Atlantic Britain

by Adam Nicolson

  I sat there - Harry had stayed below - and did not want to move or leave. The puffins wheeled around me. A storm petrel whirred just below. Atlantic heaven, this hermitage not gathered like the monastery in a unitary precinct, but distributed among the rock flakes of its chosen peak: an oratory here, a living space there, a garden on the other side, a water-filled rock-scoop beside it. This careful geometry is an act of discretion and intimacy, a mark of civilisation, on the most extreme point of the most extreme rock off the edge of the westernmost island that lies beyond the edge of Christendom.

  The sun dropped. I went down with Harry in the twilight, as easy as going down the companionway steps, your hands behind you on the step above, and found Claire still at the Saddle. We went together to the landing, the air full of puffins on the wheel. George collected us one by one, as we jumped for the dinghy in the swell. I raised the Auk’s now shiny anchor, we hoisted the sails, and turned for the north. It was a night reach north to the bare shelter of Inishvickillaun in the Blaskets. The half moon glittered a broken path on the water to the west. Harry lay back in the cockpit, Claire helmed the boat in the night, making for the light on Tearacht, and I told George it had been one of the happiest days of my life. ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘I feel as if I have been let into another room.’

  4

  The Man

  A week or two later, the Auk was tied up one morning next to the fishing pier at Port Magee, on the Kerry coast. I was asleep in my berth. The day was filthy, a dirty wet southwesterly, with almost zero visibility, blowing rain and fog all over us. I had poked my head out of the companionway hatch at six and decided against it. With that wind and swell, and the thick fog, there was no going anywhere. The air was filled with a penetrating damp. Back to bed, dreaming.

  We had been having a high, fine time: some grey blustery days, some brilliant and glittery, the Auk, if I think of her now, smiling all over her face, settling into her world. One afternoon, the wind had died for a while and the sea had gone warm and still, a sudden pool of turquoise water a mile or two across. You would have seen it from a satellite, a pond of the Caribbean carried up in the North Atlantic Drift like a drop of oil into the vinegar north. The temperature gauge on the hull registered 17.8 degrees Celsius, an extraordinary 64 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind had simply disappeared, the Auk had stopped and George and I both jumped off into the warmth of it. Strange moment! The Auk lurched here and there on the slow hint of a swell. Her sails flapped in the stillness, the spars banging as they shoved over from one side to the other and then back. From in the Atlantic I watched her moving her great bulk at sea, the underside of her belly showing grey with its anti-fouling, her topsides scuffed already from all the quays that she had gone against in Cornwall and southern Ireland, rubbed like an old clog. It is the most unsettling of experiences, to float in the sea beside your loved home like that, to watch it, and all the safety it represents, from the very element from which it is designed to protect you. You should be part of the scene you are watching; you should be there at the helm, but you are not; or coiling the ropes at the pin-rail, but you are not. You are removed into the otherworld of the sea beyond the boat. It is the nearest I have ever come to feeling like a ghost in my own life.

  We had come into Port Magee the night before, just ahead of a big wind; a cold evening, with the sun dropping into the Atlantic behind us. My 15-year-old son Ben was on board, a sleepy, beautiful, long-haired presence in our own endlessly busy, what’s-going-on lives. He stayed with the boat for nearly two months - his summer holidays - and, without breaking step, accepted it all, rough and smooth, dull and horrible, visionary and alarming, as though this was simply what life consisted of. I think of him now as a pool of calm in all the anxiety and excitement, a way of being that adults take fifty years to remember. He too was asleep that morning, laid out in the pilot berth, his face turned to the boards that line the hull.

