The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  White’s world was closed down by war. He was as captive on his island as any internee on the Isle of Man. He could not leave Ireland, nor enter England. Communication with friends such as David Garnett (who himself had been a conscientious objector during the first war, when he was lover to Duncan Grant) and Sydney Cockerell was reduced to fitful correspondence. In an age already reliant on telephones and telegrams, radio and radar, White’s words were restricted to letters and diaries, in the past of the old England he imagined. He thought seriously about becoming a Catholic, went to Mass every Sunday, observed abstinence and even considered becoming a priest as an alternative to being a combatant.

  But as he wrote his epic story of battles and ancient heroes, White realised that by charting Arthur’s story he had sealed his own fate; that he had no choice but to enter the war himself. To remain outside it would be to betray his creation, let alone the country which he determined should have his bones. He saw direct parallels with the animals he loved. In nature, he claimed, only ants and bees fought wars. Animals did not own property, nor conduct industry. They avoided rather than courted aggression. ‘Now what can we learn about abolition of war from animals?’ He hunted, but he only killed the things he loved very much, which is why he was not keen on killing human beings.

  Deep grief brought drastic thoughts, and what he learned from the death of his beloved Brownie ‘maimed his heart’. His red setter had become as eccentric as her owner-lover. She would adopt chicks and baby rabbits and bring them to bed with her; and since she and her master shared the bed, he would end up being bitten by rabbits. Brownie also kept a collection of stones under the kitchen table, to which she added regularly. And when she died, on the one day that White was away on business in Dublin, her master was so distraught that he stayed up for two nights with her body beside him, only then burying her in the garden, having clipped a lock of her goldenred tresses to tape into his journal.

  For a week afterwards he visited her each night to say, ‘Good girl: sleepy girl: go to sleep, Brownie’, familiar phrases to reassure her, since he half-believed that her consciousness might persist. It was almost madness, he admitted, ‘but that was the kind of chance I had to provide for’. ‘She was the central fact of my life,’ he averred; the only being he dared to love. He blamed himself for his absence when she died, for having failed her; for having killed the thing he loved more than anything.

  It was too late, too, to enter the fight. By now the war had passed, and with it White retreated yet further. He moved to the Channel island of Alderney, partly to escape British taxes, partly because it was the only island that would accept his new dog, Killie. There he discovered the sea: ‘You cease to be your own master, as you become a waiter-on upon the moon and sun, whose tides take no account of mealtimes or bedtime or times to get up.’ And there, in 1959, he was interviewed for BBC television by a precise young presenter named Robert Robinson.

  Forever smoking a pipe, White was now white-haired with a beard and a sailor’s tan, looking older than his years: he was only fifty-three. Living on an island had served to accentuate his peculiarities. He painted the interior of his house red, and often wore a cassock of scarlet towelling. He resembled a more epicene, English Hemingway: the film begins with a still of White raising a shotgun over his head; his eyes twinkle with mischief and teasing. He tells Robinson that it is part of his physical training as a writer every day to ‘swim underwater looking at fish’. He had recently taken advantage of a visit by an Admiralty diving vessel to don an old-fashioned helmet and rubberised suit, which reminded him of what it was like to wear a suit of armour.

  ‘I met another diver at the bottom and we leaned against each other like amorous manatees. It was enchanting to be mothered by these tough, tender, bronzed young men,’ he wrote, while the sailors dressed him in his suit like squires attending their knight. In the garden of his nineteenth-century villa he’d dug a great pit and built a swimming pool which he referred to as a gladiatorial arena and in which, in the film, we see two young boys diving. Close by he was constructing a temple to a Roman emperor – ‘I think Hadrian was a very fine fellow’ – and in between, besides recording the commentary for a film about puffins he’d made, took the time to paint vaguely surrealist canvases of female nudes and disembodied eyes. He seemed to be happy in his loneliness. Or at least, this is what the camera saw.

