RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  Seventeenth-century stone ice houses, dug into the ground like air-raid shelters to preserve seasonal gluts of salmon, lie under turf waves. The Spey spews three-foot fish into the mouths of bottlenose dolphins waiting like grizzly bears on a salmon run – grown so rich and fat on the supply of protein that they’re among the largest representatives of their species in the world. While they leap out of the water within yards of the shore, their sedate seal cousins lounge on the rocks, subtle in their various shades of grey, beige, taupe, charcoal, stone, like some fashionable paint manufacturer’s chart. Their eyes implore a semi-human state; as if they were humans in the process of becoming or unbecoming. Arrayed on a far beach across Findhorn Bay, under a sandy scarp topped by dense dark pines that might mark a remote strand in British Columbia, their animal nature is undermined by those eyes. ‘There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the end of time,’ Mr Ramsay says in To the Lighthouse. ‘The seals sat up and looked at you.’

  These are accessible marine mammals, all too easily hunted, hauling out on the land, hugging it with their languorous furry coats, almost modelling their allure. For centuries they have provided food and oil from their meat and blubber, and as David Thomson relates, their skins supplied clothes and caps and purses sleek with their thick pelages, still alive with the sea. A purse made from seal fur was said to react to the weather, its pile rising like a hairy barometer –

  ‘Aye. It’s sleekit now. The hairs is lying even down like the hairs of a sleepy cat. But in the morning likely they’ll be standing like the bristles of a sow.’

  – as if even in death the animal had a life of its own.

  ‘Did ye ever hear tell of another skin that would live that way, after one hundred years?’

  Some fishermen kept scraps of sealskin as charms against drowning, like cauls. When I was a boy, a friend returning from Norway gave me a little seal made of its own fur, with bead eyes and nose. I loved its glossy hard pelt, both soft and stiff at the same time; it made me think of stories of Romany children from the forest whose mothers sewed them into rabbitskins for the winter, like wild inhabitants of the woods. For the people of the sea, the seal too merged between myth and reality: between the selkies – who came onto land in the guise of a human and kidnapped a lover, grasping them in an inescapable embrace, breathing deeply into their mouth before diving off a cliff and taking them down, down deep into their world – and the animals that supplied them with food and warmth and light as they burned their oil in lamps, yet which they killed as predators of the fish to which they, the greedy humans, also laid claim.

  If seals look and sound human, it’s easy to imagine that they might become us, or we become them. I’ve often shared northern shores with these animals. In the Outer Hebrides – the Islands of the Strangers where Britain fractures into the Atlantic and the landscape looks so alien, with its puddle-like lochans dropped like lakes from the sky into burnt-orange peat bog, that it stood in for the infinite beyond Jupiter in 2001 – I’ve slipped my skin to swim in surging white and turquoise waves as grey seals hung in the surf, their limber shapes against the shot-through light, watching me curiously. Across the ocean off Cape Cod, their peers spy on me through the same blue water. Even in the Solent, seals have popped up next to me, surprising me as much as I surprise them. They are sentinels of the near shore. Their heads bob in the surf like buoys, or they weave about below my legs, their dexterity far exceeding mine. They follow as you walk down the beach, accustomed to anglers casting their lines; a fishing rod signals supper to them. For all their physicality, they’re caught between one element and the other, as Thomson’s book would record.

  ‘But I suppose now,’ said Tadhg, ‘that the creatures of the water, not being able to sleep, I suppose that they wouldn’t be tormented in themselves the way you and I would be lying awake at night.’

  ‘I don’t know then,’ said Sean. ‘But them that was that way enchanted in human form suffered everything that you or I would suffer if we lay awake for years. And worse. Or so the old people used to tell me. And the seal above the others, Tadhg, you know well, for they say she is something differing from every creature.’

  ‘But what is in the mind of them, I don’t know – the creatures,’ says another islander; he too sees the seal as a symbol of the mortality of the sea. ‘She went out with the ebb tide,’ says Michael the ferryman of his wife, two months deceased, ‘the way I knew she would, for I was looking from the window when God took her and I never saw the water lower than it was that minute. I thought to myself, and I still praying, if God spares her now for those few minutes, and the tide to turn, she will be safe.’