  Very quietly, at about nine, George woke me. ‘Adam, have a look at this.’ I got up and went into the cockpit. Tied alongside, attached to us fore and aft, was the most bruised and battered boat I have ever seen,.at least afloat. It was a little thing, about twenty feet long, perhaps eight feet wide, its freeboard no more than eighteen inches above the water amidships: a small blue lobster boat, scuffed and scraped, the fibres of the fibreglass showing in places through the paint. A narrow, upright wheelhouse occupied the stern, big enough for a single man to stand in its shelter, a chaos of charts and papers inside, even their surfaces rubbed and worn so that they were no longer entirely legible, and a VHF radio hanging off one of the walls. In the bow was a low decked space, more like a kennel than a home, which served for a cabin. It too was a mess. Through the opening, you could see a little gas cooker in there, a thin mattress and a sleeping bag rumpled and twisted on top of it. All looked as grimy as an anchorite’s cell. A lightweight fisherman’s anchor was roughly tied with orange twine to a cleat on the foredeck. The lines holding this boat alongside us were frayed pieces of blue string, more abandoned washing-line than rope. Where they crossed the Auk’s own thick tan mooring warps, it looked like the meeting of two worlds.

  This apology for a craft had arrived half an hour before, when I was asleep, towed into harbour by the Valentia lifeboat. Port Magee is a mile or two up a winding channel, sheltered from the open sea, and there is no view of the ocean from there. Nevertheless, in this wind, there could be no doubt: the sea that morning had been a mass of wild-haired greybeards.

  A man appeared crouching and reversing outwards from the grey shadows of the cabin: stained grey trousers, a light and slightly greasy brown cardigan, a big, leonine head, a worn face, the cheeks sunken and covered in grey stubble, huge, hooded eyes, his grey, sandy hair standing in a crest above his scalp. Hunched over, attempting to tidy odds and ends, he looked like an aged Rodin. Everything about him was too big for the boat, his big lanky body slack and rangy. As he looked at us, he swept his hair back from his forehead with an enormous hand.

  Here was a vision of everything that shouldn’t be. The man and his boat formed something the sea had chewed, tasted, shifted to the other side of its mouth and spat out: there was nothing neat here, nothing protective or protected, only a terrifyingly naked vic-timhood. All coherence had gone. The boat looked like a fish after a gull had picked it over. George said hello briefly to him but even though there was scarcely a yard or two between us, George and I stood there for a few moments, doing nothing but looking at him and his situation, aghast.

  We came to. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I shouted over. ‘Come and warm up. Have some breakfast. You must be frozen. We’ve got some dry clothes.’

  ‘Oh really?’ he said, with a French accent. ‘That is too kind. You Englishmen know how to be kind. It is something I know about the English. You are at heart, all of you, gentlemen.’ That was the first revelation from Herve Mahe: this uncalled-for courtesy, drawing-room speech from the half-wreck of his life.

  He came on, we gave him dry clothes and boosted up the Auk’s heater. George made him tea and an enormous breakfast, sat him down in the saloon and, as he ate for four, we listened to his story.

  He was Breton. ‘I am no Frenchman,’ he said when I said how much I loved France. ‘I do not like the French. Nothing is more different from a Frenchman than I am. I am simply not interested in Rene Descartes or Voltaire or anything to do with that’ - a pause for the right expression - ‘French aridity.’ Thirty-five years ago he had escaped the French imperialists who were taking over Brittany and had come to live in Ireland, for a kind of freedom. He was intrigued by the Breton-Irish connection and had lectured on his own culture to university students here. His accent now crossed Galway with Gallic, rolled consonants blurred into fat-bodied vowels. He was the man of the Celtic margin, a merman, an apparition from the sea.

  ‘She’s good,’ he said when I asked about his boat. ‘Georges, sit down,’ he suddenly went on, ‘I will cook you something. Do you have mushrooms? Where is a
knife? Aoh, a good knife! Do have garlic? And oil? I need oil.’ Sarah and Kathy had stocked the boat with several litre bottles of the finest Tuscan olive oil and Herve slapped into a new one like a masseur. Soon the inside of the Auk was a steaming hot-tub of Herve’s mid-morning mushroom dish, a pint of double cream piling in after the bacon, mushrooms and oil. ‘Do you have kidneys?’ he asked, brandishing the knife like a corsair. No, sadly, no kidneys, but otherwise we had it all. Suddenly, it was life a Varmoricaine.

  ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘she is a good one.’ He had bought the little fishing boat two weeks before from a man at Kilmore Quay in the far southeast corner of Ireland. Since then, step by step, he had brought her around the coast. He was taking her to Galway, where he lived, and would probably use her to drop a few pots. He had been a fisherman before, in Brittany. He knew what he was doing on boats.

