Atlantic Britain (6 page)

After a few yards, the path is not heavily worn. Few tourists seem to go that way. It soon became obvious why. The path becomes a shaly rock-cut ledge about a foot or ten inches wide. Below, the cliff drops five hundred feet or so to the agitated sea. Above, the cliff, when you are not used to it, has a habit of pushing
your body out, as if it is bulging, pregnant. Every rock is animated here. Panic comes stealing up from your boots on these ledges, a fear that rises and has to be slowly wooed and seduced into calming down and subsiding like the sea.

Then Harry and I found we had gone too far, into some ancient rock-cut cul-de-sac, perhaps a path on which the monks had picked their way to catch the fulmars that were still peering at us around every corner. Back, gingerly, to a point where a clear succession of rock-cut foot- and hand-holds stepped up the cliff for us. In none of them was the stone worn or polished like the public way up to the monastery. English stonecrop, buttons of thrift, and the long green hair of the lichen grew on their treads as well as the risers, the lines of the stone still sharp after ten, perhaps even thirteen centuries.

We climbed. All around, the world was only vertical, dropping five or six hundred feet straight below us into the incredible brightness of the western sea. The
Auk
rocked far away, as if in a cradle, in the nine-foot swell. Up here, everything stood still. A puffin turned to me at one point and the wind behind him just lifted the feathers of his cheek as if it were a
hat at Ascot. A section of the stair involved squeezing crab-like up a chimney in whose walls the steps had been cut. None of it was difficult if you forgot the height. Instead, I felt, these steps, so laboriously cut, forming so intimate a connection with the distant past - they were clearly made by a man not as tall as me, the reach between them shorter than I needed - were an act of generosity. A man we could never know was showing me and Harry the way to his summit hermitage. An immense quantity of work had been done here, perhaps over generations, by one hermit after another, a restless and relentless improving of Skellig, making the physical metaphysical, making an island’s holiness both explicit and accessible.

We reached a terrace that was man-made. A dry-stone retaining wall had somehow been engineered to stand up from a near-vertical rock slope and the resulting wedge of space between it and the cliff-wall filled to make a level platform about six feet wide. A small, ruined oratory was poised on its far edge. On the inner side of the artificial platform, two shallow basins had been carved from the rock where rain falling on the cliff would drain down into them. We drank the sweet water. A dead puffin lay on the grass, its
breast meat eaten away by a peregrine, the pilgrim bird, whose country this also was.

On the next step above, now seven hundred feet above the sea, a further platform had been built, this time out to the west. The sun was now glorifying the western sea: golden air on a bed of golden metal. Cushions of bladder campion were growing in the entrance to another tiny ruined building. This was the highest and the westernmost point of the ancient Christian world. You could go no further. It was the end of the known solidity, the highest place, at the furthest place, encased in and enshrined by millions upon millions of acres of sunlit sea and seawashed sky.

I sat there - Harry had stayed below - and did not want to move or leave. The puffins wheeled around me. A storm petrel whirred just below. Atlantic heaven, this hermitage not gathered like the monastery in a unitary precinct, but distributed among the rock flakes of its chosen peak: an oratory here, a living space there, a garden on the other side, a water-filled rock-scoop beside it. This careful geometry is an act of discretion and intimacy, a mark of civilisation, on the most extreme point of the most extreme rock
off the edge of the westernmost island that lies beyond the edge of Christendom.

The sun dropped. I went down with Harry in the twilight, as easy as going down the companionway steps, your hands behind you on the step above, and found Claire still at the Saddle. We went together to the landing, the air full of puffins on the wheel. George collected us one by one, as we jumped for the dinghy in the swell. I raised the
Auk’s
now shiny anchor, we hoisted the sails, and turned for the north. It was a night reach north to the bare shelter of Inishvickillaun in the Blaskets. The half moon glittered a broken path on the water to the west. Harry lay back in the cockpit, Claire helmed the boat in the night, making for the light on Tearacht, and I told George it had been one of the happiest days of my life. ‘Why?’ he said.

‘I feel as if I have been let into another room.’

