Seven-Tenths (19 page)

It can happen without warning. We might be travelling from one town to another without giving much thought to where we are, beyond being in a car or train. We look up and catch an unsettling glimpse of sea between hills. At once the day changes, becoming particular, much as it does when we hear of the death of a distant acquaintance. Suddenly we are made aware of a horizon, and over it has come a reminder of outlying importances which have always been there but have been temporarily forgotten. Merely knowing that the sea is near gives the landscape a different feel. For the rest of that day the edge of things nudges in towards us.

To most Europeans, at any rate, ‘the seaside’ is no mere littoral, a bald geographical margin where land happens to stop. It is too closely bound up with the past to be an indifferent location: with summer holidays, once-yearly pursuits, even erotic adventure. We delve in a cupboard in a winter month, looking for something, and come up instead with a pair of shoes from which sand trickles as from a snapped hourglass. At once we are flooded with memory. We almost hear surf break outside the window in waves which have crossed fields and city streets to find us. Summer’s gear with its sad charge is an authentically modern artefact.

Driving to a holiday place on the coast from a town or airport creates an expectancy which is both fulfilled and intensified by seeing the straight line of ocean off at an angle between trees.
Someone lives
here all the year round used
to be one’s private thought, but only half envious. That straight line is always of another time, of another land where maybe once one had been happy. Else it stands simply for promise, that tireless harbinger of loss. Anyone who travels is reminded: over just such a horizon is … the land where lemons bloom, where corals lie, the El Dorado or Atlantis of the future.

So coastal towns have quite a different feel from those inland, poised for ever on the edge of onward travel or of turning back. They exude impermanence, as if everybody there were touched by this
crucial indecision. Even their fabric is subject to it, as though the houses themselves knew that sooner or later they would find themselves eroded away or else stranded far inland. The old port of Dunwich, sometime capital and commercial centre of East Anglia, began to collapse into the sea in the middle of the eleventh century and now lies beneath the waves. And on the opposite side of the North Sea are Dutch fishing villages miles from the ocean, cut off from it by the building of the Great Dyke in 1932. (Tarshish, come to that, is today buried beneath the marshes inland from the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, north of Cadiz. In Jonah’s day, and well before that, it had been an entrepôt on a bay which stretched inland almost as far as Seville.) The idea of no abiding city is nowhere more evident than on a coast, where over the centuries the sea writes and rewrites its own margins.

Maybe this is why in Britain so many old people migrate to the seaside to await death. In order that it should not be too obvious they are drawn to the impermanent to gaze at annihilation, the towns are often built to look deceptively solid and are sited in places renowned for their therapeutic qualities. Yet to retire to Bournemouth is to admit to being in transition. There they are, chairs pulled up in long lines on the promenade, passengers on a municipal voyage. Maybe for some it is a return to a deep, inchoate thing which has been slumbering inside them all their lives. It is death which stretches before them to the horizon, a great absolving sheet beneath which they will slip. What is there to see which makes them stare long hours? The constant flux of waters holds something that mesmerises
Homo
, though whether it speaks of human origins or of individual destiny is unclear. Moving water has in it a fascination both lulling and imperative. Maybe all continuous movement, whether flames in a grate, crowds in a street, trees in a wind or the flicker of a television screen can catch at the mind and set it into introspective motion. Of all such things, only the ocean never moves without an underlying gravity, even on waveless days of sparkle and dance. No weather is inappropriate for a burial at sea.

Death as a voyage is a common trope and the sea invites embarkation whether the dead are literally set adrift in a boat with a few
possessions or sewn into a canvas shroud with the last stitch through the gristle between the nostrils and committed to the deep. Some, still on shore leave, may be seen drawn up on the council’s benches along a pier. Before life goes out with the tide the waiting ranks of the elderly may yet be quite unmournful since their conscious intention in migrating to these, their last resorts, was anything but morbid. Rosily remembered childhood treats and holidays at Blackpool, Margate and Skegness awake hopes of dignified rejuvenation. By retiring to the edge of things a lifetime of unfulfilled summer wishes might be made good or truced. It is rationalised by talk of a milder climate and sanctioned by doctor’s orders. Yet even the retired mind must know that most of the year is not summer. In the long winter months after dark, when invisible below the esplanade a black sea raps peremptory knuckles on the shingle, it is time at last to go.

Part of the pleasurable melancholy of beachcombing comes from speculating about where the objects came from, what they were, how long they took to arrive. Having been in the sea, jetsam, like wrecks, becomes pickled in agelessness. Even bright fragments of plastic give an impression that they might have been adrift for centuries or a week. A knowledge of winds and currents adds a further dimension of interest and I have spent hours like a maritime Holmes, pacing beaches and building up a mental map of how rubbish circulates in a complex archipelago. Once after three days of storm I walked a deserted coast and came upon the shelving mouth of a watercourse bringing floodwaters down from the hills in the far interior. The sea, still fretful, was tumbling in the surf the things it had thrown up together with what the river had brought down. Scattered around were sodden coconuts, splintered palm boles, empty condensed milk cans, shreds of nylon fishing net, the dull white sole of a training shoe.

