Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Praise
Acknowledgements
Preface
Credits
Seeing the Light
On the Bottom
Changes
The Sea of Surprises
Sentiment and Seaweed
Navel Manoeuvres
Bunnies and Badgers
Filtersville
Committed to Biology
The Song of the Dredge
All at Sea
Stars and Starfish in the Sky
Slitherers and Skeletons
Sea Meadows
Fishermen’s Tales
The Turquoise Pool
Voyagers
One of the Crowd
Caribbean Nights
He Who Dares, Swims
Brace Yourself
Green
In the Zone
Go West Young Man
What’s in a Name?
The Pleasure of Piers
Kelp and Selkies
Lost Ships
Home Deep Home
Just Visiting
Wet Behind the Years?
Worlds Within Whorls
A Walk in the Park
A Little Night Music
Playing the Field
Alien Invasions
Pretending to be a Leaf
It’s a Small World
Only Skin Deep
Here Be Giants
Freewheeling
Moonstruck
Sardines and Scarlatti
Deserts and Dreams
Ghosts in the Marine
Darkness at Noon
The Shipwrecked Dentist
Piercing the Isthmus
Polyps and Politics
Dynamite and Cyanide
Memento Mari
Bibliography
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Truly magical.’ – David Puttnam
‘I am still much beneath its spell to write level-headedly about it … It is magnificent.’ – James Hamilton-Paterson Whitbread Prize Winner
‘A fascinating true-life adventure story … You have only to open Trevor Norton’s Reflections on a Summer Sea to experience how thrilling the study of natural history can be. … I thank him for making me feel young again.’ – David Bellamy, New Scientist
‘A lovely book – an affectionate portrayal of rural Ireland in the Sixties and a richly nostalgic memoir … Norton writes beautifully.’ – Sunday Express
‘A wonderful book. Not only does the author have an exceptionally rare ability to recapture those ecstatically funny moments in life, but also a profound, and quite moving ability to capture what it is to be human … It is a world that has now gone, but Trevor Norton has immortalized it in his crystalline prose. This is the kind of book that you don’t ever want to end and after you have read it you want to go straight back and start reading it all over again.’ – Frank Ryan Amazon.co.uk
‘An extraordinary second book from the author of Stars Beneath the Sea, which won him the accolade: “Bill Bryson underwater” … The [ecologists’] antics and interactions with their Irish neighbors are lovingly described with Norton’s keen eye for the absurd.’ – Amazon.com
‘Laden with wisdom and wit, it is also the moving story of the bond between two extraordinary ecologists. … Magical images remain in the reader’s mind. Norton’s writing is spellbinding.’ – Southern Star
‘A fine account and a touching tale of friendship. Highly recommended.’ – The Bookseller
‘A delightful, lyrical, funny book … tinged with sadness, that you just want to go on reading.’ – Choice
‘A wonderfully warm, gentle book in which the richness of Irish life is intermingled with the wonders of natural History.’ – Book of the Month
‘A funny and in places touching story … Norton has the true enthusiast’s knack of drawing us into the strange and at times apocalyptic world of the sea.’ – Belfast Telegraph
‘A nostalgic memoir that’s richly entertaining.’ – Woman and Home
‘Norton’s writing is often very funny, but he also writes poetically and lovingly about science. He is exceptionally good at making seemingly dull things into objects of fascination. … It is also delightfully illustrated.’ – Eclectica
‘Norton captures wonderfully the wit of the local Irish neighbours … but at the same time he documents fascinating marine biology… This is certainly a book worthy to sit alongside his widely acclaimed Stars Beneath the Sea, which has already won him recognition as the underwater world’s finest writer.’ – Dive
Praise for Stars Beneath the Sea
The extraordinary lives of the pioneers of diving
by Trevor Norton
Winner of the Bachrach Literary Award
‘Trevor Norton has shown that a gifted writer is an alchemist … His agile prose is burnished with humour and he has the natural storyteller’s eye for detail. Teeny facts gleam and pass like shoals of tropical fish.’ – Daily Telegraph
‘Norton delights infectiously … and writes with wit and a fine eye for the poetry in the scientific work… His narrative is by turns funny and gripping.’ – The Guardian
‘A quirky history of the eccentric experiments of some truly mad individuals. … I loved it.’ ‘Choice of the Month’ – The Bookseller
‘A marvelous book … from the first page you are snatched into a racing current of excitement, adventure and discovery … He writes with humour too. Take it one chapter at a time or you might get the bends.’ – New Scientist
‘A delightful portrait gallery … Norton writes with a light touch and a wonderful feel for his material … His survey of lives changed by an obsession with the sea swims with serendipitous adventures, odd twists and dark moments.’ – Publishers Weekly, New York
‘Gripping, informative, often amusing, often sad, always interesting.’ – Newslink
‘Absolutely delightful.’ – The Good Book Guide
‘Admirably concise and witty, entertaining and informative.’ – Booklist, New York
‘Rich entertainment.’ – Mail on Sunday
‘So fondly related that even the most aquaphobic reader might be tempted to don a rubber suit and flippers.’ – Four star bestseller Bertrams Buyers’ Notes
‘Readers will be enthralled … Norton is a charming and likeable writer.’ – Dive magazine
‘Simply one of the best books I have read in a long time … delightful … laugh-out-loud funny … it really is a gem.’ – Amazon.co.uk
‘A very rare book … Professor Norton tells his tales like an old salt holding a pint of grog in a smoky tavern. You’ll love them!’ – Amazon.com
‘Splendid … excellently written.’ – James Hamilton-Paterson, Whitbread Prize winner
‘Trevor Norton’s brilliant book, Stars Beneath the Sea, owes its appeal not only to its remarkable subject matter, but to the succinct and eloquent style of the author … fine prose written with wit and compassion.’ – Ocean Enterprises, Australia
‘Trevor Norton’s entertaining history of diving.’ – Bill Bryson
I am for ever indebted to those people who inspired me to explore the margins of the sea. Hans and Lotte Hass I have acknowledged elsewhere. Sadly, it is now too late to thank my science master, Frank Graham, my research supervisor, Bunny Burrows, and my colleagues and mentors, Jack Kitching and John Ebling, but I would like to record my gratitude just the same.
