Swimming with Seals Read online

  ‘We’re not here to find answers,’ I tell my students every year. ‘We’re here to ask better questions. There’s no such thing as a historical fact.’

  As well as an academic, I am also a writer of archaeological fiction. Note, not historical fiction, not really, although that is where my novels are usually pigeonholed. But they are set in the ninth and tenth centuries, and they deal with times and places, settings and circumstances and types of people for whom there is almost no conventional historical evidence. Most of my characters are reconstructed not from chronicles and letters but from the coins minted by a Viking king, from skeletal remains, from carved stones, or bronze or silver-gilt brooches. I’m interested in the minor characters, the spear-carriers, the ones who merit only the briefest mention, or who slip entirely between the gaps in history’s floorboards.

  So, what choice do I have here and now, looking at the landscape in front of me filtered through all the different overlays I carry in my mind, but to do the same thing, to try and find the stories of the people who lived here? I’m listening for their voices, whether they speak in Orcadian or Scots or English, Norn or Old Norse, in Pictish, or Latin, or something else entirely. These hills and shores echo with words uttered in languages known and unknown. I’m listening extra hard for the women’s voices, always more elusive than the men’s.

  The voices I carry in my head are persistent, too. My own ever-remorseful conscience; fragments of poetry and fairy tale; the constant imaginary conversations with people both living and dead. In the Old English poem, The Wanderer, the poet describes how in his sleep he has visions of those he has loved, now lost to him; he wakes in confusion to see the wintry waves and the birds; he talks about the fleotendra ferð, the floating spirits, and how they always elude him, swimming on their way. He describes them in words that elide birds and memories of the dead, the dreaming and the waking worlds. I first translated that poem when I was eighteen; and I have written undergraduate essays about it, used it to bolster arguments in academic publications, learned it by heart in Old English, chanted it as I walk or run or drive as a way of scaring off the feelings I don’t want to have. The first time I ever came to Orkney I thought, This is The Wanderer made into landscape – the wind, the cliffs, the ruins, the restless waves, although the poem survives in Exeter, almost as far from Orkney as you can be and still remain within the UK’s borders: the book which preserves it was bequeathed to Exeter Cathedral library by Bishop Leofric in 1072, and it’s been there ever since. I think about The Wanderer a lot when I’m swimming here at the Sands of Evie, the floating spirits of my own dead calling in the voices of the wind and the birds.

  I pause again, knee-deep now, the breaking surf buffering my planted legs and rocking me slightly, and I stretch my senses outwards, checking for birds and seals, looking for clues to today’s mood. I may come here every day, but I have never yet come to the same place twice.

  Of course the sea is always, everywhere, moving, but in Orkney this eternal verity is compounded. It’s not just the water, but the restless air as well: they conspire in endless movement. The wind governs life here in ways a ferry-louper, an incomer, like me can only slowly begin to comprehend. It shapes my body just as it does the land: makes me more Orcadian. Year on year I cut my hair shorter, and my leg muscles get sturdier from ploughing into the gale, step by dogged step. I’ve given up cycling, exhausted by having to push the bike downhill into a headwind. Every conversation about gardening starts with, Well, what shelter do you have? A couple of years ago, one of my MLitt students wrote her dissertation on the role of wind in local politics: it proved a fertile subject, touching everything from the management of AWOL wheelie bins to the placement of wind turbines. After a big gale, the fields are strewn with the corpses of bent trampolines and contorted polytunnels.

  Feng shui, the Chinese philosophical system designed to harmonize humanity and environment, means wind-water; and Orkney’s feng shui is potent, perennially visible in the flutter of grass, the tearing spindrift and the drama of the sky. I spent most of my childhood in Kenya, and the shifting play of light here reminds me of the shadows of clouds chasing each other endlessly across the East African savannah. The colours too – Orkney’s salt-burned, wind-scorched foliage gives the winter hills and fields a brown, brittle edge, like Kenya in the dry season.

