Coasting (9 page)

There was plenty of wreckage in the dusty antiques shop in Peel—cracked china souvenirs from Blackpool and Southport, floral chamber pots, dreadfully oxidized daubs of boats at sea, a vintage spin-dryer, fishing rods, Brownie box cameras, cardboard boxes full of old copies
of Woman’s Own
and
Picture Post
, two hat racks, a crate of tarnished silverware, a ship in a bottle, a Utility dining table plus three chairs to match, and a lot of shelves of disowned books. I
was browsing in the Poetry section, through ink-stained school editions of Tennyson and Shelley and sepia-inscribed, morocco-bound editions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Sonnets from the Portuguese
. The owner of the shop, looking himself like a premature antique, was watching me from behind his littered desk.

“You know T. E. Brown?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, thinking that he must be mistaking me for someone else.

“You see—we’re a roughish set of chaps,” he said. I looked at him with interest. I would have said that he was long-boned, molting, bespectacled, shabby-suited, but hardly “roughish” by any standards.

“That’s brought up rough on our mammies’ laps—” He was, I realized, quoting, and not apologizing at all.

“And we grow, and we run about shoutin’ and foolin’ till we gets to be lumps and fit for the schoolin’. Then we gets to know the marks and the signs, and we leaves the school, and we sticks to the lines, baitin’ and settin’ and haulin’ and that, till we know every fish from a whale to a sprat. And we gets big and strong, for it do make you stronger to row a big boat, and pull at a conger. Then what with a cobblin’ up of the yawl, and a patchin’ and mendin’ the nets for the trawl, and a risin’ early and a goin’ to bed late, and a dramin’ of scollops as big as a plate, and the hooks and the creels and the oars and the gut, you’d say there’s no room for a little slut. But howsomever it’s not the case, and a pretty face is a pretty face; and through the whole coil, as bright as a star, a gel slips in, and there you are!”

“Wow—.”

“T. E. Brown,” he said. “The Laureate of Man. Great Writer. There’s a ‘Collected’ there you can have for two pounds. It says two pounds fifty in the front, but I’ll let you have it for two pounds, seeing it’s Friday. Well, that was just the way with me and the gel I’m speaking of—Betsy Lee.”

Dazzled by the man’s salesmanship, I bought the “Collected” Brown along with a 1785 Church of Ireland Prayer Book and took them back by bus to the boat. I read Brown’s
Fo’c’s’le Yarns
—immense dialect poems, as long as novels—in the fo’c’s’le, with the oil lamps winking and the tide lifting the boat slowly up the quay wall. The same quick, tinny, musical Manx voice which I kept on hearing in snatches through the open porthole came ringing off the page.

Was I reading this, or was this just Mrs. Quillin talking to Terry Kelly beyond the window? It was hard to tell.

Brown’s poems are obsessively insular. Douglas Pier represents the limit of the known world. Saturated in the names of local people (Quillins, Cains, Kerruishes, Kermodes, Skillicorns and Christians) and local places (Bradda, Ballaugh, Thousla, Ballacraine, Calf and Ayre), they insist on the global self-sufficiency of Man. If an experience lies outside the range of the scallop fisherman, the parson, the draper, the miller’s daughter, then it isn’t an experience worth having. “For mine own people do I sing,” Brown wrote, “And use the old familiar speech”—a speech that by definition excluded all formal culture, all politics except those of the parish pump, all ideas. In his address to “The Future Manx Poet,” Brown hopefully instructed his heir:

In Brown’s narrow world, anything English, let alone intellectual or speculative, was cockney balderdash, to be despised long before it be understood.

The poems didn’t plod. Brown had a wonderful ear for the rhythms of the local talk, and he wrote with absolute conviction about what it felt like to be out in a gale in a scallop boat or crouched in a stone cottage in front of a smoky peat fire. Yet reading them, I felt suffocated—and attacked. The dialect served as much to keep outsiders out as to include the insiders in its cozy circle; it told the foreign reader that he was an ignorant trespasser. There was a great deal of aggression in Brown’s sweet-sounding homeliness, a sense of grievance and affront at the larger world for the way it treated Man as small.