Several people kindly supplied me with information and I am especially grateful to Professor Chuck Amsler, Dr David Anderson, Dr Einar Anderson, Dr David Bramwell, Lisa de Cesare, Dr Val Gerard, Dr Joanna Jones, Dr David Leighton, Dr Claes Lundgren, Professor Dan Morse, Professor Brian Moss, Dr Richard Nash, Dr Peter Neushul, Joan Parker, Professor Robert Waaland, the late Professor Wheeler North and, as always, Reg Vallintine. Roger Rawlcliff kindly checked my Latin and Greek.
Sincere thanks to Caroline Dawnay and Mark Booth for their unstinting encouragement and brave attempts to temper my worst excesses.
My wife, Win, has again produced lovely images where I had only words.
I grew up beside a sullen sea rimmed with coal dust, and that was where I first felt the tug of the tide. But the whisper in the shells was of bluer oceans beyond the horizon, salt-scented and transparent, alive with strange creatures.
So I searched for their shores and this is the story of my journey.
O’Faolain, S., An Irish Journey, Readers Union & Longmans Green, London, 1941. © 1940 by Sean O’Faolain. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Sean O’Faolain, c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN
Plath, S. 1971, two lines from Three Women a poem for three voices published in Winter Trees, Faber & Faber, London, 1971. Reprinted by kind permission of Faber & Faber.
Ricketts, E.F., and Calvin, J., Between Pacific Tides, 3rd edn revised by J. Hedgepeth, Stanford University Press, 1952. Reprinted by kind permission of Stanford University Press.
Stark, F., The Southern Gates of Arabia, 1936. Reproduced by kind permission of John Murray Publishers.
Stephenson, T.A., The British Sea Anemones, Ray Society, 1935. The vignettes at the foot of page 150 is reprinted with permission from the Ray Society.
While every effort has been made to secure permissions, I apologise for any apparent negligence on my part and undertake to make any necessary corrections on future editions.
We lived on the second floor and misted with salt. At night the beams from the lighthouse swept my ceiling.
I was seven when we had the worst winter for a century. The seaweed went stiff with rime and even the tide pools froze. A Greek freighter was driven ashore to perch upright and drip rust on to the rocks.
Snow drifted in an arc right up to my bedroom window and, if I’d had the courage, I could have slid down to the ground. Dad dug a tunnel out from the front door and carried me to school on his shoulders through a deep trench, and only I could see the surface of the sun-dazzled snow. For a few weeks we lived at the North Pole and I expected Father Christmas to sleigh round the corner at any moment. Then the myth melted, the streets turned to soiled slush and Santa, I suppose, was out of the question.
The following summer we walked to Curry’s Point at the northern edge of Whitley Bay, where I lived. Two hundred years earlier I would have heard the clanking chains on the gibbet, where the corpse of a murderer, Michael Curry, hung until it disintegrated. From the Point was a causeway leading to St Mary’s Island, where the lighthouse stood.
The 120-foot tower was the first really big thing I had ever seen close up, an immense rocket ship, white and wonderful. Inside, there were no cosy rooms with curved walls, just a hollow with a staircase spiralling around a central abyss. At the top, encased in a wilderness of prisms, was the lamp, like a crystal from another planet, able to incandesce and brush aside mere earthly darkness to explore my bedroom two miles away. The four-and-a-half-ton lamp floated on a lake of mercury and the slightest nudge from my finger would have made it revolve.
Lighthouses have shrunk a little since I grew, but I still love the big, clean, white ones, vertical and virginal yet audaciously erect, signals to sailors and signposts to God.
Whitley Bay was the last resort on the north-east coast of England. It squatted beside Newcastle, to which it was unnecessary to carry coal in those days. The words ‘Whitley Bay’ were on every visitor’s lips as they sucked the sickly, lettered rock. Everything then seemed designed to damage your teeth: the rock, the candyfloss, scuffles outside the boozer. The cautious often removed their teeth as closing time approached.
