driftCliff Forshaw David KennedySimon Kerr Christopher ReidDavid Wheatley

AHumber Mouth Special Commission 2008. First published in 2008 byHumber Mouth Hull City Arts, Central Library, Albion Street, Hull and theUniversity of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull. This edition copyright ©Humber Mouth 2008 and the University of Hull. Copyright of individualpoems and stories resides with the authors. Copyright of individualphotographs resides with the photographers. Humber Mouth 2008acknowledges the financial assistance of Hull City Council and Arts CouncilEngland, Yorkshire.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written consent from thepublisher or contributors who hold the copyright. Requests to publish workfrom this book must be sent to the copyright holders.

Contents

4 At the Embarkation Point........................... David Kennedy6 In Search of the Tenderer Thorns............... David Wheatley7 Low............................................................. Cliff Forshaw8 A Fret.......................................................... David Wheatley10 The Truelove............................................... Cliff Forshaw12 Crossing the Equator, 1892......................... David Kennedy13 Sperm Tooth................................................ Christopher Reid14 Authentic Victorian Mermaid..................... Cliff Forshaw15 AKilnsea Chorale....................................... Christopher Reid16 Read’s Island............................................... David Wheatley18 Avocet......................................................... David Wheatley20 Charms of Lost Villages............................. Christopher Reid21 Sea Views.................................................... Simon Kerr30 from Out of Reach...................................... David Wheatley33 Field Trip with Voices................................. Cliff Forshaw37 At Filey Brigg............................................. David Wheatley39 Futures........................................................ David Kennedy42 The Lord Paramount Looks Seawards........ Cliff Forshaw45 Flotsam....................................................... David Wheatley

3

At the Embarkation Point

What happens here?River falls into river and river falls into sea.

Is there more?There is surface and there is depth.

Is that the story?It is one story and a way of beginning it.

Are there others?Bows cut the waters open

and the waters close.What else can you tell me?

Voyages vanish into voyageslike water into water.Yes, I know there are voyages.

Dreams that cancel themselves;lines that change in the writing.Can you say more?

Nerves that run from Hessle Roadand Syke Street, from Blue Bell Entry.Are all voyages the same?

No, many do not return.Who are you?

I am the keeper of the names.How do you remember them?

I stand here on the lowest stepwhere the water laps.Would I know any?

St. Romanus, Kingston Peridot,Ross Cleveland.Are there others?

6,000 lost fishermen and counting.What can I do here?

Remember what the sea does.

4

Which is?The sea sifts and the sea sifts,washing its vast ossuaries.What does the sea remember?

Itself.What else can I do here?

Find a way to write it.

after Le Livre des Questions by Edmond Jabès

5

In Search of the Tenderer Thorns

Wait for the change in the tide where the Ouse meets the Trent andthe Humber is born. Sound your foghorn once and slip down thejetty, where a tethered goat flicks its ears in the breeze and skittersa volley of piss in your general direction. These parishes, theirrunnelled fields all alluvial warping and tillage, secrete their tidalglue round your feet, and the scabby-legged cockerels in the bendof the road have spied you, Phrygian caps a red shock of sedition.Follow them twice round the mulberry bush and into thechurchyard: follow the late poet squire of Yokefleet’s cigarette tipin the distance like a will o’ the wisp across the ‘fructuant marsh’,and stumble into the arms of a barman out beating the bushes onpressgang duty for the Tuesday night darts team. Stand everyoneat the Hope &Anchor a drink, and that grass, that mistcircledgrass on the dyke, cock an ear for its whisper under the jukeboxand the farm dog barking half a mile down the road. Have youcome about the interview for church warden, someone will ask.Are you that pigfeed salesman, someone will ask. No pigs aroundhere, or hadn’t you noticed. Plenty of moles though. Match ontonight then? That island out in the estuary, what is its name, theisland out where the freighters pass and the avocet dips andwades: it’s a trick of perspective, you’re on the island, you’re inthe nature reserve, you’re already drifting out to sea with theestuary mud; there is no island and never was, the goat hasprogressed to chewing its tail, you slip back on board, sound thefoghorn again and disappear into the chaos beyond the last hightide. And a couple of pound coins in the change, love, for thecondom machine in the jakes, and a packet of crisps. Where theOuse meets the Trent and the Humber is born, that swaying grass,that mistcircled grass.

6

Low

Muddy tongues staked with timber,dark gantry, the guillotine of the Tidal Barrier,the resonant iron of walkway, handrail,and then it all crouches down to stone,where even the giant fish peep-show of The Deepis much less like shark’s fin than sinking shipand the whole low land seems to be going down.

Up the estuary, steel harps on its theme:only connect. Here an iron willdetermines to let no water sunder us,bolts low land to low land;tenses chords against the sky.