Brown told his Future Manx Poet:

In another poem, he saw “the coming age/Lost in the empire’s mass.” England was Man’s mortal enemy, an imperial monster in whose maw everything that was Manx would be crushed and consumed; in this respect, Brown was standing shoulder to shoulder with all the Scots, Welsh, Irish, Indian, American and African writers who have struggled against England’s stifling colonial weight.

Yet there was a false note somewhere in Brown’s protestations. For one thing, he wasn’t himself a “roughish” sort of chap: he took a degree at Oxford, then spent a lifetime teaching at an English public school, Clifton College, where my own grandfather must have been one of his pupils in the early 1890s. I felt cheated at finding this out. Who was this comfortably off, expensively educated man, living in a very handsome Georgian quarter of Bristol, to shove my Englishness in my face and make me feel guilty for not being a weasel-browed Manx fisherman?

The Manx themselves loved Brown, though. He was still quoted, and not just by secondhand booksellers. Whenever I mentioned his name and said I’d been reading him, I was
met by another torrent of dialect lines. I heard everyone’s favorite bits—of “Betsy Lee,” “Tommy Big-Eyes,” “The Doctor,” “The Manx Witch,” “Kitty of the Sherragh Vane,” “Mary Quayle” and “Job the White.” People could recite whole pages at a time. They stood in pubs and in their front rooms, and even in the heartily philistine setting of the Isle of Man Yacht Club: they put their hands in their pockets if they were men, or clasped them in front of their waists if they were women, they stuck their chests out, and then they started. They produced swathes and reams and yards and bolts of Brown, with his hop-hoppity-hop meter and the rhymes chiming like a concatenation of two-tone doorbells.

I had T. E. Brown coming out of my ears. He was a national institution. The Bristol schoolmaster had managed to find a voice which embodied all of Man’s insular pride and all its insular sense of grievance and slight. Listening to his verse, with its nostalgia for old days and folk ways, its foursquare localness, its constant undercurrent of xenophobia, I thought that T. E. Brown, who had won the hearts of the Isle of Man in the 1880s, might be just the poet for Britain at large in the late twentieth century.

The sea was black, shiny, creased, like the bombazine of a Victorian mourning frock. There was no further news of the
South Stack
. At least, there was no further news of the lost boat, but I was being continually reminded of it by the single flash, every ten seconds, of the South Stack lighthouse, ten miles away to the east. At this distance it was tricky to pick out—no more vivid than the flaring of a match seen across a valley on a clear night. I was trying to take regular compass bearings on it, and kept on losing it in the crowd of starlights on the water.

There were other lights too. At night the sea always seems more populous than it does by day. As your eyes get used to the darkness, you see that you’re not nearly so alone as you thought. Trawlers, hard at work under the horizon, show as a sparky
ignis fatuus
of reds and greens. Trinity House puts on its great free firework show of lightships, buoys and lighthouses, every one chattering in the dark in its own code. Counting off the seconds—
a-hundred-and-one; a-hundred-and-two; a-hundred-and-three
—you figure out who they are. The quick double wink every ten seconds is the Skerries; the lazy brushstroke of light painting itself on the water every ten seconds is Point Lynas; the quintuple blip-blip-blip-blip-blip, fast as morse, every fifteen seconds, is Bardsey Island. When you’re alone at sea in the nightmare hours, these marvels are as profoundly comforting as the nursery rushlight burning on the table beside the child’s cot.

At eleven o’clock I watched the Holyhead–Dublin ferry pass astern of me; a complete floating city, eerily sweeping across the horizon at twenty knots, making the sea around it blaze. I thought I could hear jazz bands playing, corks popping, the late-night crowd whooping it up; but that must have been a sea delusion, since the ship was at least seven miles off.

