Читать книгу The Sea Inside - Philip Hoare, Philip Hoare - Страница 6

I have lived long enough in the Shire to be

able to afford to go away from it with pleasure.

I suppose this is what homes are for. If one

hadn’t got an anchorage it wouldn’t be

exciting to sail away.

T.H. WHITE, England Have My Bones, 1936

In the years since I have come back to it, the house has grown to become part of me. It is held together by memories, even as it is falling apart. Surrounded by ivy and screened by trees, it has become an enclosed world, left to itself. As I look out from my bedroom window, a blackbird paces out the garage roof, over which a broken willow hangs. Below, tadpoles swim blindly in a slowly leaking pool.

Every day here is the same. I work at the same time, eat my meals at the same time, go out at the same time, go to bed at the same time. I hold fast to my routine, anchoring a life that might otherwise come adrift. But at night the anarchy of my dreams disturbs this self-imposed regime, freefalling till I regain the rituals of the morning.

I’m woken by the cold outside my window, the dark pressing against the glass. I listen to the litany of the forecast, taking me around the coast –

Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay, Trafalgar, FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes

– places I’ll never visit but whose names reassure me with their familiar rhythms, while their remote conditions seem strangely consoling.

Low, losing its identity, mainly fair, moderate or good, falling more slowly, mainly fair in west, occasionally poor in east, good.

I pay attention to the wind direction; not for my boat, but for my bike. A northerly means a chilly but fast ride south, an uphill struggle on my return. A prevailing sou’westerly signals a speedy cycle home, the wind behind my back like a sail. I peer through the curtains for a faint sign that the long night is drawing to a close.

Variable three or less, fog patches at first, becoming mainly good.

Outside, I smell the night-morning air; promising and inviting, or closed-down and denying. I unlock the old brass padlock on the garage door and pull out my bike, feeling for its cable lock like reins.

I follow the same route. I’ve been doing it so long that my bike could steer itself to its destination. Its tyres know every crack in the tarmac, every worn-out white line, every pothole. The urgency of my mission leaves the sleeping houses behind. I ride like my mother walked, at a furious pace, always trying to keep up with myself. As though, if I went fast enough, no one would see me.

It’s December. The colour has yet to seep back into the sky, before the warmth of the night meets the cold of the dawn. My body is geared to the bike. Green lights signal to non-existent cars; I sail through on red. Sodium lamps soak the streets in a Lucozade haze. I ride down the white lines, arms outstretched, reclaiming the road.

Soon I pass out of the suburb’s sprawl, from the land to the sea. Crunching through the shingle, along furrows made on earlier visits, I rumble to a halt at the appointed spot. Leaning my bike against the sea wall, I climb over and – no going back now – lower myself in.

The water is so clear it scares me. Fish leap up as though they’d dropped out of the clouds. Everything is rising to the surface, summoned by the light, slowed to the sea’s heartbeat. The water brims like an overrun bath. I push out through the stillness of the standing tide, my hands creating the only ripples.

I drift out as far as I dare. Borne up by the water, I turn briefly on my back, hips held to the sky, before striking back for the shore. I haul myself out, my body pink and steaming like a wet dog. The scar on my knee is a livid purple; my white T-shirt glows blue in the faint light.

Birds become visible and audible before the sun rises and the world wakes, a netherworld neither dark nor light, out of time. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet of ‘The Wanderer’ had a word for it, ūhta, ‘the hour before dawn’, as he travelled by winter, watching ‘the sea birds bathing, stretching out their wings’.

It’s over all too quickly. A frail sun appears over the trees, milky-lemon pale, more like the moon. The morning begins. My body suffers but my spirit soars at having stolen a march on the day; having been rewarded as well as punished. I’ve forgotten my gloves. I stuff one hand, then the other, in my pockets. A skein of geese fly low over the mud. Curlew call out their names – curl-you, curl-you – whistling through their arched bills. Gulls clamour.

Cloud layers over cloud, plum, purple and navy, cocoa, khaki and grey. The cold surrounds me, almost comforting. The light lifts and falls. I smell the iodine of the shore and an intimation of drizzle in the air as the birds’ noise rises in a crescendo, an orchestrated start to the day. The docks rumble into action. A brightly-lit liner sails up the estuary, silent yet so full of people, a distant glimpse of glamour.

The night fades away. I race the ship back to port, flushing a lone and indignant duck from the freshwater pond that has gathered at the mouth of a shingle stream. Somewhere in the woods a woodpecker hammers. The dawn is replaced by ordinary day; the emptiness soon filled by the commonplace. I can see my hands once more. Everything seems to pause in these final moments, as though the performance were put on hold, even as it begins again.

The beach isn’t much of a beach. It’s really all that’s left behind by the slow-moving estuary, more a kind of watery cul-de-sac, fed by two converging rivers. One is filtered through chalk downland to the north-east, flowing through watercress and filled with swerving trout, slowly widening and losing its virginity until it reaches a carved-out bay in the semi-industrial arse-end of the city. Its outer curve, bulwarked by great heaps of rusting cars, is strewn with every imaginable item of litter, deposited by the tidal flow. Its fellow river emerges from the far side of the city, broadening through reed-seeded marshes into the shadow of the docks – a forbidden land where giant cranes stalk like wading birds, and where shiny new cars begin a journey which will end in the same kind of dump in the same kind of city. Yet somehow, somewhere, all this is forgotten in the conjunction of tide and shingle: something quietly miraculous, perpetually renewed.

The sea defines us, connects us, separates us. Most of us experience only its edges, our available wilderness on a crowded island – it’s why we call our coastal towns ‘resorts’, despite their air of decay. And although it seems constant, it is never the same. One day the shore will be swept clean, the next covered by weed; the shingle itself rises and falls. Perpetually renewing and destroying, the sea proposes a beginning and an ending, an alternative to our landlocked state, an existence to which we are tethered when we might rather be set free.

I say it isn’t much of a beach, but that doesn’t do it justice, since it has a beauty all its own – more so for being seldom visited out of season except by dog-walkers and anglers. It is set at the end of a shallow bay that marks the south-eastern limits of the city. To reach it, I ride along a waterfront set with desultory concrete shelters and backed by common land to which are chained half a dozen horses. Behind stands a post-war housing estate, one-quarter of whose population live in poverty.

The path ahead passes through a stand of trees, then gives way to the beach, bordered by a waist-high sea wall with a narrow ledge, just wide enough for a person to walk along. To the landward is a sweep of grass and an avenue of oaks and pines. Gnarled and bowed, they mark an old carriageway that leads, with a grandeur out of all expectation, to a Tudor fort and a Cistercian abbey that once dominated this eastern bank of the estuary. Now the abbey lies in ruins, surrounded by scrubby woods and stagnant stewponds, while the fort, built out of stone robbed from the dissolved abbey, became a grand Victorian pile, recently extended in a replica of itself as a series of expensive apartments.

In this interzone, the modern world has yet to wipe out the past. Although the city is in sight, this place can seem haunted on a winter’s afternoon, with its bare trees bent back by the prevailing sou’westerlies, and its rotting wooden piles, the remains of long-decayed jetties. The yacht club’s boats stand unattended in their pound, the wind rattling nylon lines against aluminium masts in a continual tattoo.

Further down the shore, after an interruption of small shops and terraced houses, is a country park, the site of a huge military hospital. It exerted its own influence for a century or more, but it too has been demolished, absorbed into the turf, leaving only a nuclear shadow and its chapel dome poking through the trees. One day those tower blocks on the shore will be romantic ruins, too, relics of the work of giants.

If the weather is good, I’ll cycle past the park to a far beach, overshadowed by holm oaks rooted in a low bank of gravelly, gorse- and bracken-clad cliffs, where southern England is slowly collapsing into the sea. As I ride, my route parallels the forest on the other side of the estuary. There may be barely three miles between me and its purple heath, but they might as well mark a continental divide. Not only because we are separated by water, but by virtue of what stands on the distant shore and now dominates the entire waterline, a triumvirate of new, industrial installations: oil refinery, chemical plant, and power station.

In the changing light, this cluster of cryptic structures could be anything. Tapering spires for a new place of worship; circular tanks as giant igloos, pale green with rusty streaks; silos like newly-landed space ships; tripod gantries ready to fire salvos of secret missiles. At dawn or dusk, the whole place might be a martial Manhattan, replicating every day, sprouting out of the shore, an alternative new forest of steel. There’s no human scale to this petropolis; it has a curiously temporary feel, although it has been here for half a century. It might be disassembled in a day and imported to some other shore on the other side of the world. Stripped down, utilitarian, it makes no apologies to its surroundings. It has only one function: to make the fuel that confirms its existence. It is brutal, practical, inevitable.

Like the nearby docks, this great complex, which employs more than two thousand workers, is sealed from public access. My own uncle worked there after his wartime service in Kenya, although I couldn’t tell you what he did – any more than I know what he was doing in the middle of Africa in 1943, beyond the photographs of him in khaki shorts and a pith helmet, along with aerogrammes sent out by his family and kept carefully preserved in a Senior Service cigarette tin.