7

AFret

The coal merchant shoulders a nimbus of smutsdown a street that insists you’ve been here beforeand recognise the urchin, you, that sitsand stares at his shoes in an open front door.

Don’t buy it. The air is thick with the sloughedskin of dead selves: they fall and settle,a load too imperceptible to shift,but sickly and adhesive, mute and subtle.

Let them not expect grief. You dodge and movethrough liquid fixities of past and present,steer by a river whose mud banks leaveyou tidal, shifty, bogged down and imprisoned.

The sonic boom of the afternoon roarfrom the stadium tracks your footsteps, blowsa dull wound in the boulevard’s thin air,and your pulse thuds to its drumbeat, win or lose.

On the up this year then? Play-off places,blip, slump, plummet, dead in the water:the mustard cuts like fog. Cut your losses,a can kicked into the nearest gutter.

Here the last of empire has meanderedpast the fag-end of the North Sea fleetto a scrap yard sculpture park whose remainderedEdward VII accepts a vain salute

8

from a yawning Ford Fiesta’s bonnet.The December sun is a lazy eye.No vistas you can raise will open itand you thirst for the liquid dark to bleed it dry,

and so comes evening and beer in a backstreet pubby the bridge, where you bank the coal fire downand a dog sips a pint, and onto your tabgoes a Schlenkerla, the ‘hobbling man’;

and fog on the way home, fog all roundso I can’t see you who are a shadow away,and there are no shadows and there is no groundunderfoot for me to feel give way,

and what kind of weather is this when all I want,all that I imagine, touch and seefinds not loses itself in all I cannotgrasp, in a fog drifted in from the sea?

9

The Truelove

In 1847 a young married couple Memiadluk and Uckaluk arrivedin Hull aboard a local whaler, the Truelove. The following yearthey set sail for their home on Baffin Island. Uckaluk diedfollowing an outbreak of measles on board. There are casts oftheir heads in Hull Maritime Museum and on the Humber near thespot where they landed.

Among the dreams of hulks,Inuit voices stillring in the ship’s bell:

Memiadluk and Uckaluk,this couple off the Truelove,strange honeymooners stuck in Hull.

After the outbreak on board,alone, on a trawler’s whaleback, he rodethe cold whale-roads back home.

What’s left could be death masks:the eyes in their heads are closed,cast in plaster like dirty Newfie snow.

Now, down by the Humber,another pair of heads fetch up,in battle-ship grey

beheaded on a bollardthat might as well sayGreenland or bust.

10

They’re a long, long way from home,that Esquimaux lad and his lassie,blind to glass case or estuary,

pondering, since 1847,Jonah, whalebone corsetry,what the preachers tell of Heaven,

this place called Hull,what they warn of Hell.

11

Crossing the Equator, 1892

We left Barry on July 21st and crossed the equator on August18th, which was just a month after. On the night two men gotdressed up, 1 as Father Neptune the other as his wife Trident.Oakum wig and whiskers with a tin, cut into a crown, they alsohad the barbers with them.

They pretended to come over the side and shouted out ‘Shipahoy!’ and they rigged a platform and a large tub of water and hadlighted lanterns all round. Us 3 apprentices, the sailmaker and 2ordinary seamen were to be shaved as we had never crossed theline. We shook hands with Father Neptune and his wife then set onthe edge of the tub and was then lathered with grease, Stockholmtar and pig-shit and scraped off with a big wooden knife anddaubed on our heads. We were then put clean into the tub with allour clothes on and wet through with buckets of water but we wasall right again next morning except being a little greasy and aextra washing day. The next Tuesday was my birthday. I got asausage roll from the cook also a bread pudding and another rollfrom the first mate, but my next birthday I hope will be inEngland as the voyage will only last 12 months…

12

Sperm Tooth

Becalmed, we had little to dobut watch ice grow.

It crept and clenched to form, horizon-wide,a lid beneath which whales, our old

companionable foe, wantonly hid.

That white spell would have grippedand crushed our vessel

like a walnut shell, had not the captain sent down menwith saws to hew a dock, a jagged trench or puddle,

where we must wait and pray.

No wind to bear it away,the stench of blubber thickened,

coating throats and sickening stomachs. Stiff with grease,my beard refused the razor.

Under that curse of peace,I took up a sperm tooth and a sail needle,

enthused to try some scrimshaw work – Britannia, say,or Amphitrite side-saddle on a seahorse, or just my wife

in her new crinolines.

Nothing appeared.The tooth lay, greasy too,

athwart my hand. I pondered it like an obstinate problemin geometry: a warped cone, flattened here and bulging there,defying me with a beauty of its own; epitome of laws

I was not yet fit to understand.

13

Authentic Victorian Mermaid

They fetch up here, scuttled to ledges, beachedon pediments, among scrimshaw, harpoons,a whaler’s bow, a carved baleen seat.

