RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  And there, one afternoon in the autumn of 1986, I was admitted to his darkened bedroom in that closed-up, sleeping house. He lay on an ice-blue satin bed in a room with the curtains drawn tight against the day, as if he might fade away in its light. One bar of an electric heater glowed in the corner; a bare bulb shone faintly from the ceiling. The wind shook the windows and rattled at the latches, stirring up the leaves outside and pushing them through a gap at the foot of the front door. The ancient wilderness was ready to take over, only biding its time. Out of the gloom, Stephen offered me his hand, weighed down with a scarab ring. I reached out with mine. In a fluting voice from another era, he asked, ‘Do people still think of me in London?’ As we shook hands I was conscious of what was passing between us: a secret world, and all the people I had never met.

  Then I left him to his dreams and wandered alone around the great empty house, its every surface, from the stairs to the floor to the furniture, covered with books and paintings and letters. Downstairs, in a silver-curtained library, draped over a silver satin chair, was Stephen’s hussar’s coat, its epaulettes and braid spilling over the back of the seat; there were Venetian silver-gilt grotto chairs carved in the shapes of shells, and around the room ran a frieze of plaster scallops, encircling his kingdom beneath the sea. All the while, in the stillness, I could hear Stephen upstairs, laughing and talking to himself, as if the party were still going on and I was the last guest to arrive.

  One year later, the Great Storm of 1987 swept up the Channel and into southern England; its hurricane-force winds felled fifteen million trees. At Wilsford, the palms swayed in the garden and as the storm rose to its height that night, one enormous branch smashed into the glass conservatory.

  But none of this disturbed Stephen, since he had become ashes, and his earthly remains now lay in the churchyard next door, slowly sinking into the soft green turf.

  THEPEOPLEOFTHESEA

  A great white block rises out of the water like an iceberg. From this distance its top looks blurred, somehow in motion where it meets the sky. We are far from seeing the cause of this animation before we smell it: an intense aroma of ammonia; the sea, digested. Only as we draw nearer does the scale of the rock become apparent – along with the source of the stink.

  The island is three hundred feet high, and circling its summit are gannets: thousands of them. The air cracks with their cries, celebrating their ownership of this place. Bass Rock is a plug of volcanic basalt left behind when the North Sea washed softer rocks away. But it isn’t black: it is iced white with the birds’ bodies and their guano, a wedding cake dropped into the cold waters. It is total bird world: voraciously, noisily, all-engulfingly bird; a Haitian bidonville, a Brazilian favela of birds, as if the volcano had burst open and is spewing birds from the centre of the earth.

  The sky darkens, the light diminished by wings as wide as a man is high. No seabird is anchored to land; only its shores or its islands mean anything to them. Here, barely half an hour’s train ride from Edinburgh with its elegant terraces and lofty castle, the world’s largest colony of northern gannets – as many as a quarter of a million birds – perch on ledges or whirr around the rock like a cloud of gigantic gnats. Densely concentrated at the centre and spinning out in a vortex, their flight paths continually criss-cross each other, guided by some unknown traffic controller, each in their helical cycle spiralling from the eye of the hurricane to its outer edges, where the swirling whirlwind breaks up as birds plummet into the water at breakneck speed, sixty miles an hour. Where whales fall upwards out of their world, gannets dive down into it; the one for the other. It is a mission for which they are supremely suited, these fish-seeking missiles, with their forward vision and slit nostrils, their bills strengthened with bony plates and fitted with inflatable sacs to absorb the impact like a car’s airbags.

  I’m so excited that I perch precariously on the rubbery side of the boat, and have to be reprimanded by the skipper. I crane my unreinforced neck, trying to reach up into the sight. The sun haloes the summit as the birds create their own aurora; there’s more gannet than sky. They occupy three dimensions, like a school of fish; a single sensate mass echoing the sea, eddying with its currents. Then, as we move into the lee of the Bass, we come face to face with the raucous heaving throng. There are gannets on every possible ledge. The down from the gugas – puffball chicks whose new coats make them look bigger than their parents – drifts dreamily in the air. We’re sailing through avian snow.

