Atlantic Britain

by Adam Nicolson

  A very small minority, perhaps one in five hundred or so, were doing the climb without shoes or socks and I joined them barefooted myself. The pilgrimage is said to have been in continuous existence for almost 1,600 years, ever since St Patrick spent forty days and forty nights on the mountain, tempted by the devil and then making a series of bargains with God by which the Irish would be granted special dispensations at the Day of Doom.

  Doing the climb in bare feet could be seen as a form of repentance for past sins: one woman I met was suffering the tortures of the shoeless climb not because of anything she felt she might have done herself, but for ‘the sins of the dear departed’. It was her dead husband, she explained, whose wickedness needed accounting for. Another man I walked with, Michael John King, a charming, witty, and deeply religious mountain guide from Clifden, further south on the Atlantic coast, said he had taken his shoes and socks off and exposed his feet to the often needle-sharp rocks of the mountain simply as a kind of thanksgiving for the good things which life had brought him, and for being saved from any accidents in the year that had passed. Another man said he was doing it for world peace. Another because a child of his was afflicted with asthma. And yet another saw it, he said, simply as a means of getting in touch with the nature of the mountain and the meaning of the pilgrimage itself.

  That, in some ways the most obscure, was the version that made most sense to me. Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher and writer on the poetics of space, famously wrote: ‘You cannot remember time; you can only remember the places in which time occurs.’ That is the understanding that lies behind all journeys, especially pilgrimage, and particularly a six-hour, increasingly painful pilgrimage up a sharp-edged mountain on the edge of the Atlantic. The pain in the bottom of your feet - ‘God have mercy on your soles’ one man said to me with a toss of the head as he strolled past in his pair of £150 rubber-cushioned mountain boots - and more particularly, perhaps, the ever more delicate care with which you set your feet down on the mountain, picking out the smallest patch of smooth stone in the field of razor-spiked pebbles, is the most effective mnemonic I know. It makes the landscape into a memory machine, so that now, months later in the winter, long after my soles have ceased to burn, I can remember almost literally every step of the way.

  But how, you will ask, as I did, can that connect with any aspect of religion? How can pain in the feet have anything to do with a child who has asthma, or a dead husband’s indiscretions, or a relationship to God? The answer is perhaps largely to do with humility. ‘That is a mountain,’ Ernie Sweeney, one of the great talkers of Castlebar, not far from the foot of the mountain, had told me the day before, ‘which glorifies the humble and humbles the glorified.’ More than that, it attempts to use the landscape as a theatre for the relationship between God and man. Hard pilgrimage recognises that the instinct that drove Christ and Patrick and the thousands of other Irish saints into the wilderness is not a historical phenomenon but a religious metaphor that can be perfectly vital now. The barefooted walk up Croagh Patrick, as I thought of it anyway, is an abandoning of comfort for a while as a means of understanding what the world is like. Exposure to the rocks is exposure to the nature of things, and your own hopelessness in relationship to them. Pain shows you how things are. I told Ernie Sweenie, when I came down the mountain, that the pain made me feel like lying down and dying. ‘Well, if you did,’ he said, ‘you’d go straight to heaven like a rocket. There’d be a hole in the ozone layer to show the way you went.’

  7

  The Crew

  As the summer wore on, and as we made our way north up the Irish coast and then crossed over to the southern Hebrides, something seemed to go wrong between George and me. It was distressing then and it is distressing to write about it now; but whatever went wrong between us is, I think, connected with the nature of a journey like this. The Atlantic shore, and the experience of it in a small boat, makes relentless demands on people and is unforgiving in its exposure of them. Every man emerges naked from the sea and I think, in some ways, what went wrong between George and me was the result of that exposure. It took a long time for that to become clear and the extraordinary climax and resolution of this difficulty didn’t finally come until we were in Orkney. When it did, I could scarcely have been more surprised.