Bony Leviathans ghost hugely throughtall ships, sails; this gallery’s a tail-flick,the next’s speared by a narwhale’s horn.

Your thoughts turn krill: the floor’s a humpback,the stairwell spirals up inside a blowhole’s spout;you’re Jonah in the belly of the beast.

Then boked back up to shore. Strange creatures.You can’t hear — no sirens sweetly singing — but seethe black nightmare-maid’s screech.

(Check spatulate fishtail, witchy fingers, stitched sealskin.)You’re face to face with a scary Victorian freaksnarked on that gob of tiny fish-hooky teeth.

14

AKilnsea Chorale

The Kapellmeister of Kilnseaconfronts his mutinous choir.

He has a new cantata that he wants them to sing,but they have a composition of their own

that they’re in the middle of now,and they’re not about to interrupt it:

a chorale of absolute din, a multitude-partwhite-noise polyphony, almost unhearable

upwhelming basso-profunditiessupporting a shoving and tumbling

scrum of unresolved counterpointwith, at the top, a foamy descant, all ecstatic shatters.

They won’t stop. But the Kapellmeisteris patient. His cantata can wait.

It may even be improved, if he listens with careand can catch and steal whatever it is

that gives the racket its seeming power and purpose,and can slip it into the neat score on his desk at home.

15

Read’s Island

Henry Kirke White,Christian soldier, onward wentfrom south to north bankin the Winteringham Packet,wrote from this spot‘surrounded by a droveof 14 pigs, who raisethe most hideous roarevery time the boat rolls’,stood his groundon the perilous fluxin search of an unborn island.

Old Warp Lane:the tugs approachingthese days switchnow this way, now thatin a left-right left-righttwo-step of indecisionbefore its shifting sands.

In the pub betweencement works and Humberthere is much talkof the manufacture, distributionand correct use of cement.But here nothingis set in, nevermind stone, in water.

16

The man from the RSPBis inspecting a sluice pipe.Monitoring of vegetationand invertebrates.The avocets heckleexcitedly. At low tidethe distant cattledip a tentative hoofin the water. The lost grassno heifer will find.

When its uncementedmoorings come loosethe island lurchesa yard downstream.One of its forty-three deer,noticing, takes a stepin the opposite directionand is for that momentthe one unmovingthing in the river.

The island sinks.Bubbles in wallpaper.A previously unrecordedshade of brown.A pair of antlerspoking througha sandbank in the Tyne,the Clyde, the Severn.

17

Avocet

Dip dip dip, fussy-insistent,an avocet’s beak. Enoughis never enough: why can’t yousavour your food?

This man in the hide has been hereten hours among avocets,oystercatchers and redshanks:he knows why.

Thumbnail-sized black frogssprinting, which is to say inchingalong the path don’t knowbut still come

tumbling into the rusheswhere the rabbits come too.Safe at last! Which is to sayready to die

at an avocet’s beak, the frogsthat is, who understandnothing. Hawks comefor the rabbits,

and they too understand nothing,the rabbits, dying, devoured.The hawks on the telegraph poleunderstand

18

when a train of thought has gone onlong enough. Dinner is served,the white rumps by the ditchannounce

and the vegetarian hawkcan go without. Morethan that they can take or leave.Understand?

You they’re not bothered with.Strictly speaking your sandwichisn’t part of the food chain.In fact you’re not here.

Beak goes down, tail up,beak tip up too. Superb.Solder this basin of twilight,freeze-frame

each lucky-dip splash.Except ten hours is enough.The wellingtoned twitchers have flown.(I know a good pub.)

But it’s never enough. Firstthere’s a marsh to be drained. Splash.Dip dip dip. Slurp.I’ll drink to that.

19

Charms of Lost Villages

Thanks to a prank of Godthe fine folk of Ravenser Oddno longer sleep under the sodbut mingle with herring and cod.

Frismersk and Saltaugh deadturned rudely out of bedmust sleepwalk till Doomsday ledby ferry lights overhead.

Ladies of Orwithfleetwho used to be so discreettroll down the village streetin a seaweed winding-sheet.

From Turmarr to Sand le Merewhat the fishermen fearis that corpses will swim too nearand they’ll net a nose or an ear.

Wherever the tide misbehavesopening and plundering gravesthe only way anyone saveshimself is by hiding his bones in the waves.

20

Sea Views

I

Contempt clattered over the roof-tiles, gravel thrown up from thebeach. Spray splattered like spit across the window pane. The manstood, glaring out of their son’s old bedroom window, at themonstrous waves breaking over the cliff and his house.

Emptier Nest Syndrome: Cliff’s abandoned bedroom hadbeen stripped bare, carpet and under-felt ripped and rolled up,furniture heaved to the front of the house.

