The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  The raven pair are cold-shouldered by other birds, set apart. Their eyes give little away, saying nothing of whatever lies behind them. Maybe they’re ready to lure me over the cliff so that they can feast on my bones below. Or perhaps they’re taunting me for my ineptitude as they fly, banking and swooping and spinning and tumbling in the air, the sunlight shining through their primary feathers, turning them diaphanous and ghostly grey. They’re joined by groups of rooks and jackdaws, summoned to a corvid convention. That summer I’ll see their aeronautics mirrored by the distant loops of an air show. Perhaps we’d pay more attention to birds if they left contrails of their own.

  As I watch, a new player makes its entrance: a peregrine falcon, riding on the updraught, streamlined and straight-winged – such a noble, Spitfire of a bird, so supercharged one might imagine it had a Rolls-Royce engine, even as its name evokes a chivalric past. In his book The Peregrine, a study in a reign of terror, J.A. Baker describes how these raptors ‘perfect their killing power by endless practice, like knights or sportsmen’ – a medieval analogy underlined by the name for a male falcon, a tiercel. Like the Farnes, ‘peregrine’ signifies pilgrim or traveller, since in the ancient art of hawking, newly-fledged birds were taken not from the nest, but while in flight from it. Its Latin name reflects this, as well as its sublime shape: Falco peregrinus, sickle-winged wanderer. Murderous and exquisite, it circles seemingly without effort, belying its facility as the fastest animal alive, able to fly at more than one hundred miles an hour, pursuing its prey with such velocity that a gull or jackdaw’s head can be snapped off in the violence of its attack.

  Baker – a librarian who lived in Essex in such obscurity that until recently no one knew the date of his death – followed the peregrine for ten years, a witness to its fen-land fiefdom. He saw it living in a ‘pouring-away world’, negotiating the landscape in ‘a succession of remembered symmetries’. During the writing of his book, published in 1967, Baker was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Yet his peregrine is no symbol of the uncanny; it is utterly of its world. It is a survivor, still recovering from the wartime culls when it was shot as a threat to carrier pigeons employed as radio silence was imposed on submarine-spotting planes, and from the second assault of pesticidal poisoning in the sixties, which nearly silenced it for good. Peregrines have nested on this island cliff for centuries, raising successive dynasties in eyries set into its vertical face. It is a place made for such a soaring performer, infinitesimally attuned to movement and space; ‘the mastery of the thing!’, as Hopkins wrote of another raptor. As the unholy pilgrim scans for prey, using eyes that are bigger than a human being’s and five times more powerful, I might as well be watching a cheetah on an African plain as sitting on a cliff in southern England. To be alone with all this beauty seems somehow greedy.

  This terrain may be managed by man, but it has been edited by the wind, funnelling up the Channel, clipping the gorse and biting it into bonsai hillocks. The bushes still give off their coconut scent, as if to lure Julia’s husband from his palmy beaches. I’m almost bouncing along the springy turf, aware that any of it might collapse with my next step. Armpits and hollows, crevices and groins shifting like a restive sleeper under a downy duvet, all coursing through the ground, their cracks filled with lush plants that wouldn’t survive out in the open. Close to the edge, the chalk has begun to break off in lumps like damp icing sugar. A slow-motion earthquake is sundering the island from itself. The whole thing is sagging and groaning under the weight of its natural history, ready to slip silently and solemnly away.

  It all seems so gentle, this place, raised so far in the air. Heading west into the sun, I feel I could go on forever. Abruptly, the rolling green gives way to an astonishing view, as though it had been thrown in my face: great chopped-up chunks of white rock launched out into the water, waves washing around their weedy feet.

  I’ve seen the Needles ever since I can remember, but close to and yet still at a distance, they appear more strange than familiar, possibly because they’re always changing. The three eroded stumps, like rotten molars, are the remains of the long-lost arches and towers that earned them their name. The missing fourth, a narrow, hundred-and-twenty-foot pinnacle, fell in 1764. If there’d been a locked-off time-lapse camera running on their geological demise, we’d realise how reduced these stacks are in splendour. Now they appear as mere props to the squat, red-and-white-striped lighthouse, with its double-occulting light. Like its counterparts around the coast, it has its signature pulse – eclipse two seconds, light two seconds, eclipse two seconds, dark fourteen seconds – as cryptic as a cetacean’s clicks. It runs on autopilot, its tower flattened to accommodate visiting helicopters, watched from the neighbouring stacks by heraldic cormorants – once known inelegantly as eel-crows – and sleek black shags with aristocratic crests.

