Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Another origin myth for the selkies is that they are the chary angels who declined to take sides when the devil declared war on God. Lucifer and his rebels fell to perdition, but those angels who sat on the fence were also jettisoned from heaven, though still too good for hell. The neutral angels who tumbled on to the land turn into the fairies, the trowies; those who splashed down in the sea become the selkie-folk. I love this idea: that the selkies are like me, incapable of the kind of blind faith that God requires; looking at both sides of the question, wary of commitment, endlessly dithering about the intricacies of right and wrong. Until it’s too late, and they’re kicked out of heaven. But not damned – I hang on to that, as well.

  Angels are God’s messengers, travellers between the material and the ethereal realms. In Cuthbert’s boyhood vision of angels, he saw them taking a dead man’s soul to heaven. The selkies as fallen, morally confused angels move into this mythic and psychic space, journeying between the daylit surface and the deep sea, escorting the bodies and souls of the drowned, like a marine version of Hermes Psychopompos, leader of souls, who took the dead of the classical world to the realm of Hades. There’s a black-and-white mosaic in the pre-Christian cemetery site under the Vatican showing Hermes leading the chariot in which Hades is kidnapping Persephone. The myth has moved, in this artist’s vision, from specific narrative to archetype. Persephone represents every soul snatched by Death, journeying to the land of the dark, in need of a wise and kindly escort. The role of the soul-leader, the psychopomp, is not to judge the souls he guides, but simply to ease their passage. Jung saw Hermes as the guide who takes us between theconscious and unconscious states, between waking and the world of dreams. Perhaps the selkies can do that, too.

  Fallen-yet-not-evil angels or drowned humans: both selkie origin myths offer ways of thinking about different kinds of being, not quite human, not quite animal. Creatures of land and sea. They’re not hybrids in the way that mermaids are: the selkie looks either wholly animal or wholly human, but her soul is something else again. It’s as though the first storytellers to draw from the well of selkie-tales knew of all the ways in which seal biology adapts seamlessly between life on shore and in the water. Seals sleep in both media; when on land they sleep in the way that a land animal does, with the whole brain asleep. But when they doze in the sea, rocking nose up in the shallows, they sleep in the way that cetaceans do, with only one half of the brain switching off at a time.

  Neither the grey nor the common seal is a fully protected species, although it is illegal to kill them in their breeding seasons, and they are not to be poisoned or shot with big guns. But this doesn’t stop the fishermen from putting powerful acoustic devices in the water – known as seal scrammers, but they affect cetaceans as well – or from shooting them with other weapons: the law allows for the killing of seals if they are perceived as a threat to livelihood, and many are shot every year – around fifteen hundred between 2011 and 2015, a third of which were pregnant. So-called ‘rogue seals’ damage the nets at the salmon farms, and they take the bait out of lobster-creels. Although they are no longer officially culled, the debate has not gone away.

  Rummaging in the archives I find a 1981 leaflet protesting the culling of grey seal pups in Orkney. It pointed out the inadequacy of scientific research into their feeding patterns, their social structures and population numbers, concluding, ‘Seals are elusive, impossible to follow, and live in another medium.’ A found poem, this eloquent sentence, a haiku-like, gnomic statement which reminds me of the Anglo-Saxon wisdom lyrics, with their terse encapsulations of the essence of things:

  Sweord sceal on bearme,

  drihtlic isern. Draca sceal on hlæwe,

  frod, frætwum wlanc. Fisc sceal on wætere

  cynren cennan. Cyning sceal on healle

  beagas dælan. Bera sceal on hæðe,

  eald and egesfull.

  A sword must lie across the lap,/Noble iron. A dragon in its mound,/Wise, proud of treasure. A fish in the water,/spawning its kin./A king in the hall,/sharing out rings. A bear on the heath,/Old and terrible.

  I want to add:

  ‘A seal must dwell in the sea,/Elusive, not of our world.’

  In the ballad of the Great Selkie, the grey seal is a soothsayer as well as a shape-shifter. He foretells the future for himself, his lover and their child: she will find a human mate, and disaster will follow.

  An’ thoo will get a gunner good,

  An’ a gey good gunner it will be,

  An’ he’ll gae oot on a May mornin’

  An’ shoot the son an’ the grey selkie.