  White was a product of a particular breed, not unlike another naturalist, Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, who lived in North Devon where he slept in the open and swam naked and believed in an English race-memory of divine ‘ancient sunlight’, as well as the power of fascism (in which he sought to enlist T.E. Lawrence, who carried Malory’s Morte d’Arthur on his military campaigns, and who was also a good friend of David Garnett’s). White, however, declined to declare for any political party. ‘I don’t think about myself very much,’ he told the camera, constantly jabbing at his face with the stem of his pipe as if in self-defence. ‘I don’t know what I am.’

  Admitting that he is a ‘childish man’, White complains to Robinson – his captive audience – of being typecast as a ‘whimsical’ writer. ‘When I was young, you had to be grown up,’ he says. ‘It was fighting talk to be an escapist.’ He was, he said, ‘a middle-class, Edwardian Englishman’. He had no need to kow-tow, as he put it, to the modern world, which he accused of forever banging on drums to drown out its fear of the atomic bomb. He was insular and insulated by the success of The Once and Future King, then in the process of being turned into a musical, Camelot, the words of which I’d memorise from an album bought for my birthday. In White’s case, he had Julie Andrews as a houseguest to sing its songs.

  To the BBC, White presented a contrasting but happy picture of himself, an English writer in island exile, outside the reach of the Inland Revenue. Yet his life on Alderney had become complicated by something beyond his control. He had fallen in love with a young boy whose family had been visiting him. White did all in his power to entertain the boy – known only as ‘Zed’ – on his island, conjuring up its wonders like Prospero. Zed remained unnamed in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s remarkably frank biography of White, published in 1967. But it is tantalising to wonder if he is the same boy we see in that black-and-white film, under the summer sun; and to wonder if White saw him as his young self, the squire to his knight, the Wart to his Merlin.

  The relationship, which remained entirely ‘respectable’ on White’s part, ended unhappily. Realising its impossibility, he cut off all contact with Zed, and was left with a wounded heart. ‘All I can do is behave like a gentleman,’ he wrote at the end of the summer. ‘It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them.’ Despite the money and magic his books had brought him, they could do nothing to protect him from himself and his human emotions. His vivid imagination and innate sense of isolation – the essential unreality of his life which had produced them – only made matters worse. White’s retreat was nature. Animals do not answer back.

  Five years after this interview, White died on his way home from a lecture tour of America; he wrote his last letter as the ship passed the Azores. He was found in his cabin a few days later, having suffered a heart attack. ‘I expect to make rather a good death,’ he had told David Garnett. ‘The essence of death is loneliness, and I have plenty of practice at this.’ On 20 January 1964 he was buried in Athens. England would never have his bones. Nor would he live on in Albion, although, in some versions of the Arthurian legend, when the mythical king died, he turned into a raven, regarded in the West Country as a royal bird.

  High on the downs, I watch the water in which I’d swum. The sea writes its own story, forever coming in and going out, entering and exiting, remorseless in its attack, knowing we are ultimately helpless in the face of its power; the same helplessness to which we yield, like grateful lovers, softly eroded and worn down in its crumbling embrace.

  But this island is not a retreat for eve
ryone. On another ferry journey, later in the year, I return to a high-walled prison complex, where men are held whose crimes are deemed so awful that their fellow convicts put broken glass in their food. They are confined in cells no bigger than a saint’s, while out in the courtyard, its garden beds bright with marigolds, stands a wire aviary filled with birds. Inside the prison chapel, its concrete roof slowly leaking rain into a bucket, I talk to the class about writing, and they perform their exercises like grown children. They write of birds and animals and the sea and the places they can sense, over the walls and in their past.

  As I ride back over the green ridge of rising chalk, the shadow of Tennyson’s cross falling behind me. In the distance, the descending sun sets off a semaphore flash from the windscreen of a far-off fishing boat. An hour later, the ferry delivers me back to the mainland. Terns wheel in our wake, continually plunging into the white water, and the light is fading fast as we pull into the dock.