  Behind lies other evidence of human occupation: man-made barnacles clinging to this land’s end, relics of a past when West Wight was one big fortress, and when the entire south coast was studded with brick forts. Successive batteries were built into this slender white finger to defend all England from hostile bands, leaving it as riddled with concrete tunnels as the cliffs’ burrows. As I prop my bike by a chained gate, a pair of swallows swoop out of the darkness. Poking my head through the doorway, I hear insistent cheeping from a nest somewhere in the gloom.

  At the foot of the cliffs are paddling guillemots, sharp-beaked northern versions of penguins. As with razorbills and fulmars, the island marks their easternmost breeding ground. They lie long and low like miniature black-and-white battleships, built for the open water where they spend their lives, only coming into shore to nest. As members of the auk family, they have an antediluvian quality, evocative of ancient engravings. As they flutter down from the cliffs, their wings look improbably small and stumpy in proportion to their barrel-shaped bodies. I can just about hear them, at this distance. The guillemot ‘utters queer and eerie noises’, says my Pocket Book of Birds, published Spring 1936, ‘reminiscent of the moaning of a person in pain’. Like so many British seabirds, they have greatly reduced in numbers in recent years. Puffins too once made their nests here; they have long since vanished, although later that summer I see a sole specimen far out at sea.

  For centuries such birds were taken in their thousands for their meat, their oil, or their feathers. So great was the demand that the wings were torn off wounded birds which had been shot; like definned sharks, they were thrown back into the sea to die, in order that fashionable ladies could walk about with kittiwakes on their heads. They may have lacked a Cuthbert to defend them, but in my imagination I see spectral flocks pursuing those Bond Street dames, demanding the return of their rightful property.

  In the summer of 1936, as my Pocket Book of Birds appeared, T.H. White was busy training a goshawk. His friends found this ridiculous, and told him so. ‘ “Why on earth do you waste your talents feeding wild birds with dead rabbits?” Was this a man’s work today?… “To arms!” they cried, “Down with the Fascists, and long live the People!” ’

  White’s account of his relationship with Gos – which would not appear in print for fifteen years, and which went under the working title ‘A Sort of Mania’ – is a ferocious but oddly opaque account, quite as obsessive as J.A. Baker’s. It is bound up in medieval references and veiled allusions to the demons that drove this handsome man to become a poet and writer – as well as an artist, a hunter, an aviator and, perhaps most unlikely of all – and that almost by accident – a kind of pacifist.

  White’s journals of that testing time – which he called his day-books – are filled with loving drawings and tiny photographs of his goshawk. He even Sellotaped the bird’s moulted feathers to the pages, just as he fixed a salmon scale to an earlier journal about fishing in the Scottish Highlands (and proposed that every reader of the published work should receive a similar scale with each copy of the book). The fact that White lost Gos halfway through its training adds pathos to these relics. The b
ird flew off with its leather jesses around its feet, never to return. Unsentimentally, White concluded that the hawk on which he had lavished so much attention – to the point of staying awake for days and nights, ‘walking’ the bird so that in its own fatigue it would bend to its master’s will – had died with its jesses caught in some distant tree, where, ‘hanging upside down by the mildewed leathers, his bundle of green bones and ruined feathers may still be swinging in the winter wind’.

  Terence Hanbury White was born in Bombay in 1906, a product of the Raj as much as Julia Margaret Cameron, and as adrift from birth as Thomas Merton. Sent back to England by his uncaring parents for his education, he too gravitated to Cambridge, where, among other talents, he determined to learn medieval Latin shorthand so that he could translate the bestiaries which would come to influence his own work. Having published his poetry, he considered writing a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but left his post as a schoolmaster at Stowe – where he let loose grass snakes in his sitting room and sunbathed naked on the lawns – to retreat to a five-shilling-a-week gamekeeper’s cottage on the Stowe estate.

