12. Jan, 2018

'Coming, Ready Or Not'

People say a lot of things about travelling, don’t they?  Many cliches apply. That it broadens the mind, that you need to see the world, that you want to find yourself.  But what if, what you find, is not yourself at all, but something quite other?  Something that leaves you never the same again, because, who were you, in the first place?

My own journey had not been especially intrepid and was made in the company of others. They were strangers when I met them, of course, part of an eager group who had signed up for a mini adventure holiday; a little sailing, a little camping, a little roughing it together.  Only about the coast and small islands offshore of the British Isles, you understand, nothing too far afield.

It was one of those long summers which held stretches of the right seasonal weather and it was at a time when there was a bit of an idealistic craze for re-enacting early wayfarer journeys and simple settler communities.  This setup was loosely about doing that and finding a chance to enjoy communal living, which at the time seemed something to aspire to as a better thing.

We were to sail down around the coast, north to south, in an old fishing boat, not too far from shore for inexperienced sailors getting the hang of things, catching and cooking our fish suppers along the way.  We were then to head out from the foot of Cornwall to a set of islands where there was one, unsettled, which held its own climate, hit by warm tropical waters and airs from one side and the usual cold British seas on the other.  It was not part of the Scilly Isles, but being in that kind of zone, shared some of their qualities and held the Cornish given name of Abatti, because like many such places, there had been an early Christian abbey there. There was little sign of that left when we arrived, but I get ahead of myself.

The boat, Venus Rising, was a large, restored and somewhat modernised old fishing smack, with five crew and twelve of us novices as passengers.  ‘The apostles’, they called us, only because of our number, not due to any religious connotation.  The boat was ketch rigged, with traditional oxblood sails and was able to trawl a fishing net, for we were to play at paying our way with our catches when we called in at fish markets down the coast.

The venture was led by Norman, a rather charismatic man in his fifties, a solid veteran of alternative living, who's still thick, long grey hair was braided back Viking style with leather thongs, as unmoving as a tarred pigtail would have been.  Entertaining at first, his regular bombardment of us over evening meals with tales of hippy trail trekking and ensuing adventures, filled with carelessly roguish womanising, became something of an imposition and I, amongst others, was glad he wouldn’t be staying with us constantly on the island, merely bringing stores and doing a weekly health check.  There was a bit of a puritan spirit abroad amongst the group, which disapproved of him.  The sailors, being old fishermen, apart from one who had more of a hands on training role with us and was, therefore, more involved, were not much disposed to chat, laconic experts putting up with dilettantes amusing themselves with what were serious matters, fishing and safety on the sea.

In our group were two families, one with a single child and one with two youngsters.  The other five of us came alone, three men and two women, all in our twenties and thirties, so we had been roughly matched up as a social group.  Individually, however different we were, was of course initially masked by the social requirements of sleeping in cramped, shared spaces (roughly divided below into separate areas for crew, families and the sexes, with bunks rather than hammocks) and very active days learning our skills together, travelling from the North East coast down around to the western toe and onwards to Abatti Island.

We were genial, social and ‘up for it’, we twelve apostles, already feeling bonded over our fishing, calling in at ports to sell our wares and go for drinks and meals ashore before setting off again.  People were interested and took pictures of us at quaysides, so there must be some extant if disparate photographs of a happy group doing something enviably different, and we ourselves certainly felt validated as being more than holidaymakers.

The weather was kind and apart from occasional swells, we encountered no rough seas, putting into port if there were any threat of gales or trouble, safely in the capable hands of our crew.  Norman taught the children sea shanties of the tamer kind and gave them piratical spotted bandanas to wear, which they loved.  The single child was a boy, the other two, girls, and aged eight or nine or so, made compatible playmates on voyage.  The family groups came together quickly as natural pairings but the others of us, all here for our own reasons alone, avoided, by tacit agreement, any tentative coupling up en route.  The group experience, we kept telling one another, was what we were after.  Our actual characters did not need to come to the fore then, busy as we all were together and so there was a companionability between us, the twelve apostles, with Norman as our rather unholy Jesus.

The seaside towns of England announced themselves with buttresses of seafront hotels stacked up in bright whites, or appearing as picturesque, coastal huddles.  We were promised views of basking seals, porpoises, perhaps even whales, but although there were occasional excited cries from children or adults peering through binoculars, I certainly never saw any myself.

There were already portacabin materials on the island, we were told, to set up temporary living shelters, to be equipped with calor gas for cooking and heating water.  There was a freshwater spring, we were  assured and a generator for electricity, with a simple toilet block already available, because, as Norman said, there are some things it wouldn’t be fun to do without.  Erecting the dwellings, though, even easy prefab ones, he maintained, was an important part of it all, to get that community spirit really going.

“A bit like a barn raising, then,” suggested someone and we all laughed.