  Every now and again juvenile birds launch themselves from the lower rocks. A gannet’s narrow wings seem stiff, almost fragile; there’s more than a little of the albatross about them, and they dip down towards the waves before they gain enough lift to join the others. Once there, their endurance is formidable; some fly as far as the coast of Norway to feed. It is impossible to look at one bird in so many, to discern the single defining shape that makes up so many others, constantly forming and re-forming over my head. If the cormorants’ outstretched wings signify the holy cross, then the black-tipped gannets resemble flying crucifixes, emblematical missionaries gliding in the air, familiars of Baldred, the Dark Age anchorite who lived on Bass Rock, walled up in a cell while the birds flew all around him.

  As we round the rock – itself riven by a fissure that runs right through it, as though it had been stabbed – the lighthouse comes into view. Short and stubby, built on a platform to withstand the weather, it has been appropriated by the birds; it’s even painted in the same colours, the pure white of their bodies and the blushed ochre of their heads. The ruins of a medieval chapel have long since been subsumed, as has the castle that held Jacobite prisoners. The gannets have so completely colonised the rock that they even take their name from it – Morus bassanus – or is it the other way around? Nor are they content with their occupation: each blue eye stares out its neighbour as they dispute every inch of territory. Their dissent seems human – individual gannets may live as long as we do – but they predate us by twenty million years. Below them, arrayed on the lower rocks are their dark cousins, cormorants and shags. The latter glitter green with emerald eyes, necks subtly arched as they stand there, carved out of basalt, marquises to the cormorants’ earls.

  All these animals couldn’t be more of the sea unless they were fishes themselves. They are the extraordinary that marks the ordinary; the focus, the mass, all pulling together like the encircling waves and tides. There is no human dominion here, although it is respite from the hunters who once shot them for their food and feathers that has allowed them to build their bird city. And as we pull back towards the shore, I realise there’s another audience for this overwhelming scene. From the waters of the facing cove, under a hill topped by a whale bone arch, pairs of big black eyes peer over the long whiskery snouts of grey seals, taking it all in.

  In the late nineteen-forties, as Stephen Tennant was retreating into his Wiltshire estate, the writer and radio producer David Thomson set off on a series of journeys to Scotland, Ireland and their islands to gather stories of selkies, spirit seals – mythical creatures, part human, part pinniped. His book, The People of the Sea, published in 1954, is a lyrical record of beliefs held by coastal dwellers, already half-lost in the second half of the twentieth century. It is told in the voices of the people of the sea, sometimes as though the selkies themselves were speaking, their mournful voices drifting restlessly across firths and loughs. Thomson recounts, as if he’d just walked in on the conversation, one story told to him by an Irish teacher. ‘And I remember how they used to say that anyone that’s born of the water is not able to sleep. ’Tis like as if the movement of the water was always with them in their head.’

  His informant, who appears as a dramatic character as real as the writer allows him to be, goes on. ‘With the hare and the rabbit and the rat and the mouse and all the creatures of the land you’ll find they so waken and go asleep the same as we do. But for them that has the tides of the sea running through them from the day they are born until the day
they die there is no such thing as sleep the way we know it.’

  Thomson, whose family had aristocratic links and who was the son of an Indian Army officer wounded in the First World War, was brought up in his grandmother’s ‘sea-lit’ house on the outskirts of Nairn, on the coast of north-east Scotland; he had been sent there partly because at the age of eleven his eyesight was damaged in an accident, marring his vision for life. Sound became his sight, his most important sense; he was always listening, intently. After working as a tutor in Ireland in the nineteen-thirties, he joined the BBC in 1943, making programmes on the Irish Famine and animal folklore. In the pioneering spirit of Mass Observation and the film documentaries of the time, he investigated the selkie, caught between human and natural history. As a boy he had thought of wolves and seals, and associated the death of a seal with the death of the albatross in Coleridge’s poem, which he learned by heart at school. In his adult writing he attained ‘a state of almost animal consciousness’, as Seamus Heaney observed. Rather than anthropomorphic, he was theriomorphic, merging into the creature he was describing. Sheltering in a barn, he becomes part of his surroundings: ‘I heard a raven croak twice. I felt the autumn coldly on my face, but because this old cowshed had been lately used for dipping sheep there was a smell of dung as though the warm life of the farm lingered on.’ Heaney saw Thomson’s stories as shadowed by nuclear war; elegies for an age that progress was about to destroy.

