Atlantic Britain (4 page)

‘Go down,’ George said, a level of intensity in his voice I hadn’t heard before. Freezing rain was driving into our faces. Til get you in three hours’ time.’ Down below, the saloon was jumping, a savage version of itself, thrashing at the lamp that hangs from the deck-head, its chain not swinging but jerking like a hanged man, a maelstrom of no gravity followed by thumping smacking lurches into new seas. I crawled into my berth, jammed myself against its sides, my body held in place by my hands, the middle of my back and my knees, and hauled the sleeping bag up around my head. The engine groaned away beside me and I slept.

‘Can you do it?’ I woke to see George’s masked
face slewing and sliding above me, only his exhausted eyes visible through the slit of his sodden balaclava. ‘I’m too cold to stay up there,’ he said. ‘I’m frozen and I don’t want to start making wrong decisions.’

In the churning, topsy-turvy world of the cabin, I got up, pushed seasickness away, swathed myself in the weather-armour, went on deck, got the heading for Baltimore from George, 340 magnetic now, took the torch from his hands, and he went below. I was no less exhausted than when I had gone to sleep. I had to shake my head every few seconds to keep myself awake. On and on the engine ground away beneath me. The boat was still smacking into the seas and the drench of the chilling rain was unbroken. It was just a question of staying awake and keeping us on course. No light worked in the compass. I could only find the heading with the torch. But I couldn’t keep that on all the time. An occasional flash on the binnacle and then the hope for a few minutes that I was steering in the right direction. The hours stretched out ahead. The eyelids drooped closed and jerked open, again and again and again. The wool of my balaclava was wet in my mouth. The boat was being hammered by the seas we were driving straight into, coming up white
on the bow and then breaking over the bowsprit. For a while the stars appeared and I could hold a constellation at least half-fixed in the shrouds, a still point in a traumatic world. But the cloud and rain closed over again. I kept looking at my watch. Ten minutes had passed, sometimes twelve. How was I going to last three hours at this? My back had tensed into steel hawsers. As I turned my head, I felt the sinews in my neck clicking and rolling over each other’s armoured strands. ‘Dig deep,’ George had said to me as he went down.

It is a mysterious and powerful place to be, on deck alone, while the man you have been relying on sleeps beneath that deck. He has dug deep for you, has stood in his balaclava with the merest of eyeslits open to the world, shielded from it. He has stayed there for hour after hour in the dark while you have slept curled down in the bunk, protected from the rolling and breaking of the sea. How ancient a set of conditions is that? At this level, the sea is historyless: time has not passed here. His standing for me and now my standing for him is there in the Homeric poems and the sagas. It bears a cousin relationship to sharing a rope when climbing, but the tenderness of it and the
demands of it are, if anything, stronger. I sleep while he suffers and I suffer while he sleeps. The only continuities are the sea, the boat, and the seemingly endless stretch of time, of an almost disconnected sense of timelessness, the repeating waves, the light head of exhaustion.

A strange and distant intimacy. The three hours came and went. I knew I must not wake him but wait until he was rested enough to get up himself. He had done the same for me, and everything here was reciprocity. It was a world governed by a mutuality of duty and care. I was cold but not impossibly cold. I was dog-tired but not beyond all consciousness. He had held the wheel for me often enough already; he had, in many ways, held me; now it was my turn.

We were in the darkest night I have known. I wonder if anyone who has not been to sea in these conditions, who has not felt himself exposed and exhausted as I was that second night, can know what it means to see the loom of a lighthouse on the shore for which you are making. It is no more than a blur at first, so faint that you cannot see it with your watching eye, but only if you look away and catch its flickering on a distant screen. Is that something? Is it? Yes,
it must be. Fastnet! The Fastnet light! Again and again it smeared its paleness over the northern sky. Then another, over to the northeast, the Old Head of Kinsale. For hours they remained the two sentinels guiding me in. Lights! Land! Shore! Sleep! Home!

