Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Sigmund Freud isn’t in Brouillet’s picture, but he too was one of Charcot’s students, though they disagreed about the causes of hysteria. When Freud was around thirty he bought a lithograph of Une leçon clinique and it stayed on his wall in Vienna for fifty years; when he came to London in 1938 he hung it over his couch in his new consulting room.

  The hysterical woman in Brouillet’s picture is Marie ‘Blanche’ Wittman, a long-term patient at the Salpêtrière. A recent study moves her from object to subject, showing how she collaborated with Charcot, falling in with his expectations of how a hysterical woman would behave, making a career for herself as his most famous patient and case-study. Blanche Wittman is no longer the blank white page both her name and her portrait imply. Freud’s print of Brouillet’s painting of Charcot’s lecture still hangs above the couch in what is now the Freud Museum in Hampstead, a building my mother knew very well. Compositionally, Une leçon clinique is weirdly like that photograph from 1930 of my three-year-old mother looking startled in her short white dress and socks, being loomed over by dark-clad figures, women in cloches and fur-collared coats, Princess Beatrice clutching the flowers, my great-grandfather uniformed and bemedalled, his boots and spurs gleaming.

  My mother has been lucky; she is almost seventy-three when la maladie de Charcot is diagnosed. It’s commonest between forty and seventy, a neurological failure of middle rather than old age. There is a small but statistically significant genetic correlation. When I look at my mother now, do I see my future self?

  When is an island not an island?

  Charcot Island in the Antarctic was also named for Dr Charcot, by his younger son, Jean-Baptiste, who became a pioneer of polar exploration. When my mother was two, in 1929, a British explorer flew around Charcot to prove for the first time that it was indeed technically an island, although an ice-bridge connected it to the mainland. Eighty years later, in 2009, seven years after her death, that ice-bridge melted, and Charcot could be circumnavigated for the first time. Charcot Island is near the South Shetland Islands, not far from the Inlet of Exasperation and Cape Disappointment.

  Microcosm and macrocosm, body and world.

  In motor neurone disease, the neurons in the motor nerves die, one by one, breaking the bridge between brain and muscle, between thought and action. The sensory neurons continue to function, picking up information from the world through the skin and passing it to the brain. There’s no mental impairment: the brain tries to respond, but the motor neurons have hardened off, and the message doesn’t get through. In 80 per cent of cases the symptoms start in the legs and feet: the victim is caught unawares by tripping and stumbling over non-existent obstacles, developing a flat-footed, flapping gait, like a penguin.

  In my mother’s case, however, the dieback is starting at the top and working its way down. Vocal and facial control will go, then arms and hands, then diaphragm. She has her lawyer and her GP witness a statement: once she is no longer capable of breathing without mechanical assistance she is to be allowed to die.

  She jots me down some notes – I have the bits of paper in front of me now, densely covered in blue biro. Her familiar handwriting, just a little shaky, before her hands and arms get too weak. ‘Funeral Thoughts’, she scribbles. ‘Not laid down in talents of stone. Just suggestions. At green burial would like those want to have something to do – write good-bye on coffin? Anything read needs to be simple, familiar…’

  No embalming, a cardboard coffin, a green burial site, poems by Kavafis, MacNeice, Shakespeare; music by Mozart and Louis Armstrong. (My mother has also spent years campaigning through the Natural Death Centre for funeral reform.) And ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, in the old Book of Common Prayer version.

  Sure and certain hope of the Resurrection…

  MND has been in the news a lot around the time of my mother’s diagnosis because of high-profile cases where people with the disease have been campaigning for the right to die, either through a change in the legislation in the UK, or by making it easier for people to travel to a euthanasia clinic in Switzerland. My mother follows these stories with obsessive fascination, but her opposition to the legalization of euthanasia is absolute. She has worked for a decade in an East London hospice: she has supported patients and their families through many different kinds of death, including this one. And she’s had a lifetime of sucking it up, coping, not complaining, making do and mending, to prepare her for this end.