  We had already been through a great deal together. The first long crossing to Ireland; meeting Herve and absorbing his example; the incident on the Pembrokeshire coast; our long talks together about the relationship between boat and home, sea and shore, us out here, Sarah and Kathy back in England. Insulating layers had been stripped away and in some ways now the wires lay bare between us.

  The day on Skellig, for me like ten hours spent in a glowing crucible, had been followed by a bad night in the Blaskets. George had been unable to leave the Auk at the Skelligs. All day he had put up with the difficult combination of anxiety and tedium, sitting alone on the boat, wondering if its anchor was going to hold, knowing that the rest of us were on the island drinking in its every element, while he could only watch from the side. Demand without stimulus, accommodating the necessary and ever-present watchfulness, needing to check at every turn that the boat was continuing to cling to its tiny underwater shelf with its toothpick of an anchor, ten or twelve fathoms below. He was, as a result, exhausted, even before we arrived late, at one in the morning, at the frankly unsatisfactory shelter we had chosen.

  The anchorage in the lee of Inishvickillaun had scarcely been sheltered from the westerlies and the swell had poured through the gap to the north of the island. The Auk had been unsettled all night. None of us had tightened the mizzen sheet, and so its jaws were twisting and grinding against the mast all night. In the broken water that came round the top end of the island, halyards and their blocks were slapping against the mainmast. The anchor chain was continually grinding against its fairlead in the bow, a low rumbling.

  All night long, George was up and down, more aware than the rest of us of the possibility that the anchor might not hold. He was clearly angry. On one occasion as he went past my bunk to the companion-way steps, the boat tipped so severely that the kettle fell off the cooker and veered all over the floor. I lay where I was and said, ‘Can I do anything to help?’

  ‘That’s what’s called a BSR,’ he said.

  ‘A BSR?’

  ‘A Bum Slightly Raised.’ And none of you need bother with the fucking kettle.’

  Then, sharply, and at other times more subtly, my hopelessness and lack of responsibility was twinned with his anger. It became something of an underlying theme. George of course knew a great deal more about the psychology of the sea than I did. He had watched it at work on people, including himself, for too long not to be familiar with the dynamics of crews and with the way that adequacies and inadequacies overlapped at sea. He had often talked about the way the sea draws people who do not feel entirely whole on land. Even my presence here this year was a symptom of the belief that a boat could solve your problems. A boat, for all its complexity, is in fact a version of simplicity, but of a satisfyingly complex kind. Get to know the hundreds of ways in which a boat-at-sea works and you become its master and commander. A boat provides control in what looks like uncontrollable circumstances. It is the mirror image of the realities of life on land, which look easier but are, psychologically, far more difficult, more subtle, less visible, and less predictable. The boat, in other words, is the haven from the storms at home. And because a boat’s workings are a mystery, in the old sense that it is an arcane art, with its own equipment and vocabulary, its nostrums and obscurities from which the vulgar are excluded, it is also a source of potency and seduction.

  George had known glamorous yacht skippers in the Caribbean. As he saw, there was always something hollow about their potency because everyone at sea, in one way or another, had run away to sea. The cool of a cool yacht skipper belonged more to the yacht than the skipper. Divorced from his craft, in all its senses, the sailor becomes a diminished man, his pr
op not there for his elbow to lean on.

  George knew all these things but was at times subject to them too. There can be few people in the world as capable as him: a natural athlete, a charming and funny man, an incomparable mimic, a gifted musician, a man who sticks to tasks and knows how to dig deep, who will go ten miles before you have asked him to go one. But alongside all that, his need to exert control over the boat and its inhabitants, particularly when tired, could be powerful. He would ask me, say, to lash a dinghy to the deck, come back when I had done it and kick it to show I had done it wrongly or badly. He would ask me to attach a line to a mooring buoy or a quayside without showing me how, and allow me to struggle before showing me the right way. Rarely would he accept that anything I had done was done right. Some of my children had left their beach buckets and spades on the boat: they became somehow symbolic of my messiness and unsuitability to boat life, or my ‘guilt’, as he said one day, about leaving the children behind. In part, I felt, what mattered to him most was the boat, as a destination in itself, when what mattered to me was what the boat might do and where it might go. An air of frustration hung about him.

