Atlantic Britain (8 page)

Those breakers looked like a ruff below the cliffed neckline of the shore. Anxiety raised its little inquiring head. As George and I prepared the inflatable dinghy for me to go in, we talked about how to do it. I made sure my life jacket was tightened properly around my chest. We tied a small anchor on a very long line to the inflatable’s bow fittings so that I could drop it when still outside the surf and feed myself in. That way I would have a means of pulling back out when I wanted to return to the
Auk.
The little dinghy was lurching up and down beside the yacht’s hull. ‘Good
luck,’ George said, and in the tension of it I simply passed a flat hand through the air, as if to say nothing doing, no trouble, as smooth as you like, when, of course, that was only a signal of the wild chaos by now doing a cancan in my gut. Was this really the thing to do?

Why, after all, was I doing this? Because it was a way of stepping off the safe place, an engagement with the sea, a plunging in, a way of feeling life on the skin. I knew in my heart then, and I know now, it is something no one would do who
was
properly engaged with the sea. It was a conscious dive into ignorance, into the other element. What was about to happen was bound to happen.

As I started up the outboard and took the dinghy away from the
Auk,
in towards the shore still half a mile away, George shouted, ‘Just go very slowly! See what is going on, coast around the outside of the surfline and then you can judge the moment to go in. Pick it! Make sure you pick it!’ I was now too tense to talk. I took the inflatable in towards the shore. I had bought it at a chandlers’ in Falmouth, £1,000 of red rather handsome-looking rubber. There, at twelve foot or so, it had seemed quite a big thing. Here it
was a toy, to the wrong scale as the big ridges of the Atlantic swells came strolling towards me. I watched the
Auk
herself disappear behind each sparkling ridge. The hull, the cockpit canopy, George, and the entire mizzenmast rolled below the horizon, so that for a moment only the peak of the mainsail and the top of the mainmast remained visible, a snapshot of canvas and rigging where a boat should have been, until my inflatable rolled back up to the top of my ridge and the
Auk
herself, too much of her, her whole fat body, appeared again but now below me. For a second I was looking down on to her decks, the boat exposed in plan, with George a model of a human being in the cockpit.

It was a slow-motion roller coaster, but I was all right with it, constantly shifting my weight in the dinghy to counteract the rise and fall of the sea, up on to the side sponsons as the swell lifted beneath me, down on to the floor of the boat as they went through and past. I was taking the dinghy back and forth just outside the surf zone, watching the sets roll into the sands, getting used to their pattern, three big ones and then a pause, a passage of lower swells, three more and then a pause. The engine was responsive in my
hand. I would wait for the last of three and then go in hard for the shore.

It didn’t happen like that. Looking landward, I felt the familiar rise behind me of the next big one coming in. I shifted, still without looking, to the seaward side of the dinghy, to take my weight over there as the swell came through. But then - simply through the geometry of my body and the boat, by the steep angle at which the boat and I were now tipped - I knew that this one was different.

I looked behind me. Out to sea, still seventy or eighty yards away, with its crest breaking and the sunlight burning through the bright thin fin of water just below it, I saw the biggest wave I have ever seen coming towards me. It was steepening with every second; the impossibly white crest was lengthening and deepening as I watched. It was perfectly clear, even in that first second, that the whole thing, the whole green, heavy, and increasingly lowering wall of water was going to dump itself on top of me, fill the boat and maybe - this was my thought at the time - drive me back out of the boat like a knife scraping food off a plate. The sheer size meant that it was breaking far outside the surf zone of all the others. I was already
in its surf zone, just at the most dangerous point, the biggest wave I have ever seen coming to get me.

I know now what I should have done, or at least tried to do. I should have turned the boat shorewards at that moment and ridden with it, going with the engine at full throttle, taking me inshore on a big boiling mass of surf, a chaotic sleigh ride into the beach.