  She is adamant that legalizing euthanasia will make the old and ill afraid to go to their doctors. That vulnerable people will feel a moral obligation to kill themselves in order not to burden their families, or the state. That most people who want to die are depressed, even if they are also terminally ill, and that the two disorders should not be confused. That the euthanasia campaign distracts attention and funding from end-of-life care. That if there were enough hospices there would be less anxiety about a painful end. That the medical profession needs to stop seeing the death of the patient as the failure of the doctor. That suicide is not an option: it is the end of all options.

  That the last, and perhaps the greatest, task of a parent is to teach her children that death is not something to fear.

  We talk a lot about her experiences working in the hospice and the deaths at which she has been present. She describes what she sees as the wisdom of the existing legislation, the grey area which means that a doctor can prescribe morphine and advise of safe levels, but the patient can self-administer the kindly drug and choose to transgress those levels. ‘We already have euthanasia,’ she says.

  I don’t agree, but I can’t retaliate with an ounce of her eloquence, or her experience. She’s a wise old war baby, and her story has never been about herself. I’m on the cusp between baby boom and Generation X, and it’s me, me, me all the way.

  I am speaking in the usual way. She is not. There is a little thing like a laptop in her hands; it’s called a light-writer, and it speaks in a jerky, processed voice. There are two male and two female voices to choose from, all vaguely American in vowel sound and such intonation as they have. The female voices are squeaky, so she’s chosen a male persona called ‘Paul’. Paul can be programmed with pre-set phrases, and at the press of a button he will croak Thank you for the lovely flowers, or Look at me, being waited on like Lady Muck. But conversation takes longer, even though the motor neurons controlling my mother’s arms and hands have not yet died back and for the time being she can still pick her way across the keys. It’s so hard, though, not to finish her sentences for her. In company, everyone falls silent and gazes at her expectantly when she picks up the light-writer; we watch her tapping fingers, and when she presses play it’s only to say What beautiful weather, or More coffee? Her fear of bathos silences her. She’s always been a good listener, but now listening is being forced on her. She can no longer support a conversation with the little fillers and prompts that encourage another to keep talking. Her tongue is atrophying into a little hard poky thing; and I find my own tongue is tied. I have to resist the urge to take Paul from her and type my answer; using my own voice feels rude, as though responding to a foreigner by shouting ever more loudly in English.

  ‘… you must give this voice to me. I will take the very best thing that you have…’

  ‘But if you take my voice,’ said the little mermaid, ‘what will be left to me?’

  ‘… have you lost your courage? Stick out your little tongue and I shall cut it off.’

  My mother refuses the hospice place that’s offered her: it’s in her own old place of employment, down the road in Hackney, and in a rare outburst of emotion she is adamant that she will not go. I don’t want them to see me like this, she makes Paul squawk.

  *

  Spent the night in a field full of silverweed, cuckooflower and orchids, with Helen, Donna and other lovely Polar Bears. Swam at 00.09 for the solstice, with the sky still full of light, and sat round the fire eating very fine Norwegian buns (thank you, Ragnhild!), accompanied by dru
mming snipe. Another swim this morning and sleepily home for the school run.

  *

  What gives a ferry-louper like me the right to write about Orkney? The word first crops up in 1661: a woman from the south isles was in court for calling the minister and his wife ‘thieffes and vagabonds and runnegatis and ferry loopers’. How I long to know more about her, and the context of her words.

  I used to think the ‘louper’ came from the circular, looping journey of the ferry, endlessly back and forth across the Pentland Firth, but it’s an Old Norse word, hlaupari. And not a complimentary one. A dyke-louper is someone who comes illicitly over the wall, rather than politely by the gate. A ladder-louper goes up the ladder to the gallows, to leap off and be hanged. A land-louper is a vagrant. So a ferry-louper is a restless soul, someone who behaves suspiciously and may well end badly. It’s cognate with leap, and an Orkney word for sand-flea, loopack. Ferry-fleas, parasites coming over to irritate the natives.

  Ferry-loupers are unlikely to stay.

  ‘It isn’t the winters that get to me,’ another ferry-louper told me when explaining why she was heading south again, ‘it’s the years with no summer, when you reach late August and realize that there’s no more hope…’

  The years when equinoctial gales segue into haar and back into gales, and your skin has never once been warm. Fimbulvetr, fimbulwinter, the Great Winter in Old Norse religion: three winters in a row, when no crops will grow and the world starves, the winter that presages war, and the end of the world.