On the
Auk
drove, the Volvo engine beating steadily beneath me, George asleep, clearly very deeply exhausted. In the end, no more than his face appeared at the companionway steps. ‘Cup of tea?’ he said. The dark bulk of the land on either side was drawing us in on 340. The land now had shapes, a blacker outline against the black of the night. Ireland was a place, not a fantasy of arrival. Still an hour from the harbour entrance at Baltimore, I saw the light, marked on the chart, that I had been looking for over the previous hour. ‘I’ve got a flashing green,’ I shouted down to George. ‘Make for that,’ he said. The ocean slowly stilled. We reached the green, then the red beyond it, curving into the harbour calm, the lights of the village, the fishing boats against the quay, the ripple of harbour water against the
Auk’s
worn sides, the sea, as Auden once wrote, ‘as calm as a clock’. We dropped the anchor at four in the morning, forty-three hours out from England, and the
Auk
lay to her chain like
a stabled mare while George and I drank whisky until the sky began to show the first streaks of a green Irish dawn.

We drank our Murphy’s and sank into the lush of southwest Ireland. The place oozed comfort, salmon on every plate, scallops for every dinner. We took the
Auk
in and out through the maze of islands in Roaring Water Bay: to one side an English actor’s castle, on the other an American sculptor’s island. A deep change had occurred: there were now more ex-pat Europeans living here than native Irish. I went to buy some fish from the cutting shed on the quay in Schull. Eight young aproned women stood around the steel table, knives in hand, the bodies of the fish flipped and sliced in front of them. They stood in total silence. I asked the manageress, a white-skinned woman with hennaed hair and a creased face that had once been beautiful, why no one spoke. She was from the Loire valley, outside Tours, and had lived here eight years. ‘We do
not speak,’ she said, ‘because none of us can speak the same language.’ Lithuanians, Estonians, Germans, Portuguese and Poles: they were all here. In Baltimore, sixteen different nationalities now lived and worked. Or so the French grocer told me. The southwestern corner of Ireland had shifted from edge to centre, filled to the brim with organic veg, face creams and lovely ‘Irish’ knitwear. It was scarcely the place I had left home for.

Something else lay glowing in my mind. Eight miles off the coast of Kerry, in the far southwest, were one of the beacons of my Atlantic island world. You only had to glimpse them from the mainland, or from the boat at sea, to be drawn out there. The Skelligs, a pair of tall, crocketed rocks, are strange in themselves, more upright than islands, the bigger of the two 700 feet tall but only 44 acres in extent. They hover somewhere in the middle ground - not quite islands, more than rocks. On some days, eight, ten, even twenty miles away off the Irish coast, they looked purely sculptural, as if the sea were a desk and they lay decorating it as symbols of the remote. Or when the last of the sun glazed the Atlantic yellow they seemed to be a pair of cathedrals, a black double Chartres seen
from the cornfields around the city, but with their naves and chancels sunk beneath the sea, a pair of Gothic roofs. Their scale was difficult to gauge and at times, when the west wind blew, streamers of cloud tailed away from them, the summits of mountains in a distant country. These two islands are more literally attractive than any piece of land I know. They represent, somehow, a far-off centre, removed from this world but pivotal to it, a place that could not be further out - they are, with the sole exception of the Blaskets just to the north, the westernmost point of Europe -but whose isolation and history as one of the great centres of Irish monasticism a thousand years ago makes them magnetic. When the Blasket islanders went to the mainland and were thinking of returning home, they would talk of going ‘back inside’ to Great Blasket or Inishvickillaun. ‘Inside’ is what the vast exposure of the Skelligs looks like too. Their silence looks packed and pregnant.

Like many islands, grey on a distant horizon, the Skelligs invite and the boat allows, but circumstances were against us and for a week or two we couldn’t get out there. Even so, as the
Auk
travelled the length of that coast, up to the Blaskets and the Arans, down
past Dursey to Roaring Water Bay and Cape Clear, the Skelligs came to seem like the node of our own Atlantic geography. Skellig means ‘rough place’ in old Irish, a hard pair of rocks set out in the ever-swelling sea. The word in Irish for ‘swell’ is the same as the word for ‘stomach’ and that seemed from a distance to be the nature of our unvisited ambition: all crag in the soft and rolling ocean. We had to get there.