  And what had happened last night? ‘Ah well, last night,’ he sighed, looking first at me and then at George. ‘I saw you in front of me, five, six miles. You had everything up, didn’t you? The main and the mizzen and both the heads’ls? Yes, a beautiful sight. I knew it was an English boat. The English know how to make a boat beautiful and I could see the grace of your boat from five miles away.’ I saw Ben in his bunk, on the other side, wake up, shuffle a little and roll over, wanting to see the source of this sea-washed, Odyssean tale.

  ‘But you got into the Sound a long time before me, when the wind still hadn’t got up and the ebb wasn’t running. I was trying to catch you but I must have been there two or three hours after. It was dark when I reached the mouth and the wind had picked up, and the southwesterly was running straight into that ebb, and I can tell you that is a dirty place then, a dirty filthy place. There were waves standing all the way over the sound and they were breaking. I have two pumps on the boat but one of them wasn’t working and I was frightened that a sea would come on board and then it would be over. I wouldn’t be able to pump it out. The boat would go down. She is a good boat but she couldn’t cope with that.’ I got the chart out to track his progress. Ben stared at him with eyes like mint humbugs.

  ‘I didn’t go in. I thought I might be able to find a little place, a little corner tucked in St Finian’s Bay here, where I could get some shelter from the wind. In behind there. And of course it was getting late now and you couldn’t see much. I had the chart too, you know, and I was looking for this corner here, but in the end, no, there was nothing for it, I just had to anchor off the coast, here somewhere,’ he said moving his hand across a wide swathe of the Irish shore.

  ‘I put my two anchors out, at an angle like this, a V of them, and I rode out the night with them. I could not sleep, of course. The whole night we were rocking like this’ - he did a dance with his hands in front of him - ‘and I was praying for the morning. I was praying to the Virgin and to St Anne, the Virgin’s mother. She is a saint for the Bretons, and I heard her answer my prayer. She was with me and it was her who saved me. She was with me in the night. But of course as the tide started to ebb again in the morning, the surf at the foot of the cliffs, which had been behind me all night, started to move out towards me. The waves were soon breaking just astern of me, just here, and then, with the strain of a bigger one I suppose, one of my anchor lines broke and the boat swung round right into the surf. The anchor was outside the surf but the boat was in it and I could hear the rocks in the edge of the sea grinding against each other like footballs. That is when I was down on my knees and I knew I would die. I have prayed to St Anne. I have been in a position not very different before. I did not want to die but if I die, I die. It is not the end of the world!’

  Almost every one of these fluid sentences tumbling out of him down in the cabin of the Auk was accompanied by a sigh and a smile, a sweet ease in his face swept over at the next moment by an overwhelming anxiety and exhaustion. Again and again he stroked and squeezed his forehead with thumb and forefinger.

  His little boat was rolling in the surf. The sea was on the point of taking him. His life depended on the single anchor warp. How good was it? ‘It’s that rope up there,’ he said, ‘the blue one.’ He had survived thanks to the frayed blue string with which his boat was now attached to us. Had it broken, he would have been among the rocks in seconds, more likely battered to death than drowned.

  At first light, a fishing boat from Port Magee, the Ocean Star, saw him and came to his aid. But he was so far inshore that, although they tried again and again, they could not get a line to him. The Valentia lifeboat, the John & Margaret Doig, had been called and eventually, after Herve had died and been born again half a dozen times, it arrived. It was of shallower draught than the fishing boat and was able to come in close enough to get a line to Herve and take him in tow, a hair-raising act of everyday courage by Seanie Murphy, the Valentia coxswain.

  Even the way back had been hard. The lifeboat had tried to tow him around the north side of Valentia Island but it had been rough on the point and they had been forced back into the channel leading to Port Magee. There, Herve had been taken through the steep tidal overfalls, under tow this time, from which he had turned back the night before, gripped again by the anxiety that every time a wave would come in, his one remaining pump would fail and his boat would go down. Then he was through and approaching Port Magee, and tied up by the lifeboatmen against us. They, understandably enough, had been severe and reproachful with him. What had he been thinking of, going out in a wind like that, on such a shore, with a boat so ill found?