There was a big to do about getting in our food supplies, because, whilst we wouldn’t be hunting any game, we would have to make simple breads perhaps, griddle cake style, to tide us over between Norman’s weekly visits over the month of our stay.  A month away from everywhere, he told us, you can find, is a very long time.

The island itself was a long, narrow strip and we were to set up bang in the middle of it.  We arrived at a familiar looking coast, cliffs with seabirds, wild, tough grasses and a rocky boulder shore with sea cave inlets, but going around to the temperate other side, there was a white sanded blue water cove and soft, flowered slopes gentled by the warm currents flowing in. There, Swiss Family Robinson-like, we landed and set up our summer village on the flat lands above.

Our nets, by then, had harboured small cod, silver sprat shoals, mackerel, wrasse, pollock and fattened plaice.  A conger eel once writhed like a leviathan in the snare, virtually impossible to club into submission, and although the triumphant parent was pictured holding it up, head to tail, beaming as a fish market hero, his child could be heard having nightmares for days, having pleaded for this horror to be thrown back alive and spare him the thrashing of its slimy coils and devilish head.  The children, in particular, were encouraged to handle and admire the catch, learn what the fish were, about their habits and what eating they were good for.  They, along with us adults, had been warned to look out for weever fish, common at this time of year, which could be caught up in nets or, buried in sand on beaches, could catch your feet with poisoned barbs and, at their worst, do for you.  We didn’t catch any, but the story was potent, especially for the children.

They existed at the prelapsarian age where the approbation of loving parents had encouraged unselfconsciously attention seeking ways, for, like all children, they longed above all to be noticed.  The single son seemed more a natural leader.  Difficult and moody, prone to wild excitements and throwing himself into things theatrically, he carried the others along with him.  He was naturally spoken of as being exceptionally intelligent, which, perhaps, he was.  The girls were different, vying with each other to be the loudest shanty singer, for example, more sophisticated in their interactions together and with the adults, putting on little shows of their own invention, which they included him in, but you could see that they didn’t like it when, as the only boy, he got more of the applause and admiration than they did.

We set up our dwellings as a mirror of the shipboard arrangements, four separate sleeping spaces (two for the families, one for the young women, the other for the three men) and one for communal sitting, eating, cooking, decision-making and entertainment, longhouse style. There was a stores hut with things like fuel, torches and so on, and the toilet block already up. People who could play instruments had brought them.  We had books to read and share, a radio signal station and if required, distress flares, which Norman assured us would summon help within an hour from the nearest inhabited island, where he and the crew would weekly base, but where the 24 hour coastguard station would always be on watch and contactable. This was more in case of any unexpected ill health or accident than anything but we were all young, fit people and, as Norman said, he’d never lost anyone yet in the several years he had run this adventure holiday.

Perhaps there is something in the old superstitions about warding off bad luck from the hearth, a child’s shoe in the rafters, for example, but I don’t know what we could have done about that, with those simple square plywood portacabins we erected, but that, of course is where the first potential problems began, with the creation of a hierarchy about whose cabins should have the best aspect for light, or be next to the main facilities for necessary convenience. Under the cover of long, co-operative discussion, the two fathers faced off and the two families suggested we should lay priority ground rules for cooking, water use and heating, access to the basic cooking and washing facilities between us.  The rest of us went along, seeing this in part as the natural anxiety of parents to put families first.  

We had a beach bonfire supper the first night (there being a very adequate woodpile to start with) and watched the summer sky turn into a blue bottle glass dome over us, waiting for the stars to appear and see if, as promised, we might see Jupiter with the naked eye at this time of year.  It seemed an idyll for the children at first, that tropical seeming beach, but as time went on, they went more over to the cold side, where the sea caves were, playing happily, we all thought, until the boy reappeared hysterical one day, saying he’d trodden on a weaver fish and would die.  He hadn’t, it turned out, just cut himself on a flinty stone, but it seemed the girls had told him it was the deadly little fish and there was the start of a cooling between the two families.  That, I think, was at the end of the first week.

Initially charmed by one another, the close confines of constant camping were soon oppressive and we would all go off sporadically, singly or with others, to do different things.  The family units too would break up to break out, walking, discovering, shoring up the different parts of our communal living, like checking the plastic container water supplies we filled up from the spring well tap.  

Belief systems all start somewhere, or perhaps, from nowhere, but they’re all generated by the human psyche and any small enclave will start to observe its own safety ensuring rituals. We were educated westerners, we considered, spiritual in outlook (hence we were here) but none of us followed religious beliefs as such.  Our ‘good luck’ totems, therefore, started as a bit of a joke.  After the weever fish incident, the boy, who had a toy rubber snake with him, put it on top of a flat boulder by our ‘village’, in our solemn group view of the ceremony, to see off the sea eel nightmares, a little offering to apologise for his part in its demise and the consequent injury, he seemed to feel, to his foot, and this seemed to work for him.

