Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Allow us to grieve. Allow us to be aware of the dark as well as the light, and to see death as a friend. Life is too short and too absurd to do otherwise.

  They talk about endogenous and exogenous causes of depression. I cannot comment on the former. It’s outside my experience. But when I was doing my PhD, researching the poems and stories and sermons about death that survive from England in the ninth and tenth and eleventh centuries, looking at site reports from churchyard excavations and the treatment of the body in the grave, a common response from others, including Sid the supervisor who had dug at Newark, was ‘Isn’t it a depressing subject to work on?’ Inevitably, I was called Dr Death. My students gave me a ring adorned with an open coffin revealing a skeleton within, like a mourning ring made at the height of the cult of melancholy that prevailed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I began to accumulate other mementoes: a bracelet of skulls; a whole slew of Mexican Day of the Dead cavorting skeletons; a pendant mirror into which a beautiful woman gazes, her elegant, naked back to the viewer – but peer at her reflection, meet her gaze, and there’s a shock lying in wait: a skull grins out at you. Around the mirror is engraved ‘Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis’ – ‘All things change and we must change with them’. But these reminders of death make me happy, and I’m ready to bet that keeping a skull on the bedside table had the same effect in the sixteenth century. Look death in the eye every morning on waking. Say, Hey, don’t I know you?

  I didn’t lay out my mother’s body. After she died we rang the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and they took her body away, and then Roz the undertaker collected her from the hospital. My mother’s brain and spinal cord had been removed, in accordance with her wishes. They survive as histology slides, the material embodiments of her consciousness dispersed into numerous fragments like the True Cross or the relics of St Columba. I wanted to help with her body, but Roz asked me, ‘Did your mother look peaceful when you last saw her?’ I nodded, and she patted my arm. ‘Let’s keep it that way.’

  Kipling’s ‘Seal Lullaby’ comes from The Jungle Book. After the Mowgli stories, he goes on a brief northern excursus before returning to India to explore narratives of mongooses and elephants. It’s the story of the little white fur seal, Kotick, growing up in northern Canada. There are mortal threats that Kotick and his kind can cope with, like orcas:

  Now and then he would see a thin fin, like a big shark’s fin, drifting along close to shore, and he knew that that was the Killer Whale, the Grampus, who eats young seals when he can get them; and Kotick would head for the beach like an arrow, and the fin would jig off slowly, as if it were looking for nothing at all.

  And there are other dangers, which the seals have no way of dealing with:

  Kerick said, ‘Let go!’ and then the men clubbed the seals on the head as fast as they could.

  Ten minutes later little Kotick did not recognize his friends any more, for their skins were ripped off from the nose to the hind flippers, whipped off and thrown down on the ground in a pile.

  It’s a story about a little hero, an outsider, who goes on a quest and becomes the saviour of his people, leading them to a promised beach, ‘a sea where no man comes’. Kotick is the Moses of the northern marine mammals. A visionary, like Columba leading his band of monks to their new home on Iona. Kipling isn’t a fashionable writer these days, but his animal fables are so much more than a modern Aesop pointing a moral, a Disneyfied world of humans masquerading in animal form. He is tough and unsentimental, and yet his animals are complex and individual. I have a complete edition of Kipling, taking up almost a whole shelf. Their flaking red leather is embossed with gold elephants, each volume has its silk bookmark; they belonged to my mother’s father, and then to her, and now to me. My grandfather bought one a month with his first salary from the army, when he was still a teen-ager. Some look almost new, but The Just So Stories and the two Jungle Book volumes have been read almost to destruction.

  In ‘Seal Lullaby’ the sea is a cradle of safety, a place of habitation, a substitute for a mother’s embrace.

  We gave my mother the funeral she had asked for, on a bright day in early April. The cardboard coffin had been decorated inside and out with snatches of poetry, family jokes, children’s handprints. It was taped shut: I couldn’t see her, but Roz assured me that my mother was wearing her red cotton Marks and Spencer’s pyjamas and shrouded in the multi-coloured Afghan blanket that she had crocheted some time in the 1970s. In the coffin with her was the edition of Pride and Prejudice from which I had been reading to her over the days before she died. We had just got to Netherfield Ball, when Lizzie Bennet is flirting with Darcy for the first time – that undercurrent of sexual excitement sparking the sharp, self-aware dialogue. ‘“Perhaps by and by I may observe that private balls are much pleasanter than public ones...”’ I looked out of the window to see the district nurse’s car arrive, and finished Lizzie’s speech. ‘“…But now we may be silent.”’ Two hours later she was dead.

  Between her death and her funeral the garden comes alive with forget-me-nots.

  We played Mozart, as she had requested, and Louis Armstrong singing ‘What a Wonderful World’ on a battery-powered cassette player; I read Kavafis’s poem ‘Sailing to Ithaka’, in which the island destination is only important because it gives you the journey.