The first time we went on holiday it was to Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast. As far as I could tell it was exactly the same as Whitley Bay, a land of leaky pails and broken spades and sandcastles that succumbed to the tide. I peered into the pools and collected red rubbery lumps in the hope they would blossom into anemones.
We stayed in a dishevelled hostel masquerading as a guest house. It was painted hospital white on the outside, boarding-house brown within. The landlady was firm but fair and had a face you could have abseiled down. It was cheaper if guests brought their own food for her to cook. You paid extra for a warm breakfast and a partial view of the sea, but you were locked out until teatime, even when it rained. We knew how to enjoy ourselves in those days.
Although I didn’t know it then, this was where the British love affair with the seaside had begun and in a most unlikely way. In 1660, a local doctor had published a book extolling the virtues of sea water for gout or ‘drying up superfluous humours, and preserving from putrefaction … and all manner of worms’.
In France, medics forecast that sea bathing led to ‘immediate death’, but Scarborough’s beaches became infested with scrofula sufferers and imaginary invalids, and bathing certainly lightened the load for those suffering from the effects of dirt. Later books extended the menu of afflictions amenable to salt-water cure to include ‘ruptures, rheumatism and madness’, as well as ‘phrenzy and nymphomania’.
Bathers were indeed forcibly submerged by burly female ‘dippers’ – ‘hideous amphibious animals’, according to the artist Constable. The shock of those icy waters was fundamental to the cure, for it was well known that the ‘terror and Surprize, very much contracts the nervous membrane and tubes, in which the aerial spirits are contained’. Scarborough assured its patrons that it had the coldest water of all.
In all senses the melancholia, worms and putrefaction were washed away with the tide. This gave nature’s seaside sanatorium the edge over inland spas where, as Tobias Smollet feared, invalids with running sores might convert the warm baths into cauldrons of infection keen to dart into his open pores. Worse still, what if the bathwater got into the pump from which he drank the mineral water, and he was swallowing the ‘sweat, dirt and dandruff and the abdominal discharges of various kinds, from twenty diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below’? No, the chill and voluminous sea was undisputedly a safer kettle of fish.
The ‘beach’ had been invented and many city dwellers would see the horizon for the first time. They came to enjoy the whipping of the waves which ‘invigorates all parts’, and a confrontation with the ‘congenial horrors of unrestrained nature’. Others succumbed to a massage with freshly gathered seaweed, or simply admired the bathing beauties from afar while simultaneously celebrating the invention of opera glasses.
The lure of the seaside was that people were liberated to let their hair down in public, both metaphorically and literally. After bathing, a woman’s wet tresses had to be brushed and the beach was the only place where they might be viewed free from the nets and buns in which they were normally imprisoned.
As soon as the ‘lower class’ arrived, they seemed to ‘give up their decorum with their rail ticket and to adopt practices which at home they would shudder to even read of’. Indeed, ‘men gambol about in a complete state of nature’ and women frolic with only ‘apologies for covering’. In 1866, the Scarborough Gazette contained angry letters claiming that a healthy recreation had been turned into ‘an immoral and depraved exhibition’. On the other hand, traders knew from experience that ‘if first-class visitors are obliged to wear drawers when bathing … Scarborough will lose its fame’. New by-laws divided up the beach into bedrawed and knickerless sections.
Scarborough Spa prospered. The visitors’ book read like a Who’s Who of high society. The town published a weekly gazette to list all the important new arrivals. It was the first to have bathing machines and had forty of them by the 1780s. Arcades, a covered promenade and assembly rooms were built to occupy the bathers when they were out of the water or if, inevitably, it was raining. Seaboard towns all over Britain followed Scarborough’s lead, each boasting saltier water than the others, or younger female bathing attendants, or fewer of those wicked waves that ‘annoy, frighten and spatter bathers exceedingly’.
In the 1850s you couldn’t step on the English coast without tripping over a resort bulging with ‘attractions’. Visitors were deafened by the noise of barrel organs and brass bands.
But by the 1950s, when I came, even the grand buildings of Scarborough were about to fall on hard times. The desire to retire to the seaside to await death gave some places a bad name. Deadly Llandudno had the highest death rate in Britain.
In Whitley Bay, most of the iron railings had been melted down during the war and dropped on Hitler. The few that remained received their annual overcoat of royal-blue gloss, covering an undercoat of rust.
At the Spanish City there was still some of the fun of the fair: the Waltzer, dodgems smelling of sparks, and lairy lads in kiss-me-quick hats who stood on the cars chatting up your girl while taking the fare. In the amusement arcades, ball bearings clattered around in the ancient mechanical slot machines. Men in short white coats roamed the floor like disconsolate dentists. ‘Change!’ they cried. ‘Any change required?’
The times they were a-changing. The gypsy palmist, having read between the lines, packed up and left.
