Atlantic Britain

by Adam Nicolson

  9

  Seamanship

  The end was wrong, though. Our arrival in Torshavn had done damage to the Auk. The battens had been torn out of both the mizzen and the mains’l on that wild night when we had been caught in the tide. The gulps of seawater which the engine had sucked in had not done any good at all. While I had been gallivanting around the Faeroes with the film crew, relishing my arrival, fowling and fishing, tucking into my pilot whale stew, George had been buried in the harbour trying to get the boat sorted and the sails repaired. The steering system seemed to have developed a fault too: when you turned the wheel to port the rudder would sometimes respond and sometimes not, a hydraulic problem whose cause wasn’t clear. Even at the last, the wholeness George and I had both wanted from this journey was as far away as it had ever been. I was having fun, he was in the engine room. I would arrive back at the boat saying ‘Hi!’, he would look up wearily from the bilges after two or three frustrating hours, trying to get a nut on to a bolt in a corner which you could scarcely reach and could not see.

  The weather had been vicious, welding-torch blasts of cold arctic wind burning between the islands for a week. It had meant we had stayed almost twice as long as intended. Sarah was anxious for me to come home. It had all gone on too long. One of the children was ill, the dog had run away, her business had entered one of its periodic phases of acute stress. I had to come home.

  I had wanted nothing more than to sail back with George to England. Without the other pressures of film-making, it would have been a mending passage. But if I had waited to come home with him, after the work had been done on the Auk, and the weather, which was forecast gales for days, had cleared, I wouldn’t have been home for the best part of two weeks. I had to fly. We left George and the Auk in Torshavn. She looked lovely tied up at the quay, riding much higher than the little Faeroese boats around her, dressed, at least in my mind, in the adventures she’d had, anxious, like a dog at the door, for another go. George looked and felt bereft, abandoned by us all after he had done everything for us.

  Jacky Houdret, the indefatigable Keo producer, put an ad on Faeroese radio, asking if any seamen would like to crew a sailing boat back to England. About a dozen turned up at the quayside, George picked one and within a few days the two of them set off south in fine conditions. Twelve days and 1200 miles later, George and the Auk were back in Falmouth.

  This was not the right end. George and I should have been casting off together in Torshavn, heading south, reeling up the cotton thread that we had been slowly unwinding all year. At home with Sarah, as George and the Auk made their way south, I thought of that every day. We were texting each other. I knew at almost every moment where he was. The Auk and he were running over the ground of our shared, or at least part-shared, year.

  I had the chart of the northeast Atlantic on my wall, reaching from Brittany to Iceland and southern Norway. I could look at it and see a band of it, a sailed swathe of ocean, glowing with memories, a lit arc of life and richness draped around the western boundaries of the British Isles. A stretch of country, which I had only known remotely and patchily before, now had a shape and a continuity. I could see it all, from one headland to another, and could bring it all to mind. It had come to occupy me, as if I had grown another lobe.

  Memory is the imagination’s cousin and as I sat in my room again, looking at that chart, I was reading the same pages I had been looking at a year before, but a richer, illuminated version of them, sequined with marvels in a way they had not been before. The pale-skinned beauty of the Scillies at the spring equinox, as the tide dropped away and revealed a sundrenched, sand-thickened Bronze Age landscape; the whales in the Sound of Sleat lunging that still evening like sea-mastiffs after the shoals of sprats; the tall, canted pyramids of the St Kilda stacks standing like black totems on the western horizon as the sun dropped behind them; the shearwaters all year, signalling to me freedom and excellence; the Romanesque, sea-cliff substance of St Magnus, the red sandstone cathedral in Kirkwall, the church at the heart of the North Atlantic world; the casual grace of the Faeroese fulmar-catchers, smilingly relaxed as they plucked the birds from the wind.

  These are treasures that can never be denied and will never go away. I now own them. George and the Auk acquired them for me and they exist in a kind of everlasting present, a strange echo of what he said to me as we left Falmouth for Ireland that dark evening. Wherever I am, or George is, whatever we are doing, those shearwaters are cutting their curves above the breaking seas; those whales are sliding their long dark backs under the shoals of prey; and the fulmars are fluttering, caught in the tall, delicate nets of their hunters. That is the treasure-hoard of a journey like this: a collection of memories through which, for ever, you can riffle your hand, as though through the hair of a child.

  Memories like that cannot be shared. Worse, they actively set you apart from those who did not share the experience. Sarah was shut away when I came home. It had been too much. She knew, and I knew, that she could not ask where I had been and what I had done. She had protected herself and our children by withdrawal. That wasn’t a process which could be flicked into reverse when I returned. I knew that, and for a while we simply lay alongside each other, like two boats berthed, co-present but not co-terminous, together and apart. It was all right, like a new meeting between us, or at least a meeting again, going quietly and carefully, a slow and courteous unpeeling of layers.

