

  I had a useless stab at sketching the coast myself, and later a woman with a Labrador (like Marie Krøyer’s, I thought, though of course it wasn’t her) asked whether I had been painting. ‘Just dreadful drawing,’ I said. She, she said, had been collecting stones – the pieces of flint with holes that the Danes so prize, call cow stones and hang on wires or string to decorate their summer houses.

  I headed back to Jacob’s shed to join him and Jens for another lunch. ‘Have a Slots!’ said Jacob, and a paper plate of plaice and prawns was pushed in my direction. The subject for discussion was the future of fishing and how it had all been taken over by big business.

  What was happening was madness, said Jens. For anyone now to make money out of the sea, it was necessary to borrow eighty to a hundred million euros: twenty million to buy the boat and the remainder to buy up the quotas necessary to fill it. There was no future for anyone who lacked big corporate backing.

  ‘Whose sea is it anyway? Does the bank now own all the fish? How can you capitalise nature, fish, like that? Not only does it make no economic sense, but it’s immoral. And unsustainable. Everyone knows that the fish could just disappear overnight, leaving the trawler owners with huge unpaid debts and useless boats.’

  Everything Jens said made sense to me. Did he think there was a parallel, I asked, with the recent financial crisis, in which the banks had over-stoked the market with sub-prime mortgages?

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and it’s driven by the same thing: everyone is trying to make money without working. It’s just speculation.’

  Jens seemed disappointed and uncertain and let down by the world, not for his sake but for its own. The natural cycle of things had been disrupted, he argued. A generation used to mean twenty-five years, but now it had been stretched to forty because everyone started their families so much later. Nobody was serious about anything any more, and everything was postponed as people shirked their responsibilities for as long as they possibly could.

  Jacob appeared less dispirited by the state of the world, and was pott
ering and tinkering with things in his shed. I knew that he knew I wanted to go fishing. He’d yet to decide, it seemed, and was busying about happily, sort of singing – ‘Da da daa da da daa’ – while in the kitchenette a radio played a song about being in the mood to dance, romance and take chances by an Irish girl band called The Nolans. I myself was in the mood for fishing, and was hoping that Jacob would take a final weather check, announce that the wind wasn’t so bad after all and point me in the direction of some sea boots. But it was not to be.

  We walked out onto the quayside, where the wind was picking up, bashing the stays against the masts of the fishing boats and playing kick-the-can on the cobbles with an abandoned can of Slots. Standing on a bollard, a herring gull appeared to be choking to death on a large cod’s head. ‘I think,’ said Jacob, ‘that it isn’t going to happen today. Sarah’s just a little boat. It’s going to be a pre-e-etty uncomfortable ride on a day like this.’

  Jacob was a kind man. To soften the blow he told me about another writer, an Australian woman whom he had taken fishing, but who had vomited without cessation for a whole day. And he walked over to the bucket of ice where he kept the Slots and pulled out some sole, which he handed me, advising me just to dredge them in flour and fry in butter and oil and serve with fresh lemon and pepper. But there it was. ‘Next time, maybe,’ said Jacob with a kind of avuncular concern that I appreciated. ‘Hey – maybe you’ll find someone to help you eat all those fishes!’

  If the weather was too bad for fishing, the obvious thing to do was to return to the Grenen to see the meeting of the seas in one of its darker moods. The wind was growling now, and in the distance the white horses were leaping higher. Despite the weather, tourists were heading off determinedly, hoods and coat-tails flapping, shouting at each other against the wind, arms raised against the flying sand.

  On the way out I saw a man in a black suit and tie loitering by a big bunker, part of the Atlantic Wall, upon which some wag had daubed ZIMMER FREI. It was a curious vision – like a scene from a Jack Vettriano painting gone awry – or perhaps, I thought, he was the first to arrive at a gathering of crypto-fascists or a fashion shoot, if there’s much difference between the two.