  Ferry-louper (like fimbulvetr) is an Old Norse word, but surely the Norse were themselves the first ferry-loupers. Longship-loupers. Those Norse settlers must have come to Orkney with hopes, fears, uncertainties, just like their modern equivalents. Did the Picts smile to the Vikings’ faces, mutter about them in corners, cast half-curious, half-baleful glances, say I told you so when Knut and Hild upped stakes and went back home to Hordaland after a few years?

  *

  Sea a slubby shot-silk in blue-black and jade, embroidered with silver-wire and seed pearls. Sky dip-dyed Wedgwood blue and lemon, tie-dyed peach. Moon a great silver sequin low in the west.

  *

  I have gone down to the sea early. No time to swim, I have a meeting in the town, but there are a few minutes in hand. The sun is already high, the tide low and retreating further. A likely time to die, on the ebb of the tide and the waning of the moon. A bad time to marry, in Orkney lore. Did that proud girl Brita/Ursilla from Stronsay marry her handsome, sulky farmhand on a day like this?

  It must have been at this kind of tide, with the strand all gleaming and the rocks on show, that the Thorodale farmer and his wife came down to collect bait in the liminal, inter-tidal zone. I wonder for the first time what that young woman thought about her abduction by the Fin-man. Was she altogether sorry to be snatched away from drudgery on the croft? What was life like on Eynhallow, among the Fin-folk? What did she say to her man when he came to haul her back?

  The breakwater is exposed, its slabs of sandstone stacked like haphazard piles of books waiting to be boxed and carted away. Bits of rusty metal, hooks and staples. A length of chain. Colonies of limpets, clinging to their home scars. The various weeds, kelp and daberlack, carrageen and wrack. If you wander up the western side of the breakwater and peer into one of the crevices towards the lower end, the bit that’s under water most of the time, there is a surprise waiting. We have a guerrilla artist, who takes smooth pale stones and draws on them in indelible black pen, creating stark zigzags and cells, patterns reminscent of the carved stones from Skara Brae and the Ness of Brodgar, then tucks them into the landscape, balanced on fence posts, camouflaged among the shingle, resting on top of a drystone dyke. One of these anonymous gifts, like a Neolithic Easter egg, lurks wedged and irretrievable in a crevice of the breakwater.

  The calm sea has left the pale gold sand smooth, clear of weed and thickly studded with shells. The sand is patterned with tiny wavy lines that run parallel to the ebb, each one marking a fallback, a retreat, the fingerprints of the last fluttering wave to reach this high. A few paces to the west the little burn has cut a ravine through the sand, exposing the underlying slab and shingle, before spilling laterally into a miniature estuary of a thousand interlacing rills that run down into the lapping brine. You lose all sense of time and scale: this could be the Grand Canyon, the Mekong Delta. Great deeds of geology are compressed into a few square metres, the twelve hours between tide and tide.

  Everyone reads this beach differently. One friend helps me understand weed; another shells; a third, who’s a sailor, talks about the tide and the rosts; another reminisces about her childhood, trudging down here to swim before the council put in the road and the loo-block.

  I see this space as a landscape of the dead. A couple of hundred yards up from the beach there is a little walled cemetery, eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century graves, Orkney names of folk and farms. There was a medieval chapel here, dedicated to St Nicholas, but it’s hard to trace, even though the undulating grass within the drystone dyke has been mowed recently. In the seventeenth century the minister recorded that mysterious lights glowed from within the ruins ‘as if torches or candles were burning’: explanations have ranged from spontaneously combusting kelp to clandestine Catholic masses. The church went out of use in 1788, though some of the dyke-stones may have come from its walls. An irate evangelist visiting in 1797 noted that ‘in Evie there had been no sermon for eight or nine years’.

  In St Nicholas kirkyard a different artist has been at work: in among the gravestones of standardized, imported granite there is an upright slab of local sandstone. Unsigned, but I know who made this one: Frances Pelly; she’s a well-known local sculptor whose secret stone gifts punctuate the Orkney landscape. It looks like another headstone at first, but you need to lean in close and read the elegantly serifed capitals, up and over and down again, forming a tantalizing sentence-fragment, like a half-heard whisper: ‘found the secret of immortality and took it with him to the grave’.

