Shot through with wonder (First glimpse of the sea)

JOURNAL ENTRY

23^rd August, Friday

“All night the winds blew;
Battering and hooliganing
Around the boat.
Perhaps that’s why I woke
In a disquieted mood.

I stand on the bank
And feel my feet set squarely
On the towpath.
Each morning, a raven rows his way
Across the sky, from east to west.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

The towpath is looking a little unkempt with small branches and twigs scattered harum-scarum across the towpath; the aftermath of some very stormy weather. The winds have now dropped, but brooding clouds remain and rain has started to play rings upon the water and rattle on the roof. 

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of a late summer stormy night to you wherever you are. 

Thank you so much for coming. I was hoping that you could make it. The rain is forecast to get heavier, so come inside, and make yourself at home. The kettle is on the boil and the biscuit barrel is waiting on the side. Let's batten down the hatches and welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

August is a sociable month. A month of gatherings and re-groupings. The swallows are clustering in quite large groups now. They’re also spending more time in the trees; off the wing. Saving their energy, boosting their reserves, ready for their long flight home. All the while they chatter together. It sounds as if the trees are filled with troops of baby monkeys. Contact calls, making and reaffirming bonds (paired and kinship) that will carry them over the miles ahead of them.

The ducks too are massing during the day. Late summer moulting makes identifying male from female difficult at a distance. Juveniles are now beginning to swap their younger colours for more adult plumage. Most of the paired ducks dispersed to nest and bring up their hatchlings and so it is difficult to keep track on them. However, from the current numbers of the group here, it seems to have been a more successful season than last year.

The swan pair and their remaining three cygnets are well. The cygnets, still in their scruffy juvenile scrubs, but their babyish grey is taking on the scorched brown tinge that shows that their adult feathers are growing. They are nearly as big as their parents. They could probably look after themselves – although they still stay very close to their mother uttering their incessant piping cheeps. They give off the air of gangly tweenagers. That awkward phase of a child growing into a body that no longer quite fits them. It’ll be a few months yet before they will begin to learn to fly and be truly ready to flee the nest.  

All this busyness and re-gathering gives this time of the month a ‘back to school feel.’ Returning from holiday, catching up with old friends, sharing news, getting back to the old routines.   

Hazy blooms mist the indigo and mid-night blues of damson and sloe. Blackberries too add their deep night-sky colours to the hedgerows. And the elderberries are almost over. The reds here are only just beginning to show. Apart from the scarlet pillars of Lords and Ladies, of course. But black bryony is beginning to turn, and some haws have already reddened – although plenty more are still green. Rosehips though largely remain plastic-green capsules with only a few beginning to show the first signs of flushing red.  

The nettles and a lot of undergrowth is now thinning and dying back, creating a sparser look along the banksides. It bringing light once more to the ground layer hidden for the summer. It makes it easier to spot the lords and ladies (so completely hidden in the spring) and also the mosses and lichens shadowed by the ivy. 

And the ash keys, hang bat-like and the sycamore helicopters are ready to fly. The long grass is the colour of hessian and calico, and below sun-glint on the water.   

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

SHOT THROUGH WITH WONDER (FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SEA)

The very first time that I saw the sea, it sang to me a siren song of mermaids, and whales, and the flash and wheel of gulls. Our family minivan had just crested a hill and Mum said ‘Look, there’s the sea!” And there it was, stretched out before me; something immense, something solid, something wonderfully alive. It lay before us, grey-blue, bordered by an arc of whale-grey cliffs. Crested and sparkling in the sunshine.

I have no idea where it was – this first sight of the sea. I can still see it now, as if I were still there. A small boy, hanging off the back of the front seats, perched between Mum and Dad – these were the days long before seat belts and ‘clunk-click’ – transfixed by what I was seeing. Even more than that, I can still feel the feeling that this sight filled me with. A giddy sense of wonder and surprise. It looked exactly like the pictures that I would lose myself in, in my favourite comic summer specials or the Rupert Bear annuals. I seemed to have a fascination with the seaside when I was small. I loved stories and pictures of the seaside. The images pictured by the song ‘Morningtown Ride’ sung by The Seekers every weekend to announce Junior Choice rang in my imagination and painted my world with seaside colours.

“Train whistle blowing makes a sleepy noise
Underneath their blankets go all the girls and boys.

Rocking rolling riding out along the bay
All bound for Morningtown many miles away”

I had created such a definite and vivid picture Morningtown, at the end of the railway line, tucked beside a cove of blue sea and golden sand, starlit with crabs and starfish. At infants school I repeatedly tried to draw it. It was one of my first experiences of artistic frustration. I fought my recalcitrant hands as they gripped the thick stubby crayons to follow the lines of the familiar town that lay with such clarity behind my eyes. But the crayons skated over the rough sugar-paper, unrolled and handed out to us by the teacher, leaving oily snail trails of grease and washed-out greens and yellows and blues. Even to my infantile mind, I recognised that it looked nothing at all like the Morningtown I knew so well inside my head and dreams. I had to fill in the gaps with lengthy explanations to the patient teacher, chasing elusive words to complete the forms that my hands were incapable of.

And now, from the back of this little pea-green minivan, as we descended down the high hills to the shiny ocean glimmering below us, there it was!

It really was real! It did exist. There it was, just as it was pictured. It was there, physically, tangible. The choppy blue mass of ever moving water, glinting and glittering with shards of light, like Christmas foil, bearing small boats that bobbed and swayed. It was very like the feeling that I had waking up one Christmas morning and finding that the empty pillowcase that had been placed at the end of my bed really was still there and filled with presents. It was not that I think I didn’t believe it would happen, but I must have had doubts, deep down, as I wouldn’t have felt that way. Perhaps, that is what I felt about the sea.