But I didn’t. I didn’t have the gumption. At the time I thought my only option was to turn into it and take it on the bow. I had only just made that decision when I realised it was the wrong one, but too late to do anything about it. I certainly couldn’t turn sideways on now. The boat began to climb the vertical face of the wave, I leant forward because I thought the wave was going to break over my head and I didn’t want to be washed out of the back. But the wave didn’t break over the boat; it simply turned the boat over, bow over stern, a slam-dunk, head-over-heels, throwing me out as it did so.

It goes slow then. I am underwater and under the boat. The wave is breaking through me and over me, an aerated chaos of half-lit green. I am no way up but I am under. I didn’t know it at the time, but the anchor that George and I had put in the bow fell out as the
dinghy went over. It hit me in the face, cutting my forehead, cheek, and upper lip. All I knew was that my face felt hit, as if punched, sore in the salt water. And then I was up in the light and the air, breathing, looking at the sky and its hobbled clouds. No sooner had I emerged, than another of the big ones, the big seas, the sea monsters that can consume you more easily than any sea monster with fins and tails ever could, was on me again and I was rolling down into its turn and overturn. Back up and breathing, the dinghy beside me now upside down, with the shaft of the outboard sticking up above it and the propeller still turning in the air, the two of us, the boat and I, slurping in the big valley between two swells. Another coming. My life jacket. Why hadn’t I inflated that? How to inflate it? I thought it was one of those self-inflaters. No, as flat as when I had put it on. Pull the toggle. Where was the toggle? I was scrabbling for it, unable to see it or feel it or find it with my fingers, as the third of the huge breaking seas came through me again and that, for a few seconds, is when I thought I might drown.

Down deeper this time into the roll of the surf, suddenly alarmed at the idea of the dinghy itself, and
its protruding outboard, coming slamming on to my head as I was down there, and the feeling of enclosure, of wanting to shout, but the water of course clogging me into silence, a wet muddled claustrophobia like the worst of a bad dream, a fear like a nightsheet twisted around your head, into your mouth and nostrils and neck, a gag on your life, a garrotting by water.

This was the sea in its killing horror, the death element, the antithesis of life. This moment, seen face to face, was the reason that people have always, from the very beginning, loathed the sea. The
Odyssey,
which is not only the first but the greatest sea poem ever written, as old as the tumuli in which chieftains lie buried on the hills of southern England, and older than the great hillforts that straddle the skyline beside them, is suffused not with love of the sea but fear of it. Odysseus - the first great middle-aged hero in literature; his poem the story of the Middle-aged Man and the Sea - longs to go home, to the sweetness of land and the stillness of a house. But the loathing of Poseidon, the sea god, encloses him in one near fatal sea-trap after another. That is one of the
Odyssey’s
central meanings: the sea itself is the element of death. And nowhere more powerfully than the land of the
dead, which Odysseus finds at the very limits of the known world. He travels there only so that Tiresias, the blind seer, can tell him how he might return home.

These are the outer limits, the edge of the Ocean River, a desolate coast, where the only trees that grow are ‘tall black poplars and willows whose fruit dies young’. The waves break on a darkened beach. Hell has never seemed so beautiful.

I came bursting to the surface. As I rose, not knowing if I was rising or falling, I was looking with my fingers for the toggle on the life jacket, scrabbling in its folds with my fingertips, like a piglet or a lamb desperate for the nipple, some source of life. At last I found its little plastic berry, stuffed in between the Velcro it should have been hanging below, pulled it, triggered the canister of C0
₂
and
wwoohoosh
- up came the wonderful life-giving life jacket around me like a meadow, a home, a bed, a pillow, a nurse, a life. I laughed aloud alone in the sea! Never have I felt
so happy. My life jacket held me. I was safe in its arms. I was somehow free of anything the sea could do to me, more free than I could ever have been on land. Life in the arms of death. Escape from Hades.

What was this? Some adrenaline high? I don’t know, but I lay there ecstatic in my new buoyant state. The propeller of the outboard had stopped turning. I had to decide what to do. I thought at first I would swim to the shore, as if nothing had happened, and go on to look at the geology of Marloes as planned. The film crew I knew were on the beach. I could stroll out of the surf like Odysseus and start looking at the rocks. What else could this new-given life be for? And so, doing backstroke and my arms windmilling, I started heading inshore. The inflatable, upside down, stayed where it was because the anchor was now holding it in place. Occasionally, a big sea like the one that had overturned me came thundering through, but that was fine. My mother and father of a life jacket held me up on the surface. However broken the sea, I floated.

