Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  The same interconnectedness and exclusivity was manifest at the swimming pool in Stromness, where I went three times a week before I abandoned the pool for sea-swimming: the elderly ladies bellowing the most intimate details of confinements, operations, family scandals and legal disputes from behind the closed cubicle doors. People are known by their nicknames, and embedded in complex pedigrees. Suddenly the face-to-face world of the Icelandic family sagas, which I have been studying and teaching for decades, makes sense. Now I see why the saga-writers expended pints of their precious oak-gall ink on those endless details of genealogy and legal niceties, so hard for the modern reader (the outsider, the ferry-louper) to plough through: this is the latticework that supports a functioning insular culture and society.

  Our first house, in Harray, was as far from the sea as you get in Orkney, around six miles in most directions, although even so on a still night you could go outside and hear the Atlantic surf beating at the foot of the Yesnaby cliffs, and after a westerly the windows were coated with salt crystals. Harray is the only Orkney parish with no coastline, and there are jokes about the Harraymen and their inability to recognize crabs. The house had been converted from a stable by an Orcadian who had spent his working life in Australia and retired home with his adult son. We found enormous horseshoes in the garden, suggesting that the heavy Clydesdales who drew the plough had lived in our sitting room. Down the road, in the Corrigall Farm Museum, the stalls had been restored with the massive planks rescued from our house, dry dung still stuck to their boards.

  The man who had converted our house was buried in St Michael’s kirkyard up the hill, and his son had inherited a few years before we moved to Orkney. There had been an old farmhouse, we learned, its crowstepped gables a local landmark. But the son had torn it down and sold the stone and slates. People shook their heads when they learned where we lived. ‘He did it,’ one neighbour told us, ‘to please her.’

  Her?

  ‘The internet bride from Gateshead.’

  Slowly the story began to take shape. The son had been brought up in Australia; he’d never liked Orkney. He’d inherited the conversion and the ruin and eighty acres, but he sold what he could, bit by bit, to fund his wife’s aspirations. The house we bought had only an acre and a half of land left. She was responsible for the enormous conservatory, tacked precariously on to the front of the house and lacking proper foundations, the showy, rickety spiral staircase up to the attic, and the whirlpool bath whose jets were a fertile ground for mould. They’d stayed a step ahead of the bailiffs for a few years, and then fled, leaving debts all over Orkney.

  Intriguing as this was, it didn’t quite explain the raised eyebrows, the twitching mouths that accompanied the news of where we lived. Finally, a neighbour put me in the picture. The son and his wife had had a reputation for hosting swingers’ parties, notorious, raucous, booze-fuelled evenings. I hired a carpet cleaner and tried yet again to get the stubborn stains out of the wall-to-wall beige. Not long after that we moved over the hill to the house overlooking Eynhallow Sound. Its former owner was the fragile widow of a civil engineer.

  I could write my life in houses. In Kenya they were stone-built, French-windowed, thick-walled against the heat, with parquet floors which Timona polished gliding up and down in sheepskin-soled bootees. The first house in Islington, where my parents lived when I was born, was like a tall thin birdcage, a couple of rooms off each landing, like little perches. The house my parents bought on retirement, in which they both died, was a rambling detached cottage, an oddity in central London. After my mother’s death it declined in tandem with my father, window-panes rotting, new leaks in the roof, the brambles advancing steadily on the shrinking patch of lawn, my mother’s flowerbeds choked with clover and couch grass.

  When I met my future husband, I had a house that suited me perfectly. A late-Victorian worker’s cottage in York, near the river, end of terrace, five rooms (sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, study). It was a little too close to the river: the first winter I was there, in 2000, the Ouse flooded worse than it had since records began in the 1650s, and my ground floor filled with a foot of filthy water. But we got it cleaned up, and I held a legendary Après le déluge party; dried-out and redecorated, it was my functional little machine for living.

  But it was too small for two writers.

  The first night I met the man I was to marry, at that party in March 2003, he talked about his work a lot. His love of particular poets, his book on a twentieth-century sculptor, and this plan he had for doing a doctorate. He wasn’t sure where to go: Oxford was a possibility. I was flattered by the interest shown in me by this attractive man seven years my junior.