  When she is excavated from her chalk hillside in Hampshire there will be no coffin, no blanket, no book, no pyjamas, no fossil imprint of Mozart or Louis Armstrong or Shakespeare or Kavafis – just bones and little red plastic buttons, and maybe an organic stain. In the writing of this book I contacted the National Hospital, asking for details of how the brain and spinal cord were removed. I wanted to know if their extraction would have left any signature on the skeleton, but no one got back to me. Although my mother was born in Broughty Ferry just outside Dundee she spent her youth in Hampshire: analysis of her collagen and stable isotopes will point to her growing up not too far from her grave. Would anyone find evidence of the middle age spent so far away, in the volcanic landscape around Nairobi?

  On the underside of the lid of her cardboard coffin I wrote a verse from a seventeenth-century monument she and I had once read in a parish church in Exeter. St Martin’s was built by that same Bishop Leofric who bequeathed the Exeter Book with The Wanderer in it to the cathedral in 1072. We’d been to the cathedral, she had dutifully admired the rather plain manuscript, we were looking for somewhere to have tea, we drifted into the church as we did so often on our expeditions.

  This, is my dwelling: This, is my truest Home.

  A House of Clay, best fits a Guest of Loam!

  Nay, ’tis my House. For, I perceive, I have

  In all my life, been walking to this Grave.

  They may find her bones and her buttons, but the rest of her is gone, burst like a bubble, or leached out through the chalk into the River Meon and out to the Solent, the sea around the Isle of Wight, atoms that were part of her washing up on the beaches where she played as a child, foam on the crest of the waves. Swinburne, a writer whose lush, sensuous fin-de-siècle verse is possibly even less fashionable than Kipling, wrote (in ‘The Garden of Proserpine’):

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no life lives for ever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  If my mother lives, she lives in memory.

  After she died, her colleague Ngozi said to me, ‘You know, I think Sheila did more to bring black and white social workers together than anyone else in London.’ I just gaped at her. I had had no idea. Right to the end, she had been my mother. Never, quite, a name or a person in her own right. ‘You can’t die,’ I sobbed to her once, ‘because nothing I do will matter any more if you’re not there.’ I had had a sudd
en shocking vision of pausing in my song-and-dance routine, looking out over the footlights and realizing that the auditorium was empty. When will I finally move on from being that bouncy, attention-grabbing child whose ego spans the heavens? Look at me! Watch me swing on the monkey bars! See my name on this thesis!

  Perhaps you can only really know a person when she is dead.

  I feel I’ve ticked all the obvious boxes, writing this book. My own version of Orkney Cliché Bingo. The wind. Selkies. Groatie buckies. The martyrdom of St Magnus. Let’s just riff through old tropes, shall we? I’ve mentioned a chapel built by Italian prisoners of war, but it’s not the one in Orkney. I’m pleased about that.

  And, reiterated though they are, these themes wind their way differently through everyone’s story.

  What’s more, we need new stories. Orkney is changing, just as my beach is different every time I pick my shivering course across the sand. The way we understand the landscape is changing: we are learning new things, even as old ways are being forgotten. Renewable-energy engineers are paying close heed to the shape of seals’ hydrodynamic whiskers. Researchers in nanotechnology are fascinated by the way that the molluscs who inhabit top shells exude their nacre, so flexible, so resilient, so tough. Limpets’ teeth, with which they fasten on to their home scars, are the strongest biological substance on the planet. There are many lessons here – not just for the nanoarchitects and the designers of wind and wave turbines. Hang on in there. Bend, don’t break. Go with the flow…

  My life has changed, too, while writing this book. My husband and I have agreed to go our separate ways, and in the last few months my daughter and I have left Orkney – for how long I don’t know – and washed up like flotsam in Easter Ross, on the Moray Firth.

  A little later my furniture followed me south in a van, many of my possessions inherited from my mother, thick with recent dust and neglect, overlaid with greasy fingerprints and bad memories. I’m wiping them and waxing them and polishing them: a Georgian chest of drawers, bedside tables, Regency dining-room chairs, silvered mirrors and foxed prints in wormy frames, both those little balloon-backed chairs. A mismatched pair of Wakamba salad servers, one carved with an elephant, the other with a lion. Soapstone chameleons and a malachite egg. I’m looking at the tapestry chair-seat embroidered by my grandmother, all those wild animals circling the sturdy Kikuyu woman in her blue dress, shouldering her burden of firewood, smiling, smiling, smiling. I’m thinking, I’ll dismantle the chair, have the tapestry off and frame it – it feels wrong, plonking my arse down on that indomitable little figure – and I can hear the reproving voices of my ancestors, loud and clear.

  Hush, I say. Come on, you can do better than that. I’ve got enough to carry without you dumping filial piety on top of the load. I want to live my life, not curate it.

  And while we’re about it, the green balloon-backed chair badly needs re-upholstering. I might choose mossy velvet again, but I might fancy something else. Neon flamingos – why not?