A week or two later, the
Auk
was tied up one morning next to the fishing pier at Port Magee, on the Kerry coast. I was asleep in my berth. The day was filthy, a dirty wet southwesterly, with almost zero visibility, blowing rain and fog all over us. I had poked my head out of the companionway hatch at six and decided against it. With that wind and swell, and the thick fog, there was no going anywhere. The air was filled with a penetrating damp. Back to bed, dreaming.

We had been having a high, fine time: some grey blustery days, some brilliant and glittery, the
Auk,
if I think of her now, smiling all over her face, settling into her world. One afternoon, the wind had died for a while and the sea had gone warm and still, a sudden pool of turquoise water a mile or two across. You would have seen it from a satellite, a pond of the
Caribbean carried up in the North Atlantic Drift like a drop of oil into the vinegar north. The temperature gauge on the hull registered 17.8 degrees Celsius, an extraordinary 64 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind had simply disappeared, the
Auk
had stopped and George and I both jumped off into the warmth of it. Strange moment! The
Auk
lurched here and there on the slow hint of a swell. Her sails flapped in the stillness, the spars banging as they shoved over from one side to the other and then back. From in the Atlantic I watched her moving her great bulk at sea, the underside of her belly showing grey with its anti-fouling, her topsides scuffed already from all the quays that she had gone against in Cornwall and southern Ireland, rubbed like an old clog. It is the most unsettling of experiences, to float in the sea beside your loved home like that, to watch it, and all the safety it represents, from the very element from which it is designed to protect you. You should be part of the scene you are watching; you should be there at the helm, but you are not; or coiling the ropes at the pin-rail, but you are not. You are removed into the otherworld of the sea beyond the boat. It is the nearest I have ever come to feeling like a ghost in my own life.

We had come into Port Magee the night before, just ahead of a big wind; a cold evening, with the sun dropping into the Atlantic behind us. My 15-year-old son Ben was on board, a sleepy, beautiful, long-haired presence in our own endlessly busy, what’s-going-on lives. He stayed with the boat for nearly two months - his summer holidays - and, without breaking step, accepted it all, rough and smooth, dull and horrible, visionary and alarming, as though this was simply what life consisted of. I think of him now as a pool of calm in all the anxiety and excitement, a way of being that adults take fifty years to remember. He too was asleep that morning, laid out in the pilot berth, his face turned to the boards that line the hull.

Very quietly, at about nine, George woke me. ‘Adam, have a look at this.’ I got up and went into the cockpit. Tied alongside, attached to us fore and aft, was the most bruised and battered boat I have ever seen,.at least afloat. It was a little thing, about twenty feet long, perhaps eight feet wide, its freeboard no more than eighteen inches above the water amidships: a small blue lobster boat, scuffed and scraped, the fibres of the fibreglass showing in places through the paint. A narrow, upright wheelhouse occupied the
stern, big enough for a single man to stand in its shelter, a chaos of charts and papers inside, even their surfaces rubbed and worn so that they were no longer entirely legible, and a VHF radio hanging off one of the walls. In the bow was a low decked space, more like a kennel than a home, which served for a cabin. It too was a mess. Through the opening, you could see a little gas cooker in there, a thin mattress and a sleeping bag rumpled and twisted on top of it. All looked as grimy as an anchorite’s cell. A lightweight fisherman’s anchor was roughly tied with orange twine to a cleat on the foredeck. The lines holding this boat alongside us were frayed pieces of blue string, more abandoned washing-line than rope. Where they crossed the
Auk’s
own thick tan mooring warps, it looked like the meeting of two worlds.

This apology for a craft had arrived half an hour before, when I was asleep, towed into harbour by the Valentia lifeboat. Port Magee is a mile or two up a winding channel, sheltered from the open sea, and there is no view of the ocean from there. Nevertheless, in this wind, there could be no doubt: the sea that morning had been a mass of wild-haired greybeards.

A man appeared crouching and reversing outwards
from the grey shadows of the cabin: stained grey trousers, a light and slightly greasy brown cardigan, a big, leonine head, a worn face, the cheeks sunken and covered in grey stubble, huge, hooded eyes, his grey, sandy hair standing in a crest above his scalp. Hunched over, attempting to tidy odds and ends, he looked like an aged Rodin. Everything about him was too big for the boat, his big lanky body slack and rangy. As he looked at us, he swept his hair back from his forehead with an enormous hand.