  My own doctorate had been examined only three years earlier: it was all fresh in my memory – the biggest intellectual adventure of my life to date, and I was flushed with vicarious excitement on his behalf. Finishing my thesis had coincided with my mother’s terminal diagnosis, and from then until her death in March 2002 my academic career had largely been on hold. I had spent the year between her death and meeting my husband working furiously to turn the thesis into my book on death in Anglo-Saxon England – gutting my research, jettisoning almost all of it in favour of exciting new material, in the library every hour it was open. Writing about death and bereavement a thousand years ago channelled some of my own furious grief. My husband came along just in time to offer a critical commentary on the penultimate draft, do sterling work on the index, celebrate its submission with me, and then its publication in 2004. In retrospect it seems significant that he didn’t know me while I was sweating blood over the writing of the book. He didn’t witness the pain and the struggle, just the achievement.

  He started work on his doctoral thesis in the same month that we came to Orkney for the first time. I thought then – and I still believe – that he really felt the lure of the islands, that he wasn’t just suppressing his own wishes to please me. His thesis and my own writing, and the houses we lived in, are all mixed up together for me, the laboratory spaces in which we conducted our experiments in creativity and cohabitation.

  The house I lived in when we met being too small for all our books, we jumped at the chance to move to the house across the street: seven rooms (sitting room, dining room, kitchen, utility room, two bedrooms, bathroom). My husband was doing his thesis, so he had the second bedroom as a study. I camped out in the dining room. I wrote my first novel.

  We moved to Orkney in 2008. My husband was still working on his thesis: he had the chilly attic as a study. I camped out in the sitting room. I wrote my second novel. Time slowed. The island became the world.

  Moving to the islands suited me, but I wonder now if I were being selfish, over-writing his desires and ambitions with mine. Even in the age of superfast broadband, opportunities are limited on an island. Travel is time-consuming and expensive: no budget airlines fly into tiny Grimsetter and airfares are eye-watering. There’s the long-haul ferry, which leaves Kirkwall around midnight and gets you into Aberdeen at six in the morning. Or the shorter ferry journey over to Caithness, and then a weary drive, or an even wearier train journey – four hours chugging south and you’re still only in Inverness. Online virtual communities are still no real substitute for meeting colleagues face to face, the casual connections and accidental conversations that arise at seminars and conferences and workshops, the chance meetings that change your life.

  Two different flashpoints here – the closing down of those familiar networks; and the challenge of identifying what new opportunities an island offers. Moving to such an intricately woven community as Orkney has made me hyper-aware of dislocation and intrusion. It’s hard to find a role. You pick up single threads of complex stories, miss most of what people are saying, know someone by their name but not the all-important nickname. You must know Davey; he’s married to Fiona, Inga’s cousin in Stromness – you taught one of Inga’s daughters… It takes commitment and a particular kind of personality to become a strand in this web
.

  Seven generations in the kirkyard… but if you were to relocate to Orkney now even those seven generations might not be enough to sea-change your twenty-third-century descendants into natives rather than incomers, producers rather than consumers of Orcadian-ness. The logistics of our lives have changed too much. Orcadian identity was hard-forged out of centuries of seasonal necessity and marginal survival, not the luxury of Chilean strawberries and Kenyan green beans available in the Kirkwall supermarkets year-round. You can’t become an Orcadian by treating the place as a bolthole from the stresses of the world. Robert Rendall has stern words for those of us who use the shore for mere recreation rather than as a place of work, a source of food or fuel or scientific knowledge: ‘Only those can know it intimately who do something on it, harvest tangles, catch fish, gather whelks, study nature, or even comb the beach for driftwood…’

