And I recall my mother, a sea-girl herself, reading to me and my brother—who came later—from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Forsaken Merman’:
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep;
Where the spent lights quiver and gleam;
Where the salt weed sways in the stream;
Where the sea-beasts rang’d all round
Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground;
Where the sea-snakes coil and twine
Dry their mail and bask in the brine;
Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye.
I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.
Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood—the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon. After all, in England, no place is what? more than seventy miles from the sea. ‘There,’ I’ll be told, ‘there it is.’ As if the sea were a great oyster on a plate that could be served up, tasting just the same, at any restaurant the world over. I get out of the car, I stretch my legs, I sniff. The sea. But that is not it, that is not it at all.
The geography is all wrong in the first place. Where is the grey thumb of the water tower to the left and the sickle-shaped sandbar (really a stone bar) under it, and the Deer Island prison at the tip of the point to the far right? The road I knew curved into the waves with the ocean on one side, the bay on the other; and my grandmother’s house, half-way out, faced east, full of red sun and sea lights.
To this day I remember her phone number: OCEAN 1212-W. I would repeat it to the operator, from my home on the quieter bayside, an incantation, a fine rhyme, half expecting the black earpiece to give me back, like a conch, the susurrous murmur of the sea out there as well as my grandmother’s Hello.
The breath of the sea, then. And then its lights. Was it some huge, radiant animal? Even with my eyes shut I could feel the glimmers off its bright mirrors spider over my lids. I lay in a watery cradle, and sea gleams found the chinks in the dark green window blind, playing and dancing, or resting and trembling a little. At naptime I clinked my fingernail on the hollow brass bedstead for the music of it and once, in a fit of discovery and surprise, found the join in the new rose paper and with the same curious nail bared a great bald space of wall. I got scolded for this, spanked, too, and then my grandfather extracted me from the domestic furies for a long beachcoming stroll over mountains of rattling and cranking purple stones.
My mother was born and brought up in the same sea-bitten house; she remembered days of wrecks where the townspeople poked among the waves’ leavings as at an open market—tea kettles, bolts of soaked cloth, the lone, lugubrious shoe. But never, that she could remember, a drowned sailor. They went straight to Davy Jones. Still, what mightn’t the sea bequeath? I kept hoping. Brown and green glass nuggets were common, blue and red ones rare: the lanterns of shattered ships? Or the sea-beaten hearts of beer and whisky bottles. There was no telling.
I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets—tossed in abandon off liners, or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds or braids of daisies. No two patterns ever matched.
Then one day the textures of the beach burned themselves on the lens of my eye forever. Hot April. I warmed my bottom on the mica-bright stone of my grandmother’s steps, staring at the stucco wall, with its magpie design of eggstones, fan shells, colored glass. My mother was in hospital. She had been gone three weeks. I sulked. I would do nothing. Her desertion punched a smouldering hole in my sky. How could she, so loving and faithful, so easily leave me? My grandmother hummed and thumped out her bread dough with suppressed excitement. Viennese, Victorian, she pursed her lips, she would tell me nothing. Finally she melted a little. I would have a surprise when mother came back. It would be something nice. It would be—a baby.
A baby.
I hated babies. I who for two and a half years had been the centre of a tender universe felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth. Babies!
Even my grandfather, on the glassed-in verandah, couldn’t woo me from my huge gloom. I refused to hide his pipe in the rubber plant and make it a pipe tree. He stalked off in his sneakers, wounded too, but whistling. I waited till his shape rounded Water Tower Hill and dwindled in the direction of the sea promenade; its ice-cream and hotdog stalls were boarded up still, in spite of the mild pre-season weather. His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn’t want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin: I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.
The tide ebbed, sucked back into itself. There I was, a reject, with the dried black seaweed whose hard beads I liked to pop, hollowed orange and grapefruit halves and a garbage of shells. All at once, old and lonely, I eyed these—razor clams, fairy boats, weedy mussels, the oyster’s pocked grey lace (there was never a pearl) and tiny white ‘ice-cream cones’. You could always tell where the best shells were—at the rim of the last wave, marked by a mascara of tar. I picked up, frigidly, a stiff pink starfish. It lay at the heart of my palm, a joke dummy of my own hand. Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish. It had no wit.
I stubbed my toe on the round, blind stones. They paid no notice. They didn’t care. I supposed they were happy. The sea waltzed off into nothing, into the sky—the dividing line on this calm day almost invisible. I knew, from school, the sea cupped the bulge of the world like a blue coat, but my knowledge somehow never connected with what I saw—water drawn half-way up the air, a flat, glassy blind; the snail trails of steamers along the rim. For all I could tell, they circled that line forever. What lay behind it? ‘Spain,’ said owl-eyed Harry Bean, my friend. But the parochial map of my mind couldn’t take it in. Spain. Mantillas and gold castles and bulls. Mermaids on rocks, chests of jewels, the fantastical. A piece of which the sea, ceaselessly eating and churning, might any minute beach at my feet. As a sign.
A sign of what?