  I remember my parents’ gaunt faces as, separated by a decade, they lay back on their respective beds, the tide gone out of them, their cheekbones as high as rocks on the shore. The end of the land is the end of all this. As Molloy says, from here on you can only get wet, or drown.

  Does death always come at low tide? ‘No,’ says Michael. ‘But if a beast or person is anyways weak, then their strength will fail and build with the ebb and flow. ’Tis just the same with the moon, though you wouldn’t remark it in yourself, your mind being strong; if you watch a person that’s weak in the mind you will see how his sense comes and goes with the moon.’

  Thomson’s tales of the people of the sea turn from one story to another, declining to decide between myth and reality. As he wanders around the relic edges of the Celtic islands in the late nineteen-forties, a lost romantic in a black-and-white world, he listens to stories from another age: ‘I came only just in time to hear the last remnants of pre-Christian culture.’ These were places where sentinel stones still stood in the watery land, buried tide-high in the bog like whale teeth in their jawbones, placed there to tell out the phases of the moon, so much more important than the sun to people of the sea. A man whose sight was impaired spoke to people of the sea who still believed in second sight, especially when it came to tales of the other people from the sea. He hears of a baby accidentally left in a cave by the sea, thought drowned, only to be found being suckled by a seal: the child grew up to be ‘a great man, a fine young man, and a remarkable swimmer. He was a great swimmer.’ The fact is emphasised. Seal-hunters are reproved by the grieving voices of selkie-seals, plaintively calling,

  ‘Who killed Anna? Who killed Anna? Who killed Anna?’

  To be answered by another,

  ‘Oh, the same man, the man always, the man always, the man always.’

  On the coasts and islands, from the Outer Hebrides to southern Ireland, Thomson learns of the King of the Seals, chosen by a thousand million seals, rising up out of the waves, the size of a cow with the face of an old man, with limpets and periwinkles growing on his cheeks and head. Skinned seals lament their lost city beneath the waves, condemned to live on land, as hairless as humans. Men take selkie wives, hiding their pelts until the women, now mothers, discover the hiding places and steal back to the sea, returning only to leave gifts of fish and beautiful shells for their abandoned children. Neglected human wives turn to selkie partners for comfort, their children born with webbed fingers and toes, the webs successively clipped away by midwives and mothers and regrowing as horny patches on their hands and feet – ‘the fins couldna grow their natural way, so they turned into this horn’, like the toughened lumps on my hands, caused by my own seaborne condition that curls my fingers and toes as if to fuse them into fins (and which, for one Hebridean I meet, his palms a network of scars, prompted him to have his little finger amputated ‘because it got in the way’).

  ‘For the seals and ourselves were thrown together in our way o’ getting a living, and everything we feel, they feel, ye may be sure o’ that.’

  ‘I’ve heard a Shetland man say they are some o’ the fallen angels. God threw them out,’ says one islander; another that ‘There was supposed to be a creature in the water for every one on land,’ or, ‘There was many a man drowned after seeing one.’

  This world fades even
as Thomson writes about it, like a distant recording. Yet his stories are anchored by the details and textures that define the hard edges of the land where it becomes the sea. The tar-covered curraghs like coracles which turn men into turtles, paddling aquatic creatures; and the way the fishermen dress as counterparts of the herring quines, becoming what they hunt or the land provides, their trousers ‘woven at home out of wool, undyed in the weft and blue in the warp, which gives them a shadowy worn appearance. The fly buttons are not covered and the narrow trouser legs are split at the ankles, like cuffs. They wear heavy jerseys, grey or blue, knitted in an intricate pattern, and a sleeveless tweed waistcoat. Some have a serge-blue jerkin and some still wear the bawneen – an undyed jerkin almost white, for which they were so famous long ago. On their feet they wear pampooties – flatsoled shoes of uncured cowhide with the hair outside like the rivlins of the North. These grow hard and stiff if a man walks on dry land too long, but as the Aran Islander spends half his life in the sea, there is little danger of that.’