I’ve grown up with this place, which is only just older than me; I have no memory of the virgin shore before the coming of the towers, now imprinted on my view of the shore. Their stacks occasionally burst into life like huge Bunsen burners, as though the whole thing were some gigantic experiment, or a memorial to an unknown warrior. First lit in 1951, these flares commemorate an age of energy and industry, power and destruction. Their function is to burn ‘excess gases’, but as their orange-red tongues lick the sky, they could be drawing directly from the molten depths of the earth, rather than the crude oil from the Middle East which is pumped from tankers that line the mile-long terminal, five abreast like petro-cows waiting to be milked, their bridges branded with slogans, NO SMOKING and PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT.

To process its daily quota of three hundred thousand barrels of oil, Fawley sucks three hundred thousand tonnes of water from the sea, claiming to return it cleaner than it was before. (In fact, many living organisms are drawn in too: fish are caught in screens and often die, while smaller fry are sent through the factory’s cycle as though through a washing machine, a process which few survive.)

Indeed, the word ‘refinery’ itself is deceptive, since its end products have precisely the opposite effect on the world into which they are released. And while the site is declared to be perfectly safe, its neighbours live in the knowledge that in the event of an emergency, they would be evacuated from their homes, just as the islanders of Tristan da Cunha were evacuated from theirs during the volcanic eruption of 1961, and were brought to a military camp here, in the shadow of the neighbouring power station, close to where their descendants still live. Its cylindrical chimney, an enormous ship’s funnel on a concrete liner fading into pale blue, marks the end of the estuary and the beginning of the sea. Beyond is the tantalising outline of the Isle of Wight and its fields and downs. In the winter, when the trees lack leaves, I can see it from my window, its pairs of red points blinking like landing lights, foreshortening the distance between me and the sea, making it seem suddenly nearer.

Despite its industrial installations and historic layers, this is an unspectacular, unremarkable landscape. You could easily drive by and take away nothing from this place. Many do. No one writes books about this shore. No one who does not live here knows anything much about it, and even those who do would be at pains to report anything noteworthy about the place they see every day.

I just happen to live here. I didn’t choose to; it chose me. I might have found a more picturesque place, wild and romantic or urban and exciting; the kind of places people pass through here to reach. A port city relies on its relationship to elsewhere. Perhaps that’s why I like it so well, since it does not impose any identity on me. I came back here from habit as much as choice, like the birds that migrate to and from its non-descript shores.

You assume you know your home. It’s only when you return that you realise how strange it is. I first saw this beach half a century ago, but all those years have made it seem less rather than more familiar. I’ve taken it for granted. But now, as I look out over its expanse, it occurs to me that what I thought I knew, I didn’t really know at all.

The first recorded settlement here was Roman – the port of Clausentum – followed by Anglo-Saxon Hamwic; Southampton translates out of Old English as ‘south home town’. Sholing, where I live, barely existed until modern times: its name is a contraction of ‘Shore Land’; its neighbour, Netley, means ‘wet wood’. Until the nineteenth century, this was common land, coursed by a Roman road and scattered with tumuli and cottages; an oddly isolated area, separated from the rest of Hampshire on three sides by rivers and the sea. Troops trained here; shanty towns of huts were set up for navigators working on the railway line and the sprawling military hospital. Their presence may have been why this place became known as Spike Island, a slur on its itinerant population of travellers and horse-traders, and a wry reference to a notorious penal colony of the same name in Ireland’s Cork Harbour, Inis Pich. There was a wildness to this heathland. One corner was named Botany Bay, after the destination of the transportees who were held there – as their Irish counterparts were in Cork Harbour – before being shipped out to the ends of the earth.

Even now, this eastern side of Southampton Water can feel insular, outcast. A place through which to pass, rather than to stop at for its own sake. There’s a sense that anything could happen here and already has, caught up in the flow of changing tides and people and animals and beginnings and endings, the obscure currents of history.

Recently, I flew home after spending some days on the banks of a Scottish sea-loch. The north had been dramatic, monumental, with rivers of mist running down granite valleys, falling like dry ice into the still, deep water from which the mountains rose on the other side, blue-purple and faintly oppressive. The skies were overcast by the damp Gulf Stream and second-hand winds from the Caribbean. Flying back south, I felt an immense lifting of the atmosphere as the sun broke through the clouds and the plane banked over Southampton.

In those few minutes I saw the past and present unroll beneath me, as in a camera obscura. The horizon had vanished, to be replaced by a careering view, as chaotic as it was ordered. The plexiglass porthole filtered the light like a prism, and gave the scene a watery air. I might have been looking out from the side of a ship or even from a submarine.

Down there, somewhere, was my house, sheltered by trees and shrubs. To the south lay the sea, a broad strip of blue-green bordered by yellow shingle. As the plane flew over the beach I knew so well, but could hardly recognise from this angle, it turned back from the forest and into the heart of the docks, passing monumental cranes and ocean liners lined up like bath toys, swimming pools shimmering in the sun. Then it flew over the bridge that connects one side of the city to the other, over the school I first attended more than four decades ago.

The afternoon sun lent it all a glowing sheen, highlighting every reflective surface. Even the scrapyard and its defunct cars reduced to metal screes acquired an allure, shining like piles of iron filings. Seeing all this laid before me, even after only a few days away, made me intensely happy and profoundly sad, its streets and shores so familiar that they seemed extensions of my own body. Finally, descending to the airport, we touched down on southern soil once more.

This suburban sea is a living thing, ever shifting as it is contained. Everything seems open to the light, some subtle combination that has never been seen before and will never be seen again: the sun forced from under a bank of cloud, a pure white egret like a flapping appar-ition, a pair of mute swans gliding close to shore. Even on the dreariest days, the most forlorn afternoons, it’s never not beautiful here. The slow surging waves seem to be suppressed by the mist, yet every sense is heightened. I can smell the forest across the water. Sound behaves differently; with no buildings to bounce from, it spreads over the surface and soaks back into the sea.

Black-headed gulls, barely more than pale smears, splash their heads and wings. Unresolved shapes drift by. Everything coalesces, caught in a dreamy, half-hallucinatory loop. There are shadows under the water as it withdraws over weed and rusty outfall pipes. A distant yacht becomes a silent white smudge. A fall of black crows scatter in the murk. The saturated greens and browns of grass and leaves turn the colour balance awry, in the way that reds and greens take on an eerie vividness before a storm, when the pressure appears to affect the light itself.

My time is determined by the ebb and flow. At low tide, the beach is an indecent expanse laid bare by retreat, more like farmland than anything of the sea: an inundated field, almost peaty with sediment, as much charcoal as it is sludge.

Bait-diggers leave little piles by their sides like slumped sandcastles. With their buckets and spades, they might as well be burying as disinterring, these sextons of the shore. Standing over them is an outfall marker in the shape of an X, which has turned to become a cross. In the uncertain light, the mud takes on new colours, from black to taupe and even a kind of rubbed silver.

As I say, it is never not beautiful here.

Behind me, bare oaks and beeches lie as cracks against the sky, evoking a peculiarly English landscape. In the late eighteenth century, Turner drew the abbey’s ruins in his sketchbook, tracing out the trees that had grown up around the crumbling gothic arches. In 1816 John Constable stayed at Netley on his honeymoon, and painted its scudding clouds and billowing greenery. Theirs were records of a Romantic setting, an alternative reality of sensation and emotion. Hanging over the shore, the gnarled, enamelled branches are made darker by the reflected light of the sea and the stretch of bright shingle. My shortening eyesight renders it all abstract, blurring the scene like Turner’s evocations of nothingness, with their vague shapes that might be waves or whales or slaves tossed overboard, rising and falling in foam with ‘a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it’, as Ishmael says in Moby-Dick, ‘until you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant’.

That fixity of sea and sky is a supreme deception. Over it lies what Herman Melville called the ocean’s skin – a permeable membrane, one-sixteenth of a millimetre thick, fertile with particles and micro-organisms and contaminants; a fantastically fragile yet vast division. The horizon is only an invention of our eyes and brains as we seek to make sense of that immensity and locate our selves within it. The sea solicits such illusions. It takes its colour from the clouds, becomes a sky fallen to the earth; it only suggests what it might or might not contain. Little wonder that people once thought the sun sank into the sea, just as the moon rose out of it.

Not many artists come here now to see the sun set or the moon rise. Netley’s beach is hardly thronged with easels, and Turner and Constable left long before the refinery turned the shore spiky with petro-chemical romance. Perhaps the strangest thing about this massed industry is its absence of sound, at least at this distance, both innocent and ominous at the same time, although occasionally the plant emits a dull indefinable roar, like a giant stirring in its sleep.

This is a place both dead and alive. Being here, in or by the water, at either end of such a cold, closed-down day makes me physically part of it. A crested grebe pops up, charting the shallows for its prey. It arches its neck to dive again, as I swim towards it. A jumpy, almost nervous plunge, a little leap forward, then it’s gone.

As with so many things about birds, you have to take a lot on trust; to discern what is real, and what they want you to believe. The pattern of a duck’s feathers, for instance, breaks up the surface, blurring its body between water and sky, an effect that prompted the American artist Abbott Thayer to suggest eye-dazzling camouflage for First World War soldiers and ships, mimicking natural cover in an industrial war. A grebe’s markings, intensely detailed against the grey of the sea, may seem darkly obvious to us, but from below, its white throat and breast renders it invisible, able to deal death with its stiletto bill. Thayer called this disguise ‘counter-shading’; it lends animals from birds to whales a flat deception in the overhead sun, making them seem insubstantial rather than solid things.