  Even seven generations of people interacting with Orkney in the way that I do would hardly be enough to produce the knowledge Rendall describes in his portrait of an old fisherman making his way through the rocks of the Birsay foreshore to the water’s edge: he ‘keeps to a predetermined route – one, doubtless, taken by his father before him, and by untold generations of Birsay fishermen… an invisible contour line… particular crevices that criss-cross the uncertain surface’. On their way home in the dusk, ‘familiar reefs are now blurred and indistinct, and the value of the traditional route at once becomes apparent’.This criss-crossing traditional intimacy – so evident in the toddler group and the swimming-pool changing room – is powerful enough on Mainland, with its fifteen thousand people. The smaller islands, with populations between two hundred and five hundred – Eday, Rousay, Westray, Hoy, Stronsay, Sanday – have even more hothouse environments. Smaller still are Wyre, Egilsay, Flotta. Mainland Orcadians have low expectations of the indigenous inhabitants of the outer isles: any report of wrongdoing or eccentricity is met with a nod and a sucking of teeth and an Isles folk, ken...

  As though Mainland were not itself an island.

  But sometimes the tiniest islands bounce back in unexpected ways. Since 1999 minute Papa Stronsay has been owned by a community of Catholic monks, who have built their profoundly traditionalist haven on a once-abandoned island that was almost certainly an ecclesiastical site before the Vikings ever arrived. Their black-clad figures have become a familiar sight, shopping for groceries in Kirkwall or shuffling through security at Grimsetter Airport, having divested themselves of cingulum, scapular and massive wooden-beaded rosary. In an era of religious decline, Golgotha monastery is thriving: the monks are young; they have just founded their first daughter house. Their website quotes St Columba’s words to the Pictish king in the late sixth century:

  Some of our brethren have lately set sail, and are anxious to discover a desert in the pathless sea; should they happen, after many wanderings, to come to the Orkney islands, do thou carefully instruct this chief, whose hostages are in thy hand, that no evil befall them within his dominions.

  St Magnus would be proud of them, Columba even prouder.

  *

  When I was in the sea at 5.30 the tide was right out. A raft of dunters with many ducklings was pottering in among the weed, and I went nosing close, pretending to be a seal. They didn’t mind at all. Back in my study now – glorious sun and stiff breeze – watching the turning tide come fluttering in over the expanse of sand. There are fifteen ravens sunning themselves on the Flaws byre roof, and Cally Bonkers-Cat is sitting in the window watching their every move.

  *

  Orkney is a scatter of islands across a thousand square kilometres of sea. The exact number depends on your definition of island. But it’s something like seventy, of which about twenty are inhabited. Not all the islands in the archipelago are part of Orkney. Stroma, just south of Swona in the Pentland Firth, belongs to Caithness. Fair Isle, just visible from North Ronaldsay, is part of Shetland. But Sule Skerry and Sule Stack, the gannet rocks far to the west, are Orcadian.

  I have seen Sule Skerry just once, and that was from a place where it should have been impossible. On a crystalline day last September I was walking along the shore by the Point of Ness on the edge of Stromness. I had a visitor with me, my Swiss friend Anouk, another Pictish-obsessive. She had never heard of the ballad ‘The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry’, and I was telling her the story as we strolled past the ruins of wartime searchlight emplacements and gun batteries, past the seals hauled out on the inshore Skerry of Ness, looking out west through the gateway of Hoy Sound and into the Atlantic. At the same moment we both spotted a grey motionless lump, hovering on the horizon, hazy, best seen with peripheral vision, but undoubtedly there. We looked at maps later, worked out angles, Googled images of the skerry, and were left in no doubt of what we had seen although Sule Skerry is sixty kilometres from Orkney, and supposedly only visible from the top of the Hoy hills.

  Some strange refraction, a lucky trick of the light, allowing the impossible.

  Anouk teaches me wonderful French words for the sounds of the sea. Clapotis: the slap and lap of the water around and beneath the jetty. Ressac: the surf, and she tells me she would also use this word to describe the sound of water draining back after a wave has broken on a shingle beach. Matthew Arnold’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’. In English, the technical jargon of hydrodynamics has its clapotic wave, one that undulates regularly without breaking but with great erosive power. But ‘clapotic’ is not the same as clapotis: with the shift of the stress and the hard velar [k] to close it the word loses its mournful, onomatopoeic charm.

  The ballad of the Great Selkie tells of a mother singing to the baby at her breast when a ‘grim guest’ enters, and speaks to her of past, present, and future. He identifies himself as the child’s father.