  Here rituals, too, are holdfasts, like the late-night prayers over the dying embers of a fire, trusting to God that it will revive the next day.

  ‘We rake this fire as the pure Christ rakes all. Mary at its foot and Brigid at its top. The Eight highest angels in the City of Graces preserving this house and the people till day.’

  And so Thomson wanders off, out of his story, not caring whether what these fishers and crofters told him was true or not. That was not the point. ‘As to the seals themselves,’ he concluded many years later, looking back on his travels as a young man, ‘no scientific study can dissolve their mystery.’ Like the waves which frustrated Thomas Stevenson, the seals defied definition. To David Thomson, no other animal had such a dream-like effect on the human mind, or such a place in our unconscious. The selkie was part of our ancient narrative.

  ‘But what is in the mind of them, I don’t know – the creatures.’

  The shape hangs in the water, a downed barrage balloon. Barely ten feet from the tideline, it resolves itself, with a rising snort, into a seal, suspended there, the same animal I first saw here years ago. Its black-grey back is ingrown with green algae, like those mythic whales said to grow trees and shrubs on their backs, as if they were another country. Kicking off my sandals, I wade out to it, worried that it’s ill, lying there, puffing away like an old man with emphysema.

  I’m right next to it now, alongside its bulk; I want to reach out and pat it and tell it things will be all right. Its whiskers are thick and yellowy and stubby and spare. It looks at me with that sidelong glance that dogs have, and which makes you vaguely concerned for what they might be thinking.

  It’s disturbing to be so close to such a huge animal on a suburban shore. It is longer than I am tall, and at least three hundred pounds heavier; an overweight surfer in a wrinkly wetsuit, or a hippo waylaid from some African watering hole. Its bones must be old and weary. The water is warm around it. I feel I could float there with it, basking, growing algae on my own back. It’s just an old old creature, I realise. An old old seal, with more of the walrus about him. Best left alone. Later I see him further out to sea, still hanging there, still waiting. For what, I don’t know.

  He was there again this morning, in the dawn, gently lolling in the swell. I wondered if he recognised me, with that sidelong flash of his eyes, this King of the Seals, ‘the biggest seal I ever saw, as big as any cow’.

  ‘I remember well his face,’ said Sean Patrick, ‘for ’twas like the face of an old man.’

  The mountains of North Wales seem built to keep out invaders. They hold the world at bay, as much a barrier as the sea. Mountains scare me. They make me think they’re hiding something; that they’re a dam against an unseen ocean, welling up with whales and seals and sharks and squid held behind the tides of deep time. These rocks turn the skyline barbaric, then fall sharply to the sea. Above me is Coed y Bleiddiau, the Wood of the Wolves, where, it is said, the last wolf in Wales was killed.

  A century ago Porthmadog, set at the mouth of the Traeth Bach estuary, was a working port, then known as Portmadoc, exporting Welsh slate around the world. But it has long since fallen into disuse, and its harbour is full of recreational yachts rather than industrial barges. A restored railway carries tourists over the water and into the hills – the same toy-like trains I remember from holidays when cargoes of visitors were trundled past vast vertical fields of slate, tipped-up hills, as if the mountains were slowly slipping into the sea. I felt that I had only to take out one sliver and the whole lot would come tumbling down, Snowdonia and all.

  Those silky slabs, originally formed as sedimentary layers of ancient seas in greys as subtle and various as the colours of sperm whales, and whose leaves occasionally fall apart to reveal fossilised creatures preserved like pressed flowers, were the saving of this place. This roof of Wales roofed the world. Portmadoc slate provided Netley’s military hospital with its roof – the same shards I still find on my local beach, worn into rounded tokens, offered the drowned as their fare to the other world. At its peak Portmadoc was as busy as any pithead, a place of masts and men and machines. Ships arrived full of ballast to be exchanged for cut slate. In return, their rubble was dumped in the harbour, forming a foreign reef where Welsh trees are rooted in Mediterranean debris.