As they emerge from their dives, I realise that there are half a dozen birds patrolling, moving into their winter haunts. From their own level, in the water, I feel accepted, or at least tolerated – any bird will have seen you long before you see it. I’m too far away to see the grebe’s blood-red eyes, although there’s a suggestion, even at this distance, of the outrageous ruffs which once supplied Edwardian society with stolen plumage. But then, grebe parents will pluck out their own feathers to feed their chicks, lining their young stomachs against fish bones.

The tide ebbs, and the birds assemble, as if someone had laid the table and called them in to dinner. Gulls and geese are already working the shoreline, as are the oyster-catchers, in their white winter ‘scarves’. They’re one of my favourite birds: familiar, stalwart, forever looking out to sea.

Untrue to its name, imported from its American cousin, the Eurasian oystercatcher eats mostly mussels and cockles teased from the shore, using its greatest asset: a bone-strengthened bill, part hammer, part chisel, able to prise open the biggest bivalves. Delicately coloured carrot-red to toucan-yellow – it might be made of porcelain – it is a surprisingly sensitive probe. At its tip are specialised Herbst corpuscles that allow the bird to sense its prey by touch as well as sight; an oystercatcher can forage as well by night as by day. Perpetually prospecting the beach, it stabs and pecks or ‘sows’ and ‘ploughs’, altering its methods to suit its prey. It can even change the shape of its bill – the fastest-growing of any bird – morphing from blunt mussel-blade to fine worm-teaser in a matter of days.

Living and dying by its wits, the oystercatcher has evolved to take advantage of its environment. It has been present on Southampton Water for centuries, if not millennia: graffiti’d into the sixteenth-century plaster wall of the port’s oldest house is an oystercatcher, a scratchy Tudor cartoon of an animal familiar from the nearby shore. In 1758, Linnaeus classified it as Haematopus ostralegus – blood-footed oyster-picker – but in Britain, where it was prized as a dish, it was called sea pie and was reduced to near-extinction in some southern sites. In modern times the birds were seen as threats to cockle beds: from 1956 to 1969, some sixteen thousand were shot in Morecambe Bay alone.

My oystercatchers, if you’ll forgive the proprietary tone, may feed and roost here, but they nest as far away as Belgium and Norway. They’d do well to steer clear of France, where hunters still shoot two thousand of them every year for recreation, sometimes ten times that many. These monogamous animals have complex social structures and can reach forty years or more, the longest-living wading bird. And they always return here, where they feel most at home. Their peeping calls drift over the water as they fly in low formation, wings emblazoned with white streaks. They settle to forage on the tideline, occasionally breaking into indignant arguments.

I raise my binoculars. I spy on them, they spy on me, one eye always on the stranger. As I watch, they’re joined by ringed plovers. The skittish newcomers bank in synchronised circles, suddenly swerving as if they’d hit some unseen current, then performing a deft communal turn to land. As they do so a gull takes off clumsily, lurching into their flight path and causing them to scatter. Rapid wings rev into reverse. All of a sudden, they’re on the ground, camouflaged bodies merging into the mud.

As timid as they are, the plovers are unfazed by the ever-present carrion crows that have established themselves here, a black-flapping backdrop in the car park. Overnight they’ll empty the bins like delinquent dustmen, leaving the tarmac strewn with the guilty evidence of their scavenging. Surveying the drifting fish-and-chip wrappers, they avert their eyes as if to say, ‘It wasn’t us.’ Although my books tell me that they’re solitary animals, they gather here in a great fluid flock of two hundred or more. Perhaps they’re evolving into aquatic birds, just as the gulls have moved inland to rubbish tips and shopping precincts.

There are other worlds of communication going on here, unknown orchestrations of action. Every so often the crows will rise up in waves, bird-shaped holes in the sky. They’re a lustrous lack of colour, denuded of detail; a fluttering negation, as dark as the night. Ted Hughes, who made a new myth of the crow, saw the bird as suffering everything even as it suffers nothing. Encouraged by its ugly name, we indict its assemblies as ‘murders’; yet crows mark the passing of one of their number in funereal demonstrations, cawing their grief in the way elephants and whales mourn their dead.

These ignored birds – whose ubiquity only makes them less visible – display the fascinating behaviour of their family. Broad-shouldered males swagger from one leg to another. Using their thick, oiled-ebony beaks, they peck over stones so much more dexterously than a wader or a gull. There’s a determined, discretionary air to their epicene foraging, although actually they’ll eat almost anything. They seem surprised if you stop and look at them, as though no one had bothered to do so before. They stare back briefly, abashed, then turn away, unable to believe that anyone other than their own might find them interesting. Or perhaps there is disdainful pride in that sideways glance, assuming the reverse: that they are the most intelligent of all birds.

As indeed they are. Raptors may be more majestic, songbirds sing more sweetly, waders are more elegantly poised, but corvids such as crows and ravens exceed them all in matters of the mind.

You can see it in their body language. They’re full of character, with their grizzled, quizzical stances; individuals, possessed of particular attributes. Their eyes glitter and their heads swivel with curiosity, ever alert to what is going on around them. Bold and twitchy, timid and territorial, their restlessness is a sure sign that something is going on in their heads. Singly or en masse, they react to every sound and movement. They’re always aware of what the others are doing: fighting, preening, competing, conspiring, minding each other’s business to see if it can be outdone. If a fight breaks out between two of them, the others will swoop in from the trees around to see what’s going on, like children in the playground chanting Fight, fight, fight. They’re irredeemably nosy, socially-adjusted birds.

Crows appear crafty to our eyes, since we seem to find intelligence in any other species than our own suspicious (I write all this down in my policeman’s notebook, as if I were about to arrest one of the avian young offenders). They’re an alternative community over our heads; gypsy birds, a mysterious race with their own hinterland. They live on the periphery in the way that all animals do, existing on the same plane as we do but inhabiting another time and space. They even have their own voices, resembling the patterns of human speech: captive corvids can be taught to speak as well as, if not better than parrots; it is one reason why they were said to be carriers of dead men’s souls. Acting in loose unison, at some unspoken signal they will fly out of the woods and onto the shore, as if they were the spirits of the monks evicted from their dissolved abbey. No one really knows what they do or how they think. Perhaps theirs is just a convenient congregation, only motivated by food and sex. But then, you might say the same about us. As a species, we are unable to resist the temptation to impose our own failings on animals; it’s almost an act of transference, and I’m as guilty as anyone else.

When the water has fallen back far enough, the crows will swoop on shellfish, rising up to drop them on a stone from a perfectly judged height. All the while they keep one eye on their fellow birds, ever ready to steal from friends or passing squirrels. They’re a disputatious, bullying, larcenous lot, forever finding fault with one another. They’ll tumble two-against-one in aerial combat, before falling to the mud to scrap over a mussel, the soon-to-be-loser on its back, eyes glaring, claws defensive, determined not to let go of its hard-won bivalve. Then, as suddenly as it started, it’s all over. A moment later and the same birds are strutting alongside each other perfectly amicably.

They may be vermin to most people, but I’ve come to love carrion crows. Sleek and knowing and iridescent, they could be in disguise for all I know, glossy agents sent to spy on us. If I were to die here on the beach, it would be the crows who picked my bones clean.

Even on this nondescript stretch of water the colonisation continues: the annual invasion arriving over here, and the annual exodus leaving for over there. Around now the dark-bellied brent geese appear from Siberia; one-tenth of the world population winters along this coast. For them, Southampton Water is one big runway. Travelling three thousand miles in six weeks, they’re long-haul flyers, built to purpose with compact bodies, sturdy ringed necks and neat dark heads. I hear their rolling honk as they pick their moment to settle, their voices eliding and trilling like the chorus from a minimalist opera. Even their name sounds northern: ‘brant’ is Norse for burnt. As the tide flows, they will ride the surf like little ships, proud of their survival, joining the herring and black-headed gulls hunkering to the swell; at this time of year, the air is colder than the sea.

This international, modest gathering of birds – constant and ever-changing, unremarkable and exquisite – are united only in their search for sustenance. I have to remind myself that they’re not here for my entertainment. They choose this part of the shore because it is a fertile patch, fed by a freshwater stream that oozes from the woods, turning brackish in a holding pond before running clear to the sea, and with it the nutrients that feed whatever the birds feed on.

They’re always waiting for the tide to go out; I’m always waiting for it to come in. Time may move faster for them – a day to them is a month to me; they live ten lives to mine – but they’ve been here for generations. This is their refuge. They feel safe here, despite the bait-diggers who disturb their foraging and the heavy metals and organochlorines that pollute their food and threaten their fertility. They remain loyal to these blackened flats; northern animals, like me; philopatric-, home lovers. They were here before Jane Austen came to visit the abbey’s ruins, and before the Romans rowed up the river to establish their own colony.

We should pay attention to birds, says Caspar Henderson; ‘being mindful of them, is being mindful of life itself’. They have always surrounded us; our movements mirror theirs. For humans, this too is a place of migration and emigration: from the tribes who came here when the sea was still a river, to the post-war ‘ten-pound Poms’ sailing for Australia – among them my school friends, never to be seen again – to the Filipinos, Poles and Bangladeshis who constitute the city’s latest arrivals.