  Every wind has its own personality, affecting the house in different ways: I’ve started thinking of an easterly as the cat-flap wind – and installing a cat-flap is a classic ferry-louper mistake – while a south-westerly, which makes an unearthly high-and-low whistling in our windows, is the trowie wind, named for the fair-folk, the little people, the mound-dwellers. One of the skills a new postie needs to learn in Orkney is how to park at each address depending on the airt of the day’s wind: get the angle wrong in the tunnel between shed and house and the van door could be wrenched right off, the letters and parcels carried to Norway on a prevailing westerly. It’s a longstanding problem: in the earliest survey of Orkney farmland, from about 1500, we hear farmers protesting that they can’t pay their taxes because all their topsoil has been ‘blawne to Bergen…’

  The wind makes for uncanny weather sometimes, not just wild. A dry fine spell in summer comes to an end – almost always – with a shift in the wind to the east, and the first fingers of fog creeping in, following the contours of the land. The summer fog – the haar – can last for day after day after day, a white blank wall across the whole archipelago, the hill roads unusable, the usually huge skies and horizons brought down to a few feet from your face, the air clammy and palpable. Headlights on full beam at noon. And the wind, which you’d think would blow the haar away, just keeps creating more, as the warmer air passes over the cold waters of the North Sea. It brings on cabin fever; I’ve heard it called suicide weather. One friend calls it Auntie Mary weather: Auntie Mary arrived for her first visit to Orkney on the day the haar come down, she stayed for a week and it did too, only lifting after her ferry had blundered back to Scotland. She never came back.

  Orkney’s restlessness inheres in the geology and the folklore as well as the air and the water. Across Eynhallow Sound, on the island of Rousay, there’s a standing stone, the Yetnasteen, which is said to lumber down to the loch to drink every Hogmanay. Over to my right, on the head-land of Aikerness, there is an outcrop of aeolianite, named for Aeolus, classical god of the wind, where wind-dropped sand is slowly turning to stone, cemented by the calcium carbonate of dissolving shells. The haunting tales about the selkies, the seal-folk who can come on shore in human form, dramatize transformation and exile and irrevocable loss.

  This very restlessness had been a powerful attractor in luring me back to Orkney, year on year, before we took the plunge and moved here, experimentally at first – We’ll give it a year, we said to friends and family, and see what happens.

  Where’s Orkney?

  Isn’t it very remote?

  Is that in the Hebrides?

  Will you have to learn Gaelic?

  Do they have roads?

  Do they have broadband?

  What on earth will you do?

  And, always, But isn’t it very dark in the winter?

  I have learned to bite back some of the more sarcastic answers, and respond with patience.

  Go to the top of Scotland and get a ferry.

  When you’re here it’s London that’s remote, irrelevant; Edinburgh marginally less so (but only marginally).

  Orkney is north, not west.

  It’s never been Gaelic-speaking.

  The roads are excellent.

  And the broadband is better than

  much of rural mainland Britain.

  I’ll write and I’ll teach, just as

  I always have done.

  As for the winter darkness, it’s mitigated by the brilliance of the Milky Way, and the aurora borealis.

  No one has ever said, But isn’t it very light in the summer?

  Yet I find the summer nights as exotic, an
d as challenging, as the winter days. For someone raised on the equator, Orkney’s rollercoaster of light and dark is intoxicating. By August I have become drunk and giddy on light, longing for twilight, the gleam of stars in a purpling sky. There comes an evening, around the time of the County Show, when I find I have to switch on the car headlights in darkness (rather than in haar) for the first time in months, and that little twist of a lever brings a sense of relief, changing pace, Greenwich Mean Time looming on the horizon. A deep inbreath after the long outbreath of summer. The ice cream parlour closes; the B & B owners put their feet up; the islands take off the mask they wear for tourists and settle in to the serious business of harvest homes, muckle suppers, ploughing matches; concerts and knitting circles and reading groups.

  County Show, they tell you, then winter… It’s true, too. After mid-August the sense of being sucked down into the vortex of the dark comes on at speed.

