Atlantic Britain (7 page)

‘I put my two anchors out, at an angle like this, a V of them, and I rode out the night with them. I could not sleep, of course. The whole night we were rocking like this’ - he did a dance with his hands in front of him - ‘and I was praying for the morning. I was praying to the Virgin and to St Anne, the Virgin’s mother. She is a saint for the Bretons, and I heard her answer my prayer. She was with me and it was her who saved me. She was with me in the night. But of course as the tide started to ebb again in the morning, the surf at the foot of the cliffs, which had been behind me all night, started to move out towards me. The waves were soon breaking just astern of me, just here, and then, with the strain of a bigger one I suppose, one of my anchor lines broke and the boat swung round right into the surf. The anchor was outside the surf but the
boat was in it and I could hear the rocks in the edge of the sea grinding against each other like footballs. That is when I was down on my knees and I knew I would die. I have prayed to St Anne. I have been in a position not very different before. I did not want to die but if I die, I die. It is not the end of the world!’

Almost every one of these fluid sentences tumbling out of him down in the cabin of the
Auk
was accompanied by a sigh and a smile, a sweet ease in his face swept over at the next moment by an overwhelming anxiety and exhaustion. Again and again he stroked and squeezed his forehead with thumb and forefinger.

His little boat was rolling in the surf. The sea was on the point of taking him. His life depended on the single anchor warp. How good was it? ‘It’s that rope up there,’ he said, ‘the blue one.’ He had survived thanks to the frayed blue string with which his boat was now attached to us. Had it broken, he would have been among the rocks in seconds, more likely battered to death than drowned.

At first light, a fishing boat from Port Magee, the
Ocean Star,
saw him and came to his aid. But he was so far inshore that, although they tried again and again, they could not get a line to him. The Valentia
lifeboat, the
John & Margaret Doig,
had been called and eventually, after Herve had died and been born again half a dozen times, it arrived. It was of shallower draught than the fishing boat and was able to come in close enough to get a line to Herve and take him in tow, a hair-raising act of everyday courage by Seanie Murphy, the Valentia coxswain.

Even the way back had been hard. The lifeboat had tried to tow him around the north side of Valentia Island but it had been rough on the point and they had been forced back into the channel leading to Port Magee. There, Herve had been taken through the steep tidal overfalls, under tow this time, from which he had turned back the night before, gripped again by the anxiety that every time a wave would come in, his one remaining pump would fail and his boat would go down. Then he was through and approaching Port Magee, and tied up by the lifeboatmen against us. They, understandably enough, had been severe and reproachful with him. What had he been thinking of, going out in a wind like that, on such a shore, with a boat so ill found?

That had been George’s and my first reaction, too, seeing this piece of inhabited wreckage dragged in, as
if by the scruff of its neck like a vagrant dog. But in the warmth of the
Auk
that morning, with Ben gazing down from his bunk, and the rest of us gathered round, and Herve so passionately and honestly and forth-rightly describing his night’s adventures, it became impossible to see him as a victim or an incompetent. He became, somehow, more like the man we wanted to be.

Soon his conversation was ranging widely over the passions of his life. He made us all some coffee - this man who had been all night within earshot of his death - sat back in the corner of the cabin, the mugs steaming on the table in front of us, the rain hammering on the deck outside, and began to lecture me. ‘Adam, listen, no, listen, you must listen,’ he said his arms crossed tightly over his chest, his huge, unshaven and distinguished head drawn back like a bow to gather the energy for what he was about to say. ‘What is important in the relation of man to the world is the hand.’

‘The hand?’

‘Yes, the hand,’ and Herve held up one of his huge hands as an exhibit, some diesel and grease smeared on it, callused at the base of the fingers, before catching hold of my wrist and holding mine up in turn. ‘As long
as the hand is the shaping organism of an enterprise, or a relationship, as long as it is the hand which governs your connections with the world, those connections are healthy, living and warm.’ He sat back with a huge smile. A philosopher had been washed up on our shore. Ruskin was having coffee on the
Auk.

