Dart (5 page)
Authors: Alice Oswald
Can
I
come
over?
All
kinds
of
weather
when
the
wind
spins
you
round
in
your
fish-tin
boat
with
its
four-stroke
engine
.
Who
lives
here?
Who
dies
here?
Only
oysters
and
often
the
quartertone
quavers
of
an
oyster-catcher
.
Keep
awake
‚
keep
listening
.
The
tide
comes
in
fast
and
after
a
while
it
looks
like
you
’
re
standing
on
the
water
still
turning
and
shaking
your
oyster
bags
.
Already
the
sea
taste
wets
and
sways
the
world
–
what
now?
Now
back
to
the
river
.
Feel
this
rain
.
The
only
light
’
s
the
lichen
tinselling
the
trees
.
And
when
it’s
gone
,
Flat
Owers
is
ours
.
We
mouth
our
joy
.
Oysters
,
out
of
sight
of
sound
.
A
million
rippled
life-masks
of
the
river
.
I thought it was a corpse once when I had a seal in the net – huge – a sea lion.
They go right up to the weir.
They hang around by the catch waiting for a chance.
That’s nothing – I almost caught a boat once.
On an S-bend. Not a sound.
Pitch dark, waiting for the net to fill, then
BOOM BOOM BOOM – a pleasure boat
with full disco comes flashing round the corner.
What you call a panic bullet –
ten seconds to get the net in,
two poachers pulling like mad
in slow motion strobe lights
and one man, pissed, leans over the side and says
hellooooooooooooo?
But if you’re lucky, at the last knockings it’s a salmon with his
great hard bony nose –
you hit him with a napper and he goes on twitching in the boat
asking for more, more to come, more salmon to come.
But there aren’t many more these days. They get caught off
Greenland in the monofilaments.
That’s why we’re cut-throats on weekdays.
We have been known to get a bit fisticuffs –
boats have been sunk, nets set fire.
Once I waited half an hour and
hey what’s happening, some tosser’s poaching the stretch below me,
so I leg it downriver and make a bailiff noise in the bushes
And if you find a poacher’s net, you just get out your pocket knife and shred it like you were ripping his guts.
whose side are you on?
I’ve grown up on this river,
I look after this river,
what’s your business?
beating the other boats to the best places:
sandy pools up Sharpham where the salmon holds back to rub the sea-lice off his belly.
He’ll hold back waiting for the pressure of water
or maybe it’s been raining and washed oil off the roads or nitrates and God knows what else
and he doesn’t like his impressions up the weir.
Some days the river’s dark black – that’s the moor water.
But the dredger’s got rid of those pools now. We tie up at Duncannon now.
We go there after work, we dash down a cup of tea and a sandwich, then lie about chatting on the stones
and we’re down the Checkers every Friday evening,
saying nothing, playing yooker,
in the bogs in twos and threes, sorting out the order of the River –
You’re Mondays, you’re everything down from Am,
my place is the blind spot under the bridge
and if anyone else turns up, break their legs
why is this jostling procession of waters,
its many strands overclambering one another,
so many word-marks, momentary traces
in wind-script of the world’s voices,
why is it so bragging and surrendering,
love-making, spending, working and wandering,
so stooping to look, so unstopping,
so scraping and sharpening and smoothing and wrapping,
why is it so sedulously clattering
so like a man mechanically muttering
so sighing, so endlessly seeking
to hinge his fantasies to his speaking,
all these scrambled and screw-like currents
and knotty altercations of torrents,
why is this interweaving form as contiguously gliding
as two sisters, so entwined, so dividing,
so caught in this dialogue that keeps
washing into the cracks of their lips
and spinning in the small hollows
of their ears and egos
this huge vascular structure
why is this flickering water
with its blinks and side-long looks
with its language of oaks
and clicking of its slatey brooks
why is this river not ever
able to leave until it’s over?
Dartmouth and Kingsweir –
ferryman
two worlds, like two foxes in a wood,
and each one can hear the wind-fractured
closeness of the other.
I work the car ferry, nudge it over with a pilot boat,
backwards and forwards for twenty three years.
Always on the way over – to or fro –
and feeling inward for a certain sliding feeling
that loosens the solidity of the earth,
he makes himself a membrane through which everyone passes into elsewhere
like a breath flutters its ghost across glass.
I was working it the night the Penhilly lifeboat went down:
soaking, terrified, frozen – the last man out on the river.
But I never saw any ghosts. I came home drowning.
I walked into the house and there was my beautiful red-haired wife,
there wasn’t a man over twenty-five that didn’t fancy her.
I think of her in autumn, when the trees go this amazing colour round Old Mill Creek.
I go down there and switch off my engine. Silence.
After a while you hear the little sounds of the ebb.
Or in winter, you can hear stalks of ice splintering under the boat.
Wholly taken up with the detail to hand,
he tunes his tiller, he rubs the winter between his fingers.
On a good day, I can hear the wagtails over the engine.
Or I’ll hear this cough like a gentleman in the water,
I turn round and it’s a seal.
