Atlantic Britain

by Adam Nicolson

  Findbarr said nothing, dipped his hand into the grass, pulled out a salmon and threw it to Scothine who caught it and held it, shining, in his hands. ‘There you are,’ Herve said. ‘It’s the hands! The hands are the heroes of the story! Now lunch! What about lunch? What shall we make for our lunch today? Do we have wine? Do we have meat? And do we have time? Oh yes, I think we have time. Georges! Onions!’

  The following morning, he left. He started up his engine, said goodbye and hoped we would meet again. We untied his lines, he began to move off, standing in his wheelhouse, heading under the bridge and up the channel towards Cahersiveen. As the boat gathered way, he stepped out of the little wheelhouse and gave a big sky-wiping wave, his hand as big as a gull in the air. It was then that I saw the boat’s name for the first time: Happy Days.

  No one at Port Magee heard any more of him, but a few weeks later a letter arrived at the Valentia lifeboat house. It contained 100 euro in notes and a few lines of thanks. Herve had brought the Happy Days home. ‘Thank the bitter treatment of the tide,’ Auden wrote in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, ‘For its dissolution of your pride.’ Herve Mahe, neither modest nor with any need for modesty, a man beyond pride, who had already absorbed all the lessons the tide might teach him, profoundly intimate with the realities of risk and experience, an uninsulated man, as naked to the world and its riches as any of us ever might be, had nothing to learn there. If I were in the habit of blessing people, I would have blessed him.

  5

  The Beach

  Two weeks later, George and I had our own version of an Herve experience. We had now embarked on making a television series about the Auk and her journey, and a crew from Keo Films, a London production company, had joined us. They had missed the beginning and so the boat had returned from Ireland to Padstow in north Cornwall. It was, in many ways, a beginning again, but George, I and the Auk were all in good shape and, from the Cornish coast, 120 miles to the south, on a good southwesterly wind, we had breezed steadily up to the coast of Pembrokeshire. It was the Auk’s happiest point of sail, a broad reach, with the wind just coming on to her over the port quarter, across your left shoulder if you were at the helm, striking the face on the left cheek from behind, even in a gust just lifting the lobe of that ear, all sails full, their big creamy bellies curved out against the sky behind them.

  All day long, coming north, the bow, as it bit into each new wave, had made that repeated wet breathy sigh, as the bulk of the new water beneath her was compressed and driven back under the hull. It’s the most evocative of sea sounds, not exactly the sea breathing, nor the boat, but the steady, half-hissing rhythm of that wonderful amalgam, a boat-at-sea.

  Manx shearwaters from the Pembrokeshire islands provided a kind of welcoming party for us, forty and fifty miles out from land, turning around the boat on their black scimitar wings half an inch above the wave tops, slicing through a layer of air as thin as paper above the sea. They were the real edge-dancers. If they misjudged their flight, the sea surface would trap and catch them. It never did; the shearwater is the great sea lesson: endless attentiveness and total response. I watched them for hours. All that grace is nothing but focus.

  They became a symbol of everything I wanted to be and all year long George had to summon me again and again to the point. ‘What’s happening, Adam? And what are you doing about it? Concentrate!’ The shearwater life. It became a sort of code between us. Just then, too, dolphins had come to play in our bow wave, squeaking and rolling beside us, synchronising their surges so that four or five came up together in an arc of gaiety and pure abandon, an expression of the sea at its most generous. It felt in the sunshine as if the big mother Auk was with her brood, as though, by some kind of miracle, she had actually given birth to them.

  In that beautiful sailing expression, we soon raised the Pembrokeshire coast, our progress pulling the land up out of the horizon haze. We moored the boat overnight, away from the wind, in the harbour at Dale, a still and sheltered nick tucked in at the entrance to Milford Haven. The film crew met the boat in Dale. Not a whimper of the big swell out at sea found its way into Dale Roads, and George and I, Will Anderson the director, Ben Roy the producer, Luke Cardiff the cameraman, and Paul Paragon the soundman, all of us sat that May evening on the harbour wall outside the pub, making plans.

  I had long wanted to go to Marloes Sands, a wonderful two-mile beach just around the corner from Dale, famous geologically as one of the richest in the country, with tens of millions of years of sedimentary rock layers tipped upright in the cliffs and displayed like a library of the past above the sands.