I didn’t misspend my youth; in fact, I didn’t spend it at all. It just fell through a hole in my pocket. In summer my mates and I lounged on the beach listening to the shrieks of timid bathers, their skins in summer scarlet. The donkeys had been temporarily displaced by rides on an army surplus DUKW from which dads might relive the D-Day landings. We eyed the girls in their new nylon bathing cossies, which were a big advance on the old woollen ones as they were transparent when wet. On quiet days we amused ourselves by divining the character and lifestyle of those who had left their bum prints on the beach. The smallest pleat in the sand or asymmetry of cheeks would reveal acres of biographical detail. It was a form of palmistry and about as reliable.
The opaque water slithered in, then oozed out again. It never seemed to smile and it never got warm. Autumn always came too soon, with winds that caused the gull droppings to fall obliquely and congeal before they hit you.
I didn’t enjoy being young. Perhaps I wasn’t very good at it. My parents were summoned by the headmaster to be told that I was the worst boy in the school. To me this became almost a point of honour.
My essays, though lively, were decorated with extraneous scrawls and blots, which I rather liked, but they elicited tetchy comments such as ‘Keep this book away from the dog!’ Perhaps I was concerned that, should my handwriting improve, they might discover how little I knew. I came a creditable bottom of the class in woodwork: ‘15th out of 15 – Much improved work this term.’
Television was to change my life for ever with a series of films in which Hans Hass went Diving to Adventure. Each week he swam with giant manta rays and moray eels, and his luscious wife, Lotte perched on mounds of coral while sharks circled ominously. She looked good enough to eat.
In one film I’m almost sure she peeled and swallowed a banana underwater. I forget the biological significance of this, but it made a lasting impression on at least one fourteen-year-old boy. I coveted Hass’s beautiful yacht and the freedom to rummage below on tropical reefs. And then, of course, there was Lotte. I decided that I too would become a handsome Austrian adventurer.
As soon as the spring sea warmed to almost frigid, I submerged beneath the waves for the first time equipped only with a pair of bathing trunks. Instead of the ripple of sun flecks on the pale sand, all I saw was a blur swilling below me, and a fuzzy cloud as a flatfish fled. Our eyes don’t work in water. They need a layer of air to allow them to focus. So I bought a diving mask and a snorkel with a caged ping-pong ball to keep out the water. Begoggled, amphibian-footed and carrying a toasting fork fixed to a bamboo pole, I slid off the sandstone slabs at St Mary’s Island and into the cold and cloudy sea.
In a kelp-lined gully the tall plants swayed back and forth in the wash of the waves. It felt as if I were passing between rows of galley slaves pulling against a big sea. I was fighting the swell one moment, surging forward into a fizz of bubbles the next.
Bursting for breath, I thrust my head into the gloom beneath the canopy of kelp. With each movement above there was a flicker of sun and shadow on the rocks beneath. Then two seaweeds closed around my neck with the soft hands of a strangler. I shot to the surface and tried to look as unconcerned as Hans Hass in a swirl of sharks.
From the surface I could see a large dome about fifteen feet below. I took a deep breath, folded my body at the waist then lifted my legs out of the water. Their weight caused me to slide effortlessly down. The mask squashed against my face and it felt as if a needle was being inserted into my ears. The water was closing in on me. Everything with air in it – my lungs, sinuses and ears – was being compressed. Even a foot below the surface the compression on my chest was equivalent to a weight of over 180 pounds. It was the same on my abdomen, pushing the diaphragm up into the chest cavity and squeezing it still further. Three feet underwater the pressure differential is so great that it is impossible to suck down air through a tube from the surface, but I soon learned that snorting into the mask pushed it out again, and swallowing hard took care of my ears.
It was a painful lesson, but I couldn’t be distracted. Being underwater was more exciting than I had ever imagined. A kaleidoscope of new images overwhelmed me: the elegant untidiness of lazily swaying seaweed, the uncontrived encounters with silver sand eels and crusty crabs. I had walked through some woods without seeing a single squirrel or badger, but here wild animals came out to meet me.
On the bottom, the dome I had seen turned out to be a ship’s rusty boiler and I stared into its dark and dangerous interior. Who knew what might be lurking inside? In the surrounding sand, softly lifting and settling in the swell, I found a rudder and a brass propeller with its shaft. It was my first wreck and it had waited sixty years for me to find it. I surfaced breathless, more from excitement than lack of air.
I went down again and again. Suddenly, while I was below, something stabbed the water in front of me, a dark javelin in a cone of bubbles. It transformed into a cormorant. Having misfished for a sand eel, it escaped back to the sky. It was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen and I have never seen it since.
This, I decided, was the real world. The air-bound attic up there beyond the surface was no place to live. This fresh and alive sea was everything that the land wasn’t. We plod around on land, victims of gravity. It is merely a surface on which to stand, the wind a mischievous nuisance. But underwater, weightless and often powerless in the current, you become one with the flow.
On my final return to the surface a fluttering shoal of pollack parted to let me pass. They were neither anxious nor curious. I was just one of the boys. It was as if the sea had been expecting me.