  Here he lived in rural solitude, drawing his water from a well and using an earth closet – although he also spent a hundred pounds on carpets and curtains, mirrors and an ornate antique bed, and stocked his larder with tinned food and bottles of fine Madeira. In 1936 he published an account of his time there, archly entitled England Have My Bones, in which he sought to define himself, and the morally empty country Thomas Merton had left two years before. ‘Nowadays we don’t know where we live, or who we are,’ he wrote. ‘This is why, in a shifting world, I want to know where I am.’

  His book was assembled from his various hunting, fishing and flying diaries, with one eye on his ancestor, Gilbert White of Selborne, and the other on Richard Jefferies, the Victorian naturalist who recorded the vanishing world of southern England and who wrote ‘To me everything is supernatural’ as he lay on his back on the downs ‘so as to feel the embrace of earth’, imagining the sky was the sea. White rhapsodised, in similar tones, about the country that he knew, caught in a few years of peace, a kind of insular refuge in time. ‘20.iii.xxiv. So is the whole British Island an anchorage, if you avoid the towns. So are birds and beasts and the sporting seasons. All the things which will outlast London are important to philosophic man.’

  White may have been thinking of Jefferies’ futuristic novel After London, Or Wild England, published in 1885, in which the writer imagines how the country would look if its capital ceased to exist and the land returned to its natural state. White could not know, though he may have suspected, that the coming years would see that city threatened with just that sense of oblivion – or that the countryside too would change as radically. And as William Cobbett, on his rural rides around Hampshire, had delivered a similar polemic against the iniquitous effects of the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century, so White’s was a last glimpse of Britain before the mechanisation to come, when its fields would be turned into chemically treated food factories. He wrote of its people and its animals, and of the carrion crow which he believed to live ‘as long as a man, is extremely destructive of game, and is hunted for that reason with much enthusiasm by gamekeepers, as well as by emotional people who object to the creature for pecking out the eyes of dying animals’.

  In fact, crows live for ten years, often less. But to White, animals were barometers of an even greater threat, unable as they are to defend themselves. He wrote in a weird interregnum, an era which flirted with any creed or philosophy or politics, no matter how extreme – indeed, made more so by the bookends of global conflict just past and soon to come. White made up his own myths, his own heroic narrative. He hunted and fished and learned to fly. ‘Because I am afraid of things, of being hurt and death, I have to attempt them,’ he wrote. ‘This journal is about fear.’

  It is not surprising that his book ends violently, as White leaves friends late at night after drinking, careers off the road and crashes into a ditch. His head strikes the dashboard of his car, and his nose and throat fill with blood. As he gets out, into the still-shining beams of the headlights, he realises he has lost the vision in one eye. Happily, he regained it, and resumed his helter-skelter life.

  White could not stay still. He despised people who ‘don’t do enough things with their bodies’, and was proud of the fact that he had not slept in London for five years. He railed against the countryside’s despoliation – ‘perhaps one day the New Forest will be the name of a tube station’ – and said that the best thing for Britain would be a new war to wipe out two-thirds of its population. Yet White would spend the coming years in exile in Ireland, a kind of conscientious objector by default, having been advised against enlisting by his friend and fellow hunter Siegfried Sassoon, who told him three days before the Munich Agreement in 1938, ‘The only way to be helpful in this emergency is to remain as calm as a wick and to keep still’ – much the same advice White had given himself when dealing with his beloved but infuriating hawks.

  You can see why White and the author of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man might bond over dead animals. But White was much less enthusiastic about killing animals out of print. He found it difficult to sacrifice live birds to his hawk, regretted the death of a mouse, and above all doted on his red setter, Brownie, ‘my Pocahontas, my non pareil’. She sat on his lap when he wasn’t working, and groaned at the typewriter that took her place when he was. While her master hunted geese in the freezing winter dawn, she wore a flannel coat, her hindquarters in his bag, his woollen mittens on her front paws. In the rain, she sported a waterproof coat with spatterdashes to stop her feathery legs getting mud all over the house (a canine costume which, when he moved to Ireland, was the source of suspicions that White was a spy, carrying secret maps stashed in his dog’s coat). And had anyone ever harmed her, they would have faced swift retribution. When out with a hunting party, White made it clear that if anyone shot his dog by mistake, it would be the last one that they made. ‘I shoot him. Shot one. Shot two. Like that – no hesitation.’

