Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  So it was quite possible to have spent the morning practising Weelkes, Mundy or Gibbons and that afternoon to dress in thick khaki and march out of a safe and cloistered world into the clutches of the professional Army. With the school band blowing and banging away at our head we would march in a long column up the road through decaying Tudor streets (today no doubt restored and prettified beyond bearing) while the thudding of the drums would bounce back off the house-fronts, off little tobacconists’ with their bottles of Tizer and forbidden copies of Reveille and Health & Efficiency, an echoing thud-thud for each beat. Then the band up ahead would turn a corner and its sound at once be cut off so that we were left with the sudden naked percussion of our marching boots. And all the time we were going slightly uphill, drawing ever further away from that reassuring civilian heap of pseudo-Edwardian clothing we had left piled on our desks. Then turning in at the barracks the sentry-boxes, the whitewashed kerbs, the brilliant red fire buckets, the stencilled letters everywhere, another self-contained world with its own signposts and bus service, policemen and cinemas.

  ‘You’re in the Army now!’

  The mirthless grin on the cruelly-shaven face before it split into that terrifying parade-ground wail cut off by an explosive consonant.

  ‘Get your fucking legs apart you ‘orrible lot. You’ve got nothing to drop, you’re not women. Though I’ve got my doubts about one or two of you. Oh, comedian am I?’

  The collective glare personally interpreted by each boy in the squad, rigid with terror.

  How silly it all now seems that we delicately nurtured little rulers of tomorrow should actually have felt aught might have befallen us. But we did, and for as long as it lasted the square-bashing reduced all horizons to the wall of the nearest clapboard hut. It always ended in time for us to be marched off into the Scotland Hills to a landscape used exclusively for military manoeuvres and which in consequence looked as if it had been designed from the beginning with this in mind. When we had done our Brengunning, which I liked and was good at, we went up to the top for grenade-throwing and lectures.

  It is the lectures which come back now most vividly. Not the content, of course, although I can still remember back-bearings and how to call in fire on a given target. It was the hours spent sitting on those bare hills in gathering winter dusk and the rooks flying down into the city below with its cathedral standing like a cool grey toy in the sunset. The particular quality of the chilly and deepening sky, the pinkish clouds, the slow and angular birds bending and unbending their way all stood as a pastoral bulwark against the uniform, the boots which rubbed, the idiotic talk about reinforcements and covering fire and the lecturing officers themselves who would take off their caps to scratch their heads and suddenly become ordinary bald and greying men looking forward to their tea. On one of these occasions I wrote my first sonnet on the inside cover of my Cert. ‘A’ part 1 instruction manual. I would like to pretend I can no longer remember its first line but I can:

  *

  ‘Twas there I sat, on heather-tufted mound, it went. It would be nice for any writer to claim he had been precocious. Alas for that. Or even truthful, since I seriously doubt the heather. Alas for that too. I can no longer muster a blush for my fourteen-year-old former self, at the revealing conservatism of the heartfelt clichés. I do remember it was a perfectly good sonnet in terms of mechanical technique and that it was almost entirely about nature. So why in 1956 should the sub-Keatsian vein have suggested itself so easily? Paul Fussell in his absorbing book The Great War and Modern Memory has a chapter called ‘Arcadian Recourses’ in which he assesses the relentless pastoral and floral tradition in English literature and shows how in time of war it became the most natural kind of language for Britons to use to give irony to their descriptions of the indescribable. The pastoral was set up as the antithesis of war. Quite without perceiving it I had as a teenager lapsed straight into this comforting mode showing that no matter how dead the style might have been it was still alive and accessible at some subliminal level.

  The only other thing I remember about my sonnet was that it was interested in decay in a Tennysonian, Tithonus vein, for even then I associated nature absolutely with mutability and death. It was not until I read Paul Fussell’s book that I realised this, too, was peculiarly British:

  In a brilliant essay Erwin Panofsky has discovered that ever since the eighteenth century the English have had an instinct not shared by Continentals for making a special kind of sense out of the classical tag Et in arcadia ego. Far from taking it as ‘And I have dwelt in Arcadia too,’ they take it to mean (correctly) ‘Even in Arcadia I, Death, hold sway.’