  Thomson’s book begins in Nairn, ‘a hard, small town’ caught between mountains and sea, ‘which on fine days lies opposite the blue cliffs of Cromarty and on grey days looks out at a rigid black skyline, very close and broken in the middle by a gap called Cromarty Firth’. These are sharp places, holding out. They’re not soft or comfortable. They bear the relics of war: Cromarty’s cliffs are still strung with rusting gantries from the First World War, wrapped around the rocks like metal wrack. Further up the inlet, facing the Black Isle, decommissioned oil rigs rise out of the water on corroding pillars like drowned temples. Houses cling as limpets to the land; low block-like cottages run sideways to the sea rather than face it head on. Settlements peter out by the shore, as if they’d ceded defeat, seeking a truce with the sea.

  Here people are part of, rather than apart from, the water. The herring fishery pursued its silver darlings along these coasts; my great-grandfather, arriving from Ireland in the eighteen-eighties, would work in the same industry down at Whitby, where his wife may have joined him in the trade. Fisherwomen were known as herring quines, as Elspeth Probyn notes, so covered in fish scales as they prepared the catch that they looked like fish themselves. In 1859, Charles Richard Weld, historian to the Royal Society and organiser of John Franklin’s polar explorations, observed on a visit to northernmost Wick that the women ‘all wore strange-shaped canvas garments, so bespattered with blood and the entrails and scales of fish, as to cause them to resemble animals of the ichthyological kingdom, recently divested of their skin, undergoing perhaps one of the those transitions set forth in Mr Darwin’s speculative book … If a man may become a monkey, or has been a whale, why should not a Caithness damsel become a herring?’

  And in a strange way, Weld’s vision melds with an older Scottish one, that of the mysterious animal which the tattooed Picts carved on their stones and perhaps inked on their limbs, along with all their animal-headed human hybrids. The Pictish Beast might be merely fantastic, a water kelpie or a loch monster; or, as some contemporary historians have speculated, an echo of the bottlenose dolphins that swim in Scottish waters, or even a rare beaked whale. But to me it looks like we all do in the womb: the beginning of all animals, a curling, snouted creature rearing up on unfurling fins in some extended process of evolution.

  I can’t imagine I’d ever feel at home in this place, for all my father’s love of Scotland and our childhood visits here. The North Sea roars along wild beaches; I could never befriend these waves. They are not built on a human scale; they are untamed, barbaric and brutal. These are not resorts. There’s no balm here, only the offer of more injury. Their sentinel lighthouses, as constructed by the Stevenson family, admit as much: ‘Battered by storms, ravaged by waves, built by Mr Stevenson.’

  In feats of extraordinary engineering, the Stevensons sought to defy the sea. On Bell Rock from 1807 to 1810, Robert Stevenson built a 115-foot-high lighthouse, one of a dozen he would create around the Scottish coast, and commissioned Turner to commemorate man’s mastery of the ocean and, perhaps, its animals: when Robert took Sir Walter Scott to visit the site, the celebrated author noted the presence of ‘several seals, which we might have shot, but, in the doubtful circumstances of the landing, we did not care to bring guns’. From 1838 to 1844, Robert’s son Alan struggled to erect Scotland’s tallest lighthouse on Skerryvore, a remote reef off the Hebrides. He used three hundred charges of dynamite to excavate a space in the rock; the 156-foot-high tower he built was said by his nephew Robert Louis Stevenson to be ‘the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights’, sweeping upwards, slender and curved.