  On this particular winter day the dawn tide is ebbing fast. My habitual beach is in the embrace of a sickle-shaped bay, open to the north-west, and within the bay the currents are contained and gentle, usually running parallel to the shore. The old stone breakwater that points north like a compass needle takes some of the immediate force out of the wind-whisked sea. Beyond the headland of Aikerness, however, I can see thick white and dark fast-moving lines and swirls on the sea’s surface: even I’m not so stupid as to go into the water from there. Although the gale of the last week has now slackened the wind is still stiff enough to spur little white horses, flickering across from right to left, slapping against and occasionally cresting over the breakwater.

  I first came to Orkney in 1988, the summer after I turned twenty-one, after the final exams for my first degree.

  I was at a loose end. It was an accident.

  I cannot quite believe, looking back to that first of many visits, that I had never heard of these islands – I had been studying the thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas as part of my degree, and Orkneyinga Saga must surely have already crossed my radar – but my erratic, expatriate sense of British geography gave me little purchase on the map. My archaeology tutor had laughed at me only months earlier for confusing Leicestershire, Lancashire and Lincolnshire. Ignorant and irritable, I got on a train, and then another. A third in Perth, heading north through Cairngorm. Although I’d been to the Lake District, once, briefly, the idea that Britain encompassed such wild, empty landscapes was new to me. I’d never heard of the Highland Clearances. A fourth train in Inverness. Works on the line meant we were booted off at Dingwall, loaded on to a bus to reboard the train at Brora. I watched the names of the stations switching between Gaelic and Norse, gradually more of the latter. The train finally spat me out at the harbour town of Thurso, clinging to the surf-battered margin between Caithness and the Pentland Firth. I wandered down to the edge of town, wondering what the hell I was doing there, looked north across the water, and saw islands.

  What explains the lure of islands? Remote, wild, integral: hard to get to but infinitely beautiful and desirable – islands are their own places. Just to step off the ferry is to achieve something exciting. I’ve never wanted to give in to John Donne’s hectoring ‘no man is an island’; and even if he’s right it needn’t apply to woman.

  It was July, grey, wet, cold. The summer ferry from John o’Groats across to Burwick at the southernmost tip of South Ronaldsay was running. There was a bus to Kirkwall, the capital.

  I stayed for a week, as long as I could afford. It was like walking through a portal into the Anglo-Saxon and Norse texts with which I’d been stuffing my head for the last three years. Njál’s Saga, The Wanderer and The Seafarer, and Beowulf and Snorri’s Edda. I saw the sea beating the storm-cliffs, and the ruins of churches and halls and wartime huts; I exulted in decoding the Norse place-names – Stenness and Stromness, Scapa and Sandwick – and I stood at the Ring of Brodgar and thought about the eald enta geweorc, the ancient work of giants. In David Spence’s newsagents in the shadow of St Magnus Cathedral I came across Magnus by George Mackay Brown, and was blown away not only by the lyrical prose but by the way the novel shatters time in its analysis of power and its abuses, mashing up the twelfth century and the twentieth, mapping the landscape of Orkney on to that of the Nazi concentration camps. I took the ferry out to Egilsay to see for myself where St Magnus had been martyred. The sun and rain came and went; the wind was a constant.

  I fell in love, and not only because I had found a world that brought the early medieval North alive for me at last. For the first time since my family had moved away from Kenya I was encountering a landscape that felt familiar. The cloud-shadows hurtled across the hills. The past lurked just under the epidermis of the present. At the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae it felt as though the original inhabitants had only just left. I sheltered from horizontal rain in the lee of one of the standing stones at Stenness and shared local oatcakes and soft sour Grimbister farm cheese with another tourist, a young Frenchman who pointed out the dark shapes lying in the water of the brackish loch across the road. ‘Phoques!’ I stared at him, not understanding, startled by what sounded like a sudden obscenity. And then I saw them. Phoques. Seals.