An enthusiasm for foraging came into play, as one amongst us was a keen collector of food from the wild and experimental cooking from it.  Our ‘on the go’ vegetable and barley pottage stockpot acquired other local ingredients, such as wild garlic and parsley, various herbages, though we drew the line at allegedly edible mushrooms.  I went out myself one day, unconvincedly looking for rumoured samphire, and thought I was probably only coming back with some kind of marsh grasses, when I heard the voices of the youngsters nearby and, looking over the knoll, saw them playing hide and seek in the dunes, the strawberry blond heads of the two girls visible to me but not to the boy, who was ‘it’.  His search had wearied and he was calling out:

“At least shout hot or cold!”

I stopped to watch for a few minutes, amused, but they didn’t answer and there was something about their stillness I didn’t like.  Then, they started throwing pebbles to fall at a distance from him and deceive him as to their whereabouts.  At first, he laughed and ran towards the potential directions, but as the trick continued, I could see it began to distress him, and when one missile, by accident or design, hit him in the face, although there was no force behind it, it began to seem there was malice, for when he began to cry in earnest, they still did not announce themselves.  Of course, I stood very little of this (I am a primary school teacher by profession, after all) and called out authoritatively:

“That’s quite enough, children.  I can see you, girls, out you come.  Now then, Simon, let’s see if you’re alright,” and I strode over the brow and down the dunes to them.  He stopped crying at the sound of an adult voice and the girls ran up, as potential bullies do, all innocence and, to be honest, their regret appeared genuine.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Simon.  I didn’t mean to hit you.  I can never throw straight.”

“No,” agreed her sibling.  “If we play ball, she usually throws it backwards over her head!”

Two cheerfully freckled faces made a fuss of him and the child smiled again.  Still, as I shepherded them back, I decided to sound a cautionary note about perhaps a little more supervision being needed.  Even the nicest of children, scenting a way of indulging their mean streak, is likely to do it, and what starts as a joke doesn’t always stay that way.  I’m not talking ‘Lord of the Flies’, here, just a knowledge of playground relations.

We no doubt looked a sweet little quartet, me with my ‘samphire’ gathering and three scampering, playful children returning from a happy outdoors.  The girls had learned some basket making and weaving skills from their mother, who was busily making things out of straw, raffia and wicker, simple baskets and placemats and the like.  She was in the communal room doing this when we came in and, begging materials, the two girls involved the boy with them in producing a straw ‘corn dolly’.  They’d done this for harvest festival last year at school, it seemed, and soon they had one each, which from that day on, would appear in various spots unexpectedly, after play, like poppet familiars.  The boy’s was placed by night with his rubber snake on the rock, to keep it company, he said, and since it never rained, it came to no harm.

I chose my moment for a quiet word with both sets of parents and did it as tactfully as possible.  They didn’t really take it well, however, and the incipient hostilities between the families shifted towards me instead, for being interfering and speaking out of turn.   This would have been towards the end of the second week.  The first had passed well, with us all doing our level best to get along, and when Norman arrived with supplies of fresh goods (milk, eggs and so on), he found a convivial enough group.  The second time he came, however, we were all tired, nobody sleeping very well in the basic portacabins and the fractures had begun to appear.  We felt grubby, had resentments, were no longer so excited.  He geed us up, saying this was usual and that we needed to set ourselves some team building task goals.  The children were set to writing journals, diaries of things they had found and done on the island.  He was impressed by our foraging efforts.  What about, he suggested, some local fishing offshore, he could bring rods?  One of the dads mentioned being a woodworking expert, so he went and came back with tools and supplies for makings.

At his suggestion, too, we all went to collect bladderwrack from the cold side of the island for fuel, as islanders always had done in such communities.  This required teamwork in helping one another down the cliff peaks and across the bouldery beach, where a few windier nights had cast up plenty of the seaweed, together with a heap of stranded jellyfish globules, purple veins threading their flattened umbrellas.  I own, that the initial triumph of piling up the seaweed heap, monster like, by the huts, soon palled for me.  The blubbery bubbled flesh, blackening slowly like a body curing in the sun, had something horrible about it and sensitive Simon went back to having nightmares.  He announced, oddly, that he thought it would be all right if God were there, too, and so the woodworking dad created a large cross to stand beside the totem stone.   It comforted Simon, but I didn’t like the shadows it cast.

I took as my job checking daily the radio signal post and the acoustics up there were peculiar. The children had continued their favourite game of hide and seek and wherever they were doing this, I could hear the shrill voices up there, counting down and calling,

“Coming!  Ready or not!”