  This seems at first to exemplify a hard-edged adult realism as opposed to sloppy Continental wishful thinking. But it is surely the English attitude towards death and the passage of time which is the more child-like in that it is the response of a culture obsessed with loss. Nostalgia is very much the home province of the English and when they tap into its rich vein they become adult–children perpetually grieving over some indefinable passing, a whole nation in mourning for the pre-lapsarian. How easy it becomes to view a landscape in these terms and how full our school poetry-books were of its afforded vision.

  ‘Right. First ten lines of The Deserted Village by tomorrow bedtime, word-perfect, or I’ll send you to be caned.’

  Thus a thirteen-year-old school prefect to a ten-year-old transgressor. Back it comes thirty-odd years later, word-perfect at bedtime in a bamboo hut in the South China Sea:

  Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,

  Where health and plenty cheer’d the labouring swain …

  It was a homogeneous literature, a homogeneous landscape. Goldsmith’s leas were such that Gray’s lowing herd could have wound slowly over them without feeling remotely lost. What did it matter that Gray’s darkness was occasioned by his sexual melancholy or Goldsmith’s polemic by brutal landlordism? The lament for happiness lost descended once more on the English landscape – which could take it, being quite used to acting as a metaphor for this sort of thing. Less than two centuries later it afforded the poignant scenery for Housman’s doomed bucolic lads in the depths of an industrial age, and half a century or so after that it supplied heather-tufted mounds and adolescent gloom to an unwilling recruit in the Scotland Hills.

  Decades later I descend Tiwarik’s uplands, barefooted on the baked steep soil that extrudes thick waves of grass which flow snaggingly about the shins. I am wading through the island’s hair, up here on its crown with blue calm ocean on three sides and the mainland passive in the torrential afternoon light. Do I feel nostalgic? Is there anywhere in me an ache for a glimpse of England? I can be quite specific now.

  The nostalgia is undeniably there for a lost time, for imaginary lost content, for an actual long-ago happiness botched. It exists as a cultural trait defining my nationality, age and – let it be said - class. But whatever I may mourn it is revealingly not resident in any of the landscapes of my past. I do not miss the smallest heather-tufted mound of the English scene. I do not care if I never again see the South Downs, the tennis courts and patios of Beckenham, the hills and hopfields of Kent. Neither do I wish to revisit the dank water-meadows of Oxfordshire, de-poplared Binsey, the ivy-clad alma mater. I wish very much to avoid Postcardland: Haywainland and Kendal-Mint-Cake-Words-worthland and West-Country-Family-Holidayland.

  I am aware of missing something, though; something which I was brought up to expect or to be, something nowadays so unfashionable and discreditable I almost find it hard to mention at all. For, unexpressed but implicit throughout my childhood and adolescence was the idea that sooner or later in this life one would have to fight. One day I should go to war. We warbabies born during the Blitz who grew up in a world of ration books, gasmasks and uniforms breathed a pungent atmosphere of evacuation and alarm. Our fathers were away being heroes, just as our grandfathers had been heroes in the previous war and their fathers had distinguished themselves in South Africa … India
… the Crimea … and so on back for centuries. Not a generation but hadn’t grown up knowing it would be called upon to fight.

  As it turned out my own anxieties about National Service were unnecessary: it was abolished just as I was beginning to resign myself. Suddenly all that marching with the CCF, the Armourer’s course at Catterick, the annual pilgrimage to Bisley stopped being training and overnight turned into grim recreation. We had been playing at soldiers after all. The promise of rigour and comradeship was back where it had always been, in the cockpit with Biggles or in the serials in Tiger.