  3

  The inland sea

  Merely to be alive, indeed, is adventure enough in a world like this, so erratic and disjointed; so lovely and so odd and mysterious and profound. It is, at any rate, a pity to remain in it half dead.

  WALTER DE LA MARE, Desert Islands, 1930

  The suburbs slip by in a succession of deserted stations, trailing disembodied voices from unheard Tannoys. Silver birch march beside the tracks, shiny as wrinkled tin foil. Plastic bags blow in sycamore branches. The train rolls on. A dead badger lies slumped between the rails; a fox ambles out of the undergrowth. Despite the splintered chairs and decaying mattresses dumped over walls and wire fences, it would take only a few weeks for nature to overcome it all, after we’ve gone.

  Ever since I lived there, leaving London felt like an escape. It frightened and excited me with its streets and alleys down which I might disappear, the soulless suburbs surrounding its dark heart, their entangling avenues like some voracious octopus. I used to think of how I’d get home if war was declared. How, once the sirens had sounded or the newsflashes came over the radio, I’d have to walk through the endless outskirts, along a motorway or down the back roads, trying to find my way south.

  I was defeated and enthralled by the scale and sprawl of the capital which spread like a stain from its river. I descended into gloomy basements made glamorous by punk and all that came after, caverns in the dreariness, sparking into energy and abandon. I learned to drink and take drugs and dress for each night as if it was the first and last. I wanted to relive the posters on my wall, to escape my origins. And yet I always wanted to go home.

  London, skewered on its own waterway, represented containment. But to set yourself free you had only to get on a bus, one of the routes that might have been running since the city began, carrying ghostly passengers through the ever-changing, never-changing streets, immemorial generations told off in bus stops. From the top seat of a trembling double-decker the familiar panorama unfolds: Old Street to City Road, the Bank to St Paul’s, Blackfriars to the Thames. New shops and new skyscrapers rise, high-water marks of the city’s fortunes. One morning I was all but thrown out of bed in my flat by an IRA bomb; now the steel and glass has grown even higher over the ever-erased, ever-rebuilt city.

  From this jerky eyrie you see everyone undone. The bus creeps through the streets, its obstinate slowness a rebuff to the manic movement around it; the sclerotic traffic in its blue haze; the people on their way to work, briefcases and coffee cups in hand, sneaking surreptitious cigarettes in illicit clouds of smoke.

  Along this ramshackle route lies my history, too: Bunhill Fields, a green refuge on a summer’s afternoon, though under its turf lie the bones of William Blake and thousands of victims of the plague; Barts Hospital, in whose Victorian interior I was operated on for a strange white patch that had begun to spread along my spine, elaborately diagnosed as Lymphangioma circumscriptum as if it were written on my back and which, once excised, left a scar running like a thread knotted through my vertebrae; the newspaper offices in Fleet Street where I worked shifts wearing a cheap suit in the last empire of typewriters and alcohol; and Holborn Hill, where, in the opening of Bleak House, Dickens fantasised about a muddy city ‘as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth’, with ‘a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard’, fresh from the Thames’s ooze. All along the way are monuments to forgotten men, their dreams disguised by voluminous beards, and muscle-bound tritons, their scaly thighs rising out of the water that runs beneath the streets. It is strange to live in a place where rivers are forced to flow underground: Holborn itself means hollow bourne or brook, one of the streams that fed into the river Fleet.

  An artist, who also happens to be a diver, told me how, some years ago, he’d lived in a dank basement in Pimlico. The atmosphere of the place was almost oppressively cold and damp; he was reduced to wearing blocks of polystyrene on his boots to keep his feet warm, with a similar layer under his bed. One day he looked outside and saw that a large portion of the brick pavement had fallen away, like a piece of jigsaw puzzle, to reveal free-flowing water; not in a drain or a conduit, but with gravel like a proper river bed. It was as if someone had punched a hole in the city’s carapace.