Here was a vision of everything that shouldn’t be. The man and his boat formed something the sea had chewed, tasted, shifted to the other side of its mouth and spat out: there was nothing neat here, nothing protective or protected, only a terrifyingly naked vic-timhood. All coherence had gone. The boat looked like a fish after a gull had picked it over. George said hello briefly to him but even though there was scarcely a yard or two between us, George and I stood there for a few moments, doing nothing but looking at him and his situation, aghast.

We came to. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I shouted over. ‘Come and warm up. Have some breakfast. You must be frozen. We’ve got some dry clothes.’

‘Oh really?’ he said, with a French accent. ‘That is too kind. You Englishmen know how to be kind. It is something I know about the English. You are at heart, all of you, gentlemen.’ That was the first revelation from Herve Mahe: this uncalled-for courtesy, drawing-room speech from the half-wreck of his life.

He came on, we gave him dry clothes and boosted up the
Auk’s
heater. George made him tea and an enormous breakfast, sat him down in the saloon and, as he ate for four, we listened to his story.

He was Breton. ‘I am no Frenchman,’ he said when I said how much I loved France. ‘I do not like the French. Nothing is more different from a Frenchman than I am. I am simply not interested in Rene Descartes or Voltaire or anything to do with that’ - a pause for the right expression - ‘French aridity.’ Thirty-five years ago he had escaped the French imperialists who were taking over Brittany and had come to live in Ireland, for a kind of freedom. He was intrigued by the Breton-Irish connection and had lectured on his own culture to university students here. His accent now crossed Galway with Gallic, rolled consonants blurred into fat-bodied vowels. He was the man of the Celtic margin, a merman, an apparition from the sea.

‘She’s good,’ he said when I asked about his boat. ‘Georges, sit down,’ he suddenly went on, ‘I will cook you something. Do you have mushrooms? Where is a knife? Aoh, a
good
knife! Do have garlic? And oil? I need oil.’ Sarah and Kathy had stocked the boat with several litre bottles of the finest Tuscan olive oil and Herve slapped into a new one like a masseur. Soon the inside of the
Auk
was a steaming hot-tub of Herve’s mid-morning mushroom dish, a pint of double cream piling in after the bacon, mushrooms and oil. ‘Do you have kidneys?’ he asked, brandishing the knife like a corsair. No, sadly, no kidneys, but otherwise we had it all. Suddenly, it was life
a Varmoricaine.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘she is a good one.’ He had bought the little fishing boat two weeks before from a man at Kilmore Quay in the far southeast corner of Ireland. Since then, step by step, he had brought her around the coast. He was taking her to Galway, where he lived, and would probably use her to drop a few pots. He had been a fisherman before, in Brittany. He knew what he was doing on boats.

And what had happened last night? ‘Ah well, last night,’ he sighed, looking first at me and then at George. ‘I saw you in front of me, five, six miles. You
had everything up, didn’t you? The main and the mizzen and both the heads’ls? Yes, a beautiful sight. I knew it was an English boat. The English know how to make a boat beautiful and I could see the grace of your boat from five miles away.’ I saw Ben in his bunk, on the other side, wake up, shuffle a little and roll over, wanting to see the source of this sea-washed, Odyssean tale.

‘But you got into the Sound a long time before me, when the wind still hadn’t got up and the ebb wasn’t running. I was trying to catch you but I must have been there two or three hours after. It was dark when I reached the mouth and the wind had picked up, and the southwesterly was running straight into that ebb, and I can tell you that is a dirty place then, a dirty filthy place. There were waves standing all the way over the sound and they were breaking. I have two pumps on the boat but one of them wasn’t working and I was frightened that a sea would come on board and then it would be over. I wouldn’t be able to pump it out. The boat would go down. She is a good boat but she couldn’t cope with that.’ I got the chart out to track his progress. Ben stared at him with eyes like mint humbugs.

‘I didn’t go in. I thought I might be able to find a
little place, a little corner tucked in St Finian’s Bay here, where I could get some shelter from the wind. In behind there. And of course it was getting late now and you couldn’t see much. I had the chart too, you know, and I was looking for this corner here, but in the end, no, there was nothing for it, I just had to anchor off the coast, here somewhere,’ he said moving his hand across a wide swathe of the Irish shore.