Extreme weather warning: Winds gusting to Storm Force10. His wife was downstairs, taking refuge in what had been herposh dining room, watching TV. She did not want to watch the seaanymore, had said she was tired, needed a distraction from thestorm. There was bravery to be found in facing their fate alone.He didn’t want to hear any more about her dreams of seal suicidebombers blowing the house to kingdom come, or her ridiculousfairy tales about the tiny crab and that stupid conch shell. Betterthat she watched TV, though how she could hear what theEastenders were saying over the shrieking of the wind and thepounding of the waves was beyond him. The volume of the TVwas as nothing to the roaring North Sea and the whipping North-East wind. 100-mile-an-hour gusts. Potential structural damage.

Row upon row upon row of waves: a roiling froth of fitfulnightmares, a stampede of giant white horses charging the shore.

The man’s arms were folded tight to his chest so he couldfeel the thud-thud-thud-thud of panic beat in the bones of hiswrist, under his watch. He had sandbagged the backdoor and thevents, spread towels on the windowsills. There was nothing moreto do but watch, and wait, and will the sea back with all his might,like King Canute.

It was a dirty war they had to fight. He knew what dirtywars looked like: he’d fought for his country. Coldstream Guards.Done three tours in the Northern Ireland. They were fighting a

21

Low Intensity Conflict with the sea, losing battle after battle withthe waves. Perfidious Albion: this England under their feetbetrayed them, this useless boulder clay that fell away day afterday after day – in the same way his country’s will to fight for himfell away. Two hundred and eleven feet of their land eroded awayin fifteen years. East Riding Council would not defend them. SeaViews – their holiday home business wrecked – having todemolish the chalets one by one, sell off the caravans at knock-down rates. The government would not defend them. Theirneighbours could not help. Coverage of their case on TV didn'tstop the cliffs collapsing. The East Riding of Yorkshire has thefastest eroding coastline in Europe. The underlying problem datedback to the last Ice Age. The coastline was formed 100,000 yearsago from the moraine the ice sheets scored up from further upnorth and smeared down over the chalk to form a ridge known as‘The Binks’. From Flamborough Head to Spurn Point the coastalcliffs weren’t made of rock, but of a layer of glacial sludge twentyto fifty metres deep in places.

Their home was doomed. To lose hope, to fear you willlose everything, to succumb to that fear, was against his nature.But it had happened. The sea was cruel. The sea was merciless.Attacking like an ancient god, like Neptune enraged, determinedto destroy all mortal heroes.

They needed protecting. Other people had erecteddefences, privately, illegally. Wooden groynes. Rock groynes.Concrete groynes. Concrete sea walls. Rock armouring.Revetments. If only the Coastal Protection Authority had let himbuild his own tyre reef. That had been his plan. A rubber reef, todeflect the waves from this small stretch. It was low-cost.Environmentally friendly, well sort of. The Americans had tried itand it had worked for them! It was his right to defend their home.If an Englishman’s home is his castle then a Yorkshireman’s homemust be his chapel! Is nothing sacred? Surely a soldier has a rightto defend his own home! He’d argued that at the planning meetingtill he was red white and blue in the face and red white and blue in

22

his language, but they wouldn’t give him planning permission. Weshall go on to the end. We shall fight the seas and the oceans. Weshall fight on the beaches. We shall fight in the fields and in thestreets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.Whathappened to the Blitz spirit? The British electorate binned it whenthey betrayed Old Churchill that’s what: every man for himself!

A journalist had covered the story: the headline in thelocal rag read: Rubber Rock scheme hits the Rubber Rocks. Somepeople had no sympathy! If they’d just allowed him to dosomething, anything, to defend himself. Instead the EnvironmentAgency threatened him with legal action; instead DEFRAwrotelandmark strategies entitled, Making Space For Water; instead thecouncil spent coastal protection funding on typing two-hundred-page-long reports full of hollow-tipped bullet-points stating thebloody obvious.

o The majority of the coastline in the East Riding – opencountryside, scattered hamlets, farmsteads, touristholiday parks – is to be left unprotected, and as aconsequence, twenty permanent dwellings will be lost tocoastal erosion in the next fifteen years.

II

Over the stormy sea and the TV, you hear the crab in the QueenConch shell: Tonight is the night, my deary.

The TV is on maximum volume so you can answer outloud without him upstairs hearing: ‘You never give me any credit.’

Credit where credit is due, Deary. Do you want to saveyour husband and your son?

‘You know I do.’Then make an offering of yourself.You nod. The crab sounds like your late father, with a bit

of Jim thrown in. You first heard the crab talking to you seven

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days ago but silly you thought it was the conch talking. The crabcalled out your name from inside the Queen Conch shell: Helen.Helen. Helen.