Sitting on the rocks and trying to dry myself in the wind, I watched a heron pluck green crabs from the pools then soar away like a tired pterodactyl. Flights of knots and oystercatchers came in with the tide to feed or to loiter on one leg. It was a super place to shiver. There were a couple of cormorants chatting on a rock. Perhaps one was my cormorant, boasting to his chum about the one that got away: ‘I saw the queerest thing today. Put me right off my fishing. So ugly. And it couldn’t dive for toffee.’
The next day I sawed off the end of my snorkel and threw away the ping-pong ball. I would never again mind the taste of the sea. After all, the world was seven-tenths salty water and so was I, and the chemical composition of my blood was almost identical to that of sea water. The ocean was truly in my veins and briefly, when still in the womb, I even had gill slits.
Everyone was shocked. It was completely unexpected. I began to pass exams.
So far I had promised little and lived down to everyone’s expectations. Secondary-modern kids weren’t even supposed to take exams. We were on the bottom of the educational ocean.
French might still be a problem. My French mistress prophesied that by the time I learned to speak the language I would be too old to cross the Channel.
My parents thought a little coaching might help, so they exhumed from the most Yellowed Pages Miss de la Motte, who would give me an hour every Wednesday evening during the winter. She lived in a musty villa with a dark staircase leading to locked attic rooms. The parlour was laden with the past. It was as if a survivor of the Tsar’s family had fetched up here with a wagonload of furniture and photographs. There were heavy velvet drapes redolent of damp decay, fat candles and guttered volcanoes of wax everywhere, extinct gas brackets and an old bell-push on the wall. Long ago, the ivory button had summoned servants, now it dangled on a wire like an escaped eyeball.
Every surface was dense with dust. Not the friendly fluff that hides under the bed, but the deep silt that accumulates on the bottom of an unvisited ocean.
The chill and the gloom added to the feeling that we were trapped in a wrecked ship lost in the abyss. At any moment an octopus might slither out from behind the curtains.
Miss de la Motte lived alone. Her face was as crumpled as discarded paper, but she had wonderful porcelain-blue eyes. Great whorls of hair gathered on her head like a beret after rain.
Over the empty fireplace was a painting of a placid stream. On the bank, half hidden in the shadows, sat a wistful young girl in an Edwardian apron and dress. She had cast a stone into the water and was watching the ripples expand, wondering perhaps where she might travel to and who she might become. The girl had porcelain-blue eyes.
I can still hear Miss de la Motte’s voice, that rich whisper of an ancient record, punctuated by the soft rattle of loose teeth. Yet she spoke more perfectly than anyone else I have known. Although she never dusted an external surface, no sentence emerged until it had been polished for public view.
We used an ancient textbook and however carefully I opened its desiccated maroon covers, it creaked like the door to a haunted house. In its corridors lurked an encyclopaedia of unknown words, hiding beneath grave or acute eyebrows and circumflex frowns. I can’t recall the lessons except for the phrase l’enfant refractaire. As with all the other phrases, I had to look it up in the glossary. It said: ‘the refractory child’. I was none the wiser.
There were only so many frozen Wednesday nights that I could stand. I had better learn the language, and amazingly I did. One day the sous dropped and French didn’t seem so hard. I passed the exam and began to rise towards the surface.
Just up the coast, flying a pennant of smoke, was Blyth. Cambois, nearby, was pronounced ‘Camuss’ to prevent the inhabitants getting ideas beyond their station.
The taste of coal was on the wind and the town rang with the clank and rumble of shunting wagons and rock tumbling down the loading chutes into echoing ships’ holds. Everything was the colour of anthracite: the docks, the dockers and the rusty coasters. More coal was being shipped from this little port than from any place in Europe.
I transferred to Blyth Grammar School. Each day I travelled up by train and each day it was late because, they said, the weather was too cold (frozen points), too hot (buckled points), or too wet (rusted points). Once, if the newspaper was to be believed, the delay was a result of the driver being too short to reach the pedals.
The suburban train to school was one of those without corridors, just a series of separate compartments. When you stepped into that enclosed box you never knew who might await you; a leggy blonde with Michelin lips, or maybe a mad axeman – but it was usually a shambles of untidy school kids.
The journey to school passed through mining country. The footballing Charlton brothers were born just north of here in Ashington and had they stayed they would probably now be dead from pneumoconiosis. Everywhere there were conical spoil heaps like Fujiyama foothills. They remained resolutely black, shunned by vegetation. Someone had the idea of planting their slopes with cherry trees to help them ‘blend in’, but the sad saplings failed to thrive. Ashington was once the biggest mining town in the world, but twenty-one years after I first saw it, the last mine would close.
I studied geology, zoology and botany, and games were of course compulsory for everyone except the games master. Like all games masters, ours limped around in an elastic knee bandage, which mysteriously changed knees. It prevented him from joining our football match in the mud and meant he had to skip the gruelling cross-country runs. Luckily, his lungs were sound so he could shout a lot and smoke energetically while we ran around in the rain. So I learned to play football and studied a little – much too little.