  What better way of coming to Pembrokeshire than to plunge into the ancient past straight out of the breakers? We decided on it that evening. I am not sure quite why, in retrospect, none of us considered it a dangerous and difficult thing to do. Perhaps we even did acknowledge that, but slid past it in the way one does, thinking of the goal, of the good outcome, without fiddling through the details of how to get there. Plunge in and you will arrive. That was about the limit of it.

  It was blowing a little harder the next morning. The crew drove to the beach, George and I cast off in the Auk and beat out of the entrance to Milford Haven, each tack taking us deep up against the battered red sandstone headlands of south Pembrokeshire. The seas were driving hard into them, leaving spume-stained pools of turquoise at their feet, while big modern oil tankers slid out past us, one swell after another slapping up against their bows.

  By mid-morning, we had arrived half a mile or so off Marloes Sands and hove to. The swells were magnificent, whole downlands on the move. They go much faster than you think, thirty or thirty-five knots, but something about the length between crests, which can be a hundred yards or more, and their wonderfully effortless gliding ballroom motion, the sheer untroubled progress of that bulk through the sea, makes them seem slower, gentler, less powerful. Hove to there in the Auk, they rode up under us and past with the discretion and sleekness of a butler: fat, waistcoated, perfect. We could have sat there all day, drinking our tea, drinking up the sunshine, listening to the boom and surge, half a mile away to the northeast, of these very seas breaking on Marloes Sands.

  Those breakers looked like a ruff below the cliffed neckline of the shore. Anxiety raised its little inquiring head. As George and I prepared the inflatable dinghy for me to go in, we talked about how to do it. I made sure my life jacket was tightened properly around my chest. We tied a small anchor on a very long line to the inflatable’s bow fittings so that I could drop it when still outside the surf and feed myself in. That way I would have a means of pulling back out when I wanted to return to the Auk. The little dinghy was lurching up and down beside the yacht’s hull. ‘Good luck,’ George said, and in the tension of it I simply passed a flat hand through the air, as if to say nothing doing, no trouble, as smooth as you like, when, of course, that was only a signal of the wild chaos by now doing a cancan in my gut. Was this really the thing to do?

  Why, after all, was I doing this? Because it was a way of stepping off the safe place, an engagement with the sea, a plunging in, a way of feeling life on the skin. I knew in my heart then, and I know now, it is something no one would do who was properly engaged with the sea. It was a conscious dive into ignorance, into the other element. What was about to happen was bound to happen.

  As I started up the outboard and took the dinghy away from the Auk, in towards the shore still half a mile away, George shouted, ‘Just go very slowly! See what is going on, coast around the outside of the surfline and then you can judge the moment to go in. Pick it! Make sure you pick it!’ I was now too tense to talk. I took the inflatable in towards the shore. I had bought it at a chandlers’ in Falmouth, £1,000 of red rather handsome-looking rubber. There, at twelve foot or so, it had seemed quite a big thing. Here it was a toy, to the wrong scale as the big ridges of the Atlantic swells came strolling towards me. I watched the Auk herself disappear behind each sparkling ridge. The hull, the cockpit canopy, George, a
nd the entire mizzenmast rolled below the horizon, so that for a moment only the peak of the mainsail and the top of the mainmast remained visible, a snapshot of canvas and rigging where a boat should have been, until my inflatable rolled back up to the top of my ridge and the Auk herself, too much of her, her whole fat body, appeared again but now below me. For a second I was looking down on to her decks, the boat exposed in plan, with George a model of a human being in the cockpit.

  It was a slow-motion roller coaster, but I was all right with it, constantly shifting my weight in the dinghy to counteract the rise and fall of the sea, up on to the side sponsons as the swell lifted beneath me, down on to the floor of the boat as they went through and past. I was taking the dinghy back and forth just outside the surf zone, watching the sets roll into the sands, getting used to their pattern, three big ones and then a pause, a passage of lower swells, three more and then a pause. The engine was responsive in my hand. I would wait for the last of three and then go in hard for the shore.

  It didn’t happen like that. Looking landward, I felt the familiar rise behind me of the next big one coming in. I shifted, still without looking, to the seaward side of the dinghy, to take my weight over there as the swell came through. But then - simply through the geometry of my body and the boat, by the steep angle at which the boat and I were now tipped - I knew that this one was different.