Swift fragmentary happenings
that ferry him between where things are now
and why, disengaging his eyes from the question
naval cadet
twenty years old and I already know knots and lowering boats. I know radar and sonar, I can cross the gym without touching the floor. I can nearly handle a two-engine picket boat, turn it on a sixpence and bring it alongside.
I’m officer-quality, I’ve been brutalised into courage. You could fire me from a frigate and I’d be a high-kill sea-skimming weapon, I’d hit the target standing to attention.
I’ve got serious equipment in my head: derricks and davits, sea-pistols, fins and wings and noise signatures. When the Threat comes I’ll be up an hour before it with my boots bulled and my bed pulled up. Then down the path to Sandquay and encounter it whatever it is. I’ve got the gear and the capability.
Every morning I bang my head against the wall, I let it shatter and slowly fill up with water. I’m prepared you see. I jog round the block, I go like hell and there’s the sea the whole of it measuring itself against my body, how strong am I? I can really run, I take steps two at a time, I salute the painted Britannia.
I’ve got the knack of fear, I’ve done two acquaints in a dinghy, just enough to get the feel of the wind, a hostile at the end of a rope. Would I float? If the hull was damaged, how long can I hold my breath?
the day the ship went down and five
policemen made a circle round
the sand and something half imagined
was born in blankets up the beach
all that day a dog was running
backwards forwards, shaking the water’s
feathers from its fur and down
the sea-front noone came for chips
and then the sun went out and almost
madly the Salvation Army’s
two strong women raised and tapped
their softest tambourines and someone
stared at the sea between his shoes
and I who had the next door grave
undressed without a word and lay
in darkness thinking of the sea
I remember when I was a boy
rememberer
born not more than a mile from where I am now
a whole millennium going by in the form of a wave
Dad was pilot on the Dart
at two in the morning in a force nine gale
flashing a torch to lead her in
you can see the current sliding through that moment
over a thousand tons of ship plus cargo
the quay getting closer at full speed and at a certain pace
you get this pause superimposed on water I remember
two sisters, Mrs Allen and Mrs Fletcher
used to row the plums across from Dittisham
and one dawn there were seven crusader ships
in the same steady stream of wind
it isn’t easy to make out
in driving rain through water when you consider
your eyes are made mostly of movement
the cod fleet and the coal hulks and the bunkers from the Tyne and
a man sitting straight-up, reading a book in the bows while his Ship Was Sinking
(Humphrey Gilbert)
but that was way back, when a chap made his living from his wits,
when I still had my parting in the middle and you could pull up
forty thousand pilchards in one draft
I stood here, I saw a whole flock of water migrating,
I saw two square-rigged barges carrying
deals, battens, scantling, lathwood
going out again with empty casks,
bags of trickling particles, bones, salts
Lew Bird, Stormy Croker,
former pilots on the Dart
tiny spasms of time cross-fixed into water
and that same night, Dad took a merchant ship out
and left her at Castle ledge and she was bombed
and I saw the flames for hours up over that hill there
crabbers
two brothers, both sea-fishers. Left school at fifteen and joined the supercrabbers, big boats working out of Dartmouth and when I say working
Say it’s stormy, you walk a thousand miles just to stand upright. Each crab pot seventy pounds and the end ones that weigh the net down about the weight of a washing machine, that’s twenty tonnes of gear per day and only five hours sleep. Plus it’s high risk. We were out in a hurricaine twenty miles off the Sillies.
No greenery – when you’re at sea it’s all sea. Then you head for Dartmouth and fifteen miles away you can smell the land, you smell silage, you see lights and fires. You’ve got a thousand pounds for a week’s work, you’ve got five days to enjoy yourself. I went mad, I sent my wife champagne in a taxi.
I taxi’d to Plymouth, gave the cabbie lunch and paid him to wait all day for me.
We got a reputation, smashing up the town a bit, what could we do? Age fifteen we were big money, it was like crabs were a free commodity, we could go on pulling them from the sea year after year, it was like a trap for cash. Not to mention what some crabbers pull up, they don’t always set their pots where the crabs are.
Ten years of that you pay for it with your body. Arthritis in the thumbs, elbows, knees, shoulders, back. A friend of ours died twice lifting pots, literally died, he had two heart attacks and got up again.
So now we’re rod-and-lining off small piss-pot boats and setting nets for whatever. Some days we don’t catch anything. Don’t catch don’t eat. Me and my dog went six days without food last winter.
But we’re fisherman, Matt, we won’t starve
Sid, we’re allergic
to fish
But tell me another job where you can see the whole sunrise every morning. No clocking in, no time bell. In summer you can dive in, see whales jumping, catch turtles the size of a dory. You slap your hands on the boatside and tell me another job where a dolphin spooks you, looks you straight in the eye and lets you touch him. You don’t know what you are till you’ve seen that
they start the boat, they climb
as if over the river’s vertebrae
out of its body into the wings of the sea
rounding the Mew Stone, the last bone of the Dart
where the shag stands criticising the weather
and rolls of seals haul out and scrabble away
and the seal-watcher on his wave-ski
shouts and waves and slowly paddles out of sight.