  From the Sands of Evie I can see two nesses, two headlands: Gurness, which forms the eastern arm of the bay, and Westness over on Rousay. There was a Pictish cemetery on Westness, typical Pictish graves, rectangular, stone-lined, unfurnished, east–west aligned, into which the Norse later inserted their own more cluttered and complex burials. Gurness has its Iron Age broch, later surrounded by Pictish houses, and there are Norse burials at Gurness as well, of which one survived largely intact.

  The Westness brooch is a famous thing – famous, at least, in the circles in which I move. It’s in Edinburgh now, trapped in a glass box set into one of the bronze humanoids by Scottish sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, in the lower gallery in the National Museum on Chambers Street. The Paolozzi statues are big, assertive forms, part of the Early Peoples gallery, though they themselves are futuristic cyborgs. They’re very masculine, they intimidate small children, but this brooch belonged to a woman, part of her grave-clothes. She was buried in the middle of the ninth century together with a baby, newly born and newly dead. They were wealthy and well cared for, interred in a stone-lined grave. The woman also wore traditional Norse oval brooches to fasten her dress, and a bead necklace, and she was buried with her tools: weaving implements, an iron sickle, a lump of pumice.

  The Westness brooch was the most visible and expensive part of her burial outfit, pinning a cloak or shawl across her breasts. Its pin is nearly eighteen centimetres long, the ornamented ring five and a half centimetres wide, made of silver, decorated with gold, red glass and amber. The brooch was already a century old when it came into the hands of the doomed young mother at Westness: it’s much the same age as the Book of Kells and emerges from the same artistic milieu – the Kells scribe and the Iona stone-carvers would have been at home with the elegant birds and serpents adorning the brooch, the delicate filigree interlacing, the minute scale at which the artist felt comfortable working. The brooch is full of tricks and secrets: traces of beeswax in the cell
s that hold the glass insets hint at the adhesive the goldsmith used. The red glass looks like garnet until you get it under a microscope and can see the bubbles. Gold wire was soldered with copper which vaporizes when heated. The finest wires are less than a quarter of a millimetre thick. Examination of the back of the filigree panels shows that the design was laid out by one hand, but the ornament executed by another, and less skilful, one. All the closest parallels come from Ireland, and so it seems likely that this brooch crossed the Irish Sea, though whether it was new or old when it did so is anyone’s guess. It could have belonged to a Pictish woman. Maybe she was the loving mother of the woman in the grave. Or the brooch could have been looted from her still-warm corpse. Sentimental, or cynical: make up your own story.

  The Westness brooch is a Christian object, although it has no explicitly Christian imagery – no cross, or image of Christ. But that’s typical of this art: you find the same ornamental repertoire on the bindings of holy books, on reliquaries, chalices and patens. It’s probable that to the informed eye these images encoded messages about the relationship between God, Man and Creation, life and death, time and eternity. The beast-head out of whose jaws the pin protrudes has been compared to a classical sea-monster, a Ketos, the creature who menaced Andromeda and swallowed Jonah, and gave its name to cetacean. An image of the devil.

  The Westness lady’s necklace had thirty-nine beads, three of bone, three of stone, many of Baltic amber. These are all carved natural substances, but the glass beads, of which there are also many, some of which are multi-coloured mosaic and millefiori, represent a different level of investment. Beads are one of the commonest objects in furnished Viking graves, men often have a few, perhaps carried in a bag or attached to a thong; wealthy women have spectacular necklaces. Our Westness lady’s is pretty low-key compared to the crystal, carnelian, garnet, gold, silver and amethyst rocked by some of her contemporaries. Still, one of her glass beads, striped blue and white, comes from the Mediterranean or Near East, others were probably made in France or Germany, others still in Scandinavia. The Arab commentator Ahmad ibn Fadlan, writing in the late tenth century, said of Scandinavian traders on the Volga that they prize green clay beads: ‘They will go to any length to get hold of these; for one dirham they procure one such bead and they string these into necklaces for their women.’ We don’t know why beads were so prized: whether they were status-markers, or souvenirs of travel, or protective amulets. All three maybe.