  I wanted to be at home and with her, more than ever and more than I have ever wanted anything. That is also what the journey had taught me: the womanly beauty of homeliness. The Egyptian hieroglyphs for woman and for home are the same, and that enfolding and absorption is what I knew, on returning, I both needed and needed to support. Life was not out with the boys; life was here with women and children.

  Within a few days, I pushed a knife into this. The TV company needed more film of George and me at sea in rough weather. They wanted to have us at the end of a hard, short-handed two- or three-day passage, all gaiety gone, sick and dead with it. I went to tell Sarah. She was upstairs in the bedroom by the window, the cold white light of November falling on her face. She started to cry, her face in her hands, that white November light. ‘We’ve all held on,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time. And you can’t keep adding to it. Every time you add to it, it gets worse and worse.’ Her face and shoulders were held away from me, rounded into themselves like the shell of an egg.

  This was the other side of my encounter with the seal in the cave at St Kilda. Why, for God’s sake, look for intimacy with a seal, if the price of doing that is these shoulders turned away, this face held in these hands, this woman sobbing beside me?

  She told me about a bad moment in her year. It was midsummer. I was in Ireland somewhere. The fields at home were filled with flowers and new grasses. She had decided to take the children out into the fields to camp for a night or two, ‘to get our sea,’ she said, ‘something at home of what you were getting out there.’ They’d had a lovely time, cooking on the fire beside the tents, watching the moon come up over the buttercup meadows. It was some consolation in a time that was bogged down in work and business.

  The next evening, they thought they would do it again and walked back out into the fields with their campfire supper and bottles of lemonade. Someone had let cows into the meadow during the day. They had trampled all over the tents and destroyed them. The canvas was torn, the poles were bent and everything inside was broken and wrecked. They had all trailed home feeling broken too. If I’d been there, simply as another person, another source of energy, it would have been all right. But I wasn’t, so it wasn’t. I needed to be here. I needed to love them, not in some distant, airy-fairy way, but in the practicalities of mending the tent and keeping the cows in the right field. Other echoes came back to me. Wasn’t this what George had said to me over and over again? That it was all very well sitting on deck looking at the view while someone else worried about the engine and all the other systems by which the b
oat worked, but loving the view had nothing to do with seamanship. Seamanship was keeping other people alive.

  George and Kathy came to stay in December and we four talked into the night about the polarities of our year, our separations, the ways we had and hadn’t been with each other. I began to say to George the burden of what I have written here. We felt our way carefully, each testing the other to see how much we could say, like doctors pressing on a tender stomach. By the fire, with the candles lit, I thanked him for the months of care he had devoted to me and the Auk and our journey, something to which he had given, I thought, more than he had received.

  ‘I can’t say what went wrong, Adam,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it was the teaching thing. It’s a very curious art and I know I struggle with it. I have always worked in a world where not losing the dinghy over the side has been the proof of a good job. It didn’t have to be achieved in a caring, patient way.’

  ‘You mean when you asked me to lash the dinghy and you kicked it to show it was loose?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The irony is that you remember me kicking the dinghy, don’t you? Not that we didn’t lose the dinghy over the side?’

  ‘I would rather we had lost the dinghy. Or neither. I’d rather you’d shown me how to do it.’

  ‘I know. I was tired. And I never did show you how to do that knot.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Though you asked me several times.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is about seamanship, Adam. And seamanship is about taking and carrying the risk. The Risk with a capital R. I was hired to look after the boat. That was my job. If something had gone wrong, if someone had died, it wouldn’t have been you they came to. I would have been the person standing there. You’re a plucker, Adam.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You float above things, you float from one thing to another, you take life’s pleasures as if they were designed to please you. You pluck. It’s an enviable condition. It’s the luckiest place a man could find. But it doesn’t carry the risk, does it? That was always with me. I carried it for week after week, second-guessing the next thing to go wrong. You never shared it, you never came in there with me.’

  ‘I think it is probably impossible to share that,’ I said.

  ‘I have never not shared it before. And there were times, like that night of the big tide off the Faeroes, when I kept thinking to myself, “Come on, Adam, help me, come in here too. Don’t just keep saying how fantastic the waves are.” But you never did. And because you never took the risk, the risk always came between us.’

  ‘But we’re all right now,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ George smiled. ‘We followed our course, we came back, we’re all in one piece. We rubbed each other up the right way and the wrong way. And no one can say we don’t know each other more deeply because of it. That’s a rare thing, and you and I will never lose it. A small piece of my life is welded to yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘ - welded - that’s right, and mine to yours.’

  Sarah, George and Kathy sat at the table, the candles glittering up into their eyes and teeth. It was a harbour picture, a painting of home. What was seamanship? Keeping other people alive.

