Atlantic Britain

by Adam Nicolson

  The swell was pouring into the cave and breaking among the big boulders in the hollow at the back. It was as if a beach had been buried deep in the socket of an eye. I rolled over the side of the boat and in, under, and down. The surge was there in the cave, swooping your body up towards the beach and back, a rocking, cradling motion, and I watched the surf from thirty feet below. Bubbles of air broke into the blue-grey world of stone and water, noiseless, the smoky opaqueness of underwater disturbed every few seconds by a sudden infusion of air, as if a gas cylinder was being released from above. We went down, three of us, forty or fifty feet into the depths of the cave. Secret St Kildan wonders! There was little kelp, only the vast, bare monumental walls of the underwater landscape, as big as Roman architecture, a drowned place, an Ice Age shore submerged by the Atlantic rising 10,000 years ago.

  The surge of the sea animated it. The vertical cave walls, fifty yards long, sheer to sixty feet, were coated in clustered crowds of jewel anemones, purple, green, and silver. The crabs sat among them, alert and claws raised, hanging there poised, armed and Homeric, each one a toy Achilles with his spear and helmet set among the display cabinets in Cartier’s or Tiffany’s.

  High above me, the glittery, silvered undersurface of the sea shifted in the swell. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Looking to one side, I saw a seal I hadn’t noticed before, a sudden mammalian presence beside me in this exclusively mineral world, his hands wafting to and fro in front of his big liquid body. He approached to within a few feet. I saw the little dimples where his whiskers met his lip and his eyes looked straight and inquiring into mine. We gazed at each other. The air trapped in the pockets of his fur gave his whole bulk a blue, shimmery sheen as if encased in a singer’s dress. He was sequinned from head to toe. His body was so full and rounded and so exoti-cally liquid, and the dress so tight on his wonderfully moving, slow-dancing curves, that it seemed for a moment we were in the murky blue half-light of a nightclub somewhere and I was swimming with Shirley Bassey or Nina Simone, but in silence, all eyes and curiosity, a deep, careful ‘Who are you?’ emerging from those eyes. From us divers, little streams of bubbles rose to the surface as if from champagne. We had entered the seal’s world. Two others came out from the shadows among the rocks and the three of them swam around us, a little frightening, because they might bite us, but at the same time mesmeric, so capable, turning in such perfect head-twisting curves, until at once they moved off together towards the shoal of pollock. But, because there is nowhere to hide in the sea, fish are quick and the pollock swam away in front of the seals, and we were left with nothing but the surge, the rocks, the wary, armoured crabs, and our own bespectacled, rubber-suited bodies, with our lumpen scuba gear and the bubbles coasting towards the air. I wished George had been down there too, but he was on the Auk, anchored in Village Bay.

  It was like a marriage. We had arguments and apologies, long attempts to explain what each of us thought and deliberate, careful conversations to find out why the tension and gap existed between us. The difficulty kept recurring, particularly when I would turn up with the film crew and say ‘Instant performance, please’, at which George was expected to jump to it like a marionette, or when, just as suddenly, the circus would move off and leave him feeling abandoned. If ever, in some tiny way, he failed to deliver when required or made a demand when not required, it was as if he had stepped miles out of line.

  At supper at the Indian restaurant in Stornoway one night, all of us deeply tired, George said that, for good sailing reasons, it would be better to go straight from the Hebrides to the Faeroes and then come back to Orkney, as the weather inevitably worsened towards the end of the year. In the prevailing winds, it would be a much more sensible way of doing it, wind on the port quarter up to the Faeroes, wind on the starboard beam back to Orkney. He knew of course that the film people wanted to do the journey in its real sequence, risking the difficulties of the end of the year, because ‘exposure’ was what, in the end, they wanted this to be about. ‘None of you know what you are talking about,’ George said. ‘Do you have any idea what the North Atlantic is going to be like, or might be like, if it gets really bad?’