  I don’t wonder, because what I had asked him to do for me was not easy. It is a version of the old predicament for a boat owner and the skipper he employs. The boat owner knows what he wants to do and the skipper knows how to do it. Even if that relationship has a dose of resentment and difficulty built into it, it is straightforward enough compared with our situation. With George, not only was I his employer, but also his crew. I would tell him what I -and, even more, the director of the TV programme -would like to do and he would then tell me to do it. The poor man had to look both ways, listening to and instructing the same person. No wonder he felt taut.

  This difficulty was made worse by my own lackadaisical, freedom-searching, and non-mechanical frame of mind. The qualities I love in my son Ben - a kind of disengaged ease about things - George found wildly frustrating in me. He dreamed, he often told me, of the two of us becoming such a good crew together that there would be no need to talk. The boat would simply happen. It would go on its way as sleekly and neatly as an Atlantic panther.

  In his eyes anyway, that never occurred. Although he did once say that maybe it was because he was refusing to let me grow out from under his shadow, George never felt that I could skipper the boat myself. I did! I learned, well enough, how to read the weather, how to set the sails, how to navigate, how to anchor and weigh anchor, how to make our way along a difficult shore, how to stick with it, how to take the Auk out into a wind-strewn sea, how to bring her home, how to choose shelter for her. I could look up and read from the rigging what every stay and halyard was doing. But George never thought I could! What a sadness that is: the dream we both had at the beginning of the year, of a deepening friendship, of a trunk full of intimacies, of us becoming bound together, that never really developed.

  Of course, he was right. If a halyard block broke in a storm, or the bilge pump blew; if the fuel supply to the engine became clogged, or if we were being blown, with no power, on to a lee shore, embayed and unable to escape, with a frightened crew around me, then I would have been at a loss. I simply did not have the hours, the days and the months for sea habits and sea knowledge to have been creased into my mind as they had been over years into his. Nor was I progressing fast enough. Too much time was spent away from the boat with the TV crew, filming various adventures underwater and down cliffs, chasing sheep and netting birds, digging up fossils or interviewing monks, for my sea knowledge to be deepened and enriched in the way it should have been. I was both a neglectful employer and a skiving pupil, arriving back at the boat from time to time, saying, ‘Right. Everything OK? Let’s go. Now. Aren’t we ready? I know how to do it. Jump to. Tell me how. Why isn’t this working? Haven’t you mended that yet? What a mess it is down here. Help me. Listen to me. Don’t talk to me like that. Let’s try and have a good time, can we?’ Inch by inch, yard by yard, over the weeks, George was improving and honing the Auk, and I can only imagine that in all of this, half there, half not there, half critical, half engaged, I was a nightmare.

  I would not have put up with it for long, but I also saw, in miniature, we were acting out all the traditional sea dramas. We had rival authorities, which is always a mistake on a boat. He knew how to work things; I knew what I wanted to happen. He was, in a way, less certain than me; I was far less certain than him at sea. I was closely involved with making the TV programmes, George felt marginal to them, and when the TV crews came aboard he needed to impose his authority on them. Sometimes the world of the Auk felt bleak.