  Swimming here in Easter Ross is quieter, the water more sheltered than in Orkney; the beach at Shandwick is surrounded by houses, the bird life is less varied, the seals are fewer. But dolphins are much more common. And only weeks after I got here some of the Northern Isles orcas (including matriarch Mousa) were sighted a few miles from here. They don’t often venture down the east coast of Scotland; they have never before been recorded so far south; and though I didn’t see them their fleeting presence feels like a blessing.

  *

  The Sands of Evie were scintillating this morning, sparkly-choppy in a light northerly. My first Orkney swim for about six weeks, my last till God-knows-when: the water was ice-champagne. Blue sky hazing over, the scream and flutter of a tern proving that it really is spring. Stayed in until I was almost immobilized with cold. Worth every shiver.

  *

  When I was pregnant I prepared for labour with a hypnotherapy CD, lying in bed with door and eyes closed. It took me down into a deep meditative state by asking me to imagine I was on a favourite beach, and the beach to which I always went was one where we often used to holiday in Kenya, self-catering cottages on a little cove south of Mombasa, built of blocks of coral and thatched with makuti, the fronds of the coconut palm.

  I close my eyes and wind my way down between the leggy doum palms and the squat baobabs. The wind hushes in the casuarina trees whose needles and spiky cones litter the path; the white shell sand is soft and flaky between my toes. It is half-light, and the beach is deserted apart from the pale pink ghost crabs scuttling along the tideline. A few hundred yards out to the east the surf breaks gently on the coral reef. I settle into the warm sand and let the soothing voice on the CD describe the experience of giving birth in affirmative, comforting language, no mention of labour or pain, just a powerful reassurance that this is my body doing what it was designed to do. The hush-hush of the waves is indistinguishable from the beat of my heart. I press a switch and go down to the beach, every night, for months, happy and alone.

  But the last time I do it, when I wake soon after midnight on my daughter’s due date with contractions that tell me quite clearly she is on her way, and I settle into the familiar, soothing narrative of hypnosis, I go down to the beach at Capricho to find that my mother is there already, waiting for me. She and I sit companionably side by side, sometimes talking, but mostly in easy silence, watching the rhythmic play of the water. After a while, she says, ‘You’re allowed to be Demeter, you know, as well as Persephone.’ When at last I return to the surface and breathe the air of the waking world again four hours have gone by, and I am primed for the most exciting day of my life.

  Demeter as well as Persephone. The strong mother as well as the needy daughter.

  Swimming in the sea has helped me rediscover myself. It has opened Orkney up for me, and made me understand the strengths of my body, as well as its limits. It has been fundamental in healing my feet, but, more than that, it has allowed me to fall in love with being embodied all over again. With being alive. I have finally lost a lot of my self-consciousness: there’s nothing like trying to wriggle out of a wet swimming costume on a darkening beach in a Force 7 with a lot of other giggling idiots for knocking some sense of proportion into you. And then there are the seals – the orcas, too, but mostly the seals. The human face of the sea. The shape-shifting selkie offers me a narrative that makes sense of my tangled life when nothing else does. Swimming out into their space gives me the release I seek, beyond the line of surf. A different way of being human, a freedom unavailable on land.

  Xenophon tells a story of a Greek army who had been fighting the Persians and were struggling their way back westwards and homewards overland, lost, starving and disorientated, until at last they stumbled down to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. With one voice, they shouted in joy, ‘Thalassa, Thalassa!’ The sea, the sea… It might not have been their own particular stretch of salt water, but it was the sea, and once they had found the sea their way home was clear.

  *

  I swam at Shandwick in silver light, the sun already high in the sky at 7 a.m., a running swell with a few white horses herded by a steady easterly. There was one vocal tern hovering overhead, reminding me of Eleni’s wonderful paper on The Seafarer at Leeds. A seal bobbed in the shallows – neither of us in more than four feet of water – swam around me, treading water and stretching its neck up to see better. Sea swimming: like having a finger on the pulse of the world.

  *

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  Victoria Whitworth’s next novel is coming in 2018

  For an preview of her recent novel Daughter of the Wolf, read on or click the following link

  Read preview

  For more information, click the following links

  Appendix

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  A Note About the Cover Painting

  About Victoria Whitworth

  Also by Victor
ia Whitworth

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  APPENDIX

  The Wanderer: MY TRANSLATION

  The lonely man often abides God’s mercy, even though, careworn, he has to stir the freezing sea with his hands, walk the paths of exile. Fate is fully determined! So said the wanderer, mindful of hardship, battle, the fall of kin.

  Often, every dawn, I have to voice my cares alone. No one now lives to whom I dare clearly open my heart. I truly know it’s a noble habit in a man that he keep his thoughts fast bound, hold his secrets, no matter what he thinks.

  The weary spirit can’t withstand fate, nor can the tired soul seek help. People eager for renown often bind sad thoughts in their breasts; so I, wretched with care, deprived of my native land, far from my kin, have often fettered my spirit since long ago I buried my gold-friend in an earth grave, and I went hence in wintry mood over the surface of the waves; sad for the lack of a hall, I sought a treasure-giver – somewhere, far or near, where I might find the man to comfort me in mead-hall, friendless as I am, to bring me joy.