You’d warily approached the conch shell, picked it upand held it to your ear. Conch is pronounced ‘Konks’ Jim tellsyou, not ‘conch’, Dumbo. (When I see an elephant fly: Jim hadbought you it in Florida when you’d taken your little Fluffy-Whiffy-Cliffy to Disneyland.) You’d expected to hear the hiss ofthe sea on sand, the folding of waves on land that you get fromshells. Instead, you’d heard your name. You’d dropped the shell.Weirdly, it had bounced off the carpet like it was made of rubber,like the rubber sex toy you found in Jim’s home office and saidnothing about. Ever.

Clumsy bitch, the crab says.So, you pick up the conch, stare into the dark slit between

the pink lips. ‘The Queen Conch is also known as the PinkConch,’ Jim had told you once upon a time... You see a small crabsnapping pincers in the darkness and recoil. You shake the shellto get the horrible little monster out.

Stop it, you silly cow! This is my home. Stop it now! Youcan hear my voice because the shell makes it bigger.

You stop shaking the conch and apologise.Make yourself a cup of tea and sit down, my deary. I have

something to tell you.You obey.My name is Carcinus Maenas, the crab says. I am an

emissary of his Lordship, the Sea, sent to tell you to leave yourhouse.

‘What?’You are, the phrase is, all at sea.You must leave your house. The Sea wants to redevelop

the seafront. In exactly one week’s time, under the cover of amassive storm, He will send in a demolition crew of navyelephant seals from the Pacific to reclaim this area.

‘Seals?’Yes, Deary. The fate of your house is sealed. When the

24

navy bull seals attack the house with their demolishing trunks, youwill be forced out into the last caravan you possess, living in yourown driveway like refugees until that tarmac strip is consumed byHis might. Do you want to live like me – a crab that has lost itsshell?

‘No.’Understandably, at first you will not believe the crab. You

go to the doctor, get some pills to stop the voices. He is verysympathetic. ‘Very understandable in your situation, MrsForeshaw,’ Dr Jones says. ‘You’re under a lot of stress. These willhelp. Minimal side-effects.’ But his pills do not help, and the crabis very insistent, has such an insidious call, talks about how yourhusband is wrong – that King Cnut, Cnut not Cunt or Canute,walked out into the waves not to hold back the sea in a show ofpower, but to abase himself before the power of the sea. Youcannot ignore the way it clicks its pincers, the conch amplifies theclick-click-clicking. Then cometh the morning of the seal suicidebomber: a bull elephant seal leapt in through the kitchen door,trunk swinging wildly, barking: Die, human scum! It tries todetonate its back-pack, but it fails to go boom. Mother of Satan!the seal aar-aars, and flops out of the house.

Dinner time, you break down, and tell Jim about thesuicide-bomber seal, confessing about the crab in the conch andthe warning; dinner time, an admission of madness. ‘Christ-and-a-night, woman, as if I don’t have enough on my plate!’ Jim goesand shakes the shit out of the conch shell, but finds no friggingcrab. He drives to his local, The Neptune, to get pissed. You cryfor hours.

The crab takes pity on you. Deary, stop this drowning ingrief, it says. There may be a way to stop the Sea.

You stop your weeping. ‘I’m listening.’If you throw yourself in the waves, make yourself a

sacrifice to Him, that might appease His wrath.‘You mean kill myself?I mean, give your life freely as a gift to quell the Sea,

25

Deary. It has worked in the past for the Greeks.‘I don’t want to die.’Why die a thousand deaths? Why erode away? Think of it

as Nature taking its course. You are an old woman with no one tomother. Your son has left home, yes?

‘Cliff has flown the nest, yes.’Your life has no meaning. But you death…you are insured?‘Jim insured me.’Then your death has more meaning then your life, Deary.

Your husband, and your son Cliff, can cash your life insurance, livethe good life afterwards.

‘I don’t want to die.’I know you don’t want to, but you need to, this very night.

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III

All Jim Foreshaw could do was watch as a thirty-foot swell, atidal wave, blew in from the North Sea, rolled into a breaker in theshallows, thumped into the cliffs, hurdled up over the top,athletically energetically engulfing the house in pure force. Cliff’sold bedroom window imploded with the weight of water; daggersof glass flew at him and hit him in the face.

Staggering back, all he could see was red. He fell to hisknees, screaming, thrashing in the freezing cold water. The sharp,burning pain in the cold, cold water was too much to bear and hepassed out…

When he came to, there was a light, a tunnel of shiveringlight, shining into the bedroom from above and the whump-whump-whump of helicopter blades gyring. His fingers numblywent to the dull throb in his face. There was a huge hole where hisnose had been. The sea had cut off his nose despite his face. Hescrabbled around the floor, frantic to find it, and thanks to thesearch-light, grasped up the bloody pulp that had been his nose.He went to the window, waved to his rescuers. I’m all right.

The search-light was a Night Sun on a Coastguard SeaKing. It flicked from him to illuminate more saviours than he everdreamed of.