I picked this last object out of the scum to look for a trademark which might give a clue to its origin. It was not a training shoe but the sole of a human foot, perhaps half an inch thick and trimmed of the toes. Its pulpy upper side, long since leached of blood and colour,
was threaded with nematodes. On the underside were the callosities and scars of a life lived barefoot. Although it smelt I sat with it a short while, wondering when and how each scar had been acquired. It was quite broad and, despite sloughing, still deeply lined in the arch. Not a young person’s foot. I imagined a middle-aged fisherman caught in the typhoon a few days earlier and presumed sharks had done the rest. It was hard to see why a shark would snip off the toes and leave the remainder or, indeed, how it could so cleanly have severed a flap of meat. But they are strange and beautiful creatures whose acute olfactory sense makes for impetuosity and abrupt switches of attention rather than thoroughness. Probably the victim had not been on his own and the animal had found a surfeit of food. I threw the sole back into the sea and rinsed my hands. Out under the waves would be sleek stomachs and powerful alimentary canals digesting a cigarette lighter, tatters of denim, a pair of spectacles.

Some people do not need actually to be in the water to experience the flexible boundary between life and death. For them it is enough to be on the sea in a boat. They are the victims of seasickness and frequently claim, while in the throes of this ailment, that they would far rather be dead. In this they are in august company. Cicero, having fled to sea to escape Mark Antony’s sentence of beheading, was so seasick he gave up and returned to Gaeta, preferring execution to the unconsummated death sentence passed on him by the ocean. Given how long human beings have been seafarers, it must be one of the oldest forms of illness to be described, consistent in its symptoms from culture to culture as across the centuries. No doubt its cause was occasionally attributed to malevolent sea spirits or witchery, but even in Antiquity people were quite capable of being rational about it. Plutarch was curious as to why it occurred only on the sea and not on rivers. He blamed the smell of the sea and the apprehensiveness of the sufferer, perceiving the psychological component which seems to play a large part in the condition. Apparently he never made the connection between seasickness and motion.

There are several seventeenth-and eighteenth-century treatises on seasickness with titles like
Dissertatio de Morbo Navigantium
, for it must always have been recognised as a problem for navies as well as for ordinary travellers, and therefore worth serious medical attention. One suspects it only attracted more general and popular concern during the nineteenth century, when there were enough passengers taking part in the mass emigrations to the New World. By the time tourism proper started, especially with excursions from England to the continent in the latter half of the century, seasickness was the subject of dozens of booklets
and articles. Most were more interested in remedies than in causes, the majority admitting that these were not well understood. Among the theories might be any of those suggested by doctors of the day: 

As for treatment, this generally amounted to heavy sedation. Thomas Dutton, a popular medical author writing in 1891, presumably thought travellers also needed the placebo effect of a bizarre regimen. His ‘cure’ began a fortnight before sailing and consisted of a light diet, a digestive pill at night, a glass of salt water twice a week before breakfast and a four-mile walk daily. Three days before travelling his patients began taking a medicine of ammonium bromide and chloroform. Once aboard ship they were to reduce the bromide as far as possible, avoid ship’s food and subsist on strong beef essence, dry biscuits and whisky or brandy and soda. In addition, Dutton recommended any or all of the following: chloral hydrate (favoured ingredient of the Mickey Finn or ‘knockout drops’), dilute prussic acid, iodine, amyl nitrite, cocaine in quarter-grain doses, creosote, cerium oxalate, soda bicarbonate, caffeine, eucalyptus and Nepenthe (a proprietary solution of opium in alcohol, dosage as per laudanum). The amyl nitrite was taken orally, diluted in alcohol. Any sufferer on this regime would be doing well if he was even aware of being on board a ship. Many travellers must have spent entire voyages in deep narcosis. In the meantime,
starting a ‘cure’ two weeks before any possible onset of the ailment might be presumed to have the effect of almost guaranteeing seasickness. The sufferer had thoroughly prepared himself to be ill, whether from the sea or the prussic acid. The glasses of salt water are odd. They were no doubt emetic, but they might also have had a homoeopathic function, as if small doses of salt might make one immune to the briny. That might also go for the iodine, which was derived from seaweed.