What if all the vessels that ever sailed this water rose up from this much-dredged ditch? Celtic coracle, Roman galley, Norse longship, Tudor barge, Victorian merchantman, interwar liner, twenty-first-century ferry, all tumbled together like Paul Nash’s painting of dumped war planes, Totes Meer, Dead Sea. Sometimes the trawlers spit out fragments. I’ve found rusting revolvers brought back by wartime troops and chucked overboard when they were forbidden to import their souvenirs. Two thousand years before, their Celtic counterparts cast offerings to the water gods, and Roman centurions tossed tokens to Ancasta, the river deity who lived in this estuary. It all lies there, entire worlds of marine archaeology awaiting excavation; crockery and weapons and bones piled in a watery midden.

Out of the calm there’s a sudden surge as if some invisible vessel had passed by, followed by a reluctant riffling, running over stones as waves first set in motion thousands of miles away spend themselves on the shore. The sea plays its own tricks here. For two hours or more, its height and weight is suspended in a delayed action produced by the Atlantic pulse, although I must admit that the logistics of this mechanism somewhat mystify me.

If I understand it correctly, the tide runs from west to east and back again, courtesy of the pull of the moon, rocking up and down the Channel like a seesaw. Set at its midpoint, Southampton’s tide bounces back up its estuary. But added to this are local complications. The stopper of the Isle of Wight creates further oscillations, as the water enters and leaves from either side. The result is a unique selling point for the port. For centuries this double tide has been a boon to marine traffic, making Southampton ‘a seaport without the sea’s terrors, an ocean approach within the threshold of the land’, according to one nineteenth-century account. Its downside is what it leaves behind, an intractable stretch of mud, scattered with debris.

This is a place with its own rules. Its performers enter and leave the stage left and right, from wading birds pecking at the mud to slow-moving tankers pulling into the refinery to be suckled dry of their tarry cargo, and flat barges bearing turbine blades on their backs like sleek grey cetaceans. But they’re all dwarfed by the estuary’s most evident yet oddly ignored actors: container ships and car carriers.

Registered in Kobe, Panama or Monrovia, their names aspire to a Western status – Lake Michigan, Austria, Heritage Leader – while their sides are proprietarily stamped Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, or with the anonymous initials – nyk, eucc, cma–cga – of commercial states. Apart from the fact that they float, there’s little to associate these giants with the romantic notion of a vessel. Rather than roaming the seas, they’re locked into rigid routes. They accomplish in days journeys that James Cook took years to traverse. They’re standardised to the width of the Panama Canal: ships made to fit a world made to fit them. They might as well have been chopped off the production line. Their cantilevered prows look down on everything else, but their square sterns appear wrinkled, as if they were papered-over hardboard.

No one rhapsodises over these maritime pantechnicons as they come and go on their migrations. No one celebrates their arrival after heroic journeys to and from the other side of the world. They are filled. They are emptied. They move in between. No one stands on the quayside to wave them off. There are no Royal Marine bands to see them on their way. No bunting, no ceremony, no joy or sadness, just a slipping away. They embody a shrinking world. Half as big again as Titanic, they sail down the same waterway with bland indifference, lateral tower blocks so huge that, as one waterside inhabitant tells me, they cut off all electronic signals as they pass by. Their sides dribble with rust; the sea will get them in the end. They are ghost ships, devoid of life, save for shadowy figures seen through letterbox slots let into their flanks.

A life at sea? Their ill-paid crews might as well have signed up to a sweatshop. Since the decks are too dangerous to walk, the men remain within the metal hulks, themselves contained. Yet these ships carry almost everything we consume. Top-heavy, stacked with blocks like toy bricks, fifteen thousand tonnes of steel, four hundred metres long, sixty metres above the surface and another ten below, they ride high in times of unequal exchange. As one captain says, ‘We take air to the East.’ In better circumstances they sit lower in the sea, a plimsoll line of the global economy. At the end of their journey they will be unloaded by bestriding cranes onto railway trucks. In turn, others take on shiny new vehicles shelved in multi-storey stacks like factory-farmed chickens, from which they are driven into the bellies of the floating car parks and out the other side to Singapore.

But then, this is a city of the sea, built on reclaimed land; even its railway station platform is composed of cement and shingle embedded with shells. Meanwhile those same ships bring back invasive species on befouled hulls or in their ballast, Japanese seaweeds and Manila clams; to marine biologists, this is probably the most ‘alien’ estuary in Britain, with new organisms arriving every year.

In the nearby National Oceanographic Centre – an oddly industrial-looking complex itself, mounted with telecommunication masts, and flanked by long refrigerated sheds that contain sample cores of the earth’s archival depths, every three metres representing one hundred million years – I study the Admiralty Navigation Charts of these commercial waters. Pulling great plasticised sheets from chest-high cabinets, I pore over maps that have turned the world around to show the importance of the sea to the land, rather than the other way about. Atlases display the waters around our coast as blank blue expanses, but here all the contours and depths are laid out, along with their utility to men and women at sea.

The shore from which I swim, for instance, is labelled, unappealingly, ‘East Mud’. Nearby is a ‘Swinging Ground’, along with a ‘Hovercraft Testing Area’ and ‘M.O.D. Moorings’. Buildings, houses and roads have vanished, to be replaced by sites selected only for their relevance to the sea. Church spires and ‘Tall Buildings’ become landmarks, identified by bald details: ‘House (red roof)’. Through Southampton Water and into the Solent and the Channel beyond, a martial arena is mapped out: from the benign ‘Dolphin Bank’ to the treacherous shallows of ‘The Shingles’; from ‘Radar Scanning’ and ‘Foul Area’ to ‘Firing Practice Area’, ‘Submarine Exercise Area’, ‘Explosives Dumping Area’, and ‘US Base’; the reverberations of seismic global conflict brought to placid inshore waters. They are designated training grounds for the closed installations scattered along this coast, like the military port at Marchwood, busy sending ships laden with materiel to foreign wars and bringing back the broken remains. After the Falklands war, the bodies of eighty men were stored in its cargo shed.

One afternoon, after sitting on the sea wall watching the birds, I was about to ride home when I saw a strange shape moving down the water. It sat low on the surface, matt black, absorbing the light around it. Escorted by three tugs, the nuclear submarine – HMS Tireless, a ‘hunter-killer’ here on a ‘friendly visit’ – glided slowly south, powered by invisible force. I could see figures on its conning tower, and others walking the length of the vessel. They looked precarious to me, moving down its rounded back with no restraining railings to stop them rolling off; they might as well have been strolling on the back of a whale. As I watched, two of the crew reached its high tail fin and from the vessel’s stern pulled out a white flagpole that stood there, as though it were a parade ground. It was being prepared for its descent.

Soon, somewhere off the Isle of Wight, it would submerge into the English Channel, and travel six thousand miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic to the Falklands. Nuclear submarines are so efficient that they can stay below for three years or more. In Scotland, a taxi driver told us how he’d worked in Faslane, at the submarine base. He said that the submariners’ mail was habitually screened for any possible bad news from their families which might cause them upset. Even if their loved ones had died, there would be nothing they could do about it – there’d be no return to shore.

The driver spoke in a matter-of-fact manner of men going mad at sea, losing their sanity in the confines of a metal tube where they might not even have their own bunks, but be forced to share beds in sequence with their mates. He said one man had appeared in his civilian clothes, carrying a bag, saying he was ready to go home now.

One morning I arrive at the beach to an extraordinary sight, so unexpected it causes me to screech on my brakes. The water has disappeared, to be replaced by mud flats. It’s as though the plug has been pulled on the estuary, and an entirely new landscape has appeared. In the extreme spring tide, the channel has been reduced to its absolute minimum, so narrow you might almost stroll across to the forest.

Posts rise out of the mud like dead men’s fingers, ready to pull me down as I try, unsuccessfully, to walk out to this new world. The birds have it all to themselves. Even the crows have turned their backs on the human world in which they scavenge and are off in the distance, bathing with the waders.

The tide itself is weather. The weak sun tries to burn off the mist, but it only gets colder. There are astonishing effects in the sky, reflecting the sealessness below. It’s like being in an eclipse. Perhaps the river Solent is about to return to its antediluvian state, or perhaps this is the precursor of a freak tsunami. Or maybe the sea has relocated to the sky, as it was once thought there was another ocean over our heads. One medieval chronicler related how a congregation came out of church to find an anchor snagged on a gravestone. Its line ran taut to the clouds, from which a man descended, only to be suffocated by the dense air as if he were drowning.

Huge yellow buoys which normally float from chains that anchor them to the sea bed lie slumped like giant beach balls, left behind after a day’s play. At the dockhead, ships’ flanks are indecently exposed, as though someone were looking up their skirts; unsupported by the water, they might fall over at any moment. But the withdrawal must stop at some point. Soon normality will resume, and the earth and the moon will go on turning, tugging the sea between them. Some days, in late autumn, the fog is so thick that the sea and sky merge into one. There may be hundreds of birds around me, but I only hear their squawks and peeps. Unseen ships moan like lost whales.

Winter closes in, sweeping the mist away with Arctic winds. The air is so cold it seems to crack the tarmac. My fingers turn raw and crab-like; the colour of summer has long since faded, leaving brown islands on the back of my hands. It’s time to start wearing two hats, as well as two pairs of gloves. Shoulders hunched, I push my bike along the beach, knowing full well that the water will be even colder. At this nadir of the year, people ponder the wisdom, or not, of getting out of their cars. For me it’s all a question of getting in.