A new biology teacher encouraged us to do field projects, so I headed for the shore. Sand dunes stretched south from Blyth and the nearest rocky shores were beside Seaton Sluice. It isn’t much of a name for a place, nor much of a place for a name, but it had once been impressive. From the thirteenth century, salt had been manufactured here by evaporating sea water in huge pans over fires. By the eighteenth century, large amounts of coal were being shipped from here to London. An artificial harbour was built for Sir Ralph Delaval and served twenty-two resident ships. Outside the harbour there was still an island composed entirely of Kentish chalk dumped as ballast long ago. But the harbour silted up and, to make a more direct route to the sea, a sluice was cut through the rock, almost fifty feet deep, thirty wide and nine hundred long. Gates on the seaward end once opened and closed automatically with the tide.
Seaton Sluice prospered. The Delavals set up a glass factory with expert glass blowers imported from Germany. By 1777 it was the largest glassworks in Britain, producing one and three-quarter million bottles a year. Around the tiny harbour were seven alehouses to refresh the workers.
The Delavals required a residence to reflect their station in life, so they called in a playwright. John Vanbrugh had ‘a heart above his income’ and took only six weeks to pen his first play. It was a hit, as was his next effort. When a rich dilettante decided to build a new theatre in London, who better to design it than a theatrical fellow like Vanbrugh. Unfortunately, the grandiose temple he constructed had the acoustics of an eiderdown.
When next invited to design a building he asked Nicholas Hawksmoor, the chief draughtsman of St Paul’s, how it was done, then went off and did it. The result was Blenheim Palace. Next was Castle Howard, but he found Yorkshire ‘so bloody cold, I have almost a mind to marry to keep myself warm’. There were candidates aplenty for love was ‘as much forced up here as melons’. An observer wrote that ‘His inclinations to ruins has given him a fancy for Mrs. Yarborough’.
Vanbrugh’s next project lay a mile upstream from Seaton Sluice where he built a Palladian palace as confident as the Delavals themselves. The house was rumoured to have had tilting beds that tipped guests into a cold bath, and sliding walls to reveal them in bed with a serving wench.
To turn into the courtyard at Delaval Hall is to enter on to a wondrous stage set. The façade has been described as an ‘astonishment’. It is an unforgettable example of Vanbrugh’s originality and masterly disregard for the rules. He imbued all his great buildings with a drama that few have matched. It struck me that if someone ‘without thought or lecture’ could write fresh and witty plays and design some of the grandest buildings in Britain, perhaps even an educational discard like me could achieve something. And I was off to the shore to get started.
Adjacent to Seaton Sluice is the rocky arc of Collywell Bay. My project was to strip off all the animals and plants from discrete areas of the shore and see what ensued. Would similar creatures recolonise? How long would it take?
It was thought that the order of succession was fixed, because earlier colonists somehow paved the way for later arrivals. That’s not what happened on the shore where many of the squatters settled together as soon as the space appeared. The order in which they became apparent depended on their growth rates, not their arrival times.
In the areas I denuded the opportunistic sea lettuces Ulva and Enteromorpha were the first to show. Soon all the stripped areas were bright emerald squares in a field of khaki wrack. But slowly the ephemeral green algae died down and the larger brown seaweeds regained their lost territory by overgrowing and overshadowing everything else.
In its modest way, it demonstrated to me that communities were not static and immutable; they could be changed at least transiently by a single disturbance. Of course, the initial perturbation need not be deliberate. It might result from the effects of a hard winter or a good year for the recruitment of grazers, or a catastrophe like an oil spill. What is more, shore organisms were the ideal test bed for studying such changes in natural communities because the players in the drama – the snails, limpets and seaweeds – were relatively short-lived and therefore the speed of change and recuperation from disturbance was conveniently rapid.
I had also learned something far more important: that scientists find out by doing, not by being told. Existing ideas and facts are merely signposts to the future and sometimes misleading ones at that. To linger too long on what is already known, however interesting that may be, is to be distracted from the business of science, which is not just the accumulation of facts, but the pursuit of the new and, if you are lucky, the unexpected. On this unremarkable shore I had begun a quest that would last a lifetime.
My love affair with the sea would lead me to walk on empty shores before the tourists invaded. And I would come to know the ocean as a wild aquarium, a laboratory, a cemetery for men and ships, and an anthology of legends. I would understand the spell it casts on fishermen, divers, treasure seekers and writers, for the sea is a place for obsessives.
One of my early obsessions was geology so I took a hammer and chipped away at the shale. A school party ambled down on the beach.
’Are there fossils around here?’ the teacher enquired.
’A few,’ I replied and prised up a sheet of shale. There, pressed as flat as a flower in a book, was the impression of a fossil tree with snakeskin bark.
’Of course, you have to know where to look,’ I said modestly.
’Ooh,’ she said. ‘Do you want that one?’
Well, clearly a hotshot palaeontologist who dug these things out by the dozen could hardly refuse.
I never came across another tree, although down the local pit they often found them and their roots, and even the occasional coelacanth. My finds were more modest – ancient marine mussels huddled together awaiting discovery, and tiny hacksaw blades called graptolites (rock writing), many of them in pairs like long-silent tuning forks. They were an enigma, but are now considered relatives of the sea squirts. In life, some hung from floats as a fringe adorns a Victorian lampshade; others stuck in the mud like fallen darts. They tried every variant to survive, but still they became extinct, destined to sleep for ever in the rocks, in what even geologists call bedding.