  I looked behind me. Out to sea, still seventy or eighty yards away, with its crest breaking and the sunlight burning through the bright thin fin of water just below it, I saw the biggest wave I have ever seen coming towards me. It was steepening with every second; the impossibly white crest was lengthening and deepening as I watched. It was perfectly clear, even in that first second, that the whole thing, the whole green, heavy, and increasingly lowering wall of water was going to dump itself on top of me, fill the boat and maybe - this was my thought at the time - drive me back out of the boat like a knife scraping food off a plate. The sheer size meant that it was breaking far outside the surf zone of all the others. I was already in its surf zone, just at the most dangerous point, the biggest wave I have ever seen coming to get me.

  I know now what I should have done, or at least tried to do. I should have turned the boat shorewards at that moment and ridden with it, going with the engine at full throttle, taking me inshore on a big boiling mass of surf, a chaotic sleigh ride into the beach.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t have the gumption. At the time I thought my only option was to turn into it and take it on the bow. I had only just made that decision when I realised it was the wrong one, but too late to do anything about it. I certainly couldn’t turn sideways on now. The boat began to climb the vertical face of the wave, I leant forward because I thought the wave was going to break over my head and I didn’t want to be washed out of the back. But the wave didn’t break over the boat; it simply turned the boat over, bow over stern, a slam-dunk, head-over-heels, throwing me out as it did so.

  It goes slow then. I am underwater and under the boat. The wave is breaking through me and over me, an aerated chaos of half-lit green. I am no way up but I am under. I didn’t know it at the time, but the anchor that George and I had put in the bow fell out as the dinghy went over. It hit me in the face, cutting my forehead, cheek, and upper lip. All I knew was that my face felt hit, as if punched, sore in the salt water. And then I was up in the light and the air, breathing, looking at the sky and its hobbled clouds. No sooner had I emerged, than another of the big ones, the big seas, the sea monsters that can consume you more easily than any sea monster with fins and tails ever could, was on me again and I was rolling down into its turn and overturn. Back up and breathing, the dinghy beside me now upside down, with the shaft of the outboard sticking up above it and the propeller still turning in the air, the two of us, the boat and I, slurping in the big valley between two swells. Another coming. My life jacket. Why hadn’t I inflated that? How to inflate it? I thought it was one of those self-inflaters. No, as flat as when I had put it on. Pull the toggle. Where was the toggle? I was scrabbling for it, unable to see it or feel it or find it with my fingers, as the third of the huge breaking seas came through me again and that, for a few seconds, is when I thought I might drown.

  Down deeper this time into the roll of the surf, suddenly alarmed at the idea of the dinghy itself, and its protruding outboard, coming slamming on to my head as I was down there, and the feeling of enclosure, of wanting to shout, but the water of course clogging me into silence, a wet muddled claustrophobia like the worst of a bad dream, a fear like a nightsheet twisted around your head, into your mouth and nostrils and neck, a gag on your life, a garrotting by water.

  This was the sea in its killing horror, the death element, the antithesis of life. This moment, seen face to face, was the reason that people have always, from the very beginning, loathed the sea. The Odyssey, which is not only the first but the greatest sea poem ever written, as old as the tumuli in which chieftains lie buried on the hills of southern England, and older than the great hillforts that straddle the skyline beside them, is suffused not with love of the sea but fear of it. Odysseus - the first great middle-aged hero in literature; his poem the story of the Middle-aged Man and the Sea - longs to go home, to the sweetness of land and the stillness of a house. But the loathing of Poseidon, the sea god, encloses him in one near fatal sea-trap after another. That is one of the Odyssey’s central meanings: the sea itself is the element of death. And nowhere more powerfully than the land of the dead, which Odysseus finds at the very limits of the known world. He travels there only so that Tiresias, the blind seer, can tell him how he might return home.

  The sail stretched taut as she cut the sea all day and the sun sank and the ways of the world grew dark.

  These are the outer limits, the edge of the Ocean River, a desolate coast, where the only trees that grow are ‘tall black poplars and willows whose fruit dies young’. The waves break on a darkened beach. Hell has never seemed so beautiful.