I was making progress shorewards when I heard George shouting. George! I had forgotten about him. He was something from the time before! Suddenly, extraordinarily nearby, but cut off by the body of a
swell between us, I saw the very top of the
Auk’s
mainmast, a strangely unreal sight, just the radio aerials and the whirling cups of the anemometer, the rest erased by the bulk of the sea. It was about a hundred yards away. George had come to save me, bringing the big ocean-going
Auk
deep into the surf zone! The charted depth of the place he had come to get me was about eight feet. The
Auk
draws six. There was a real possibility that the swells could have dumped the boat, in one of their troughs, straight on to the bottom. God knows what would have happened; perhaps the hull fatally strained, the succeeding crest simply breaking all over it, overwhelming the cockpit and pouring below, sinking the
Auk
there and then, breaking it up, churning it into a vast quantity of smashed lumber awash beside me, with George in it, the most dangerous situation conceivable: a tumbling sea filled with jagged and hard-edged spars, the shards of hull and deck, a mobile bed of knives.

George could see nothing of me. I couldn’t see him, but I could see the
Auk,
the place of safety, which in trying to rescue me was endangering herself and him. I could hear him shouting: ‘Adam, Adam, come to the boat. Come to the boat. Come to the boat.’ He didn’t
know I could hear him. He was shouting at an empty sea still breaking in its slickbacked ridges along the whole length of Marloes Sands. All he could see was the upturned dinghy, with the shaft of its outboard still vertical like a flag of futility.

Then I rose on one of my crests, and there he was, looking back at me from the cockpit, but sailing away now, the boat in the wind powering away, heeled over, her wake full and white. I held my two hands in the air, thumbs up - not the right signal, I know, because two hands up are a conventional sign of distress at sea - but George made the same sign to me in return. We were together, neither of us broken, both alive, communicating, all right.

I flailed out towards the deeper water. He tacked, came back to me, hove to, and suddenly the
Auk
was there beside me. Huge bodies of swell and surf were still sweeping past us on the very edge of the breaking zone. It was not the place for a big-displacement yacht. Every fifteen seconds or so, twenty-two tons of boat were rolling hugely towards me and then away. One minute I was nearly level with the deck, the next seeing the huge grey underbody of the thing exposed like the flank of a whale above me and over me, not a haven
but a hammer. George had the webbing ladder down over the side. I needed to get my feet on the bottom rung just as she rolled towards me, and then have myself lifted up by the roll of the boat itself. At the same time, George had to lean down and get me by the back of the life jacket. There is a lifting hoist there for helicopter rescues. We struggled with it, George saying, ‘Come on, come on, get on, there’s no time here.’ At about the third roll I got it right, the
Auk
hauled me from the sea and I turned myself over on to the side-deck like a walrus, an exhilarated walrus, saved from the deep, a spreading smile all over my face, happiness cascading through me. George was looking anxiously into my face, to see what damage was there. There was none, only a surf-delight in the cataract of wet chaos in which I had been riding for half an hour. He looked the burdened man. Will Anderson, the Keo Films director, was on the VHF from the beach, wild anxiety in his voice. ‘
Auk, Auk, Auk
. George. Is he all right? Is he all right? How is he? Have you got him on? Is he OK?’

‘Keo,
Auk,’
George said, the flattened voice of the man long at sea. Tie is absolutely fine. More than fine. I’ve never seen him better. Wet but fine.’

If I’d ever needed a lesson that the tension and anxiety around death is not experienced by the dying, but by those who are forced to watch, this was it. I had never felt so free. Will sounded and George looked exhausted with the worry. I felt as buoyant as a balloon.

The inflatable remained anchored upside down in the surf. The only way to get it was by land, and so we sailed back into Dale and met the film crew there. Every one of them stared interrogatively into our faces. I babbled like a maniac on speed.