These beds had once been tropical swamps. Vegetation was pressed beneath the crush of fallen forests and accumulating sediment until only carbon remained. We call it coal and burn it to release the energy of sunlight that dappled leaves over 300 million years before.
Northumberland was once riddled with coal mines. The nearest pit to Collywell Bay was at Hartley where, in 1862, the twenty-ton engine beam that pumped out water crashed down the main shaft, filling it with rubble and cutting off the air supply. Two hundred and four miners lost their lives, some of them as young as eleven. Apart from five who were killed outright, they all suffocated, and when the rescuers tunnelled in they found them lying in rows, the boys with their heads on their fathers’ shoulders.
Some of the mine’s drifts tunnelled out under the sea for over two miles. The seams were rarely even a yard high. Imagine having to crawl on your stomach in the darkness with the ocean rumbling overhead.
One day I noticed an opening halfway up the cliff. Could it be an adit, an old shaft coming out on the cliff?
I climbed up and found that the hole was only 16 or so inches square, but there was an area almost as big as a door that had been filled in and disguised as part of the cliff face. The hole was where some of the fill had fallen out. The next week I returned with a torch, climbed the cliff and squeezed into the hole. I was in a man-made gallery about 170 feet long, which in the gloom seemed never-ending. Suddenly it opened out into a room and beyond this was another and another and another. It was no mine; it was a cave of empty rectangles hidden thirty-seven feet underground. From the ceiling hung long thin stalactites of lime. There was a staircase to the surface, but it was blocked by rubble and soil, the only way out was the way I had come. The quiet was damped down to way below silence and outside the feeble disc of torchlight the darkness was absolute. Then the light yellowed and began to flicker. I returned to the tunnel before I was lost for ever in the dark. If I should become trapped here, nobody would ever come to search. I thought again of the miners tunnelling beneath the sea.
Who had hidden down below in these secret burrows? The answer, I discovered, lay forty-four years in the past. On the morning of 16 December 1914, Winston Churchill leapt from his bath when handed a dispatch that read: German battlecruisers bombarding Hartlepool. Well over a thousand shells, some weighing a ton, battered the town, killing 112 civilians and an army private, the first British soldier to die on British soil in the Great War. The ships lobbed another thousand shells into Scarborough, holing the lighthouse and wrecking the Grand Hotel. A dazed man in his nightshirt was seen wandering the streets clutching a Christmas cake. Indeed, the whole of Scarborough was dazed.
A British battle squadron was sent in pursuit, but the three enemy cruisers vanished into the fog. In fact, we had been lying in wait for the Germans. Long afterwards it was revealed that the British had captured a German codebook and knew when they were going to strike the east coast, but not where.
In the weeks that followed, recruitment rates soared. The Admiralty awakened to the vulnerability of the River Tyne and supplied an immense gun turret from HMS Illustrious to perch above a shellproof complex in the cliffs at Collywell Bay. Twenty men sheltered below ground waiting for the enemy to reappear, but he never came. Indeed, the guns were not even test-fired until four years after the armistice, and this caused far more damage to Seaton Sluice than the Kaiser ever did.
Later, the guns were removed and all traces on the surface were obliterated, except for the water tower and a ‘defensible latrine’. The Hun wasn’t going to catch us with our pants down.
I needed to pass some more exams. For practical tests we had to go to the local university at Newcastle. It would include a dissection and I had examined numerous rats, frogs and dogfish in preparation. Waiting nervously outside the examination room, one candidate peeped through the half-obscured window in the door. He saw a carcass lying on the bench awaiting us. ‘It’s a squid,’ he gasped in disbelief. None of us had even seen a squid before, let alone cut one up. We slumped against the wall and one lad fainted.
Fifteen minutes later, when we were allowed into the room, the kraken (perhaps a technician’s idea of a joke) had vanished and we each had our old friend, the dead dogfish.
I needed a bursary if I was to go to university so I didn’t just take advanced-level exams, but scholarship level as well. I recall there was a question on island faunas. I knew all about how isolated islands went their own evolutionary way and gave rise to Darwin’s finches, and, when American marines fought their way across the Pacific, as John Wayne leapt ashore so did dozens of rats who extinguished the unique island pigeons and the endemic rails. The only problem was that I couldn’t remember the name of a single island. So I invented entire archipelagos: Pangoa, Tonalongi, the Malawonga group. I guess no one else could remember them either, for I was awarded a County Major Scholarship.
I had been an unruly child, but as I learned more about living things I became too busy to be bad. I was preoccupied observing wildlife in the nearest I could find to wilderness.
The northern coast of Northumberland is a wild place of clifftop castles, mist and waves. A huge carcass had washed ashore on a lonely beach. The body was almost thirty feet long and looked like a decaying hippo with fins plus two long stumps – the remains of legs. The neck was now reduced to a badly wrapped, serpentine line of vertebrae with the bristles of the mane clearly visible on the narrow head with its sinister empty eye sockets. Grizzled fishermen had never seen anything like it. It was indisputably a sea monster.