  That had been George’s and my first reaction, too, seeing this piece of inhabited wreckage dragged in, as if by the scruff of its neck like a vagrant dog. But in the warmth of the Auk that morning, with Ben gazing down from his bunk, and the rest of us gathered round, and Herve so passionately and honestly and forth-rightly describing his night’s adventures, it became impossible to see him as a victim or an incompetent. He became, somehow, more like the man we wanted to be.

  Soon his conversation was ranging widely over the passions of his life. He made us all some coffee - this man who had been all night within earshot of his death - sat back in the corner of the cabin, the mugs steaming on the table in front of us, the rain hammering on the deck outside, and began to lecture me. ‘Adam, listen, no, listen, you must listen,’ he said his arms crossed tightly over his chest, his huge, unshaven and distinguished head drawn back like a bow to gather the energy for what he was about to say. ‘What is important in the relation of man to the world is the hand.’

  ‘The hand?’

  ‘Yes, the hand,’ and Herve held up one of his huge hands as an exhibit, some diesel and grease smeared on it, callused at the base of the fingers, before catching hold of my wrist and holding mine up in turn. ‘As long as the hand is the shaping organism of an enterprise, or a relationship, as long as it is the hand which governs your connections with the world, those connections are healthy, living and warm.’ He sat back with a huge smile. A philosopher had been washed up on our shore. Ruskin was having coffee on the Auk.

  ‘Technology!’ he went on loudly. ‘It is technology which is the great destroyer, which comes between the hand and the world, which interposes its own cold deadness between the heart and the world. Why else, Georges, are you a sailor? You are a sailor because you need to feel the reality of the world in your hand.’

  George looked like he’d been given a new dad. The sterilising effects of technology were ‘terrible, terrible’, Herve said. The fishing crisis would not have occurred if technology hadn’t displaced the hand. The hand was the natural regulator. The hand understood when enough was enough. The early Irish and Breton saints had cast themselves on the waters, relying on no more than the sheets of their sails on windy days and the oars in a calm, both the ultimate in hand technologies. Those saints had stripped off the padding of the urban world and had exposed themselves to what was, to the nature of things. Truth was in nakedness like that and he quoted William Blake:’ “The body is the eternal imagination of the soul.” You know that, Ada
m, don’t you? Let us be clear about it. Let us define our positions. You must know that your body, your physical being in the world, is the full and beautiful condition which your soul has imagined for you?’

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  ‘And which parts of the body are always naked? Where are you naked, Adam? Your face’ - he held my chin - ‘and your hand’, which he then grasped, smiling straight at me. ‘I love the English,’ he said. ‘When the English are like you, I love you.’

  All this, somehow, seemed of a part with his near-wreck the night before. The way in which he had swept past the trauma of the night as if he were already intimate with death and was scarcely disturbed by meeting it again; his vigour, honesty, culture, commitment, his passion and his subtle, responsive mind, his frank belief, his praying to the great Breton saints, his half-broken and yet vital presence, his love of food and of this life, combined with his air of being on the margin, not like the rest of us: what was this but the soul of the Atlantic shore?

  If one of those early Irish Christians, a ghost from Skellig Michael, looking for vision on a distant rock, had strolled into your life, he would surely have been like Herve Mahe. Here, sitting with us on the Auk, was St Brendan himself, the man of truth, the pilgrim in the world, the stander outside the norm, a prophet of wildness and of the spiritual edge. He rolled seamlessly on to a story about one of those saints. It was clearly a set piece. Scothine, Herve said, was a man of great holiness and real power ‘in the world’, with those words slapping his hand on the table. One day, as Scothine was walking across the waves, he met another saint, Findbarr from Cork, who was rowing a boat.

  ‘Why are you walking on the sea?’ Findbarr asked him. Big smiles from Herve.

  ‘This isn’t the sea,’ Scothine said. ‘It’s a field.’ He bent down and picked a white clover flower from the water and threw it to the saint in the boat. ‘And why are you rowing your boat on the field?’