  White might have gone on in this vein, ever more misanthropic and reclusive, fading into a grumpy literary footnote. But that same year, his life was overturned by sheer luck, as he called it, likening his success to ‘winning the pools’, going almost overnight from living on credit to being a rich man. In August 1938 the American Book Club selected his novel The Sword in the Stone – Arthurian romance re-imagined for a troubled age, just as Tennyson’s and Julia Margaret Cameron’s works were for theirs. Since his days at Cambridge, White too had been fascinated by Malory’s Morte d’Arthur – a story with a new relevance, despite being sourced in medieval and Anglo-Saxon legend. White’s work would extend into five separate volumes. It was as much an act of medium-ship as of writing. ‘I am trying to write of an imaginary world which was imagined in the 15th century,’ he told his friend Sir Sydney Cockerell. ‘I am looking through 1939 at 1489 itself looking backwards.’ He accompanied this with a sketch of himself looking through a telescope, as if through time. Perhaps he saw the black knights as storm-troopers, Camelot as a bunker, and the merlins as fighter planes, while the white cliffs of Albion, Dover and West Wight became England’s first and last defence.

  White’s book was written as war became inevitable. He was both caught up in the spirit of the times, and set outside it, too. Thirty years later it would catch my own imagination when I took it out of the little public library across the road from my school, where our father took us on Thursday evenings. I identified with its boy hero, Wart, the once and future king, a prince-to-be who becomes a hawk himself, soaring over an invented, idyllic Middle England; I saw myself pulling the sword from the stone, as page to a knight, a boy-soldier.

  White never lost his own boyish enthusiasm, his sense of self-invention. He was, in the words of his biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘more remarkable than anything he wrote’. He designed his own logo, a flying hawk, and in his Who’s Who entry would l
ist, ‘Recreation: Animals’, later extending it to include painting and hawking. For him birds were not pets or prey, nor even under his dominion. He did not tame his hawks: he entered into an uneasy truce with them. So too was his relationship with the world. At that moment, as Thomas Merton was contemplating monastic life in America and would soon receive his summons to the draft, conscription became a serious possibility in Britain, ‘and everybody lives from one speech of Hitler’s to the next’, White wrote in his diary for 26 April 1939. ‘My nature is not monastic; it may be noncooperative, but it is free. It is a raptorial nature. Hawks neither band themselves together in war, nor yet retire from the world of air.’

  War for White came as a suffocation, symbolised by the day a farmer friend came to help fit him with a gas mask. Warner sees her subject trembling like an animal as the rubber seal is put over his face – before tearing it off and running into the woods. White declared he would neither fight nor run. ‘Anybody can throw bombs,’ he said; he had novels to write; it was his destiny. He even claimed that the overarching theme of Le Morte d’Arthur was to find an antidote to war. In Ireland – having left England before the issuing of identity cards or ration books and being beyond conscription age anyway – he gave up his identity just as Thomas Merton did; only he used the royalties from his writing to rent a large house and live in a medieval manner. Not for nothing did he tell Cockerell – who was the well-connected director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and who had begun his own career by sending seashells to John Ruskin – that he had to try on a suit of armour in order to enter Arthur’s world: ‘I want to know how the stuff works.’

  It may have been easier to re-imagine that world in the Celtic twilight of Ireland. White retreated into his island fastness. From there he corresponded with figures as disparate as Noël Coward, as to the suitability for the stage of his Arthurian play The Candle in the Wind, and Julian Huxley, on whether animals had a ‘mind’. Reviewing Huxley’s Kingdom of Beasts, in which the renowned zoologist claimed that man was the mammal ‘most successful at living’, White countered that ‘Man … has only his own word to go on, and to be most successful at what you happen to be best at doing does not constitute an absolute superiority over the rest of the animal kingdom.’ He would rather have lived with animals. ‘How restful it would be if there were no humans in the world at all,’ he observed. ‘If only there was a religious order which not only took a vow of perpetual silence but also decided to go to bed for ever, how gladly I would join it.’