A sign of election and specialness. A sign I was not forever to be cast out. And I did see a sign. Out of a pulp of kelp, still shining, with a wet, fresh smell, reached a small, brown hand. What would it be? What did I want it to be? A mermaid, a Spanish infanta?
What it was, was a monkey.
Not a real monkey, but a monkey of wood. Heavy with the water it had swallowed and scarred with tar, it crouched on its pedestal, remote and holy, long-muzzled and oddly foreign. I brushed it and dried it and admired its delicately carved hair. It looked like no monkey I had ever seen eating peanuts and moony-foolish. It had the noble pose of a simian Thinker. I realize now that the totem I so lovingly undid from its caul of kelp (and have since, alas, mislaid with the other baggage of childhood) was a Sacred Baboon.
So the sea, perceiving my need, had conferred a blessing. My baby brother took his place in the house that day, but so did my marvellous and (who knew?) even priceless baboon.
Did my childhood seascape, then, lend me my love of change and wildness? Mountains terrify me—they just sit about, they are so proud. The stillness of hills stifles me like fat pillows. When I was not walking alongside the sea I was on it, or in it. My young uncle, athletic and handy, rigged us a beach swing. When the tide was right you could kick to the peak
of the arc, let go, and drop into the water.
Nobody taught me to swim. It simply happened. I stood in a ring of playmates in the quiet bay, up to my armpits, rocked by ripples. One spoilt little boy had a rubber tyre in which he sat and kicked, although he could not swim. My mother would never let my brother or me borrow water wings or tyres or swimming pillows for fear they would float us over our depth and rubbish us to an early death. ‘Learn to swim first‚’ was her stern motto. The little boy climbed off his tyre, bobbed and clung, and wouldn’t share it. ‘It’s mine,’ he reasonably said. Suddenly a cat’s paw scuffed the water dark, he let go, and the pink, lifesaver-shaped tyre skimmed out of his grip. Loss widened his eyes; he began to cry. ‘I’ll get it,’ I said, my bravado masking a fiery desire for a ride. I jumped with a sideflap of hands; my feet ceased to touch. I was in that forbidden country—‘over my head’. I should, according to mother, have sunk like a stone, but I didn’t. My chin was up, hands and feet milling the cold green. I caught the scudding tyre and swam in. I was swimming. I could swim.
The airport across the bay unloosed a blimp. It went up like a silver bubble, a salute.
That summer my uncle and his petite fiancée built a boat. My brother and I carried shiny nails. We woke to the tamp-tamp of the hammer. The honey-color of the new wood, the white shavings (turned into finger rings) and the sweet dust of the saw were creating an idol, something beautiful—a real sailboat. From the sea my uncle brought back mackerel. Greeny-blue-black brocades unfaded, they came to table. And we did live off the sea. With a cod’s head and tail my grandmother could produce a chowder that set, when chilled, in its own triumphal jelly. We made suppers of buttery steamed clams and laid lines of lobster pots. But I never could watch my grandmother drop the dark green lobsters with their waving, wood-jammed claws into the boiling pot from which they would be, in a minute, drawn—red, dead and edible. I felt the awful scald of the water too keenly on my skin.
The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses and sandwiches and colored umbrellas, as if the water—blue, green, grey, navy or silver as it might be, were enough to watch. The grown-ups in those days, still wore the puritanical black bathing suits that make our family snapshot albums so archaic.
My final memory of the sea is of violence—a, still, unhealthily yellow day in 1939, the sea molten, steely-slick, heaving at its leash like a broody animal, evil violets in its eye. Anxious telephone calls crossed from my grandmother, on the exposed oceanside, to my mother, on the bay. My brother and I, kneehigh still, imbibed the talk of tidal waves, high ground, boarded windows and floating boats like a miracle elixir. The hurricane was due at nightfall. In those days, hurricanes did not bud in Florida and bloom over Cape Cod each autumn as they now do—bang, bang, bang, frequent as firecrackers on the Fourth and whimsically named after women. This was a monstrous speciality, a leviathan. Our world might be eaten, blown to bits. We wanted to be in on it.
The sulphurous afternoon went black unnaturally early, as if what was to come could not be star-lit, torch-lit, looked at. The rain set in, one huge Noah douche. Then the wind. The world had become a drum. Beaten, it shrieked and shook. Pale and elated in our beds, my brother and I sipped our nightly hot drink. We would, of course, not sleep. We crept to a blind and hefted it a notch. On a mirror of rivery black our faces wavered like moths, trying to pry their way in. Nothing could be seen. The only sound was a howl, jazzed up by the bangs, slams, groans and splinterings of objects tossed like crockery in a giant’s quarrel. The house rocked on its root. It rocked and rocked and rocked its two small watchers to sleep.
The wreckage the next day was all one could wish—overthrown trees and telephone poles, shoddy summer cottages bobbing out by the lighthouse and a litter of the ribs of little ships. My grandmother’s house had lasted, valiant—though the waves broke right over the road and into the bay. My grandfather’s seawall had saved it, neighbors said. Sand buried her furnace in golden whorls; salt stained the upholstered sofa and a dead shark filled what had been the geranium bed, but my grandmother had her broom out, it would soon be right.