  Will Anderson, the director, was all smiling deflection. He talked to Andrew Palmer, the executive producer, on the phone. Andrew was adamant that we should do things in the order in which they would appear on film: i.e. Orkney first, Faeroes second. I told George it was Andrew’s call.

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ George said. ‘You can’t do it like that.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said, ‘don’t go and get high-horsy about this.’

  ‘Do try and humour me, Adam,’ George said slowly. ‘I am paid to put in my pennyworth, my thruppence worth, and I simply ask it to be received with some courtesy.’

  The formality was ominous. A crack had opened between us and everybody looked at their poppadoms.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you have just to accept this as a normal, prosaic reality. We go from here to Orkney and from there to the Faeroes.’

  ‘What do you mean “a normal, prosaic reality”? I don’t know what those words mean. I don’t understand what you are saying,’ George said. So I repeated it in exactly the same, exaggeratedly plain words. George listened without response.

  ‘I think you owe it to me to listen,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve listened to you,’ I said, ‘and we are going to do the journey in its natural sequence.’

  ‘I think you’d have some trouble finding many professional skippers who would sit here and take this,’ he said. That was undeniable, but it was the predicament we were in.

  There may have been no answer to this. Perhaps we were all simply edgy, unwilling to give ourselves over to each other, to any shared idea. Exhaustion may also have played its part. Or it may simply have been the problem of reconciling two divergent, equally demanding, and complex systems - the world of the boat and the world of the film - each with their fiercely insistent advocates, which could not, even with the patience of martyrs, have been easily reconciled. I belonged in both camps and felt treacherous to them both.

  For whatever reason, the story is not neat, nor did it find a neat resolution. Things got better. We sang songs and got drunk. George and I reached a point where with scarcely a word we could indeed tack and wear the boat, bring her into harbour or away from a leeward quay, pick up moorings, trim the sails, be coherent in a difficult environment and sit there, at the end, below, warmly together, silent, no need for talk, a crew. How did that come about? I am not sure, but I do associate the easing of the tension with something that happened to us in Orkney, an event involving George, me, the Auk and a momentary sense of total and devastating relief, which was mysterious, disturbing, and entirely unexpected.

  We had been for a few days on Stronsay. George had been staying on the boat and I had been living in one of the cells attached to a very strict, very conservative, and largely silent monastery on Papa Stronsay, a small island offshore. We had taken Orkney to heart: a sudden northern clarity after the damp, thick, peaty darkness of the Hebrides. It felt cleaner, lighter, harder and drier here. The air that September was like mountain air, as pure and as sharp. We’d had a wonderful day, streaming in on a southerly wind and an unruffled, slowly stirring sea, sailing over from Storno-way, past Cape Wrath, with the ice-scoured hills of Sutherland standing back away from the cape, the big lit swells coming up behind us like sofas on the move, and the long headlanded stretch of the north coast of Scotland lining out to the east, the seas breaking and creaming on to its empty shores.

  At night, I would travel in my mind along the continuous thread of the Auk’s glittering path, dotted with my mistakes and muddles, our adventures and ecstasies, trailed out all the way around the rocky headlands, past the beaches and the green, cliffed islands, over the rolling widths of the sea, to what felt like the far, far distant south, a plane ride away but another world - a world before the Auk had entered it.

  Something by D. H. Lawre
nce, which I read one night in that monastery, struck me. It was part of his book on America and American literature, but it came at me with force that night. ‘Men are free,’ Lawrence wrote,

  when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealised purpose. Not when they are escaping to some Wild West. The most unfree souls go West and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

  It is only what every social critic and seer from Marx and William Morris onwards has said, but circumstances can speak more powerfully than words. Words need the right conditions for their meaning to emerge and I read this in my little cell as if hearing it for the first time. Had our whole journey been nothing but a rattling of chains? Were George and I somehow trapped in a mobile cage of disengagement, our very search for freedom and fulfilment denied by the means we were using to look for it? Was this the truth behind our tension? Was the Auk a prison?