Several Victorian experiments were made in which cabins, restaurants and entire passenger areas of a ship were mounted on gimbals so as to remain steady, but these were not a success. The engineering problems were considerable, the boundaries between the ‘stable’ and the ‘moving’ parts obviously being zones of great danger. Such things reflected the consensus that at the root of seasickness was the ship’s motion. This was not quite as banally obvious as might seem. It had not occurred to Plutarch, after all, and until the mid-nineteenth century conditions on board most ships could induce sickness even if the vessel were tied up in port. The food was foul, the sanitation facilities fouler, and contagious disease easily transmitted in the cramped and generally overcrowded conditions. In the circumstances, any number of acute symptoms might mask or exacerbate those of ordinary seasickness. M. Nelken, in his advanced and sensible book
Sea-Sickness
(New York, 1856), added an appendix in which he gave details of the safety regulations made necessary by the flood of emigrants leaving Europe for America. The new regulations were an attempt to ‘apply a remedy to the gross abuses which have caused such vast numbers of persons to be swept into the grave, during the few short weeks of transit across the ocean’. In 1848 Congress finally passed an Act which for the first time regulated the amount of space allotted to each passenger as well as their total number. Even before Nelken published his book these new laws had effected a dramatic change and ‘already showed a great drop in the number of deaths aboard to an average of less than 1 per vessel’.

Nelken, like Dutton nearly forty years later, ascribed seasickness to motion, but unlike Dutton did not relate it to other forms of
travel and perceived it as a special case of motion sickness. ‘The same symptoms,’ wrote Dutton, ‘are often felt by some people, particularly children, when journeying by train or a vehicle, so we may have train-sickness, carriage-sickness etc.’ This only needs updating with the addition of car sickness and airsickness. Airsickness used to be a much greater problem than it is now because earlier aircraft, like earlier ships, were smaller and lighter. They had only a limited ability to avoid or fly above bumpy weather. Nowadays, airsickness bags are sordid but touching relics of a bygone age. As such, they are similar to those few remaining drinking troughs for horses in towns and cities. Once in a blue moon one might be used, filling onlookers with curiosity and pleasure.

The latest medical thinking about seasickness, according to a naval surgeon in Plymouth, is agreed. It is caused by ‘a discordant clash of information between the organs of balance and the eyes’. This diagnosis is charming, being wholly nineteenth century in its phraseology and vagueness. (It even begs the question of the blind.) Evidently the advances of the past 100 years are all in the field of medication, though many people would vastly prefer cocaine to Kwells. One is left to wonder why, among other things, a clash of information in the head should provoke sickness in the stomach. Each of our two inner ears contains three semicircular canals which are set at right angles to each other in three planes. The canals are filled with liquid whose movement stimulates receptors in the ampullae at the ends of the canals. The swirling of minute particles of chalk suspended in this fluid generally enables the brain to maintain our balance in relation to a stable exterior world. When that world becomes unstable, medical theory suggests, the brain-as-computer (always a doubtful model for that organ) goes into overload, confused by too many variables and a surfeit of conflicting messages from the inner ears, the eyes, the soles of the feet, etc. Why some people should be more sensitive to this than others is unclear. It is not the same as wondering why some people are allergic to shellfish, because seasickness is not obviously a matter of pure physiology. Psychology clearly plays a significant role and so does habituation. Even poor sailors can in time acquire a degree of
immunity or at least control if they have to. To most sufferers, however, the ailment remains like an advance symptom of death. It would surely be hard for such a person to view the sea at all impartially or shorn of its mortal associations.
*

Ever since he failed to find the reef he thought he saw and the boat he
was sure he had glimpsed, the lost swimmer has become conscious of
the gulf he hangs over. At least the empty but navigable plain which
surrounds him horizontally spreads itself beneath the sun’s broad eye.
Finding his way home again, back to life, will be a matter of simple luck
or simple physics. A puff
of wind here, an eddy there, and he will be
reunited with his boat. If for a moment he were able to raise himself
only 50
feet above the water he would spot it at once and the entire
traumatic incident would be at an end.

Beneath him, though, lies a dimension which absolutely refuses to
reduce itself to a matter of simple physics. The seabed is several
hundred metres away – perhaps 1,000
if he is further from land than
he thought. Up to a mile of water, in short. The swimmer tries to
remember what a mile looks like. The entire length of Oxford Street,
Centre Point to Marble Arch, but stood on end. As he contemplates this,
something unseen like a gush of sepia roars soundlessly up at him from
below, without warning, blotting out the sunlit layer which swathes
him. This chill black torrent is overwhelming in its despair. It is as
though a microscopic ghost had arisen from every test and skeleton of
the uncounted radiolaria and plankton bedded on the bottom and had
suddenly joined in a great upward fume. Far, far below, the basalt itself
is calling in a language of aeons, and its empty message echoes up
and spreads around him in a freezing, inky pool. This tectonic voice
paralyses him. It mocks all human hope. It is worse than his first panic,
worse even than the threat of death.