I stand over the water, and wonder why anyone would want to enter it. The surface is pressed flat by the cold. Slow and viscous, it wrinkles like setting jam. An oily sheen spreads over it. Rafts of usually active herring gulls float as if frozen into place. Everything has slowed to a glacial pace. Later the sea will ice up at the tideline, like the salt around the rim of a good margarita. In the summer, the water expands with the warmth; now it physically shrinks with the cold. Checking the coast is clear, I pull off my boots and my clothes and wade in without thinking.

I push through the waves with ice-cold hands. From above, I must look like a clockwork frog. My animal heat retreats with each forward stroke; I reach out as if to warm up the water. In summer, my body settles in comfortably; now everything is taut, demanding the conservation of its core.

I line up to the distant markers where cormorants perch. I’ve reached my limit. I turn back to the beach, scrabbling like a goose to find my depth once more. Naked on the sea wall, I give a little dance, singing to myself. If ‘ecstasy’ means to stand outside yourself, then I feel happier than I have ever been. Everything stripped away; everything renewed. Just me and the sea.

In the wan light the sun is diluted and dumbed. I struggle to put on my clothes, shivering as if the whole world were shaking, rather than me. My feet leave suspended puddles on the concrete, each toeprint in three dimensions. There are red threads from my towel caught in the cracks from earlier visits. I tug on my socks. Back home, I’ll shake out the sand and weed as evidence of my folly.

The cold becomes a kind of warmth. My fingers burn as the feeling returns, like they did when I was a boy, home from school and holding my hands too near the gas fire; by winter’s end my knuckles will be cracked and bleeding. With my heightened senses, I smell the lanolin in my woolly gloves. When I manage to scrawl in my notebook, its pages held down with an elastic band, my nose drips onto the ink, turning it into Rorschach blobs. My body complains of the lack of sleep. The prospect of tea and toast and a warm house never seemed so alluring.

Yet with all this self-imposed torture comes an intense, capillary clarity. Perhaps it’s just the blood pumping back to my brain, but I feel as if something had been wiped clean. I’m ready to start again. I feel in the world, not just of it, even though sometimes, in the mist, I think I must be still dreaming.

Winter is a lonely season. That’s why I like it. It’s easier to be alone; there’s no one there to notice. In the silence that ascends and descends at either end of the abbreviated day, there’s room to feel alive. The absence makes space for something else. I must keep faith with the sea. Swimming before dawn, it is so dark that I have to leave my bike light on so I can see where I left my clothes. Once the waves washed them clean away, leaving me to wade after them.

The sea doesn’t care, it can take or give. Ports are places of grief. Sailors declined to learn to swim, since to be lost overboard – even within sight of the shore – and to fight the waves would only extend the agony. You can only ever be alone out there.

People have died here, in these suburban waters. In the cemetery of Netley’s military hospital, planted as an arboretum to blunt the edges of death, there’s a gravestone carved in solid Cyrillic characters, a memorial to three Russian sailors from the frigate Prince Pojarsky, who drowned here in 1873. In the nearby pub, an outbuilding once stood as a temporary morgue for bodies pulled from the water by the coastguard, their corpses laid out on tables while next door people drank their pints of beer. My elder brother, working on a trawler off the Isle of Wight, once watched as the net pulled up a body, one of two men who’d decided to strip off at midnight and go for a swim. The fishermen kept the bloated corpse netted off their bow until the police arrived; it is bad luck to have a body aboard a boat. Like those unswimming sailors, I can’t reconcile my love with my terror. I know full well what lies beneath me as I push out from the wall and into the water; and yet I still fear what it might contain.

One day, with the sea swollen by a near-full moon, I get the feeling I’m not alone. I’ve just turned back from my farthest point when I’m startled by a sudden whoosh. Directly behind me, barely a yard away, is a huge head with shiny dog-like eyes: a large grey seal, fat and full-grown.

I back off, shocked at the sight. I knew there was a seal colony just along the Solent – I’d seen grey and harbour seals there, lounging on the mud flats, so blubbery and lazy that algae grew on their backs where they spent all their time basking in the sun, raising their hind flippers in the air to keep them warm on chillier days. From a distance, they look quite cute. But coming face to face with one in the water was another matter. Weighing up to eight hundred pounds, grey seals have sharp claws and teeth that can cause a serious infection, Mycobacterium marinum, otherwise known as seal finger, which may result in the loss of affected digits.

The seal and I regard each other, equally surprised. He’s twice my size, clearly a mature male. He raises his grizzly head, lugubriously. I’m not sure what he intends to do, but I’m not going to wait to find out. Kicking out with my feet to persuade the animal to keep its distance, I make for the shore – only to discover that the great beast has followed me, swimming beneath the surface. Scrambling onto the safety of the sea wall and reaching for my clothes, I look down at it.

I was right to be apprehensive. Up close, it is even bigger, almost magnified by the clear water. It looks more like a manatee as it hangs there, puffing away quite quizzically, all whiskers and wrinkles, trying to work out what I am, this pale, unsealish creature. I hurry to dress, keeping one eye on my marine companion. His curiosity satisfied, he turns towards the open water and sets off, popping up at intervals as he works his way upstream, before finally moving out of sight.

Back home, I walk around the house in the dark. I know its rooms as well as I know my own body. I catch myself in the mirror on the landing, hung so that my mother could check her make-up before coming downstairs, her necklace in place, just as my father always wore a tie. Now I look in it and wonder who I am.

I step outside, under the frost-sharpened sky, and a watery array: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricornus, Delphinus, and Cetus the whale; a starry bestiary (as if infinity wasn’t frightening enough already) of ancient patterns created by minds yet to be overwhelmed by the images that fill our waking day. They fall in slow motion – Orion’s brilliant grid, Betelgeuse’s dying watch-jewel, the Pleiades’ nebulous cloud – seen in the astronomer’s averted vision, as if too big to look at directly. They seem unchanging, but they represent cataclysmic explosions, speeding into oblivion, collapsing into themselves.

The nearness of the sea opens up the sky. I hold my binoculars shakily to a three-quarter moon, its cold face forever turned away; to Sylvia Plath, it seemed to drag the sea after it ‘like a dark crime’. Once, out in the garden late at night, I watched an unusually bright meteor flashing orange, red and white. As it fell to the horizon, its tail streaming behind like a medieval illumination, I heard it hiss and fizz.

Far off in the city centre a clock tower chimes. Inside the house, things shift and fall. Floorboards creak like a ship. It ticks with the ebbing heat as it falls asleep. I lie in my narrow bed, listening to the sound of the dark. A vague rumbling drifts over from the docks, godless, twenty-four-hour places where the black water ripples with sodium traces. Turning off my bedside light, I hear someone call my name, as if the night won’t leave me alone. Evenings I once spent drinking and dancing and taking drugs are now filled with a heady emptiness. Late at night, I think there’s some animal stirring in one of the rooms, a bear cub being licked into shape. And sometimes I wake in the early hours to hear my mother washing up downstairs, even though she died six years ago.

The house has its own history, plastered over, extended, reduced, rising and falling with fashion like the hemlines of a woman’s skirt. The lawn where I lay as a teenager, reading King Lear on a hot midsummer’s afternoon although I’d rather have been listening to Ziggy Stardust on my cassette recorder, has long been overtaken by meadow grass. Somewhere deep in the bushes is the chain-link fence that first marked these plots parcelled out on the heath by a 1920s developer. If you can age a hedgerow by the number of species in a given stretch, you can date a street by its styles and details. Things here were once more empty: open coal fires rather than central heating, a hot-water geyser that exploded into blue life over the old enamel bath, and a bare electric fire hung even more dangerously overhead. No telephone, no fitted carpet, no double glazing; children spilled out of doors.

Then the view was open to what lay ahead, and a shop stood on each corner of the crossroads: a grocer’s and post office combined, where you could buy postal orders while your luncheon meat was sliced; a butcher’s shop with tiles and sawdust and bloody lumps of offal; a hairdresser’s with its oval helmets that made their occupants look like astronauts, preserved in permanent lotion; and a brown-painted cubby-hole of a shop run by a lone elderly lady which sold only sweets and was rarely if ever open. All gone now. Here, as elsewhere, suburbia has disappointed its utopian dreams. Bramble finds its way into every crack.

At the bottom of the garden – beyond the summer house whose interior is festooned with ancient spiders’ webs, each dangling white drop holding a mummified fly – is a crumbling potting shed. Recently, a sudden hailstorm caught me out in the garden, and I dived into the shed for shelter.

It was the first time I’d set foot inside the place for months, maybe even years. The roof was rotten and yawning to the skies in two places, as though a bomb had hit it; everything was decaying with lost summers and long-dead flowers. A pair of deflated bikes stood stacked against the tilting walls. Plant pots tottered in towers. Bamboo canes which once guided sweet peas to the sun gathered in the corner, the twine still wound around their knotty rings. The entire edifice was slowly decomposing. As I stood there, still in the silence save for the rattle on what was left of the roof, the hailstones poured in through the holes like sand in an egg timer, threatening to fill the interior with granulated ice.

Behind the shed a high privet hedge, blowsy like green clouds, hides an alleyway where my brothers would collect grass snakes, slithering in a bucket. Hedgehogs still shuffle out of it at night, leaving paths in the grass. At the end of the cutway, across the road, lies what is left of the common, a narrow, tree-filled valley dipping down to a stream, from where I hear the call of a tawny owl at night, drifting over the roofs, as if it might be caught by a satellite dish.