Biologists scampered to examine it and declared it to be a basking shark. The ‘legs’ were the claspers, long copulatory organs that were thrust into the female when the opportunity arose. The ‘mane’ was the remnants of the bristles the fish used to filter plankton from the sea for its dinner. But what about the neck? Well, dead basking sharks easily lose their lower jaw, as it is large and poorly attached. The skull is a flimsy affair for its size, for filter feeders have no need of the heavy cranium and massive muscles of predators. Apart from broomloads of bristles, it consists of a mouth the size of double doors and a brain little bigger than a golf ball. Basking sharks are, in all senses, empty-headed. Once the jaw becomes detached, all that remains is the pointed snout on the end of the spine that looks as if it must have once been a long neck. It was indisputably a basking shark.
Everyone was disappointed. They wanted it to be a monster. Like John Steinbeck, they felt that an ocean without monsters is like a sleep without dreams. We relish the idea of the dark depths being asquirm with forgotten dinosaurs. But we haven’t always done so.
For centuries the shore and the ocean beyond were places of terror. Although wealthy Greeks and Romans enjoyed the proximity of tamed segments of the transparent Mediterranean, they hated and feared the ocean, which was populated with gods and their relatives, many of whom were capricious or, like Medusa and Scylla, deadly.
More northern peoples were repulsed by their opaque, icy seas. The ocean was seen as unpredictable and evil-tempered. It roared with anger, and maelstroms swallowed the unwary. There was not even Joseph Addison’s ambiguous appreciation of the ‘exquisite horror’ of the tempest. The coast was a place of drownings and shipwrecks and an open door for the ingress of pirates and invaders. Even infections were believed to originate from the ocean’s ‘horrid miasmas’ that wafted ashore; the idea of fresh air blowing in was inconceivable. The horizon did not beckon, it merely reminded humans of the limitless void. Not until the late 1800s would shore dwellings be commonly built to face the sea.
The Bible had not helped the ocean’s image. Eden was a garden far from the sound of the threatening surf, and the deluge came as God’s punishment. The shore was therefore not merely the meeting of land and sea, but the battle line. The ragged coasts were the ruins left by the assault of God’s wrath against the land. The ocean floor was envisaged as the ‘most frightful sight that Nature can offer’, as it was ‘so vast, so broken and confus’d, so every way deformed and monstrous’.
The deep was also infested with monsters, which Milton imagined huddled together in palaces drowned by the Flood, copulating in bedrooms abandoned by sinful humans. The deep was the place of the Devil and all his devilish creations: the giant octopus, kraken and sea serpent. There are dozens of depictions of these monsters based on eyewitness accounts. Ships are shown enveloped in tentacles, or threatened by dragons whose heads loomed high above the rigging. We were petrified of what James Elroy Flecker called ‘the dark … serpent-haunted sea’.
The reality of the sea serpent was given credence not only by frequent sightings (over three hundred encounters in the nineteenth century alone and more since) often by experienced and trustworthy observers, but also by the discovery of huge fossil sea creatures such as snake-necked plesiosaurs that were being wrenched out of the Yorkshire cliffs near Whitby. The most widely read Victorian naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse, wrote a detailed study of the sea serpent and was clearly a believer. Most observers described the small head perched on a long neck and many recalled a line of humps following behind. If these were the undulations of a swimming serpent, then it was indeed a unique creature, for all snakes whether land-based or aquatic slither side to side not up and down.
The most photographed and fêted monster is, of course, Nessie. She appeared intermittently on the surface of Loch Ness, which at twenty-four miles long and almost a thousand feet deep is easily large enough to house whole tribes of beasts. Nessie is a creature of whim who rarely surfaces if sought, and exhibits infinite variety: sometimes she comes as a reptilian ostrich, legs submerged and wading in the shallows, or as an upturned boat, or a hosepipe out for a swim or, at her most coy, as the wake of an unseen ship seen by a half-awake observer. In 1933, she even went for a tramp overland and Mr and Mrs Spicer almost wrecked their car when Nessie, her neck undulating like a scenic railway, stumped across the road in front of them.
No less a person than Sir Peter Scott became concerned that Nessie, never having been officially named (and therefore, as far as science was concerned, non-existent), was open to all sorts of exploitation and in need of the protection afforded by the Conservation of Wild Creatures and Wild Plants Act. So, based on underwater photographs computer-enhanced by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, he described Nessie as fat, seventy feet long with a small head perched on thirteen feet of neck. Another photograph indicated that she had large diamond-shaped paddles, so he named her Nessiteras rhombopterix – the diamond-finned marvel from Ness.
His description was published in the most prestigious scientific journal in the world and perhaps it is only by chance that an anagram of the name of Scott’s co-author, Robert Rines, is ‘Bets in error’. But is it also a coincidence that Nessiteras rhombopterix can be rearranged to spell ‘Monster hoax by Sir Peter S’?