  I came bursting to the surface. As I rose, not knowing if I was rising or falling, I was looking with my fingers for the toggle on the life jacket, scrabbling in its folds with my fingertips, like a piglet or a lamb desperate for the nipple, some source of life. At last I found its little plastic berry, stuffed in between the Velcro it should have been hanging below, pulled it, triggered the canister of C02 and wwoohoosh - up came the wonderful life-giving life jacket around me like a meadow, a home, a bed, a pillow, a nurse, a life. I laughed aloud alone in the sea! Never have I felt so happy. My life jacket held me. I was safe in its arms. I was somehow free of anything the sea could do to me, more free than I could ever have been on land. Life in the arms of death. Escape from Hades.

  What was this? Some adrenaline high? I don’t know, but I lay there ecstatic in my new buoyant state. The propeller of the outboard had stopped turning. I had to decide what to do. I thought at first I would swim to the shore, as if nothing had happened, and go on to look at the geology of Marloes as planned. The film crew I knew were on the beach. I could stroll out of the surf like Odysseus and start looking at the rocks. What else could this new-given life be for? And so, doing backstroke and my arms windmilling, I started heading inshore. The inflatable, upside down, stayed where it was because the anchor was now holding it in place. Occasionally, a big sea like the one that had overturned me came thundering through, but that was fine. My mother and father of a life jacket held me up on the surface. However broken the sea, I floated.

  I was making progress shorewards when I heard George shouting. George! I had forgotten about him. He was something from the time before! Suddenly, extraordinarily nearby, but cut off by the body of a swell between us, I saw the very top of the Auk’s mainmast, a strangely unreal sight, just the radio aerials and the whirling cups of the anemometer, the rest erased by the bulk of the sea. It was about a hundred yards away. George had come to save me, bringing the big ocean-going Auk deep into the surf zone! The charted depth of the place he had come to get me was abo
ut eight feet. The Auk draws six. There was a real possibility that the swells could have dumped the boat, in one of their troughs, straight on to the bottom. God knows what would have happened; perhaps the hull fatally strained, the succeeding crest simply breaking all over it, overwhelming the cockpit and pouring below, sinking the Auk there and then, breaking it up, churning it into a vast quantity of smashed lumber awash beside me, with George in it, the most dangerous situation conceivable: a tumbling sea filled with jagged and hard-edged spars, the shards of hull and deck, a mobile bed of knives.

  George could see nothing of me. I couldn’t see him, but I could see the Auk, the place of safety, which in trying to rescue me was endangering herself and him. I could hear him shouting: ‘Adam, Adam, come to the boat. Come to the boat. Come to the boat.’ He didn’t know I could hear him. He was shouting at an empty sea still breaking in its slickbacked ridges along the whole length of Marloes Sands. All he could see was the upturned dinghy, with the shaft of its outboard still vertical like a flag of futility.

  Then I rose on one of my crests, and there he was, looking back at me from the cockpit, but sailing away now, the boat in the wind powering away, heeled over, her wake full and white. I held my two hands in the air, thumbs up - not the right signal, I know, because two hands up are a conventional sign of distress at sea - but George made the same sign to me in return. We were together, neither of us broken, both alive, communicating, all right.

  I flailed out towards the deeper water. He tacked, came back to me, hove to, and suddenly the Auk was there beside me. Huge bodies of swell and surf were still sweeping past us on the very edge of the breaking zone. It was not the place for a big-displacement yacht. Every fifteen seconds or so, twenty-two tons of boat were rolling hugely towards me and then away. One minute I was nearly level with the deck, the next seeing the huge grey underbody of the thing exposed like the flank of a whale above me and over me, not a haven but a hammer. George had the webbing ladder down over the side. I needed to get my feet on the bottom rung just as she rolled towards me, and then have myself lifted up by the roll of the boat itself. At the same time, George had to lean down and get me by the back of the life jacket. There is a lifting hoist there for helicopter rescues. We struggled with it, George saying, ‘Come on, come on, get on, there’s no time here.’ At about the third roll I got it right, the Auk hauled me from the sea and I turned myself over on to the side-deck like a walrus, an exhilarated walrus, saved from the deep, a spreading smile all over my face, happiness cascading through me. George was looking anxiously into my face, to see what damage was there. There was none, only a surf-delight in the cataract of wet chaos in which I had been riding for half an hour. He looked the burdened man. Will Anderson, the Keo Films director, was on the VHF from the beach, wild anxiety in his voice. ‘Auk, Auk, Auk. George. Is he all right? Is he all right? How is he? Have you got him on? Is he OK?’