The Royal Engineers had come to the rescue! Go on lads!There was a whole corps of sappers pile-driving steel rods intotheir last section of back garden; a green crane was droppingreinforced concrete armour over the cliff to shore it up, child’splay to keep the sea at bay; camouflaged concrete trucks pouredout tonnes of quick-dry cement.

And there was help out to sea as well. The Sea KingNight Sun flashed out to reveal hulking great shadows out there tobe frigates, destroyers, an aircraft carrier. Her Majesty’s RoyalNavy was patrolling the shore, using the steel bulk of the ships todisrupt the huge waves and shelter the army from the worst of thestorm.

27

Faster than the speed of sound, the third of the forces tothe rescue: three RAF Typhoons, the new Euro-fighters, roaredinover the waves to deliver their payloads of laser-guided concretegroynes.

He was crying tears, blood, and snot, but his house hadbeen saved, this little piece of England had been ably and bravelydefended. ‘Thank you, lads!’

IV

Crab and Queen Conch in her cardigan pocket, she found Jimbobbing face-up in three feet of black water, unconscious. Herhand went to the hole in his face. Blood bubbling in the hole –chest rising and falling – he was still breathing! She tried dragginghim out of the bedroom, but the seawater would not help her,rushed away, a cold, cold stream, out the door, down the stairs.

Do you hear that bellowing? the crab asked. The sealsaar-aar coming!

‘I have to save him.’Then you know what to do, Deary. You know what to do.Another huge wave hit the house, deluging the bedroom,

drenching her. The house lurched like a ship foundering on therocks. The power went out, delivering her into darkness.

‘I will save him,’ she told the crab, shivering, and let goof her husband. I will save him. She fumbled her way to theslippery stairs and holding on to the banister, squish-splashed herway down in the dark. I will save him for the memory of a youngsoldier who fell for me when I was beautiful. She went out thefront door, round the side of the house, into the teeth of thehowling storm. I will save us all from the sea because true love issacrificing yourself for others. Crouching low, buffeted back bysalt-spray, she marched to the cliff top.

Do it.She hurled the conch shell into the waves crashing

halfway up the cliff, and then leapt to join it, down into theseething white surf below.

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The sea was freezing, ice jellyfish stinging her all overher body, as she plunged down beneath the waves, an offering,freely given for Jim, and her little Cliffy.

The cold, cold darkness stung her eyes to blindness so sheclosed them. She curled into a small ball. The sea gathered herlike an infant, pitched her up, over the cliff face, and dashed her topieces on the walls of her own house.

The storm did not abate.

29

from Out of Reach

[Two students are living in the disused lighthouse on Spurn Point,one researching local birdlife, the other writing a thesis on thepoetry of Philip Larkin.]

MCDONALD[Enters reading from a notebook.]Sparrowhawk 2, Stock Dove 1, Skylark 9, Meadow Pipit 21, RockPipit 2, Blackbird 4, Starling 50, Chaffinch 3, Goldfinch 2, LesserRedpoll 20... [Yawns theatrically.]

MCALLISTERWhere’ve you been? The Land of Nod?

MCDONALDRavenser.

MCALLISTEROdd.

MCDONALD[Spells it out.] Ravenser Odd.

MCALLISTERWhat’s that all about?

MCDONALDSome days on the shore I can just make outwhat you might think was a buoy or the snoutof a whale but it’s, you’ll never guess what –

MCALLISTERWhere?

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MCDONALDBeyond the end of the spit.

MCALLISTERWhat?

MCDONALDA village under the tide.

MCALLISTERWhere Danish pirates lie in wait.

MCDONALDThat inch by inch slid down the long slide –

MCALLISTERWhere coffins floated down the main street.

MCDONALDIt’s all still there. I’ve seen it.

MCALLISTERYou bet.

[Pause.]

MCDONALDNo sign of Perdue?

MCALLISTERDivil the bit.

31

MCDONALDOdd. Very odd.

MCALLISTERThat’s what I said.

Any sightings?

MCDONALDThere was a whinchat.

MCALLISTERA bird of passage.

MCDONALDAlso a whitethroat.

MCALLISTERHer long white throat. I saw that.

MCDONALDOf course you did. In the Land of Nod.

32

Field Trip With Voices

Filey Brigg

1. Under the Cliffs

A tiny stunned green star: freshwater newtwashed out of the cliffs by rain.“Saltwater shock — needs to rehydrate.”

Drop him in a bottle of store-bought still;watch as that outstretched skydiver floatsthe leg-long half-mile to our feet.

Later, we put back a tiny jade trinketor a god, dead-still, in a rain-wet niche.

2. Soul Music

Catch wind-snatched boom-box;spray flicks break across somecrossover flava-diva’s groove;keep your booty in neutral,feet unsure to tap on the tumbled rocksof what some say’s a Roman quay.

Dogs shake themselves free of sea;children taste the fishy fingers of the spray;the elders stare out where water’s cut by light,wait a beat, then one scatters ashesas wind turns, bears off that track’sslick power-build to its middle eight.