  The next day was our last in Orkney. The weather was mild and sunny, with light southeasterlies forecast, a perfect and easy ride to the loneliest of all the Atlantic islands, three hundred miles north by northwest of us. We were going to the Faeroes. The long, easy lines and the pale, bleached colours of Orkney looked like a benediction. I had been deeply impressed by the twenty-five monks of the Golgotha monastery. Even that name is a signal of something. They came here in 1999, settling on their uninhabited speck of grass and rock because it represented ‘a desert in the ocean’, the sort of place monks have always sought out, away from the temptations and distractions of the city, to be named not after a version of Paradise or Eden but Golgotha, the place of the skull.

  It is as profoundly conservative a regime as you can imagine. Every moment of the day, from its beginnings at three in the morning, when the island generator is turned on in preparation for the first mass at 3.45, to its conclusion in silence at seven in the evening, sleep at eight, is tightly and exactly regulated. There is no speaking at meals, nor in their preparation or washing up. Dishes are cleaned to the singing of Latin hymns. The two novices among the twenty-five are allowed no jam with their bread and must remain in silence at all times. Every mass is said in Latin, since these monks are traditionalist Catholics, excommunicated by the Vatican, whose modern liberal drift they have rejected. This is a place devoted not to freedom but to obedience, the sanctity of tradition and the ancient Rule, even at the cost of broken relations with the Holy See.

  The monastery is still raw in its newness: the chapel, for all its icons and the enrichments of its Catholic imagery, is in a converted herring gutting shed, the refectory in an old cow barn. The brothers’ cells, in one of which I had been staying, are two long rows of small single-storey buildings, which are for the moment a stark and strange new addition to the Orkney landscape.

  The abbot or vicar-general, a fifty-year-old New Zealander, Father Michael Mary, an amused, intelligent man, full of energetic visions for his future, told me, quite unequivocally and with a steady look straight into the back of my eyes, that as an agnostic, who didn’t believe that Jesus was God, I was going to hell. I said I didn’t believe in hell either. ‘You might as well say,’ he said touching the table between us, ‘that this is made of marshmallow. It isn’t. It’s wood and you can’t deny the realities.’

  For all this exactness, this holding to many precise details of a long monastic tradition, in which there is nothing like television or radio, no private property, where all clothes and possessions (except toothbrushes and underwear) are shared, there is an astonishing absence of harshness. The discipline creates an air of ease and generosity. There is even, extraordinarily, a kind of gaiety about the monastery, laughter in the cowsheds as the monks milk their small herd of Jersey cows; as they build a new tractor house down by the pier, their habits smeared in mud and cement; as the little monastery launch makes its way to and from the pier on Stronsay; or as the two monks who are learning the bagpipes practise, the notes wobbling and wailing out on the edge of the old walled fields.

  Perhaps this is obvious enough: the commitment to tradition, the deep engagement with the exactness of a monastic way of life, liberates these men in their daily dealings with the world and other people. Father Michael Mary said to me as we were walking to the monastery’s own hermitage, away from the main buildings down on the shore, that ‘you only have to pick up the tradition which is lying there beside you, unused on the ground, to find that it is living in your hand’. And that is exactly what it felt like: life from a stone. The Auk and the monastery, in other words, seemed to be opposed to each other: a desire for freedom against a desire for certainty; the rattled against the constructed cage; tension and distance against conviction and warmth.

  Father Michael Mary and one of the monks, a smiling, red-bearded man, Brother Nicodemus, came to see George on the boat and he showed them everything for hours. When they had done, he asked them if they would come and bless the Auk. In the early afternoon, the community of monks arrived down on the quay. Father Michael Mary was dressed in the white alb and the scarlet and gold embroidered chasuble and stole of his office. George and I stood beside the monks as they gathered around us in their black habits. Will Anderson, Johann Perry, the cameraman, and Paul Paragon, the sound man, prepared to film, and the ceremony began. The men, led by Father Michael Mary, started to sing their Latin hymns to us and to the Auk, as one of the brothers sprinkled holy water on her decks from a silver vessel, walking alongside her, sprinkling first at the stern, all through the cockpit, on to the side-decks, up by the mainmast, on to the foredeck and finally to her bow, while the seamless and beautiful hymns floated out over the boat, us, and the water. Phrases came drifting at me - ‘Maria Stella Maris’, ‘Noah ambulante in diluvio’, Jonah and Job, St Paul undergoing his great storm en route to Malta. Every person in the Christian tradition who had suffered at the hands of the sea, and was in need of protection from it, was summoned to our aid. All around us, their sonorous, unaccompanied, chanted voices swelled and encompassed us.