‘Technology!’ he went on loudly. ‘It is technology which is the great destroyer, which comes between the hand and the world, which interposes its own cold deadness between the heart and the world. Why else, Georges, are you a sailor? You are a sailor because you need to feel the reality of the world in your hand.’

George looked like he’d been given a new dad. The sterilising effects of technology were ‘terrible, terrible’, Herve said. The fishing crisis would not have occurred if technology hadn’t displaced the hand. The hand was the natural regulator. The hand understood when enough was enough. The early Irish and Breton saints had cast themselves on the waters, relying on no more than the sheets of their sails on windy days and the oars in a calm, both the ultimate in hand technologies. Those saints had stripped off the padding of the urban world and had
exposed
themselves to what was, to
the nature of things. Truth was in nakedness like that and he quoted William Blake:’ “The body is the eternal imagination of the soul.” You know that, Adam, don’t you? Let us be clear about it. Let us define our positions. You must know that your body, your physical being in the world, is the full and beautiful condition which your soul has imagined for you?’

‘I do,’ I said.

‘And which parts of the body are always naked? Where are you naked, Adam? Your face’ - he held my chin - ‘and your hand’, which he then grasped, smiling straight at me. ‘I love the English,’ he said. ‘When the English are like you, I love you.’

All this, somehow, seemed of a part with his near-wreck the night before. The way in which he had swept past the trauma of the night as if he were already intimate with death and was scarcely disturbed by meeting it again; his vigour, honesty, culture, commitment, his passion and his subtle, responsive mind, his frank belief, his praying to the great Breton saints, his half-broken and yet vital presence, his love of food and of this life, combined with his air of being on the margin, not like the rest of us: what was this but the soul of the Atlantic shore?

If one of those early Irish Christians, a ghost from Skellig Michael, looking for vision on a distant rock, had strolled into your life, he would surely have been like Herve Mahe. Here, sitting with us on the
Auk,
was St Brendan himself, the man of truth, the pilgrim in the world, the stander outside the norm, a prophet of wildness and of the spiritual edge. He rolled seamlessly on to a story about one of those saints. It was clearly a set piece. Scothine, Herve said, was a man of great holiness and real power
‘in the world’,
with those words slapping his hand on the table. One day, as Scothine was walking across the waves, he met another saint, Findbarr from Cork, who was rowing a boat.

‘Why are you walking on the sea?’ Findbarr asked him. Big smiles from Herve.

‘This isn’t the sea,’ Scothine said. ‘It’s a field.’ He bent down and picked a white clover flower from the water and threw it to the saint in the boat. ‘And why are you rowing your boat on the field?’

Findbarr said nothing, dipped his hand into the grass, pulled out a salmon and threw it to Scothine who caught it and held it, shining, in his hands. ‘There you are,’ Herve said. ‘It’s the hands! The hands are
the heroes of the story! Now lunch! What about lunch? What shall we make for our lunch today? Do we have wine? Do we have meat? And do we have time? Oh yes, I think we have time. Georges! Onions!’

The following morning, he left. He started up his engine, said goodbye and hoped we would meet again. We untied his lines, he began to move off, standing in his wheelhouse, heading under the bridge and up the channel towards Cahersiveen. As the boat gathered way, he stepped out of the little wheelhouse and gave a big sky-wiping wave, his hand as big as a gull in the air. It was then that I saw the boat’s name for the first time:
Happy Days.

No one at Port Magee heard any more of him, but a few weeks later a letter arrived at the Valentia lifeboat house. It contained 100 euro in notes and a few lines of thanks. Herve had brought the
Happy Days
home. ‘Thank the bitter treatment of the tide,’ Auden wrote in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, ‘For its dissolution of your pride.’ Herve Mahe, neither modest nor with any need for modesty, a man beyond pride, who had already absorbed all the lessons the tide might teach him, profoundly intimate with the realities of risk and experience, an uninsulated man, as naked to the world
and its riches as any of us ever might be, had nothing to learn there. If I were in the habit of blessing people, I would have blessed him.