  ‘I am a man upon the land,

  I am a selkie in the sea,

  And when I’m far from every strand,

  My home it is in Sule Skerry.’

  And he’s a good father, if an absent one; he brings money for his son’s maintenance and takes an interest in his care.

  In Orkney folklore, young women are constantly at risk from the charms of visitors from the sea, whether selkie or Fin-man. In another story, a widower from the island of Sanday took his boat across to Eday to cut peats, there being none on sandy Sanday. It was a wild night, and he couldn’t get home to his daughter. She heard a knock on the door and found a handsome young man standing there, dripping wet. You wouldn’t leave me out here on a night like this. In the end, she felt sorry for him, and opened the door wide.

  Even on the way to her wedding, according to island lore, a nubile woman needs protection against supernatural abductors. At the tail end of the traditional Orkney wedding procession two people swept away the bride’s footprints with heather brooms so that no supernatural rapist could track her spoor and snatch her away at the last moment.

  David Balfour’s tenants on Eynhallow, evicted for their own good in 1851, were not the first population to be forced off the island. The same thing had happened to the Fin-folk, long ago. In Shetland lore the Fin-folk are connected to the Finnish Saami, but in Orkney they are clearly non-human, with trailing fins that they can use to disguise themselves. Their homelands are either islands like Eynhallow, floating or invisible, or a palace beneath the sea.

  A young woman – the prettiest girl in Evie – was stolen from the Sands of Evie by a Fin-man, when her husband, the farmer from Thorodale, took his eye off her for a moment. They were in the liminal zone, between high- and low-tide lines among the tang, gathering limpets for bait, moving quietly – you can only lift a limpet from its rock if it doesn’t know you’re coming. He stopped to fasten his shoe, and when he turned round she was already in the Fin-man’s boat. It vanished as he watched.

  There was no low green bump visible between Costa and Westness in those days. The island still belonged to the Fin-folk, and human eyes couldn’t perceive it.

  So the husband went to the witch over on Hoy,
and she gave him a charm and told him what to do. Just before dawn in high summer he rowed out into the sound with his three sons, and there before them was an island where no island had been before. They rowed right at it, beating off a school of vicious whales, and an assault by seductive mermaids. They landed, and defeated a tusked monster and a giant, and then they scattered the salt all round the perimeter of the island, and the Evie farmer got his wife back. After that Eynhallow was fixed in place, trapped by ritual and conquest, just another island.

  Woman and island are both contested space in this story, fertile and desirable, capable of vanishing and reappearing, best under masculine control. The farmer’s wife gets in trouble when she strays too near the sea. The farmer takes her back, and stakes his claim to the newfound land of Eynhallow in revenge, making the beach safe again.

  The Fin-man in this story is a rapist, a kidnapper, like the men who steal selkie-women’s skins; but the stories of women who take selkie lovers are more nuanced. There are various theories of selkie origins: that they are the souls of dead sailors, or, more generally, the souls of the drowned. Or the drowned go to join the true selkies, as in the tale of the man who had heard that you could get yourself a wife by stealing a selkie’s coat of fur when she takes it off to dance on the beach in human form, but when he did he found that the distraught naked woman scouring the beach for the lost sealskin was no nubile girl but his own mother, who had drowned a couple of years earlier. He still made her haggle to get the skin back, and she ended up promising her son that if he were to come to the beach on the following night she would point him to the coat belonging to the selkie-king’s daughter.

  There’s no hint that this selkie-princess is also a drowned soul: indeed, she not only comes willingly to live on land, following the man who has stolen her fur, she also converts to Christianity. When she is dying, she asks her husband to take her down to the shore and leave her there till dawn. If her body is still there at sunrise, it is a sign that she is truly a Christian, and he can bury her in the kirkyard. But if her body has vanished then the selkie-folk have reclaimed her. (In the version Tom Muir told me, the husband spends the night in his boat, listening to the selkies wailing. When dawn breaks, he finds his wife cold and dead on the strand, and takes her for Christian burial. But I am at liberty to imagine other endings, ones in which she regains her selkie self.)