  There were moments; of course there were more than moments. I will never forget the early summer morning he woke me, after sailing north all night from the Arans. We were in sight of the rocky, ironbound cliffs of High Island, the monastery island that once belonged to the Irish poet Richard Murphy, a place, as I had told George weeks before, I had long wanted to see. He had sailed five hours from midnight to bring us there. We were making towards it now in the dawn, over a swell that came and went, giving and withdrawing, the boat alive on the motion, as Murphy had written in ‘Sailing to an Island’:

  The boom above my knees lifts, and the boat

  Drops, and the surge departs, departs, my cheek

  Kissed and rejected, kissed, as the gaff sways

  A tangent, cuts the infinite sky to red

  Maps, and the mast draws eight and eight across

  Measureless blue …

  In the early light, George took us deep into the lee of High Island’s cliffs, so near that I could actually touch them from the deck of the Auk. But the walls were sheer and there was no way up on that side. ‘High Island can never be possessed,’ Murphy has written, ‘because it will always remain in the possession of the sea.’ So it was with us. We could not land and instead went on and on through the unforgettable morning that followed. George and Ben both lay below asleep and I sailed the boat, crossing the big sunlit bay between Inishbofin and Achill Island, filled with gratitude and -I will not shrink from this word - love for the two people asleep below, the sun over the mountains to the east of me, the headlands before me, a lovely big buffeting southeasterly blowing hard on my right cheek, a flat sea, all sails up, their canvas lit by the sun, shearwaters cruising past, the big, breaking sea my home.

  On and on we strode northwards, past the Inishkeas, into the night, through Tory Island Sound, turning east there, making for Scotland, finding Islay coming up over the dawn horizon, sliding in along the wild and empty southern shore of Mull, finally coming in the evening into the Sound of Mull, where Sarah and the girls were waiting for us in a house on the shore. That is another all-life memorable moment. We had come three hundred miles nonstop - a night, a day, a night and a day - and George and I and Ben, all exhausted, all happy with the strength and sureness of the Auk, slid her towards the bay where Sarah was waiting. Stillness gathered on the grey waters and I remembered Auden’s invocation of Evening, the calm, Athene-like goddess who hovers above our lives. ‘Evening, grave, immense, and clear,’ he calls,

  Overlook our ship whose wake

  Lingers undistorted on

  Sea and silence.

  Molly and Rosie, my daughters, were standing in the shallows, the water up to their shins, the dogs further out, swimming out to us, the streams running down from the moorlands over the beach, the trees behind them, the lights in the house as yellow as apricots. It was an icon of home, of resolution and relief. In all of us, I realize, beneath the tensions and anxieties of life at sea, is that longing for home.

  At heart, for George and me, there was little of home or homeliness in our sea relationship. The sadness of it was that, as we sailed on through the islands, we could both feel the other wishing for more, but could scarcely find a way through to it. I withdrew from the boat and its unresolvable tensions. A gap and something of a silence opened up between us. I made myself a passenger and allowed the boat to become George’s place and Geo
rge’s world.

  The most hidden recesses of the Hebrides became the most beautiful to me. I went abseiling down some cliffs one day with an Edinburgh botanist, William Milliken, looking for the big-leaved sorrel, the scurvy grass, and the wild carrots that grew there. We hung together in the shade of the cliff, a dank, lush place, with the sunlit Minch stretched out blue three hundred feet below us, a place, maybe, that no one had ever been before, and it felt like a kind of perfection, suspended between two worlds.

  I went diving one morning in the kelp beds for the big pink sea urchins whose roe we ate for supper. In the small inflatable dinghy I fished for pollock and coaly in the tide riffles off the headlands and lowered creels for lobsters into the depths at the mouths of caves. These half-hidden corners felt like the real thing at the time, the places that resolved the enigma of arrival. But I see them now, in retrospect, as boltholes, away from the tensions I couldn’t face.

  One day out at St Kilda, away from the stamping mayhem of the ex-army camp there, its bar, the Puff Inn, and its busy people monitoring wild sheep or the missiles fired from the range on Benbecula, we went round to the other, ocean, side. The Atlantic-besieged cliffs of the St Kildan islands, visibly smashed and storm-swept up to two hundred feet above the surface of the sea, provide as enormous and powerful a meeting of rock and ocean as you ever find in Britain. In the looming, poised mass of the great sea-stacks, Stac an Armin and Stac Lee, and the bird-thick air around them, as dense with life in three dimensions as a field packed with corn, you feel nothing but the grandeur of the world.