  Is it murder, to kill the selkies in their seal form?

  *

  I went for a run up the hill at sunrise – hares and pheasants and geese and all the Northern Isles spread out in hazy light – Rousay and Eynhallow and Gairsay and Wyre and Eday – and shimmery silvery sea. Primroses by the stream all the way to the top, and the first bluebell. Blessings were counted. Big time. Then to the sea. No seals, but a lone swallow doing a victory roll just above the surf, and looking west to Eynhallow I could see the breakers of the rosts sending up spray like plumes of smoke.

  *

  In Kenya I become a water-baby. Sunday afternoons go by in a golden haze beside the pool at the Nairobi Club, that post-colonial bastion of a very particular privilege: Ladies are not allowed in the downstairs bar until after sunset, and not allowed in the billiards room at all. Superb starlings peck at the remains of our bar-snacks, their brilliant livery of blue and orange gleaming in equatorial sun filtered by acacias. School holidays are often spent at the coast, borrowing a friend’s house or renting self-catering cottages, the endless sands fringed with palm and casuarina, the little pale pink ghost crabs scuttling over the ebb at dawn and dusk. The Mombasa Club has a pool filled with seawater, white-walled and built out into the sea, overshadowed by the square grey bulk of Fort Jesus, raised by the colonizing Portuguese at the end of the sixteenth century. My parents were life members of both clubs – their frayed and dog-eared membership cards are in those box-file ossuaries.

  We’re often at the coast for Christmas; we travel down by sleeper train: dark wood, white linen tablecloths, heavy monogrammed cutlery. You settle down in the cool thin air of Nairobi, over a mile above sea level; awaken in the steam and sweat of the coastal plain. For Christmas Day itself we’ll go to one of the big tourist hotels on Diani Beach for the pool and the bar and the cold buffet. The hotel decorates its hot, shadowed, open spaces with the trimmings of Northern Europe: fir trees and lanterns and cut-out snowflakes. Father Christmas doles out presents at the poolside, he is black, with tiny swimming trunks and a huge cotton-wool beard.

  Above all, there is Naivasha.

  A couple of hours’ drive north-west from Nairobi, winding down from the heights into the Rift Valley. Nai’posha, rough waters, in Maa: a volcano-fringed lake, trimmed with the white skeletons of bleached trees that have drowned in the periodic rise and fall of the lake level. Fish eagles sit in their branches and the water resonates with their harsh cries. The edge of the lake is ringed with the long stems and green fans of papyrus. We walk barefoot along the sun-warmed boards of the jetty. In the shallows to either side orange crayfish rattle their claws at each other. Further out, on soggy banks of vegetation, the brown bulks of coypu heave out and splash back in. The water smells wonderful, dark, clean and yet with a faint whiff of decay. Our little open outboard motorboat is moored towards the end of the jetty, and we clamber in, heaving the picnic cold bag after us. It’s 1976.

  Crayfish and coypu are both invasive species, as is the tilapia for which my parents will fish while my sister and I swim. The coypu have escaped from a fur farm; the tilapia were introduced intentionally. The crayfish are voracious predators, recent arrivals bred for export but already well established. They burrow into the lake edge, causing erosion.

  Our little boat chugs along the fringes of the lake. In the distance we can see the curve of Crescent Island (which is
– confusingly to a literal-minded nine-year-old – a peninsula), and beyond it the asymmetrical peak of Longonot. The beaches are black, made of pumice, scattered with obsidian.

  Naivasha in the 1970s was already an artificial environment: how much more so now. The lake shore is packed with flower and vegetable farms, supplying the supermarkets of Europe, and the green fields and red earth I remember are now covered with polytunnels. A client supermarket in the UK will email a Kenyan grower daily, with instructions about product and quantity depending on the previous day’s volume of sales. In Kirkwall’s big Tesco I can buy a packet of green beans picked on the shores of Naivasha only two days earlier. The lake is shrinking, growing over-rich with nutrients from agricultural run-off, matted with water hyacinth (yet another invasive species).