Perhaps that is why it has left such a vivid impression in my memory. It was one of the first times of intersection between the world inside my head and the world in which my body lived, where thoughts became reality, where things I dreamt about became tangible in a physical, solid way. Where wonder wasn’t a thing imprisoned in imagination or the pages of a book, but that they could be found here on the earth – and, if anything, they were even better. My imagination wasn’t a place of escape, but one of preparation and introduction. The world was so much larger than me!   

This feeling, these random encounters, this convergence between interior wonder and my experiences within the exterior world have occurred many times since then. Often, they are small, a fall of the light on a copse of trees, the shade of paint on a house wall, the sound of a dog barking in the distance on a misty autumn evening. Moments shot through with a grandeur that shakes me free from the passivity of existing. Moments when the wonder within embraces and kneels to the wonder of life and the living. Moments when life becomes larger than itself.

Maybe, the sea does that to a person. The first sight of it, somehow, burrowing existentially deep into the very core of one’s being.

Maybe, but then possibly not.

I began by saying how this, outside book illustrations and comic strips, this was my very first encounter with the sea. And certainly, for the most part of my life, I held that to be the truth.

But then, a few months ago, I was going through the many photo albums of my parents and I came across an old monochrome photograph that made me re-evaluate the whole thing.

It is a photograph of mum and dad paddling in the sea. Both are bare-footed. They stand on wet sand dusted with small pebbles and seashells. Mum is wearing what looks like a white summer dress. Dad is wearing a pullover and has his trouser legs rolled up to mid-calf. They both stand at the very edge of the water; gentle wavelets ripple towards their bared toes. A little further out, a small wave curls and breaks into a thin line of foaming. Further out still, two strangers wade, waist deep. The pillar of a beach groyne stands sentry-like on the horizon. Between them is me. They both hold one of my hands to support me. I am wearing a nappy and am looking up slightly, as if I’m about to say something to mum. Both mum and dad are bending down, as if to watch my expression as the tiny wavelets sweep up the wet sand to cover my feet.

I can hazard a guess where this photograph was taken. Both my grandparents had retired to the south-east coast. Grandma and Grandpa (on my maternal side) were living in Wittering, Bracklesham Bay. On dad’s side, Grampie and Chick had moved to Herne Bay. Seaside visits were therefore a common event in my early life. I have vague memories of being at both. Sitting among sun-warmed pebbles, smooth and salty. The smell and tacky feel of beach tar that I couldn’t get off my fingers or clothes. Sitting with my back to the concrete abutment that formed part of the promenade.       

The coast and the sea were clearly already very much part of my life before that moment, years later, in the minivan, descending that winding coastal road down to the beach. If my imagination fuelled my fascination with seaside pictures in comics and books, then it was informed by very real experiences, the Morningtown Bay was very much coloured by the bays and coastal towns I had already known.

Perhaps that is what gave such potency to the images and spells they wove – or was it, that we wove together, these pictures and I? Perhaps that is why the lyrics of ‘Morningtown Ride’ drew me so powerfully – I too, like the children in the song, had slept my way out along the bay, to awake in the Morningtowns of my own world.

Somewhere within the tiny me, I had known that -

“Somewhere there is sunshine somewhere there is day
Somewhere there is Morningtown many miles away”   

I had already known, as John Betjeman describes in his ‘Seaside Golf’:

[READING]

Yes, that seaweed smell, and the iodine sharp, ozone smell, and beach-wrack, and the sharp grit of sand between toes, and the lick of salt on the tidal winds. The swarms of sand hoppers, and piping of terns and the flute of oyster catchers, and the bubbles of corrosion on the white painted iron-work railings that lined the prom and wept burgundy red tears of rust where the waste pipes gurgled down the drains, and the telescopes shuttered tight for pennies, and the little packet of cheaply printed flags to proudly fly from our bucket-shaped sandcastles. The scrape of pebbles and the hiss and suck of shingle, hopping scorched-footed across the sea-grit until the smooth caress of firm, warm sand, sprinkled with lugworm casts, had been reached. And barnacled rockpools, slime edged with seaweed that we would later gather and dry to tell the weather, and popping bladder wrack and mermaids’ purses. Yes, all that I already had known – and yet in the mythic world of my mind, it lay dormant, hidden out of conscious sight, until awoken by an old photograph in an album of recent ghosts. 

Betjeman again paints pictures so redolent and familiar

[READING FROM ‘TREBETHERICK’)

And these lines too, from his ‘Greenaway’

[READING]

Now I look again at that old photograph – 60 and a good bit more years old – and conjure up in my mind that exclamation of Mum in the front seat of the minivan ‘look, there’s the sea!’ and the memory still fresh of the first time I saw the sea. Although, I now know it wasn’t. In one way, at least. For, a long time before this, I had paddled, young to this world, in the calm waters of a south-coast sea.

But I am tempted to say, in another way, despite all this, it was the first time I saw the sea. That I saw it in all its wonderous grandeur that could touch something alive deep within me and fill me with wonder and a set me afoot on the goose-chase of my future histories yet to be written.

Perhaps, therefore, it is right that that experience I had in that little minivan on top of the sea cliffs, all began years before, when a very small child stood barefooted on sandy ground held gently in the hands of his mum and dad. 

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG