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,