33

3. Brigg

End of the spit,dogs, kids, rags of wet tissue:

outfall, shit.

End of chat.

4. Guillemot

What stops the chatis someone spots that dead bird on a rock.Then the beach is littered with “Guillemots,razorbills, and that’s a little auk.”Twenty, thirty, forty plump twistsof black and white along that stretch.

The naturalist squats to check:“No broken necks … what you’d expectif they’d been caught at sea,ripped free by fishermen from their nets.”

He thumbs feathers back to skin for wounds,below for shot. Nothing: it’s a mystery.Photographs one or two in situ,is on his mobile to the RSPB.

34

5. Roman Signal Station

Digging down, they found some bones,but no larger animal skulls or feet,which they take to mean the meatwas slaughtered elsewhere, carted hereto a garrison of single men.

Nothing else came to light,except much later tiny bones of mice,shrews, voles, compacted into pellets,which must mean that while land and seaswapped places and the Roman pier just sank,

there was nothing here but that towercrumbling on the edge of the spit,and, staring down from its walls through whole dark ages,only (swoop, shadow, flit) owls, owls, owls.

35

6. Rain

What’s new and wet’s all still seeping in: drips,drips, down to beach “…the oolithic shore.”Pipefish, gutweed, velvet swimming crabs.We have guys who know it all on hand:

the geologist talks sediment, striations, rock;the naturalist gives us weed, nerve, feather;the archaeologist mentions Romans, bones.We point at stuff, get the low-down, get its names.

I’d like to know about the earth, the sea;the names of things and how they live;why the land I live in’s rumpled just so;where and why the past keeps poking through.

That was the first day of the rains.Next day, and the next, it kept it up,worrying gutters, soffits, roof,insinuating dark patches in ceiling, walls.

Monday morning, woke to floods.Went out to work, got soaked.Flooded basements, backed up sewers,offices sealed off, the server down.

I’d meant to find out just whythose birds had fallen from the sky.Never did, but, looking up, was struckby just how dark the heavens had become.

36

At Filey Brigg

Here melted the ice-age assassin’sweapon leaving onlyits glacier’s dross to pointthe promontory’s finger of gritstone.

Here sea and shore grew impactedlike a sideways-on tooth,the very rocks capricious, erratic.

I have lost all perspective.Only the green sea’s heave could turnthese crosshatched cliffs to a plumb-line.There is no telling how far downthe screaming gannets will dive.

The Roman signal station on the pointhas seen the hordes coming.Its fires are out. There is notime for escape. Its rodent bonesare owl pellets, barbarian micegnawing at the ablative absolute.

Razorbills and guillemots in their dozenshave fallen dead out of the sky,propped eyeless in rockpools.I trace the clotheshorse foldsof their wings, hung out to dry.

37

Their breasts and wings are untouched.Only their cause of death takes flight,and the sewage outflow’s sunken capstangushing through scarves of loo-rollsteers our ship of foolssafely onto the rocks.

A group fans out on a shelf.They are scattering ashes.Sheen for sheen the brightnessmissing from a dead auk’s eyebut all around me catches the waves’green surge, is thrown upwardswith them, breaks on nothingat all and scatters like ashes.

38

Futures

I

Bull weatherand bear currentsturn all hands out

to shorten sail,

send lads aloftto loose the mizzen royaland take it in;

as much as squalls

at 1 a.m. December 1st;determine howthe stars will look

far from home.

II

“Catched a sharkwhen we was at the equatorand I have got

some of its teeth.

Also got an empty ostrich eggto fetch homewhich was given me

by a Cape Town baker.”

39

The cadenceof a voyagethrough blunt water,

sea-spat, wind-flung.

In ballast to Iquique,78 days,all sorts of weather.

Seven weeks working

the cargo and nothing to see,only sand and rocks,but 90 ships laid up

and 6 lads from Hull.

“Dear Father and Mother...I haven’t had a dayof sickness since I left

the Land of Puddings.”

III

Tonnages pushedand pulledacross the expanses.

The globe bound tight

with knots of credit.Futures decidedby horoscopes cast

for cinders and cement,

40

how the profit looks20°13’S 70°10’W.The globe wound tight

with young lives aft

under the break of the poopriding out blank pagesof frail calm

or, at night, marvelling

at the walls of heaven,studded and sparklinglike a shell grotto,

coming down to the sea.

From Humber out,120 days or more,100 years and more,

the voices are moored.

Spasms of weather.Fog boils in the sea’s grate.Listen: the voices come

towards us treading water.