  The town seems empty, an abandoned film set. When I ask for directions to my guest house, the man painting a shopfront claims never to have heard of the road, even though it is only three streets away. Up above, perched on the hill, a grand terrace stands testament to past wealth; its houses, too, might be sliding into the sea. On the far side of the bay lies the unreal Italianate village of Portmeirion, another import: a pastel-painted opera set overlooking the estuary where, that autumn, I attended a festival during which young people, freed by the lack of mobile reception, pulled off their clothes to dive in the water, and under cover of night watched performers with horned heads dance on stage.

  This site was witness to other attempts at utopia. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, William Madocks, a Member of Parliament and property speculator after whom the port was named, employed a hundred labourers to build a great embankment across the estuary, draining it and creating new land. By damming the sea, Madocks sought to connect this Celtic shore with its counterpart, establishing a new trade route between Britain and Ireland – and from there to America.

  This was the ambitious scheme that greeted Percy Bysshe Shelley when he arrived here in 1812 with his seventeen-year-old wife Harriet and a trunkful of seditious manuscripts. Still only twenty years old himself, he was a man on the run.

  The poet had recently returned from Dublin, where in his attempts to distribute his Address to the Irish People he had been reduced to throwing his pamphlets from the balcony of his lodgings or running up to passing carriages and stuffing them into their windows. Although aristocratic by birth – he stood to inherit an income of six thousand pounds a year – he was a rebel and had been since he was at Eton, where he was known as ‘mad Shelley’ and had once surrounded himself with a circle of blue spirit flame in an attempt to raise the devil.

  He was now doing something similar with his words. As his teenage wife wrote, a ‘large box so full of inflammable matter’ had been discovered by the authorities at the custom house in Holyhead. It was reported to the Home Office in London as containing ‘a great quantity of Pamphlets and printed papers’, as well ‘an open letter, of a tendency so dangerous to the Government’ that the Prime Minister was alerted. Shelley’s demands drew on those of the French Revolution. He declared that ‘Government has no rights’ since it exhibited ‘barefaced tyranny’; that ‘No man has the right to monopolize more than he can enjoy’; and that ‘Those who believe that Heaven is, what earth has been, a monopoly in the hands of the favoured few, would do well to reconsider their opinion.’ Such rhetoric sounded more like a threat than a philosophy, one which would inspire Thoreau’s civil disobedience.

  At Oxford, Sh
elley had espoused atheism and free love, forswore meat and eschewed sugar since it was the product of slavery – ideas that would inspire New England’s utopians a generation later, and which got him expelled from college. Now, in the eyes and ears of the authorities this hot-headed youth had become a dangerous activist, an anarchist who would call for the people to rise like lions after slumber. After leaving Ireland, Shelley had established his own commune at a lakeside house at Nantgwillt – the Wild Brook – in the Elan Valley, mid Wales. Each member had their own commune name, and would work the land and teach pupils from their library, turning the Wild Brook into a torrent of radicalism.

  A year later, Shelley met John Frank Newton, who was a vegetarian on both moral and dietary grounds, citing the myth of Prometheus, the bringing of fire and the cooking of meat as the beginning of man’s downfall. Newton had recently published The Return to Nature: or a defence of the vegetable regimen. In it he promoted a diet of vegetables and distilled water (pointing out that the Thames was full of animal oil, and that London’s drinking water was contaminated with putrid animal matter). His children ran about naked in their Belgravia home, since their father considered clothes another bad habit of civilisation. The family ate only dried fruit and biscuits and drank weak tea at breakfast, with potatoes and vegetables in season for dinner, supplemented by macaroni and a dessert. Newton believed that man’s ‘chymical’ state, from his dentition to his digestion, was ‘wholly adapted to vegetable sustenance’, and that diseases such as cancer were caused by eating flesh. He added that the ‘monkies’ of the menagerie in the Tower of London had sickened when given meat; and that the domestication of animals

  … entails upon them many disorders and much misery. Sheep suffer in a way to call forth the most ordinary compassion … After robbing the unfortunate creature of its own warm clothing, we keep it ready for the knife in a state of incipient rot, and then we exclaim, what a dull, sluggish stupid looking animal is this! I shudder at the thought which forces itself on my mind. Tell me, reader, is that originally noble creature man more, or is he less deteriorated than the mutton?