One afternoon my father, working on his much-manured vegetable patch, called to us to see a slow worm on the lawn; it must have slithered out from the compost heap. For some reason, I picked up a spade and drove it down on the lizard, slicing it in half. I remember being surprised by the blood that oozed out of the bisected reptile.

What had I expected? Did I think it was one of my rubber toys? Fascinated and horrified by what I’d done, I stood there, staring stupidly. I still regret it. On only two other occasions have I been personally responsible for the death of an animal. One was a hedgehog that I once found with a growth on its eye like a bloated pale pea. I drowned it in a bucket of water, holding it down, feeling its tight-balled body open and close, briefly. The last was rather more recent.

I first saw it out of the corner of my eye, a white blur on the beach. After I’d swum I saw that the bird was still there.

It was nothing unusual: a black-headed gull. As I walked towards it, it ran off rather than took to the air. Then I saw its wing tip hanging, obviously and dramatically broken. Had a dog or a fox done that? Every now and then it tucked its head round to the injured site, pecking at the disconnected bones, unable to understand. Why couldn’t it do what it usually did? It could not comprehend the malfunction. I could, but I ignored it, and cycled home, thinking determinedly about lunch instead.

A year or so before, I’d been cycling along the beach when I saw a pair of mute swans, a common enough sight here, running their belisha-beacon beaks through the shallows. The Nordic historian Olaus Magnus wrote in 1555: ‘The swan, as everyone certainly knows, is a placid, good-natured bird.’ He noted that it derives its name, Cygnus, from its singing, sounding sweetly from its long, curving neck, although he added that in old age, it sings with one wing over its head, its swansong ‘as it departs from life. Plato says that it sings not from sadness but from joy as its end draws near.’ Like the ermine, said to prefer to die rather than soil its white winter coat, the swan is pledged to maintain its whiteness, as immaculate as the newly laundered shirt of an African schoolchild.

But one of these swans was not preening itself. It was tugging with its wings at a near-invisible thread: a micro-filament of discarded fishing line which threatened to trap the bird till it was trussed up in its own panic.

A man with a weather-beaten face was also looking on, concerned. I suggested we try and do something. We waded out towards the pair, but they moved off, out of reach. My comrade, as I now regarded him, made a suggestion. He owned a rib, and would fetch it from the pound. Moments later we were in the boat, in pursuit of a swan. The powerful outboard motor took us out into the channel. Our prey, meanwhile, was doing its best to evade us. Circling to cut off its escape route, we drew close to the entangled bird. Ignoring what I’d been told – how a swan can break a human limb with its wings – I leaned over and gathered it up in my arms.

I felt its whiteness in my embrace, sturdy and warm and downy. It didn’t struggle at all. Indeed, it seemed quite at home, although that may have been merely fear: captured animals will play dead, as a last resort. It was like holding a living musical instrument – or, perhaps, putting one’s arm around a ballerina. Its head swivelled to face me indignantly. I thought of Alice’s flamingo mallet as I gripped the slender, muscular neck. My fellow rescuer pulled out his penknife and cut the line. It was all over. I opened my arms and felt the bird’s tension release and the life return to its body. It swam off for a few yards, stretched its wings, turned, and honked.

Only later, reading Tag Barnes’s Waterside Companions, would I see another side of the story. Barnes, an angler since he was a boy, wrote his book in 1963 to enlighten fellow fishermen about the creatures they might see around them. Moorhens, cormorants and grebes all get their admiring page or two; even water voles, toads and coypu are given their due. But when it comes to the swan, Barnes appears to lose his temper: ‘I simply bristle with annoyance when one moves into my swim.’ He certainly does not agree with Plato’s lyrical tales. Swans, he says, are ‘the most aggressive, persistent and arrogant birds we have and can be extremely dangerous’.

It was refreshing to read natural history from the predator’s point of view; in Barnes’s words the mute animal becomes almost malevolent. No amount of stone-throwing or shooing would deter these waterborne thugs, he says. ‘They will often hiss back at the “shooer” and sometimes threaten him with violence.’ He suggests that dirty water might be thrown over the miscreants – perhaps on the basis that these vain creatures would be humbled by their besmirched plumage. His other remedy is to ‘cast a line over their backs’. Is that what happened to ‘my’ bird? Barnes convicts himself in his final blast, as deliberate as the second discharge from a twelve-bore. Having admitted that swans eat only aquatic plants, he concludes: ‘I can recommend the cygnet as being a really tasty dish!’

Faced with the plight of the gull and its broken wing, I returned to the beach that afternoon. I’d last seen the bird running into the bushes, seeking shelter from predators; I’d watched other injured birds retreat into the same undergrowth, as though they were choosing a place to die. But now it was back on the shore. Dumbly, it declined to accept its fate. For a moment I thought that somehow its wing had repaired itself, miraculously snapping back into place like a dislocated shoulder. But it hadn’t, and it was clear that I had to do something.

I crept up on the gull and cornered it against the sea wall, then threw my swimming shorts over its head and grabbed its flapping body. Like the swan, it made surprisingly little resistance, only a pathetic attempt to peck my fingers.

It was odd to see something so familiar at such close quarters: the slim elegance of its beak, long and crimson and curved to a point; the sharpness of its dusty black-brown hood defined against the whiteness of its body. It was one of the most common wild animals around, yet close to, it appeared a miracle of perfection; a perfection now irrevocably marred by the snapped bones I could feel as I examined its wing. It would never fly again, although its beady eyes looked up to the sky.

I unzipped my backpack, slipped the gull inside, and zipped it back up.

I couldn’t take it home. The ride would take too long, and I feared for the bird’s well-being in my bag. I cycled to the nearby country park. As I rode down the village street, I could feel the gull moving about on my back. Every now and again, it would let out a feeble squawk. Concerned it might suffocate in its nylon pouch, I stopped to unzip the bag a little, half wondering, half hoping that it might have passed away. But the faint scrabbling movements told me it hadn’t given up yet.

At the park office, there was little to be done. No one was interested in the bird’s plight. Someone said I was ‘too soft’ and that gulls were ‘ten-a-penny’; a rarer animal might be worth saving, not this beach rat.

I wanted to hold up its head and show them its beautiful beak, as if it might sing its own defence. But the bird just lay there, helplessly. We were each as useless as each other. I rang the rspca, and was told to take it to a vet, but the journey there would just mean more stress, for us both, only delaying the inevitable. My friend, a park ranger, was working in the nearby yard.

I unzipped the bag for the last time. Richard reached in, tenderly gathering up the bird in his big brown hands as its life passed from my hands to his. ‘It’s been shot by an air gun,’ he said quietly, then took it around the corner to wring its neck.

As I rode home, it seemed every gull on the beach turned its back to me, resolutely looking away. I imagined their reprimands as I passed, muttering ‘Murderer’; they too were once persecuted and eaten, and their eggs gathered in their thousands. When I unzipped my bag again, back on the shore, I found a slick of slimy guano, and the stain of brown blood on my shorts. A single piece of down lay at the bottom. The wind whisked it out of my bag and into the waves.

I pushed out, among rafts of floating green weed, watching the ferries pass each other way off shore. In the mid-distance, a frenzy of gulls fought over an agreed, invisible point, feeding greedily on what lay below.

After a storm, when the waves roll in as if exhausted, the sea spits out strange things: huge lengths of wood which could be railway sleepers or bulwarks from ancient ships; cupboard doors and plastic seats; snaking bristles of indeterminate origin; entangled ropes covered with weed. Sometimes the scene resembles the aftermath of a battle: the unaccountable head and neck of a herring gull, floppy like a glove puppet. Bright shop-bought flowers, commemorating some unknown loss. An empty box which once contained human ashes. Above the wrack line, the charred remains of a bonfire smoulder, ringed with empty lager cans.

As a boy, I used to think what a terrible punishment it would be to have to count every pebble on the shore. Or what it would be like to lose something precious there and never be able to find it. Now, every day, I look for a stone with a hole in it. I align it to a particular point as a viewfinder; the light bursts through like a little sun, the world seen through a prehistoric telescope. They’re powerful talismans, these holy or hag stones. Back home they tumble out of my pockets and over shelves and window-sills as calendars of my days; my grandmother, who lived on the edge of the New Forest, kept one in her glass cabinet, next to the rows of china spaniels.

In another glass case, in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, there are similar stones collected from other beaches, each with a handwritten label. William Twizel, a Victorian fisherman of Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, Northumberland, arranged them around the doors of his house, an echo of his inheritance and of a people whose blue eyes were said to be the colour of the sea in front of their cottages. Next to William’s stone is another example collected from Augustus Pitt-Rivers’ Wiltshire estate, where it was fixed to the beam of a cottage to keep witches away.

Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers – whose full name sounds more like a geographic location – was a Crimean veteran, a Darwinist, and a pioneer of British archaeology. He ordered his collections according to type and use, rather than date and provenance. Now they lie crammed in table-top and wall-cases, with fossils and fans, fetishes and tribal masks all jumbled together in a dark galleried hall resembling a particularly gloomy department store.