  Do not then (I tell myself) underestimate the hollowness of this cancelled expectation. You in your generation were brought up to anticipate war, no matter how much a pacifist you may be and no matter what later vistas of actual napalm did to your fantasies of derring-do. You are thankful you never had to fight, you are fashionably mocking of the military mind, the macho politics of confrontation. Yet underneath it you are utterly cynical about peace, to which the human race is so genetically unsuited, since you have seen that the one thing at which man excels and into which he puts his whole heart is blood-letting.

  *

  Now the thought comes: in my private war with my own past the English landscape really serves as the battlefield. I love foreignness in landscapes to the exact degree with which they violently contrast with my inherited notions of how a landscape ought to look. Whatever my sense of loss it now needs other metaphors to express itself.

  Which is why I am filled with pleasure by the millipede in my path, a very un-English affair (but with the contours of a London tube train), as thick as a small cigar, six inches long, glossy brown and with its yellowish legs seeming not to move individually but to produce waves travelling its length. I feel these waves ought not to be moving in the same direction as the millipede but backwards, rather as oar blades are left behind in propelling a boat forwards. The effect is disconcerting, like the wheels of cars in early movies. The millipede ambles off in his own familiar landscape of gigantic obstacles easily surmounted by his flowing legs and enemies to be dealt with by his nasty bite. He too is a gleaming fossil, very much alive in the sunshine.

  *

  No sooner have I explored Tiwarik than I must establish a daily routine to keep myself supplied with fish. An essential part of my scanty luggage brought down with me from Kansulay are my two home-made spear guns, the long one for daytime use, the short for nights. I am in love with my task, with the sea itself. I am also in love with the coral reef which surrounds the island, with the shocking beauty and variety of the living creatures it supports. This reef is the kind known as a fringing reef (as opposed to an atoll) which often follows the contours of an island or a coastline for miles at a stretch, broken only by such things as the mouths of rivers, for silt and fresh water are inimical to the polyps which form corals. There is also a fringing reef off Kansulay but there the reef slope on the seaward side is comparatively shallow and the bottom only about thirty feet deep, a bed of sand which slowly shelves for a mile or more offshore. Consequently there are fewer and smaller fish at Kansulay for the coral forms are neither so elaborate nor varied. Here at Tiwarik, though, the reef slopes steeply beyond the shallows, a multicoloured cliff face dropping abruptly into aquamarine and purple depths thickly grown with algae and patrolled by deep-sea fish including several species of shark.

  Arman has arrived in the Jhon-Jhon: he and his crew of four are going off round the far side of the island for a morning’s fishing. He has brought me two jerrycans of fresh water and Intoy, who leaps off the prow into the surf holding a spear gun of his own. Arman helps me carry the water up to the hut where he examines my panà, trying the barbs with his fingertips and stretching the elastic experimentally.

  ‘You have a flashlight?’

  I dig out the torch I have waterproofed by means of a motorcycle inner tube and an additional lens cut from a piece of glass. He examines it critically, testing the switch.

  ‘We’ll go fishing one night,’ he says. ‘Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘It’ll have to be late,’ I say, trying to remember when the full moon had set. Darkness is essential for good night fishing; moonlight makes the fish lively.

  ‘About one o’clock. Did you see the moon go red? So many people in Sabay were frightened. The young ones thought the world was going to end and the old ones think it’s a bad omen because they say it went like that before the Japanese came. We’ll come and sleep over here so we can all get up at one o’clock. Can you use a compressor?’

  I have already spotted that the Jhon-Jhon is equipped with a rusty air compressor. This can be driven off the twelve-horsepower Briggs & Stratton that powers the boat by the simple method of slipping the drive-belt off the propshaft and over the compressor’s flywheel. On the narrow marine-ply decks fore and aft are piles of thin plastic hose. It is the simplest (and most dangerous) system for diving which exists. The diver takes the end of a hose in his mouth and goes down, controlling the airflow with his teeth. With a good pump and a lot of nerve it is possible to go down one hundred and fifty, even two hundred feet which is effectively the limit for scuba divers as well. To work in the dark for two or three hours with a torch and a spear gun at only half that depth is to become conscious of living on the edge. I tell Arman I have dived with a compressor. He has never before heard of a ’kano doing so and wants to know where I learned. I name another province where I was three or four years ago. He is surprised.