Two weeks later, George and I had our own version of an Herve experience. We had now embarked on making a television series about the
Auk
and her journey, and a crew from Keo Films, a London production company, had joined us. They had missed the beginning and so the boat had returned from Ireland to Padstow in north Cornwall. It was, in many ways, a beginning again, but George, I and the
Auk
were all in good shape and, from the Cornish coast, 120 miles to the south, on a good southwesterly wind, we had breezed steadily up to the coast of Pembrokeshire. It was the
Auk’s
happiest point of sail, a broad reach, with the wind just coming on to her over the port quarter, across your left shoulder if you were at the helm, striking the face on the left cheek from behind, even in a gust just lifting the lobe of that ear, all sails
full, their big creamy bellies curved out against the sky behind them.

All day long, coming north, the bow, as it bit into each new wave, had made that repeated wet breathy sigh, as the bulk of the new water beneath her was compressed and driven back under the hull. It’s the most evocative of sea sounds, not exactly the sea breathing, nor the boat, but the steady, half-hissing rhythm of that wonderful amalgam, a boat-at-sea.

Manx shearwaters from the Pembrokeshire islands provided a kind of welcoming party for us, forty and fifty miles out from land, turning around the boat on their black scimitar wings half an inch above the wave tops, slicing through a layer of air as thin as paper above the sea. They were the real edge-dancers. If they misjudged their flight, the sea surface would trap and catch them. It never did; the shearwater is the great sea lesson: endless attentiveness and total response. I watched them for hours. All that grace is nothing but focus.

They became a symbol of everything I wanted to be and all year long George had to summon me again and again to the point. ‘What’s happening, Adam? And what are you doing about it? Concentrate!’ The
shearwater life. It became a sort of code between us. Just then, too, dolphins had come to play in our bow wave, squeaking and rolling beside us, synchronising their surges so that four or five came up together in an arc of gaiety and pure abandon, an expression of the sea at its most generous. It felt in the sunshine as if the big mother
Auk
was with her brood, as though, by some kind of miracle, she had actually given birth to them.

In that beautiful sailing expression, we soon raised the Pembrokeshire coast, our progress pulling the land up out of the horizon haze. We moored the boat overnight, away from the wind, in the harbour at Dale, a still and sheltered nick tucked in at the entrance to Milford Haven. The film crew met the boat in Dale. Not a whimper of the big swell out at sea found its way into Dale Roads, and George and I, Will Anderson the director, Ben Roy the producer, Luke Cardiff the cameraman, and Paul Paragon the soundman, all of us sat that May evening on the harbour wall outside the pub, making plans.

I had long wanted to go to Marloes Sands, a wonderful two-mile beach just around the corner from Dale, famous geologically as one of the richest in the
country, with tens of millions of years of sedimentary rock layers tipped upright in the cliffs and displayed like a library of the past above the sands.

What better way of coming to Pembrokeshire than to plunge into the ancient past straight out of the breakers? We decided on it that evening. I am not sure quite why, in retrospect, none of us considered it a dangerous and difficult thing to do. Perhaps we even did acknowledge that, but slid past it in the way one does, thinking of the goal, of the good outcome, without fiddling through the details of how to get there. Plunge in and you will arrive. That was about the limit of it.

It was blowing a little harder the next morning. The crew drove to the beach, George and I cast off in the
Auk
and beat out of the entrance to Milford Haven, each tack taking us deep up against the battered red sandstone headlands of south Pembrokeshire. The seas were driving hard into them, leaving spume-stained pools of turquoise at their feet, while big modern oil tankers slid out past us, one swell after another slapping up against their bows.

By mid-morning, we had arrived half a mile or so off Marloes Sands and hove to. The swells were
magnificent, whole downlands on the move. They go much faster than you think, thirty or thirty-five knots, but something about the length between crests, which can be a hundred yards or more, and their wonderfully effortless gliding ballroom motion, the sheer untroubled progress of that bulk through the sea, makes them seem slower, gentler, less powerful. Hove to there in the
Auk,
they rode up under us and past with the discretion and sleekness of a butler: fat, waistcoated, perfect. We could have sat there all day, drinking our tea, drinking up the sunshine, listening to the boom and surge, half a mile away to the northeast, of these very seas breaking on Marloes Sands.