  Like so many cities – Venice or Hong Kong, New York or Amsterdam, St Petersburg or Mexico – or sacred sites such as Winchester, whose cathedral foundations were saved by the Edwardian diver William Walker, or Ely, the ship of the fens, sailing on the marshes through which slither its eponymous eels – London is an illusion; it only floats on sand and clay. Nowhere is beyond the tidal reach; the river brings the sea into the city. Sometimes it might even be invited in, as it was at Sadler’s Wells, whose Aquatic Theatre, which opened in 1804, was fed by the New River – itself a diverted waterway – and boasted a sunken tank measuring ninety feet long, twenty-four feet wide, and three feet deep.

  Here one could witness the Siege of Gibraltar and Neptune’s chariot drawn by seahorses, along with other ‘perilous and appalling incidents’: a woman falling from the rocks to be rescued by her lover; sailors leaping from a vessel on fire; a child thrown in by its nurse, who had been paid to drown it, only for the infant to be rescued by a Newfoundland dog. So affecting were these scenes that at the end of a performance, members of the audience would jump into the water to assure themselves it was real. A theatre in which one could swim was remarkable even for the greatest city in the world, to be rivalled only by the dolphinarium which opened in Oxford Street in 1971, a murky green cellar-pool twelve feet deep, complete with swimsuit-clad ‘aquamaids’, a sea lion, a penguin and a trio of dolphins named Sparky, Bonny and Brandy who were prevailed upon to wear plastic hats and perform the usual tricks.

  The modern capital barely acknowledges the river which was the reason for its being. The Thames was not embanked until the mid-nineteenth century; you could not walk or ride along its banks, yet you could descend to the water via a series of steps, marked on old maps – Temple Stairs, Essex Stairs, Arundel Stairs, Surrey Stairs, Salisbury Stairs, Whitehall Stairs – while street names such as The Strand commemorated what was once a beach. The river was much more present then; it seeped into the city, washed the feet of its buildings. Now the embankment oversees it with a wonderful disconnection – all those cars racing by, the trains rolling over its bridges, the commuters pacing to work; all turning their backs on the strong brown god as it surges through the city. It may be the colour of mud, swirling with silt and underlain with every kind of refuse, but I’m tempted to take to it like Benjamin Franklin, who, while working as a printer’s apprentice near Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1725, would frequently plunge in.

  Franklin was obsessed with swimming. ‘I had from a Child been ever delighted with this Exercise,’ he wrote in his Autobiography, ‘had studied and practis’d all Thevenet’s Motions & Positions, added some of my own, aiming at the graceful & easy as well as the Useful.’ Even on his way to England, watching porpoises, grampus and dolphins as his ship passed the Isle of Wi
ght, Franklin jumped in and swam around the boat as if to join them. In London, he taught a fellow apprentice – ‘an ingenious young man, one Wygate’– to swim too. On a boat trip to Chelsea, Franklin decided to demonstrate his skills to the company on board. He stripped off and leapt into the river, then swam back to Blackfriars, ‘performing on the Way many Feats of Activity, both upon & under Water, that surpriz’d & pleas’d those to whom they were Novelties’. He even considered starting a swimming school in the city, before fate took him to other things.

  Sometimes, in the great stretches of my unemployed life, I’d get off the bus and walk the narrow alleys of the City, through the old inns of court and their silent celebration of privilege, being, on all accounts, an outsider. The lanes led to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, its shrubbery home then to the down-and-outs and dispossessed of the 1980s who had turned it into an encampment, stretching their plastic sheets underneath the massive plane trees. On one side of the square sits Sir John Soane’s house, its antique plaster casts and bizarre lighting effects set in a sepulchral interior; on the other rises the unremarkably grand façade of the Royal College of Surgeons, with its own cabinet of curiosities.