  These man-made responses were both ingenious and futile. In 1849 Alan Stevenson constructed the evocatively named Covesea Skerries light off the coast near Nairn; he was followed in the family tradition by his brothers David and Thomas, father to Robert Louis. Between them they built Whalsay Skerries light in 1854, and more than thirty others. But unlike his siblings, Thomas Stevenson was fascinated by the qualities of his appointed adversary. He became obsessed with waves: the forces that determined what he built, and which haunted his dreams.

  Thomas appeared to see the power of waves as supernatural; his son saw a certain melancholy in his father. Thomas measured them, assessed their height and length and volume using a wave pole and a dynamometer, and asked lighthouse keepers to record wind speed, height of spray and water pressure per square foot. The sea had become a laboratory for his ideas. He even tried to weigh waves, and published his findings in the prestigious journal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. But ‘his studies of waves were only descriptive’, as Rosalind Williams writes. ‘He was not able to reduce their tumult to a scientific understanding robust enough to make predictions.’ Quite simply, the sea was beyond him and beyond science. Waves were proof only of God.

  That same sense of tension and intangibility – and morbidity – would suffuse the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, who replaced the technical concerns which had caused his father so much angst with metaphysical ones. Down the coast at North Berwick, off whose harbour walls I dive along with the local children, Robert looked out to Bass Rock, whose lighthouse would be built by his cousin David; his Treasure Island may have been suggested by the islands of the Forth. Stevenson was an admirer of Melville, and was admired in turn by Jack London, who quoted him in Martin Eden and visited his grave in Samoa. It was the wide, wide sea, from Scotland to the South Pacific, that supplied Stevenson with his inspiration.

  As a young man accompanying his father to a construction site, Robert put on a diving suit and, encased in brass and rubberised canvas with lead boots on his feet, he was lowered below the waves. ‘I was like a man fallen in a catalepsy,’ he wrote, as he descended into the twilight of the sea. ‘Looking up, I saw a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around … nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious.’ As he returned to the surface, ‘I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of sanguine light – the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson.’ It was a kind of rebirth, Billy Budd’s fate reversed. In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, one of his few stories not set on the sea, written in 1885, around the same time Melville was writing about his Handsome Sailor, Stevenson describes another descent: that of a good doctor into an evil man in a manner which recalls his father’s crises over the meaning of waves, and Darwin’s observations on the descent of humans. For Dr Jekyll, the ‘agonized womb of consciousness’ is the ‘curse of mankind’; it only underlines ‘the trembling immateriality, the mist-
like transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired’.

  Stevenson wrote his book, not in the Edinburgh streets that had inspired it or North Berwick’s rocky islands, but in his Bournemouth villa, built on calmer, sandy cliffs, and which he named Skerryvore. Suffering from the consumption that had prompted his southerly migration, he found he could not go outside: he was often too ill to leave the house, or too dogged by fans of his work who clamoured around him, to step out and take the air which had brought him there. Like Joseph Conrad, Stevenson saw darkness and domination reflected in the imperial sea. He would escape it for the South Seas and their clear, warm waters, far from all the constructions built by his family and their ever-burning, ever-turning lights, warning of unseen obstacles and the perils of leaving the land.

  As the night gathered behind a full moon over Spey Bay, I went out for a last look at the water in which I had swum three times during the day. Where the mountains gave way to the sea, the waves thundered in, as if to pick up the land and put it in its place. In the darkness, the backlit clouds above were a ghostly mimic of the scene below. It was terrifying and sublime: the sheer force of the North Sea only a few feet away, and yet almost invisible. Had I closed that distance, as I had during the calm light of the day, I would not have lasted long.

  This is a raw, unformed place, still in the process of sorting itself out. It seems to rumble with its becoming, just as the huge cobbles on the beach roll under my feet like ball bearings, threatening to tip me this way and that as I dodge huge tree roots and other giant pieces of flotsam. The oversized scale reminds of an antipodean wilderness, of New Zealand’s South Island or Tasmania’s south-western shore, as if I’d been helicoptered into nowhere. There’s no accommodation of the human: no access, no mediation, no agreement. It’s all in dispute, with itself.