My own navigation lamps were all cunningly shielded from me, to avoid blinding the helmsman, and the only visible thing on
Gosfield Maid
was a weak pinprick of light shining on the compass heading. Numbers were sluggishly
stirring in their bowl of paraffin: 185 … 190 … 180 … 185. As long as the boat was kept pointing in a roughly southerly direction, the course was fine by me. I left it in the charge of the autopilot and went downstairs to make a supper of tinned soup, cheap claret and a loaf of fresh Manx bread.

I lit the oil lamps in the saloon and stood blinking in the sudden flood of light, the momentary oddity of finding one’s old books and pictures, the unanswered letters from the Inland Revenue, yesterday’s paper with its half-done crossword down here, literally
in
the sea. Up on deck, or in the wheelhouse, a boat seems a perfectly reasonable sort of vehicle for moving around the world in; it is when you go below that you feel its improbable frailty—a whole household and economy sustained, high over the seabed, on a skin of water. As foundations for homes go, inch-thick planks of larch, held on by nails, with hanks of oakum hammered into the cracks between them, have little reassuring solidity about them. And the sea is so noisily close-to. Even in a dead calm, it mutters into the wood at one’s ear, like an anonymous caller on a telephone.

You awake? What are you wearing? Let me guess, now, if you’ve got a nightie on
.

But everything’s in place: the books on their shelves, the pictures on the walls, the sheepskin rug on the floor. The floating room smells of potpourri, tobacco smoke and lavender furniture polish. It’s all right.

I turned on the radio. It was the cocoa-and-biscuits hour on the BBC, an actor reading
A Book at Bedtime
—something about an Indian guru in suburban Sussex sometime in the 1920s.… I didn’t listen very closely, but the actor’s plummy bedtime voice was soothing. On the early-evening news there had been a mention, fairly low down in the bulletin, of an “air and sea search for a trawler reported missing in the Irish Sea”; but by the midnight news the item had been dropped. London journalists evidently didn’t think missing trawlers worth mentioning more than once.

The chief business of Man had always been smuggling. An offshore island with a lot of rock, a few small plots of fertile soil, some thin veins of lead and tin in the hills and a modest annual harvest of shellfish and herrings has one resource left to exploit—its own insularity. The tax differentials between the island and the mainland were infinitely more profitable to the islanders than lobster potting or digging holes in the ground. The Manx fishing boats ferried illicit cargoes of tea and brandy and every other dutiable luxury over the forty sea miles to England.

The economy of the Island still worked on exactly the same principle, even if the means was less romantic than the one-gun luggers on moonlit nights, with cloaked men on the beach guiding them in with storm lanterns. Income tax on the Island was a flat 20 percent; income tax on the mainland was—I cannot bear to spell out the figures of income tax on the mainland. So the Manx were busy making money out of the difference, just as they had used to make money out of the two-and-sixpenny English duty on tea.

They trawled for English millionaires. They also fished, more easily and profitably, for Englishmen with company pensions and tidy nest eggs who wanted to hang on to as much as they could of their ten and fifteen thousands a year. Athol Street in Douglas—a hundred yards or so of seaside stucco and a bad place in a wind—was a smugglers’ cove of tin-pot banks, off-the-peg companies, avoidance schemes and useful dodges. It was Stepmar country: the source of innumerable good wheezes … loans, investments, savings and pension plans, all done on the cheap, all, in the smugglers’ favorite smooth phrase, “tax-advantageous.”

The smugglers themselves looked the way chartered accountants do everywhere: they wore colored golf socks and thick spectacles, they went to the barbers’ once a fortnight, and were shyly boastful about their handicaps after hours in the bar of the Admiral House on the promenade. Athol Street was the Douglas version of Wall Street and the City, though its brevity, its louche offshore tackiness, its cracked
plaster and its pervading smell of cotton candy and fish and chips, gave it a more amiable air than the forbidding financial centers of London and New York.