  ‘I didn’t know they did it there as well. We often get Visayans here who have compressors, though. I think maybe it’s everywhere in the Philippines, then. Typical Filipino cheap way.’

  He sounds disappointed that the fishermen of Sabay and these parts are not exclusive after all, but proud to belong to that fraternity who get by without all the namby-pamby foreign clutter of scuba equipment. I am afraid we compressor-divers rather fancy ourselves. He recommends the submerged boulders beyond one end of the beach as a good place for daytime fishing and goes back down to his boat. On the way I tell him I prefer deeper water. He looks at me speculatively and pushes off. The engine starts and soon his hemplike hair disappears around the headland and the motor’s noise is abruptly cut off. Intoy frolicks in the shallows wearing goggles made from carved pieces of wood set with olives of glass. He grins as I pass on the way to fetch my spear gun. His mouth is full of white teeth, his eyes invisible behind flashing heliographs.

  Intoy is good. He does not yet like to go much below twenty feet but he is stealthy and understands the habits of the various kinds of fish better than I do. I hang in the clear water and watch him a couple of fathoms below as he hides behind an outcrop of coral, lying in wait for a small school of parrotfish which as usual approach cautiously but full of curiosity. Just when I think he must be at the end of his breath he fires and hits a one-pound manitis, one of the goatfishes with the characteristic twin barbels beneath its chin. He comes surging up with it spitted on his spear, trailing spent air in glittering streams. He breaks the surface and pants, very matter-of-fact about his catch. Fish are not at all easy to spear during the day, being altogether too alert. The glassy water conducts every sound as if it were a tympanum; it is like being immersed in synaptic fluid designed to transmit the tiniest neural message, a sentient bath so ‘live’ it is a wonder to get anywhere near a sizeable fish. But with practice one can. After an hour or so Intoy and I have enough between us for lunch and maybe for supper as well.

  We climb from the water, spitting, and sit on the rocks with the sea lapping up over our feet. From slightly behind him I watch the droplets run from the shining wicks of his hair and trickle down his brown nape. Beneath the steady pour of sun on our backs the surface of his skin doubles its depth. A new layer stands off as though he were covered with a dusting of light, a powdery membrane which sheathes his whole body. The effect is similar to that when eye and mind are allowed to drift out of focus and undreamed-of textures float up towards them from ever more deceptive dis
tance. I think if I reach out my hand to touch his slender neck it would pass through it and stretch back thirty years. What resonance a life acquires as it goes; resonance rising like a mist from what was not, the melancholy vapour of what was. And suddenly this endless instant is compounded when he turns his head and smiles a single, brief, unreadable smile. A sadness not at all at odds with the sun is broken by his jumping to his feet.

  ‘Come on. I’ll show you where the big eels have their nests.’ And the great sea scours off all but the intent of this new endeavour as we slip back between the layers of its yielding glass.

  In this manner the days pass.

  *

  At seventy feet and beneath the jutting coral ledge which extends its sloping garden to the sunlit upper waters it is dark and colder. I am at the extreme of my air, my lungfuls of oxygen mostly burnt up in the effort of forcing my body down to this depth. Time here is very limited: the urgency to make each second’s sense impression count, to observe everything, is intense. It is partly scaring, partly exciting to know that shooting vertically to the surface is impossible because of the overhang. If mind turned responsibility over to body before winking out, then body would simply claw straight up and be caught among the juts and spurs on the underside of the ledge, swaying like weed in the currents there until eaten. Mind has to remain at its post long enough to get its blundering capsule to safety and the upper light.