Some stones come from Craig and Ballymena in Northern Ireland or Carnac in Brittany, and were used to protect cows, tied to their tethering stake or between their horns to prevent pixies stealing their milk. Horses, too, were hung with hag stones to stop witches riding them during the night, and on Dartmoor stones were worn around human necks or nailed to bed-posts to defend against nocturnal demons. The seventeenth-century Brahan Seer of the Scottish Highlands was said to have had such a stone through which he could see into the other world, although he was burned in a spiked barrel of tar on the beach at Chanonry Point for his trouble.

In a 1906 essay on ‘Witched Fishing Boats in Dorset’, Dr Henry Colley March observed that Dorset fishermen would tie holy stones to the bows and thread their start-ropes through them; it was also the custom in the same county to attach the key of a house to a holed beach-stone for luck, he noted. The learned Dr March went on – in the antiquarian tradition of his peers such as Pitt-Rivers, M.R. James and James Frazer – to discern an association with the megaliths of ritual land-scapes in southern England, Orkney and Brittany; half-natural, half-constructed objects charged with the power of the past. ‘It is impossible not to see a like motive for the ancient practice of dragging a sick or epileptic child through a hole in a large “druidical” stone.’ They might as well be threaded with sacrifices to unknown gods, although to my eyes they resemble little modernist sculptures.

But you can’t keep a beach in your house, despite the teetering piles on my shelves, a terminal moraine of memory, accumulating dust composed of the decomposing me. Deformed oyster shells grown around odd pebbles, smooth grey wooden shapes with knots for eyes, sand-blasted shards of Victorian glass, chunks of marmalade pots, soft stems of clay pipes once sucked between moustached lips and discarded like cigarette butts, and bits of blue willow-pattern plates awaiting ceramic resurrection; all of them tumbled together by the tides. As a boy I listened to the rushing noise inside shells; the same sound has been in my ears for years now, a perpetual ocean in my head.

In Iris Murdoch’s strange novel The Sea, The Sea, published in 1978, the celebrated actor Charles Arrowby retreats from London to write his memoirs. He lives alone in a ramshackle house on an unidentified English coast, having come to the sea in search of ‘monastic mysticism’. The events that follow – a series of impossible coincidences and fantastical happenings played out in a Shakespearean manner, with Arrowby as a kind of Prospero – take place over one summer. They occur in an indefinably apocalyptic time and place, as if society were on the verge of disintegration – as indeed it seemed to be at the time – although ostensibly all is normal in the world beyond Arrowby’s coastal retreat.

As he relishes his solitude and the splendour of its setting – swimming off the rocky shore, ordered by its tides or the way he gets in and out of the water via a rope – Arrowby’s idyll is broken one morning by what he imagines or perhaps actually sees: a maned and toothed leviathan. ‘I saw a monster rising from the waves,’ twenty or thirty feet high, coiled and spiny, its head crested and with sharp teeth and a pink mouth. ‘I could see the sky through the coils.’ Although Arrowby puts this terrifying vision down to an acid flashback, a legacy of his misspent youth, the beast is an omen of all that happens afterwards as his former lovers and enemies come back to haunt him. Nor was it coincidence that this unsettling apparition is an echo of a scene in Racine’s Phaedra in which a sea monster appears, so fearsome that it infects the air and causes Hippolytus’ horses to drag their master to his watery doom.

Throughout Murdoch’s tragi-comic drama, the ever-changing sea abides, a character in itself, a mindful reminder of her hero’s impotence to change his fate and manipulate his friends, despite his deluded attempts to do so. He seems locked into what is happening, all the while documenting each oddly concocted meal, even at moments of great crisis. He eats: tinned macaroni cheese ‘jazzed up’ with cold courgettes, ‘Battenburg roll and prunes’, ‘boiled onions served with bran’, ‘poached egg on nettles’, ‘a little cold jellied consommé straight out of the tin’, all washed down with Spanish wine bought from the nearby Raven Hotel. Such details serve only to make the story more bizarre. Having abducted the woman whom he had loved as a boy, and who, by extraordinary circumstance, he suddenly discovers to be living nearby, the book ends with Arrowby – who has nearly drowned, violently, in the sea in typically mysterious circumstances – experiencing an epiphany in the shape of four seals bobbing in the water, ‘their wet doggy faces looking curiously upward … And as I watched their play, I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me.’

Murdoch took her title from the cry of the Greek warriors who finally saw the Black Sea after fighting against the Persian empire, a sight that heralded home. As a writer, she was criticised for her apparent belief in myth and monsters: in person, as in her work, her fierce intelligence contrasted with a faint naïveté. She ended her life losing her senses in public, suffering from dementia and yet being taken everywhere by her writer husband. I’d often see her at literary launches: a ghostly, silver-haired figure with flickering eyes and a fixed smile, lost in a corner of a room that might have been any room, anywhere, with anyone in it.

The sea sustains and threatens us, but it is also where we came from. Some consider that the relationship is closer than we think. Callum Roberts, among other scientists, has noted that the ratio of subcutaneous fat in humans is ten times that of other primates, nearer to that of a fin whale. From an evolutionary point of view, such human blubber would make little sense for a land hunter, but it would be eminently useful for an ‘aquatic ape’ which developed by the sea. Equally, we cannot fly or even run as fast as other animals, and we lack hair to keep our bodies warm, but we can swim and dive – skills which would not make sense, some say, unless we were made for or at least shaped by the water.

First proposed by Desmond Morris and subsequently explored by Elaine Morgan – who saw a certain prejudice in the way in which her ideas were rejected – the ‘aquatic ape’ theory is controversial, dismissed by scientists suspicious of its simplicity. Perhaps there is something a little too perfect about the notion that rather than descending from the trees to hunt on the savannah, we gravitated instead to the shore, not least because it argues against the idea that we are defined by our ability to kill. Yet new evidence suggests that a diet sourced from the ocean may have provided the fatty acids that enabled our brains to grow, and that we stood on two legs to wade as we scavenged for shellfish on the shores of our earliest home in sub-Saharan Africa. That we were, and are, intimately linked to the sea.

Other factors have been marshalled to support Morgan’s argument: that we are prone to dehydration in a manner which would not be helpful to savannah-dwelling animals, and that we exhibit an instinctual breath-holding reaction when we plunge into water: other terrestrial mammals cannot regulate their reflex breathing. Does this mean that we were once well used to entering the sea, perhaps sticking our heads in to search for food, or even spending longer periods there? The Belgian anthropologist Marc Verhagen and his colleagues believe it is possible, arguing that our wide shoulders are more suited to swimming than running, and that we might owe our long legs and long strides to forebears who foraged in the shallows.

Our vestigially webbed fingers have also been claimed as an amphibious refinement of this watery life – just as the seabird hunters of St Kilda developed broad feet from climbing the cliffs, and the sea gypsies of south-east Asia, used to diving in the shallow seas, have eyes that appear to focus as well, if not better, underwater. Even our organs contain a memory of the sea. Our kidneys evolved to deal with excess salt, to which our evolutionary ancestors were subject; being fifty per cent water, we all contain the sea inside us.

While many scientists dismiss the notion of an aquatic ape, the proposal is intriguing: that we owe our development and our dominion, our intelligence and even our souls, to the water, although we live out our lives on the land.

We cannot resist; we are all watergazers. And like so many others, my own, more recent ancestors also felt the urge to travel over the sea, in search of something new.

My great-great-great-uncle, James, the eldest of William Nind’s thirteen children (of whom at least three died in childhood), was born in Ashchurch, a hamlet near Tredington in Gloucestershire, in 1782. The Ninds had been farmers since at least the sixteenth century, living in the same small triangle of fertile land at the foot of the Cotswold hills, moving between villages such as Beckford, Walton Cardiff, Ashchurch and Alstone, near the towns of Tewkesbury and Cheltenham.

As the eldest son, James was expected to follow his father, working the land. But in the family tree she compiled in her fine handwriting, my aunt recorded the tradition that James left England for Ceylon to acquire a plantation (probably of coffee, rather than tea, which was not grown on the island until the mid-nineteenth century). He was also said to have been involved in another trade: human trafficking. Slavery had been banned by Britain in 1807, but continued in its colonies until 1838, and James was engaged in ‘blackbirding’, a kind of kidnap in which native people were lured onto ships and abducted, to be sold on as indentured labourers. As a result of his activities, James Nind amassed a fortune worth three hundred thousand pounds, only to die at sea, sailing from Ceylon on a ship called Breezy Horse.

Ever since I heard about it as a boy, I’ve imagined that scene: a storm-tossed vessel, my ancestor tipping over the gunwales in a flash of lightning. Or perhaps he went of his own accord, like Captain William Ostler of the Marquis of Hastings, who, on his way back from New South Wales and China in September 1827, ‘threw himself overboard in a fit of insanity off the Cape of Good Hope, on the night of the 9th September. A paper, containing the following words, was found lying on the table of his cabin in the morning: “A bad crew and bad chief-mate is the destruction of William Ostler.”’ Whatever the manner of James Nind’s death, it was certainly unforeseen: he left no will, and his relatives were unable to claim his money. A moral return, perhaps, for such immoral gains.

For years afterwards the Ninds tried to find out what had happened to James, and his fortune; there were no records of his estate, his ship, or his death to be found. Yet the rumours persisted, fed by the prospect of lost riches. In 1921, a syndicated story appeared in the American press under the headline ‘Unsolved Mysteries’. It speculated that James Nind had actually come to America, rather than Ceylon, along with his brother William, and had accrued his wealth in South America under an assumed name. ‘The theory is that James Nind after living in New York for some years went to one of the South America Republics … building up a fortune as so many adventurers from the Anglo-Saxon race have done in different parts of the world. In these countries the state of society is so unsettled that many obstacles might be thrown in the way of recovering the Nind fortune.’