  But back in 1976 we can skirt the edge, fringed with long-lashed groves of papyrus, watching hippo and long-tailed cormorants and cattle egrets, before turning the bows towards Longonot, heading for the open water in the middle of the lake. Samosas, and sausage rolls dipped in tomato ketchup, small sour apples, and Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate which is already melting even before the silver paper is peeled away.

  The water is cool and black. I have no idea how deep it is. I think of the hippos we have just been watching as they lounged in the shallows, their huge tusks and bloated pinky-brown backs, and I imagine them swimming out into the centre, rising from the blackness below me, jaws agape. ‘The water’s much too deep,’ my father says. ‘There are no hippos here.’ I tread water, stretch a foot as far down as I can, pointed like a ballerina’s, sink myself into the abyss. Nothing, no slimy back, no matter how I reach, and I believe him, imagining the lake to be bottomless, though I know now that Naivasha has varied wildly in depth over the last sixty years, as those skeletal trees attest: as deep as six metres, as shallow as two. Its waters are siphoned off for agriculture: there are only two freshwater lakes in Kenya, and Naivasha’s rough waters are at a premium.

  When I eat that green bean in Evie, I am taking in nutrients from Naivasha. I proactively seek out Kenyan-grown vegetables in Orkney’s supermarkets despite the air-miles quandary, their shocking carbon footprint, because my adult self knows how dependent the Rift Valley economy is on the foreign currency this industry brings in, knowing also that the flower- and vegetable-growers earn good money by local standards, though still only about half what the aid agencies estimate is necessary to meet a family’s needs. And I also know that most of the hard labour that has gone into growing my bean is female. Single parents, AIDS widows and grandmothers make up the bulk of the work force. But these are the rational, sunlit arguments: what I am really seeking is a much deeper reconnection with the child I was, craving the same intensity of experience, that ability to exist utterly in the moment. Like and unlike Persephone with her pomegranate seeds, I yearn for the enchanted food that means you can stay for ever.

  I haven’t been back to Kenya for decades, but it is written in me, not just in my memories but in the elements of which I am composed. I run my tongue speculatively around the inside of my mouth, trying to remember long-forgotten flavours I knew in my childhood, counting my teeth, testing as always the rough edge where one of my incisors is chipped, the gap where a wisdom tooth is gone.

  Nairobi (cold water) and Naivasha are both very high above sea level, part of Kenya’s volatile uplands, the land mass which is tearing itself apart along the Rift Valley. From the air you can almost see the perforations. The earthquakes that set our pendant lights swaying, rattle the ornaments on the mantle; volcanoes; lakes like Nakuru, Natron, Turkana, naturally poisoned with chemicals. The water from our kitchen tap in Kiambere Road, the local milk, the maize meal which makes the greasy posho and ugali dumplings given to us for lunch at school: all these will have left their isotopic analysis in my teeth. The third molar, the M3, is the last crown to form, and analysis of my surviving M3 strontium isotopes would give a very distinctive profile, pointing to an igneous geology, the trachyte tuffs, the layer upon layer of pyroclastic flow that makes up this fertile soil. Nairobi sits on the edge of a mass of phonolite, or chinkstone, named for its metallic sound when struck. The visible landscape is less than fifteen million years old.

  The information from my M3’s strontium profile could be cross-correlated with that derived from carbon and nitrogen, hinting at a change in diet. I don’t remember minding that we had left London, the big Victorian primary school just around the corner, friends, the familiar tall, thin house. But that tomato ketchup – Zesto – it tasted wrong. Too musky. I cared about that. And the milk – it had a sour, smoky edge, and came in green-and-white tetrahedrons, not foil-topped glass bottles. Disturbing, and yet exciting.

  Finally, the oxygen isotopes in my tooth would point to formative years spent somewhere warmer, drier. The osteologist who has the few kilos of my dry bones laid out on her table, shaving and filing my teeth for the secrets they contain – she might not be able to point to Kiambere Road, on the way out to Langata. But she could certainly say, Not from Orkney. Not from anywhere near Orkney. This one doesn’t have her seven generations in the kirkyard.

  *

  A sprinkling of snow this side of the sound, more on the slopes of Rousay. The steady northerly wind driving the water into the bay, equally rough on both sides of the breakwater. A few gulls in the pre-sunrise sky, no birds in the water, no seals. Hands and feet went numb for the first time this winter but I still managed to get my head wet.