41

The Lord Paramount Looks Seawards

The Lord Paramount of the Seigniory of Holderness may claim anycetacean washed up on the coast from Spurn Bight to FlamboroughHead. In 1825 a beached sperm whale was taken to Burton ConstableHall, where its skeleton was displayed, inspiring passages in ThomasBeale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839) and HermanMelville’sMoby Dick (1851). In 2007, the reassembled skeleton wasexhibited in the Great Hall of Burton Constable.

“… in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain SirClifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale…Sir Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that like a greatchest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities...”Moby Dick.

1. A Cabinet of Curiosities

Rhino horn, coco-de-mer, shark jaws,tailfins, swordfish swords, sawfish saws,quadrants, astrolabes, a huge “book camera”,manuscripts, microscopes, a Concave Mirrorall of Twenty-Four Inches in Diameter,antiquities, dried reptiles, thermometers,fossils, rocks, minerals, shells, the Clawof a Great Lobster, a Tooth-brush from Mecca,the Leg of an Elk two Foot two Inches long,a large Sea-Tortoise from the Isle of Ascension,fowling pieces, a carbine with an extending butt,perfectly balanced forty-bore hair-triggered duelling pistols with silver escutcheonand the motto Ubi Libertas Ibi Patria.

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2. Sir Clifford’s Whale

The Lord Paramount of the Seignioryof Holderness looks down and overseesthese bones brought in by downstairs and scullerystaff from their long exile in lean-tos, sheds,from their chilly diasporas in glasshouse and stable,the outhouse earth into which they’d sunk. The head,big as a Ford Transit, has been garaged undertarpaulin for decades. But his Lordship’s visionis more than just this fleshless resurrectionthe sun shines through; it is the huge skeleton keyto reunite drifting land with inconstant sea.His mind ponders how blubber has bubbled off:how bones are bars detaining nowt; how flesh,long on the run, winks through, fugitive as light.

3. Carnival

What’s suffered a sea-change here’s the coast itself;turned inside out, all that is solid melts into air.Even this thing now hugely spine and jawis an idea in thrall to the carnivalwhose tides hold the whole of Holderness in its maw.Forget the chance encounters of sewing-machinesand umbrellas on dissecting-tables, once moreSurrealism’s at the service of Revolutionand the elephant in this room, though not yet white,is moving there from black. Trace its evolutionas the articulated folly of its bonesglides from sea through cetology, from a surgeon’sprose to a Merman’s Leviathanic museum.Misrule: now you see it, now it’s gone.

43

4. Pelagian

A rabblement of bones has breached the Hall;something huge and hugely hurt has crawledin from winter ! its great wounded bawlmust have foghorned in another world ! and died.Left here, all we have’s this x-rayed sprawl.Across the floorboards of this ancient pile,a pile of pitted uncommon bones are spilled;up there on pilastered walls, narwhal tusksmasquerade as unicorn horns, meanwhilethe portraits (Elizabethan, Jacobean,in jousting armour, classically robed,or a wild Victorian filly riding to hounds)look down on a wrecked ossuary, smileslyly at the carcass of this pelagic meal.

44

Flotsam

An arc of the bay from the pier-head,out where the factory lights flicker:only there do our sightlines cross.All parallel lines meet in time.Only stopped does the train’s centipedefinds its legs, find and lose them,its commuters shed and dispersed.

What coast is this, should I askmy eyes or my memory? What catchhas trickled to an empty creelfor the last trawler afloat? The cracksin the pavement are full of eyes.Something is moving over my skinand will vanish the instant I move.

Too ready at anchor, too temptinglythe freighter under the window awaitsmy stowaway’s manifest to sail.My flotsam will require no suchpreliminaries. Cast on the watersits flux of wanderlust returnson itself, doubled back, delivered.

A cormorant drying its wingssteps down refreshed from its cross.The sliver of moon is an ill-fittinglid on the jar of our nightand the darkened lighthousehas long been in league with the rocks.A laughably happy small dog

45

fetching a stick no one has thrownredoubles my prints in the sand,kicks through and erases them.I will not sail. Cover allmy traces as effortlesslyand I will stay for the last train,the last boat to sail and beyond.

46

Acknowledgements

“Crossing the Equator” and “Futures” use material from the letters home of

Michael ‘Kick’ Murphy (1876-1896), 3rd Mate on the Castlebank, lost with all

hands in the Pacific Ocean. Used with permission of Robb Robinson and the

Maritime History Institute, University of Hull.

Thanks to Arthur Credland at Hull Maritime Museum and Gerardine

Mulcahy at Burton Constable Hall for their time and permission to film or

use photographsof their exhibits. The image on page 12 and the

photographs on pages 41 and 44 appear by permission of the Burton

Constable Foundation. Thanks to Roddie Harris for the photographs on

pages 1, 2 and 9. All other photographs are by Cliff Forshaw. The

accompanying DVD was filmed and edited by Cliff Forshaw.

Cover design by Graham Scott at Human Design, Hull.

Printed by V. Richardson & Sons Ltd, Hull.