  *

  Yesterday the Shipping Forecast website showed Force 10–12 in every single sea area. Today those blasting southerlies have gone, to be replaced by a light but nipping northerly. Air temp 4. Water stiller than it’s been for weeks. One shag, one grey seal, both very close – the shag oblivious, the seal fascinated, lingering, popping up and down, giving me the full effect of his deep, liquid gaze. The water feels colder – I didn’t take the temperature but I would guess 7. Stayed in for about 15 minutes, lots of time under the water.

  *

  Where do you start a story? In medias res, in the middle of things, like Homer; or introducing the theme with a fanfare flourish as Virgil does, kicking off The Aeneid – ‘Of arms and the man I sing’. Maybe a neat little portrait, with just a tinge of what we might read as irony, or maybe malice: ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’ Or a simple statement of beginning: ‘I was born in the year 1632, in the City of York.’ Take that a step further, and open the book with an account of the main character’s conception: ‘I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me…’ The right beginning encapsulates the narrative: the whole pattern present in a fragment.

  Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing.

  Maybe this one starts with an ending. My mother fell ill back when I was in my early thirties; I had just finished my doctorate on early medieval death and burial, and was looking for a job in universities in the United States as my then partner was American. My mother’s illness and death stopped all that; stopped the person I used to be; put me in a different place; in a cloud, a haar, a darkness.

  I have read that you should never make a huge, life-changing decision when recently bereaved, or pregnant. I did both, marrying when bereft and buying a house in Orkney when pregnant, and I regret neither, though there is a lot of unpicking and restitching to do. When you are lost in fog you use your senses differently. It’s not just sight that’s muffled; sound is also estranged; the dampness of the air and the way the beadlets of moisture cling to your skin make the direction of the wind hard to assess, and if you have no compass then the very concept of direction is also redefined. There’s no seeing the sun in haar. The patch of hillside beneath and around your feet is the only thing in colour, and the particularity of each purple bell of heather, each grey-green dendrite of sphagnum moss becomes hugely significant. It’s a balancing act: you’re newly alive to the micro-terrain, every tiny rise and fall, the sound of each step; teetering on the edge of a peat bank, stumbling into bog. You are utterly alienated from the familia
r. Sense of scale is lost. That roar could be the surf at the bottom of the cliff, or just the beating of your own heart.

  When the fog lifts at last, you see the old world with new eyes. It has never looked so beautiful, and so uncanny. How did I get here? This isn’t where I was when the haar came in. This isn’t where I’d planned to be.

  The decisions you make while lost in fog have their own coherence; they make sense at the time based on the information available.

  Hindsight, as we all know, is a wonderful thing.

  After that first visit to Orkney the cold, wet summer I was twenty-one, I was hooked, baited, trapped in a net of longing. I kept coming back through my twenties and thirties, with friends or partners, or on my own. It became a litmus test for relationships: I knew I had no future with someone who didn’t feel the lure of the islands, their peculiar blend of Scottish present and Norse past, the volatile sky, the ever-present sea. Life took me elsewhere for a long time, York for postgraduate study, London and Oxford and Leeds for the slog of academic apprenticeships. My mother fell ill. The walls started closing in.

  I met the man who was to become my husband less than a year after my mother died, in March 2003, at a party I didn’t quite feel up to. We first came to Orkney in late October, when we were still new to each other. I was keen to show him my special places, like the Broch of Gurness. From above, the broch, neatly excavated and presented, looks as though someone has dropped a pebble into green water: concentric ripples of wall and rampart.

  ‘It’s right on the sea now, but when the tower was first built in around 400 BC, the shoreline was possibly as much as forty metres further out. No one really knows what the brochs were for: they’re massive drystone structures, often compared to the cooling towers of old power stations. Brochs were architecturally complex, their double-skinned walls allowing height without too much weight, a stairway winding between the inner and outer layer of the wall. Look, the ground floor is internally subdivided and there are hearths, so people clearly lived here. No windows. Defence? But it would have been easy to wall people up and starve them out. And there are so many of them. From here at Gurness you can see ten more. Up and down the Evie shore alone we have Costa, Burgar, Grugar, Stenso and Ritten as well as Gurness. Elite residences? Communal winter quarters? Look over to Rousay – there’s the one at Midhowe…’