None of this makes much sense – the report, in the Galveston Daily News of Texas, confuses more than it reveals – but the fact that it appeared in a newspaper gave credence to the story. With rumours of impostors turning up in Cotswold villages, only to disappear again, there were even hints of conspiracy: ‘It seems clear that someone is interested in the matter aside from the Nind heirs …’ Indeed, this family intrigue, with its echoes of a novel by Conrad or Dickens, would be strangely replayed in the next generation.

James’s nephew, also named James – my great-great-grandfather – was born one of nine children, to Isaac Nind, a gentleman farmer in Tredington, in 1824. As the eldest surviving son, he stood to inherit substantial property: his father owned two hundred acres and employed four labourers, as well as six domestic servants. Yet in 1850, aged twenty-five, this fair-haired, handsome young man followed in his uncle’s wake and left England. In his case, he definitely sailed to America, apparently drawn there by the promise of a better life.

But James had another reason to leave home. That summer, Sophia Clarke, a twenty-one-year-old woman from the neighbouring village of Gotherington, gave birth to their illegitimate daughter Rosa. The records claim, somewhat mysteriously, that Rosa was born at sea. Had Sophia travelled to America with James, and decided to return? When asked about her grandfather, my grandmother would only say, ‘There was a young man who was sent to America to make a fresh start.’

Although James already had family living in the United States – his aunts Dorcas and Judith had emigrated there some years before – it must have been an extraordinary contrast, to leave the lush confines of the Cotswolds for the vast and still largely unexplored continent. That may be why he settled in Lowville, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, New York State, a reminder of home: good farming country, like its neighbouring state, Massachusetts, where, in the year that James arrived, Melville was writing Moby-Dick. By 1859, when he was visited by his sister Mary Ann and her husband John Freeman, James was married with twin boys. But that year he announced his intention to go west to the goldfields of California, lured by reports such as one in a Buffalo newspaper which claimed that prospectors could turn fifty dollars into five thousand within twelve months. Mary Ann, initially keen to join him, decided not to go as she was about to give birth.

She had a lucky escape. James and his family were last heard of in Davenport, Iowa, from where they joined the wagon trail. From the 1840s to the 1860s, four hundred thousand travelled west, an unprecedented exodus of people from all around the world to the remote Pacific coast: Mormons, miners, farmers and families in search of fortunes or religious freedom or any kind of new life. The journey would take half a year and was fraught with danger. Wagons were towed by oxen across plains as yet unclaimed from Native Americans, through the desolate landscapes of the Great Salt Desert and over the mountain range where the Donner Party had resorted to cannibalism in their despair. This mass migration had its own power to alter the environment, not least in the hunting of bison, about to be driven to the verge of extinction.

Did James and his family make it as far as the Great Plains, travelling by prairie schooner, sailing through endless seas of grass? I once visited those same fields, without knowing that my ancestor might have passed that way. It was as far from the ocean as I’ve ever been, and I remember swimming in an open-air public pool on the outskirts of Red Cloud, Nebraska. It looked like a little piece of the sky fallen to earth. All I do know is that James wrote a letter to his sister, Mary Ann, sent back east, although it survives only in her report. ‘A wagon train can pass through the grassland seas,’ she wrote, ‘they had circled their wagons to camp and put the boys under the wagon.’ There, in an extraordinary, unbelievable stroke of bad luck, the boys were both bitten by a snake, and died. James also reported that his wife was ill. And that was all; except for his last words, left hanging in the air: ‘I don’t know.’

James never reached his destination. Perhaps he and his wife succumbed to disease. Cholera was rife among the migrants, ‘the destroyer … let loose upon our camp’, as one settler wrote. Or perhaps, as family tradition suggests, he was killed by Indians. It is not an entirely fanciful notion: such attacks were the second most common cause of death for the travellers moving in great numbers through Native American territories. James’s sandy hair would have made a fine scalp.

I can’t quite believe myself descended from these romantic ancestors, or imagine what they experienced, or inflicted. Their stories are beyond the reach of the brown-grey ghosts of the family album. They happened before the casual snaps in trellised gardens and on seaside promenades, and they suggest more than they tell. James’s sister Mary Ann, and their brother William, who followed them to America, would lead quieter lives, settling in small towns on the shores of Lake Erie, south of Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Yet for them too, leaving England was an adventure: Mary Ann would recall that on the voyage out from Liverpool, the ship on which she was sailing passed another vessel on fire, but their captain did not stop, although the law of the sea demanded that they should.

Back in Gloucestershire, Sophia went on to marry twice, each time to men from her own parish. A single image of her survives: a tintype photograph, corrupted with age, showing her in a patterned dress. Her face is strong, her cheekbones high, her stance determined. She looks like my mother, who had the same Titian red hair; it is not hard to read in her eyes what she had lived through. Sophia brought up her daughter, assisted by the Ninds, who acknowledged her as one of their own. In her teens, Rosa became a nursemaid to a naval family in Plymouth, before marrying and having her own family, among them my grandmother. She looks quite proper in her crinoline. But in every census record in which she appears, until her death in 1920, one year before my mother was born, she continued to state that she was born at sea, as if to obscure the shame of her illegitimacy.

My father’s family also crossed the sea; like my maternal ancestors, they too were caught up in an age of mass migration. My great-grandfather Patrick, named after the saint who had converted Ireland and driven the snakes from its shores, was born in Blanchardstown, a village outside Dublin, in 1856. The island was still suffering the after-effects of the Great Famine, a good enough reason for his departure for Liverpool sometime in the 1870s. Settling in Lichfield, he married an English girl, a servant in the same household in which he worked as a coachman. The pair then moved to the former whaling port of Whitby, where my grandfather was born in 1885, on a street at the end of which, in the previous century, James Cook’s Endeavour had been built.

His eldest son, my father, a dark-haired, good-looking young man, left the depressed streets of the north for a new life in Southampton in the 1930s. He had been born in the model mill town of Saltaire in 1915, but was brought up in Bradford. His journey south was the equivalent of the Ninds’ voyages, the result of greater events, of disaster and opportunity. Later he’d speak of the deprivation he had witnessed in his home town, of starving families fighting over food, of rats running down the street, and of a man found hanging in an outhouse on nearby wasteland.

Perhaps that’s why the rest of my father’s life was so resolutely ordinary and ordered. He worked for the same cable company for forty years in a redbrick factory built on reclaimed land between the docks and the walls of the old town, a hundred yards from the station where he had first arrived. Every day, at the same time, my mother waved him off. Every day, at the same time, he came back for tea. He might as well have been clocking in and out of his own home. What he did between his punctual departure and his prompt return was a mystery. He seldom spoke about his work, nor did we ask him about it.

In the summer after leaving school, I went to work in the same factory. I was a fitter’s mate, a position which required me to wear grey overalls and accompany my designated fitter on various jobs, in none of which did I perform any kind of useful function. As we set out for the day or came back to the workshop before going home, having smeared our clothes with grime to make it look as though we’d been busy, I’d look up into the glass box where my father worked above the factory floor and see him there with his colleagues. They wore bright white coats to distinguish themselves from us in our oily overalls, and they all seemed to wear spectacles, of a National Health design; anything else would have been an unwonted vanity.

Lit by the luminous shed over our heads, for a few, tantalising glimpses I saw my father as he was seen by others: as a person, rather than a dad, up there in the Test Department, with its graphs and dials and meters of resistance, dedicated to certifying six-inch cables which would be wound onto elephantine wooden drums, stencilled with yellow paint and unrolled under the ocean, anchoring England to America.

Now I see my father through the framed photographs that still stand in my mother’s bedroom, and I’m taken aback to realise how much like him I’ve become: from his shorts and the bag slung about his neck as he stands on a seaside cliff, to his love of the sea itself, which he would scan through his heavy binoculars, breathing in deeply as if to clear his lungs of Bradford soot. We share the same shape, the same bones that show through my skin; what I have been and what I may become. How could I have thought myself so different?

Recently I went back to Yorkshire. It was a long journey, each connection with its own story. The dawn suburban train, with workers’ eyes stuck with sleepy dust and toothpaste masking morning breath. The peak commuter train, full of furious notes on laptops and phones forever seeking attention. The midday train, relaxed with senior citizens, and students locked into their own, dreamier electronic worlds. And finally an afternoon shuttle explosive with children turned out of school, shouting and laughing and dodging the ticket collector as he came down the compartment, jumping off at the next halt, spilling onto the platform and vanishing as quickly as they’d appeared. As we were drawn to the north, to its wasteland and wealth, I was struck, as I watched through the window, how different it was, an abrupt view of smoke stacks, as evocative as any university’s spires to its alumni. For a few seconds I saw the town set in its sulphurous dip, its name taking me back to childhood visits – Bradford Interchange – as I sat in the modern carriage forty years later, listening to languages my father never heard.

I might have been the same person as him. As a child I never saw different people – unless in the mirror, when I dressed up as a Red Indian. Our family never went abroad; I travelled only in books, although I was born in a port. Our first fear is abandonment; our last, too. We all leave home to find home, at the risk of being forever lost.