Atlantic Britain (12 page)

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.

The
Auk
finally raised the Faeroes late in the afternoon. 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?

It is tempting and flattering to think you are in the centre of your circle, that you are, pretty well, where your calculations put you, and that the circle of uncertainty is just a construct devised by the over-cautious to discipline the free. But the circle of uncertainty is the hardest fact you have. The haziness of your condition is not helped by the difficulty of reading the land from the sea. Even from a few miles out, land shows little of its nature. There is scarcely any colour in the shore and the forms of the coast are flattened. Headlands and bays merge into a single canvas-thin backdrop. In that way, the circle of uncertainty is not resolved by landfall, but dramatised by it. It has never been wider. You are days away from the last moment of real knowledge and now the land confronts you with its questions. What am I? Am I what you think I am? Where does this shore welcome, and where does it threaten? And don’t interpret me in the way that would be most convenient. Expect the worst, stay alert, treat me with the suspicion I deserve.

As the grey shapes thickened and darkened, the Faeroes announced themselves in blank-faced, un-interrogatable simplicity. Stark, black, volcanic basalts, sheet after sheet of them, one on top of another,
preserve the sequence of the vast eruptions which made these islands fifty million years ago. The guts of the earth spat the Faeroes out and the Atlantic is now doing its best to level them. Black rock, grey ocean and, between those two brutalities, a skin of green, the colour of life. It is a naked landscape, almost exactly the same in every part, a two-phase drama on display in front of you - eruption then destruction -with a brief interval, between the two, of life staking its claim.

Night fell while we were still at sea and the wind picked up another notch. We were making for Torshavn on Streymoy, Thor’s harbour, the place where the Thunderer could rest, and we were now reaching north on a big westerly. The islands are sliced by deep, sharp-sided glacial fjords and sounds, through which the Atlantic winds and tides drive with a force rarely matched further south. The Faeroes are like a giant sieve placed across the tidal streams of the ocean, and those streams, forced through the gaps, are Amazons and Mississippis for weight and strength of water on the move.

As we approached them in the evening, longing as ever for arrival, the relationship of sea and land began
to shift. When the tide runs, it is not in fact the water that moves. The bulge of water that the moon and the sun’s gravitational pull creates on each side of the earth remains pretty well where it is. The movement is of the solid, rocky earth inside that stretched envelope of the ocean. So it isn’t the tide that is moving: it is the earth revolving within its skin of water. As we neared the huge black bulk of the Faeroes at night, with a powerful westerly wind coming over them towards us, and an equally powerful west-going tide pulling us into the channels and gaps between the islands, it was not difficult to think that the islands were heading towards us. The tidal atlas for the Faeroes shows deep, ragged red flags of turbulence in the mouths of the sounds, around the headlands and tailing out for many miles into the Atlantic on either side. In the presence of these huge, planetary forces, what was the
Auk
but a bobbing piece of flotsam? The islands were coming for us like a herd of bison.

Our journey had never seemed so elemental as this, nor the Atlantic world so animated, so
animal.
As we crossed the mouth of the wide channel between Su6uroy, the southernmost of the Faeroes, and the islands to the north of it, that tidal stream dragging
us westwards, that enfolding of the great black batlike cloak of the Faeroes around us, suddenly became more intense. The wind had the
Auk
well over. The whole of her leeward side-deck was awash. The water was up on the coach house roof and, from below, the glass of the coach house windows was filled with the Atlantic, mesmerisingly strange at night, that gushing runnel of water, no more than a quarter of an inch of glass away, lit from inside like a model of natural violence.

Entranced by this night scene, I clipped my harness on to the lifeline and went to sit on the foredeck as we plunged through the dark. Everything was high energy: the sea around us, driven one way by the tide, the other by the shrieking wind, was standing in peaks and ridges that were breaking on the spot. The
Auk,
for all her surging progress through the water, was scarcely making headway over the ground. Looking to see how we were doing by measuring the apparent speed at which one headland crossed another, or a distant piece of land disappeared behind a nearer -taking transits, as it is called - it was perfectly clear that the islands and their tide-rivers had us in their grip. A hellish kind of adrenaline thrill. I sat down below, trying to work out with the charts, the tide
tables, and the tide atlas what would happen if we could not escape the grasp of these west-going tides; if, even with the engine on at full throttle, the hold of the Faeroes, its magical and invisible fingers - the turning of the earth itself - would pull us in and swallow us, some kind of northern Homeric fate, as if this were Charybdis and Calypso combined. It felt like the sea of fate.