  *

  The water is chest-deep now, stiffening my nipples, clamping my ribs like iron bands. It’s time to launch myself, and I push off into the water with a gasp, in the January dawn and the shifting grey-gold light, using a steady breaststroke, my head above water. Once past the breakwater the choppiness of the water is more haphazard, more aggressive. But the curving arm of Aikerness still protects me from the full force of Evie’s tides. This is a sheltered harbour, a good place for visiting summer yachts to drop anchor, and it has been for a long time.

  Of all the peoples who have inhabited this shoreline, it is the Picts that fascinate me most. Orkney is identified with the Vikings, in the popular and the scholarly imagination alike. The souvenir shops of Kirkwall are full of Norse runic souvenirs; Historic Environment Scotland shamelessly flogs plastic horned helmets; and a quick Google search shows that ‘Viking Orkney’ gets six times as many results as ‘Pictish Orkney’. One has to envy the Norse their brand identity, their bravado, their capacity for playing up to their reputation. Scratched on to the stone walls of the Neolithic chamber tomb of Maeshowe they left runic graffiti bragging of their sexual and military prowess, and their love of treasure:

  ‘… Ingebjork the fair widow…’

  ‘Hakon alone bore treasure from this mound…’

  ‘Arnfithr Matr carved these runes with this axe owned by Gauk Trandilsson in the South land…’

  But even here there are surprises, details that undercut the macho swagger.

  One of the runic graffiti in Maeshowe claims ‘Jerusalem-farers broke into Orkahaugr. Hlíf the jarl’s house-keeper, carved.’ Orkahaugr is the Norse name for Maeshowe, and Jerusalem-farers are pilgrims to the Holy Land, the centre of the medieval world. We know from Orkneyinga Saga that Rognvald Kali went to Jerusalem, leaving in about 1150, returning in 1153. Hlíf is a woman’s name; she seems to identify herself with the jórsalafarar, the travellers to the Holy City, and she calls herself a matselja, housekeeper. I like to think the jarl whose house she kept was my Kali.

  As well as a woman’s name hlíf is also an ordinary noun; in the abstract it means shelter, but it’s often used to refer to a shield. Matselja is another interesting word: mat is food, and selja means to share out, but the housekeeper’s role extended far beyond that of dinner-lady. It was one of the very few recognized jobs for women, and prestigious: the matselja guarded access to the household’s stores and its secrets. The búr, the larder, was one of the few lockable spaces in the farmstead, and the Icelandic sagas
often mention it as a hiding place for outlaws and fugitives. Plenty of job opportunities here for an ambitious and competent woman, working for unmarried men and widowers as well as the wealthy who ran several farms. The indispensable Hlíf could have gone to Jerusalem with Kali, shielding him from hunger and thirst and dirty linen all the way through the North Sea and the Channel and the Mediterranean, keeping him spruce in his flirtation with Ermengarde of Narbonne. Maybe she washed his shirts in the Jordan. And maybe like Kali she too swam in the river, though if she did she might have chosen to go down to the bank before sunrise, while the men were still snoring in the tents, the dawn breeze rustling the reeds and tamarisks that screened her from curious eyes. What did Hlíf the matselja think of her bigsy, outgoing, accomplished jarl?

  In contrast to the Norse, the Picts are so elusive, despite the best efforts of people like me, historians, art historians and archaeologists. They linger in the long shadow of the broch-builders, whose descendants they almost certainly were; and their way of life was wiped out here by the Viking settlements, though whether in peaceful integration or through bloody genocide we do not know. The traces they leave behind are so finely made, even dainty: tiny painted quartzite pebbles; exquisite bone pins; delicate silver jewellery; houses whose footprint mimics the shape of a flower, with a central hearth and semi-circular, radial rooms. Above all it is their carved stone sculpture, both the enigmatic symbols and the elaborate cross-slabs, that draws me back, appealing both to my intellect and to a hunger for beauty. But they left very little written evidence, no manuscripts, their inscriptions on stone or bone often indecipherable, their language gone. How quiet do we have to be before we can overhear those voices?