  What is it about a blessing? The way it suddenly releases such a river of sadness? I felt an extraordinarily powerful grief rising up in me, waves of it, unexpected, unsummoned, unwanted. I looked across at George and saw him in a state of collapse, his face crumpled as if someone had punched him. My own tears came more as a kind of choking than anything else. I had to hold my face in my hands. I saw that Johann was crying. Why were we like this? It was not simply the beauty of the moment, although it was beautiful. Nor was it a matter of conversion or belief. None of us were ‘getting God’ that afternoon. In a way it was simpler than that. We were weeping, I think, because, for once in all our lives, a strong hand, the hand of tradition, embodied by these people we scarcely knew, believing things we did not believe, seemed to be coming up beneath us, broad enough to carry us, broad enough even to gather the battered, stalwart Auk in its folds, and, having taken us up like that, was now pouring a blessing over us. It was as if, in an act of powerful theatre, that tradition of strictness and self-abnegation to which these men had devoted their lives had become, for a moment, fatherly to us, in a way that, grown men as we were, ever required to be self-sufficient and upright in the world, we had not known for many years. It was, in other words, an act of sustaining love. Father Michael Mary gave me a rosary and Brother Nicodemus gave George the rosary from around his own neck. Neither of us could speak.

  We went aboard, cast off, hoisted the sails, and started to move away from the quay. The Golgotha brothers resumed their Latin hymns, the wind began to fill our sails, and, as we sheeted in, the Auk began to gather way, making with great certainty for the open sea, as if she had borrowed something from the place she had just left. ‘We won’t forget that,’ I said to George.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘we won’t.’ He hugged me, and I hugged him too.

  8

  The Arrival

  The Auk finally raised the Faeroes late in the a
fternoon. Autumn was verging into winter. The passage had begun sweetly enough, but, as a low had come through, the wind had veered and stiffened, and the boat had been sailing close-hauled most of the day, well heeled over, only a reefed main and the stays’l up. Now there was snow. Grey, twisting showers of it were coming out of the northwest like smudges on the wind. When they arrived, the air bit into the skin of the face as if filled with knives. Drifts of the granular snow were piling up in the ridges of our hats and sat in small cushions in the corners of the cockpit. It was soft-looking air that hurt. Anyone on the helm needed a scarf wrapped around their face, but the Auk was in fine fettle, her deck stripped, clean and exact, and George, as ever, was cooking something down below.

  Land comes up grey and indistinct, a suggestion of what it might be rather than an announcement of what it is. It is always taught to novice navigators that the object you are in charge of is not a boat but ‘a circle of uncertainty’. Too many forces are working on you - the leeway, or drift downwind, the shifting tides, the inattention of the helmsman, perhaps the inaccuracy of the compass, even misreading the charts - for you ever to be sure of where you are. At sea, unless you know where you are, you can’t know where you are. And the further you have come from the last point at which you were certain, your circle of uncertainty grows with every passing mile.

  It is a powerful idea, a sea metaphor worthy of the Odyssey: you travel on, you attend to every knot and sheet in the boat as best you can; you trim the sails, you read the sea, you ride its sudden surges, you slew away down the slopes it provides; you work with your companions, you learn who they are as they learn who you are; and all the time, all around you, the circle of uncertainty grows. After a day or two, you are navigating a balloon towards your destination. Nor do you know in which part of it you are living. Are you on its leading edge, or its wings? Or are you trailing far behind?