And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.
Snow Blitz
In London, the day after Christmas (Boxing Day)—it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years I had been tactfully asking ‘Do you ever have snow at all?’ as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid grey that make up an English winter. ‘Ooo I do remember snow,’ was the usual reply, ‘when I were a lad.’ Whereupon I would enthusiastically recall the huge falls of crisp and spectacular white I snowballed, tunneled in and sledded on in the States when I was young. Now I felt the same sweet chill of anticipation at my London window, watching the pieces of darkness incandesce as they drove through the glow of the street-light. Since my flat (once the home of W. B. Yeats and so marked on a round, blue plaque) has no central heating, my chill was not metaphorical but very real.
The next day the snow lay about—white, picturesque, untouched, and it went on snowing. The next day the snow still lay about—untouched. There seemed to be a lot more of it. Bits plopped in over my boot tops as I crossed the unplowed street. The main road had not been plowed either. Random buses and cabs crawled along in deep white tracks. Here and there men with newspapers, brooms and rags attempted to discover their cars.
Most of the local shops still foundered in a foot or two of fluff, the customers’ footsteps like birdtracks looping from door to door. A small space in front of the chemist’s had been cleared. Into this I gratefully stepped.
‘I suppose you don’t have snowplows in England, heh, heh!’ I joked, loading up with Kleenex paddipads, black-currant juice, rose-hip syrup and bottles of nose drops and cough medicine (labeled The Linctus in Gothic script)—those sops and aids to babies with winter colds.
‘No,’ the chemist beamed back, ‘no snowplows I’m afraid. We in England are simply not prepared for snow. After all, it falls so seldom.’
This seemed to me a reasonable, if ominous reply. If England was due for a new ice age, what then?
‘Shall I’, the chemist leaned forward with a confidential smile, ‘show you what I have found helpful?’
‘Oh yes, do,’ I desperately said, thinking of tranquillizers.
The chemist lifted, shyly and proudly, a rough six-foot plank from behind a counter of Trufoods and cough pastilles.
‘A board!’
‘A board?’
The chemist closed his eyes and gripped the plank, blissful as a housewife with a rolling pin.
‘With this board I simply push the snow aside.’
I stumbled out with my bundles. I smiled. Everybody smiled. The snow was a huge joke, and our predicament that of Alpine climbers marooned in a cartoon.
Then the snow hardened and froze. Sidewalks and streets became a rugged terrain of ice over whose treacherous crevices old people teetered, clutching dog leads or steered by strangers.
One morning my doorbell rang.
‘Shovel your steps, lydy?’ asked a small cockney with a vast canvas pram.
‘How much?’ I cynically wondered, not knowing the going rate and expecting extortion.
‘Oh, thruppence. A penny.’
I melted and said all right.
Then, forseeing slackness: ‘Mind you chip off the ice!’
Two hours later the boy was still working. Four hours later he rang to borrow a broom. I glanced out of the window and saw a pram full of tiny icebergs. Finally he had finished. I inspected the job. He seemed to have cleaned between the railing struts with a chisel. ‘Looks like it might snow again.’ Hopefully he surveyed the low grey sky. I gave him a sixpence and he vanished in an avalanche of thanks with the snow-mountained pram.
It did snow again. Then came the col
d.
The morning of the Big Freeze I discovered the bathtub half full of filthy water. I could not understand it. I do not understand plumbing. I waited a day; maybe it would go away. But the water did not go away, it increased, both in depth and dirtiness. The next day I woke to find myself staring at a stain in my beautiful new white ceiling. As I looked, the ceiling discharged, at various spots, drops of viscous liquid that splopped onto the rug. The ceiling paper sagged at the seams.
‘Help!’ I cried to the house agent from a puddle of black water in the telephone kiosk. I had no home phone because getting one took at least three months. ‘My ceiling is leaking and the bathtub is full of dirty water.’
Silence.
‘Not my dirty water,’ I hastened to add. ‘Water that floods up into the tub of its own accord. I think there is snow in it. Maybe it’s roof water.’
This last information was a bit apocalyptic. Had I seen snow in the tub water? It certainly sounded more dangerous.
‘The water may well be from the roof,’ the agent faintly said. Then, more sternly ‘You realize there is not a plumber to be had in London. Everyone has the same trouble. Why, I have had three burst pipes in my flat.’
‘Yes, but you know how to fix them’, I resolutely cooed. ‘There is no cold water in the cold water taps either. What does that mean?’
‘We’, muttered the agent, ‘shall soon see.’
The builders and the agent’s assistant arrived within the hour, booted and puffing and tracking up black muck. With shovels and picks they crawled through the attic trapdoor and soon great masses of snow were thunking from the roof into the yard.
‘Why does the roof leak?’ I asked the agent’s assistant.
‘These are old roofs. It’s all right when it rains, but when it snows, the snow piles up and up behind the gutters. It’s all right as long as it stays cold.’ He smiled. ‘But when it melts!’