Harry Cory-Wright, a photographer from Norfolk, and Claire Cotter, an Irish archaeologist, joined the boat. Harry, who has an obsession with the Atlantic, had long wanted to photograph the ocean
from
those rocks. Claire had worked there as a summer guardian for Duchas, the Irish state heritage service, and as a draughtswoman for the restoration project that has been underway there these last twenty years. George had been there as a young man, when skippering a sail-training vessel out of Liverpool, with eighteen world-curious Liverpudlian teenagers on board. And I was dreaming of them.

We left from the little rock and sand nook of Derrynane in a northerly, close-hauled on a starboard tack, and made a course west by northwest, out to the western horizon, where the Skelligs lay waiting. A long
swell was moulding the surface of the sea. Sometimes, as we came over one of its crests, we would find a valley in front of us as long and smooth as a coombe in the Sussex Downs, sliding away before us, the slope shallowing towards the bottom, and its whole surface crinkled, as if a silk dress had been packed away too long, the fabric crazed with little ridged creases. It was an infinite set of them: the further in you looked, the more creases there were.

The hills of the Iveragh Peninsula greyed behind us. There is a glamour to distance and the Skelligs enshrine it in a way only matched, in our Atlantic islands, by St Kilda. That is why the Skelligs remain so strong a presence in my mind. Most islands you come to, from out at sea, look like a mystery, a power zone, unlike the places you have left. But all islands, when you come within that embrace, lose something of their allure. Take Scilly, for example. You cross from Cornwall, as we did on a sunny spring day, filled with high-pressure brilliance, a good eight hours from Falmouth. At the end of that day, the islands themselves emerge from the thick air of the High like a dream country: angular, rocky places, a magical arrival, the land only visible from four miles off
in smoky blue silhouettes against the sparkling sea.

When you land, you are struck by something else: the conservatism of it, the do-as-we-do orthodoxy, the net-curtain cosiness, the tight control of its resources - even commercial access to the main quays on St Mary’s - by a small group of islanders. There is some strong evidence that Scilly was viewed in the Bronze and Iron Ages, perhaps by the Romans, as some kind of sacred island, even as a place for burial in the west. There is far greater density of ancient graves there, often on prominent skyline sites, than in equivalent stretches of mainland Cornwall. The ancients, in other words, may have seen Scilly as a kind of Valhalla, the great sunset destination for the dead.

In Scilly now, that edge-potency has gone, to be replaced by an almost stifling sense of upholstery and comfort, more middle than the middle, more, as one Scillonian said to me, ‘like an English village than any English village I have ever been to’. Self-protective, on the make, canny enough to portray itself as sweet and forgotten, Scilly is in fact hard and mainstream. But what else, for goodness’ sake, could you expect the people on Scilly to be or do? Hermits? Saints? To want an island to be a Valhalla in the west is, by definition,
an idea that belongs to strangers. It is the apotheosis of ‘not here’. If Scilly is your ‘here’, then there will be no sense of distance. I once asked a man on Barra in the Outer Hebrides what it was like to live in such a remote place. ‘Remote from where?’ he asked me. It is the slap in the face that every islander will, and perhaps should, give a man off a boat; which says, in effect, that you have done no more than arrive at a place where I daily negotiate the complexities of life.

But Skellig slides beyond that. It does not know about comfort. It knows only about discomfort and potency. In its intensity, its purity and its emptiness, Skellig delivers what the horizon has promised. It has been and remains, in other words, shaped from outside. It belongs to its strangers. It is the horizon drawn into three dimensions.

The
Auk
strode towards the distant rocks as though they were her natural home. George was on the wheel; Harry, with his giant mahogany box of a camera, took photographs of the sea at our feet; and Clare and I talked in the cockpit about early Irish Christianity. ‘Of course,’ she said in the wind, ‘remoteness from the world looks like a closeness to God.’

‘That is the power of distance, the glamour of
distance, the way in which an encompassed distance looks like potency.’

‘It is, it is, but there’s another side to it, what they call “the theology of dispossession”.’

‘Which is?’

‘That the Kingdom is a pearl of great price, and that if you are to gain it you must give all that you have to possess it.’

‘So the sea is a kind of nowhere, a divesting of everything, of every certainty, and in the nowhere, out there, is where you find the pearl?’

‘A hard and rocky place besieged by the most violent environment you can imagine is the place of redemption. That’s what Skellig is: a wet Golgotha!’