  I went out in the night and lay down on the cold December grass. A clear sky. I looked at the stars. Seamanship? What was it? Attention to detail; nurturing the ship; resourcefulness; and, more importantly, an ability to catch a kettle before it falls and to look after people and things before they need it. Did I have that? Could the plucker sail? I gazed at the stars and hardly knew.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe more than I can say to the many people who became part of the Auk and her voyage during 2003. It was both a privilege and a huge pleasure to be with and work with the team of resourceful, energetic, warm and generous people who made the Channel 4/ National Geographic series for Keo Films and ushered the Auk along her way. They were: Directors: Lucy Sandys-Winsch, Nick Read, Will Anderson, Andrew Palmer and Ben Roy; Producers: Ben Roy and Jacky Houdret; Camera: Steve Standen, Luke Cardiff, Richard Hill and Johann Perry; Sound: Ian Maclagan, Paul Paragon, Simon Farmer, and Godfrey Kirby; Editors: Simon Beeley and Peter Cartwright; and in the Keo office: Jon Hubbard, Katherine Perry, Claire Hamilton, Toyin Ogunbiyi and Ewan Fletcher.

  *  *  *

  I would like especially to thank Will Anderson, Zam Baring and Andrew Palmer for their friendship, for sticking with the idea long after all others would have dropped it and for shepherding me so carefully along so many dodgy paths.

  Susan Watt at HarperCollins has been my guide and mentor for many years, for which I will always remainenormously grateful. My agent Caroline Dawnay at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, and her assistant Alex Elam, continue to do everything any author could hope for, for which, as ever, all thanks.

  My heartfelt love and thanks to George Fairhurst, the Auk’s skipper, for putting up with me for a year, for taking the Auk where no other skipper would have dared, for doing every single thing that was asked of him in the most difficult circumstances, for the warmth of his friendship and for taking the candour of these pages in the spirit in which they were intended.

  Above all, my love and gratitude to Sarah Raven, whose own love does not alter when it alteration finds.

  About the Author

  ADAM NICOLSON is the author of Sea Room and Power and Glory, as well as many books on history, travel and the environment. He is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the British Topography Prize and the Heinemann Award. He lives on a farm in Sussex with his wife and children.

  From the reviews:

  ‘A tale of tall seas, wild coasts and frustrated relationships … Nicolson writes beautifully. His talents are well displayed in the episodes he shares with us, described in forceful and lyrical writing. He quotes poets, recounts history, gives insights into geography and geology, analyses himself, his friendships and his marriage, and confesses to a love for the natural world and a growing horror at the ocean’s savage power … entertaining and seductive.’

  Sunday Times

  ‘This thoughtful book … is the poetic distillation of a journey. Grappling with the ageless conundrum of whether to go or whether to stay, he wonders, all the way through this compelling little book, about the competing claims of belonging and leaving; of the open road and the womanly hearth; of risk and security … it shows what Nicolson is capable of as a writer. He has made a spirited attempt to examine the price one pays, in human terms, for going instead of staying: the Faustian pact of the true traveller.’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Nicholson’s siren call to the wildness of the Western sea is so seductive, and his knowledge of every puffin nesting on every little volcanic outcrop so comprehensive, that I almost felt like joining him. Nicolson is the master of the art of worried travel writing … he has the genius of making you interested in something you’re not interested in.’

  Spectator

  ‘Nicolson writes extremely well about the sea, but then he’s pretty good on dry land too … Nicolson realises that seamanship is not confined to the sea; its lessons apply any where.’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A dazzling triumph - a profound and magical account of a voyage along the wild edges of the British coast.’

  NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

  ‘Adam Nicolson has written a classic of the sea; lucid, lyrical and lovely.’

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  ‘This is a book to remember. Nicolson’s powers of description are prodigious … Nicolson has an endless curiosity about the natural world, the ability to describe it with vivid clarity and the talent for generalising from a particular but in a way that lodges in the mind and remains there. I can think of no higher tribute. This is a fine piece of writing. It’s a long time since I’ve read a book that describes quite so well the unique, rather strange relationship between seagoing men, their vessels and the sea.’

  Scottish Sunday Herald

  ‘If, as an armchair travelle
r, your main requirement is a book that transports you to where the writer has been, Nicolson certainly comes up to the mark … instead of being directly spiritual and contemplative, it’s about the best way of engaging with life.’

  Scotsman

  ‘Arrestingly narrated … he is extravagantly brilliant in description, especially of surfaces … A book that glitters and which allows you to glimpse, fascinated, what lies below.’

  Tablet

  ‘Nicolson writes beautifully … both entertaining and enthralling.’

  Irish Examiner

  ‘Its strength is its truthfulness. Voyages always make them selves in the end, and this was no exception. Nicolson is honest about shortcomings, thinks hard about what went wrong. And the book is a delight to read, written with panache and elegance, larded with a rich mix of sensitive description, phrases from Auden’s sea poems, legends of Celtic hermits and original similes.’

  Independent

  ‘A genuinely intriguing, thoughtful work that vividly describes not only the author’s various thrills and spills at sea but his own quest to make sense of his life.’

  Mail on Sunday

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  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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  Sea Room

  Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible

  Copyright

  Harper Perennial

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers