Philip Hoare - The Sea Inside

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The sea surrounds us. It gives us life, provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is where we came from, and it carries our commerce. It represents home and migration, ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives, we seem to ignore it, and what it means.In The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. He begins on the south coast where he grew up, a place of family memory and an abiding sense of aloneness and almost monastic escape offered by the sea. From there he travels to the other side of the world, from the Isle of Wight to the Azores, from Sri Lanka to Tasmania and New Zealand, in search of encounters with animals and people – the wild and the tamed, the living and the extinct. Navigating between human and natural history, between science and myth, he asks what their stories mean for us now, in the twenty-first century, when the sea has never been so important to our present, as well as to our past and future.Along the way we meet an amazing cast of recluses, outcasts, and travellers; from eccentric artists and scientists to miracle-working saints and tattooed warriors; from gothic ravens to the greatest whales and bizarre creatures that may, or may not, be extinct. The Sea Inside is part bestiary, part memoir, part fantastical travelogue. It takes us on a magical journey of discovery, filled with astounding tales of faith and fear, wilderness and destruction, mortality and beauty. But more than anything, it is the story of the natural world, and the sea inside us all.

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The Sea Inside

PHILIP HOARE

FOURTH ESTATE· London

For Cyrus, Max & Lilian

… Even now my heart

Journeys beyond its confines, and my thoughts

Over the sea, across the whale’s domain,

Travel afar the regions of the earth …

‘The Seafarer’, Anglo-Saxon verse

Contents

Title Page The Sea Inside PHILIP HOARE FOURTH ESTATE· London

Dedication For Cyrus, Max & Lilian

Epigraph … Even now my heart Journeys beyond its confines, and my thoughts Over the sea, across the whale’s domain, Travel afar the regions of the earth … ‘The Seafarer’, Anglo-Saxon verse

1. The suburban sea

2. The white sea

3. The inland sea

4. The azure sea

5. The sea of serendipity

6. The southern sea

7. The wandering sea

8. The silent sea

9. The sea in me

Footnote

Acknowledgements

Sources

By the same author

Text and Image Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

The suburban sea

I have lived long enough in the Shire to be

able to afford to go away from it with pleasure.

I suppose this is what homes are for. If one

hadn’t got an anchorage it wouldn’t be

exciting to sail away.

T.H. WHITE, England Have My Bones, 1936

In the years since I have come back to it the house has grown to become part - фото 1

In the years since I have come back to it, the house has grown to become part of me. It is held together by memories, even as it is falling apart. Surrounded by ivy and screened by trees, it has become an enclosed world, left to itself. As I look out from my bedroom window, a blackbird paces out the garage roof, over which a broken willow hangs. Below, tadpoles swim blindly in a slowly leaking pool.

Every day here is the same. I work at the same time, eat my meals at the same time, go out at the same time, go to bed at the same time. I hold fast to my routine, anchoring a life that might otherwise come adrift. But at night the anarchy of my dreams disturbs this self-imposed regime, freefalling till I regain the rituals of the morning.

I’m woken by the cold outside my window, the dark pressing against the glass. I listen to the litany of the forecast, taking me around the coast –

Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay, Trafalgar, FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes

– places I’ll never visit but whose names reassure me with their familiar rhythms, while their remote conditions seem strangely consoling.

Low, losing its identity, mainly fair, moderate or good , falling more slowly , mainly fair in west, occasionally poor in east, good .

I pay attention to the wind direction; not for my boat, but for my bike. A northerly means a chilly but fast ride south, an uphill struggle on my return. A prevailing sou’westerly signals a speedy cycle home, the wind behind my back like a sail. I peer through the curtains for a faint sign that the long night is drawing to a close.

Variable three or less, fog patches at first, becoming mainly good .

Outside, I smell the night-morning air; promising and inviting, or closed-down and denying. I unlock the old brass padlock on the garage door and pull out my bike, feeling for its cable lock like reins.

I follow the same route. I’ve been doing it so long that my bike could steer itself to its destination. Its tyres know every crack in the tarmac, every worn-out white line, every pothole. The urgency of my mission leaves the sleeping houses behind. I ride like my mother walked, at a furious pace, always trying to keep up with myself. As though, if I went fast enough, no one would see me.

It’s December. The colour has yet to seep back into the sky, before the warmth of the night meets the cold of the dawn. My body is geared to the bike. Green lights signal to non-existent cars; I sail through on red. Sodium lamps soak the streets in a Lucozade haze. I ride down the white lines, arms outstretched, reclaiming the road.

Soon I pass out of the suburb’s sprawl, from the land to the sea. Crunching through the shingle, along furrows made on earlier visits, I rumble to a halt at the appointed spot. Leaning my bike against the sea wall, I climb over and – no going back now – lower myself in.

The water is so clear it scares me. Fish leap up as though they’d dropped out of the clouds. Everything is rising to the surface, summoned by the light, slowed to the sea’s heartbeat. The water brims like an overrun bath. I push out through the stillness of the standing tide, my hands creating the only ripples.

I drift out as far as I dare. Borne up by the water, I turn briefly on my back, hips held to the sky, before striking back for the shore. I haul myself out, my body pink and steaming like a wet dog. The scar on my knee is a livid purple; my white T-shirt glows blue in the faint light.

Birds become visible and audible before the sun rises and the world wakes, a netherworld neither dark nor light, out of time. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet of ‘The Wanderer’ had a word for it, ūhta , ‘the hour before dawn’, as he travelled by winter, watching ‘the sea birds bathing, stretching out their wings’.

It’s over all too quickly. A frail sun appears over the trees, milky-lemon pale, more like the moon. The morning begins. My body suffers but my spirit soars at having stolen a march on the day; having been rewarded as well as punished. I’ve forgotten my gloves. I stuff one hand, then the other, in my pockets. A skein of geese fly low over the mud. Curlew call out their names – curl-you, curl-you – whistling through their arched bills. Gulls clamour.

Cloud layers over cloud, plum, purple and navy, cocoa, khaki and grey. The cold surrounds me, almost comforting. The light lifts and falls. I smell the iodine of the shore and an intimation of drizzle in the air as the birds’ noise rises in a crescendo, an orchestrated start to the day. The docks rumble into action. A brightly-lit liner sails up the estuary, silent yet so full of people, a distant glimpse of glamour.

The night fades away. I race the ship back to port, flushing a lone and indignant duck from the freshwater pond that has gathered at the mouth of a shingle stream. Somewhere in the woods a woodpecker hammers. The dawn is replaced by ordinary day; the emptiness soon filled by the commonplace. I can see my hands once more. Everything seems to pause in these final moments, as though the performance were put on hold, even as it begins again.

The beach isn’t much of a beach. It’s really all that’s left behind by the slow-moving estuary, more a kind of watery cul-de-sac, fed by two converging rivers. One is filtered through chalk downland to the north-east, flowing through watercress and filled with swerving trout, slowly widening and losing its virginity until it reaches a carved-out bay in the semi-industrial arse-end of the city. Its outer curve, bulwarked by great heaps of rusting cars, is strewn with every imaginable item of litter, deposited by the tidal flow. Its fellow river emerges from the far side of the city, broadening through reed-seeded marshes into the shadow of the docks – a forbidden land where giant cranes stalk like wading birds, and where shiny new cars begin a journey which will end in the same kind of dump in the same kind of city. Yet somehow, somewhere, all this is forgotten in the conjunction of tide and shingle: something quietly miraculous, perpetually renewed.

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