I remarked on it once, how much they liked playing that, but as children will, sometimes, they just looked at one another and didn’t answer.  I think they had been warned off me and from then on I became aware of a suspicion that I followed them about somehow and was mistrusted for it.  I would hear other things up there too sometimes, low laughs, murmurings of talk picked up, no doubt, by the transmitter, like a crossed line, and sometimes it would seem to me that I was cold down one side because something unseen was there.  A standing wave, I told myself, knowing something of such things.  These were, of course, pre mobile phone days, and the radio transmitter was our only connection to the outside world but only to be used in emergency.

The other singletons were more of an age, I was a bit older, so I suppose it was only natural that they began to pair off, too, now.  I didn’t mind, having always, more or less, been happy in my own company.  I had mentioned the crossed line voices I had heard up at the mast over one of our group meals, but others who went up there to investigate heard nothing and this added to me being seen as a bit of an oddity.  The children whispered and the poppet dolls always seemed to be lined up to stare at me from somewhere in the communal room.  The other young people decided to go and spend some time alone in tents on the warm island side, to enjoy the long nights al fresco and, no doubt, other opportunities away from families with children.  I was left alone in the portacabin and, without the sleep noises of the others, I found it invaded by night sounds from without, rustlings, the wind, birds clattering down its roof at dawn.

I put down my reaction on this particular morning of week three, therefore, to fatigue.  I was up at the signal point, when the most pompous seeming of the fathers put in an appearance on his own.

“Look here,” he challenged.  “We don’t think you should be up here messing about with this every day.  What if you damage it ?”

“Damage it!  I’m checking the radio’s working!” I protested.

“No need for that.  I asked Norman, last weekend.  And stop following the kids around when they’re playing.  It’s creepy!”

He had his back to the drop down the other side and I was so enraged by his accusations and self righteousness that it was all I could do to hold back from punching him over the edge to the rocks below.  He saw it, his expression changed, and he backed off hastily.  After that, I was a pariah dog indeed.  I didn’t need crossed lines to hear comments like “Weirdo”and “What should we do about him?”

They called one of their meetings, the two families, that is, the couples still playing summer camp down on the beach.  The upshot was that when Norman came that weekend, they wanted me to leave with him.  Of course, they couched it in concern.

“We think it’s playing on your nerves, here,” they said, words like ‘paranoid’ and ‘jumpy’ being mentioned.

I had started disliking them some time ago but now, I loathed them.  How dare they sit about like a tribunal with the right to judge and punish me for nothing, self appointed leaders of our group?  I objected in the very strongest of terms but brooded over this nightly, alone in my cabin, where, to torment me, one of those wicked girls (I had no doubt in was them) would now always leave one of those damnable poppet dolls for me to find.

The last time that happened, I stormed out with the thing, got kerosene from the store and set the dead seaweed pile alight, chucking the doll on it as a pyre.  I was last to bed and had, I confess, been drinking alone.  It had not occurred to me, when I then crashed out, that I had set an unwitting trap.  I mentioned that it was a long, hot summer, well, of course, the fire, tended by sea breezes, licked across first to the communal cabin, then that well alight, to to two plywood dwellings alongside where the families were.  The store hut and the other two cabins (one of which I slept in), remained untouched, the distance between a natural fire break.  I woke to faint cries and on coming out to see what was happening, saw that it was already too late for any direct action and the others were out of sound range on the beach far below.  The only things I could do, I did.

I ran to the store hut for the distress flares and sent up the signal, then up to the radio mast to send an S.O.S.  Back I went then to sluice the cabin doorways with buckets of water but the cries had long silenced, smoke inhalation probably having been the merciful finish.  Alerted by the flares and the sky blaze, the others arrived from the beach and we did our best to chain gang buckets and use fire extinguishers, forlorn hope though it was, in a silent horror film of reaction.  The rescue boat arrived with medics but there was nothing to be done except for those of us in shock.

It was, of course, ruled a terrible accident, with me, as the only witness, having no idea how the conflagration had started or taken hold, and having, like my unfortunate companions, been asleep at the time.  Venus Rising Holidays and Norman were held to account for serious health and safety failures with the amateur survivalists they were supposed to be looking out for.  A terrible accident, I have always told myself, too, it was. How was I to know what would happen, when I was only burning the hateful poppet?   The beach couples had not seen the deterioration in relations between me and the families, coming to such an unexpected climax as it did, and caught up with discovering one another, had not paid us much attention.  So, as survivors, we were all hailed as heroes who had done our best and risked ourselves in the flames to save others.  Others, I felt, who only had themselves to blame.

I returned to my job in due course, but when I was on playground duty, and even now, when the old game is underway, I have to persuade myself that when I look across at the familiar call:

“Coming!  Ready or not!”,  I don’t see two strawberry blond heads and one dark one amongst the running youngsters, waiting to find me.