The Sea Inside

was believed that they hibernated in the water, from where fishermen could cast their nets and pull out swallows, ‘huddled against each other, beak to beak, wing to wing, foot to foot … among the reeds’.

    When Gilbert White watched great flocks getting ready to leave, the sight touched him ‘with a secret delight, mixed with some degree of mortification’, since no one yet knew where they went. ‘If there are any animals with no memory they may be happy,’ wrote his descendant T.H. White, ‘but even swallows remember last year’s nest.’ To Ted Hughes the swallow was ‘a whiplash swimmer’, ‘a fish of the air’, ‘the barbed harpoon’. For sailors they were bluebirds, heralds of home; a swallow tattoo would ensure its bearer’s safe return to dry land, in the same way that an anchor symbolised hope. But my artist friend Angela, who saw her first bluebird weeks ago in Cornwall, tells me that a tattooed dagger through a swallow’s heart is the sign of a lost loved one.
    I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled knuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body entirely replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.
    A few days ago a pair of common terns appeared. They were once called sea swallows for their forked tails – hence their name,
Sterna hirundo
, from the Old English
stearn
, and the Latin
hirundo
, swallow – but they also resemble stripped-down, go-faster gulls, all cackling cries and electrical energy. They scan and dive, feeding furiously to replace calories lost on their own long flight from Africa. They look as though they’d barely make it over the Solent, but the Arctic tern holds the world record for bird migration. One was found to have flown from Finland to Western Australia, a journey of fourteen thousand miles.
    The winter birds have all flown. A few weeks before, we’d descended on the shore with cannon nets in an attempt to catch brent geese before they left. Our captain, Peter Potts, marshalled his troops with military ease, taking the sightlines of the metal tubes embedded in the mud, ready to fire over our unsuspecting prey. We stood, and waited. A passing dog cocked its leg on Peter Wilson’s bag. Suddenly, a bang and a puff of smoke, and we ran to retrieve the netted birds, as if to drag them out of the water. I feared for one which had its head in a shallow pool. But in all eight brent were bagged in sacks – along with a single oystercatcher.
    The nine wriggling bundles of hessian lay on the shingle awaiting processing, the more ambitious attempting to escape, scrabbling inside as if in an avian sack race. The oystercatcher was first out. Ruth held the now-ringed bird, showing me how its head and eyes remained focused on the ground while she moved its body, like a gyroscope, always focused on its potential food. Then she handed it to me, and I let it loose. The v-shaped white of its outstretched wings was gone in an instant. We set to ringing the geese.
    I felt the faint oiliness of the birds in my hands; saw their neat black heads, the subtle white collars around their necks, their serrated bills try to peck my fingers. They were much smaller than I’d expected, more duck-sized than goose, and yet so fearless and intrepid; fine, proud, wild creatures, Arctic emissaries to this suburban shore. We set them free together, and they too were soon gone, their burnt-grey shapes fading into the sky.
    Back home, I pluck up the courage to clear my mother’s room. The bed in which she lay, and from which she left to go to the hospital for a routine operation and never returned, has not been disturbed for six years. I left it, reassured by the smell, as if the room, like the house, were still full of her. Now I pull back the bedclothes, heartlessly. Twenty-four hours later, it’s all gone. The room is bare and empty. From the windows where the curtains always seemed to be drawn, I peel the sticky plastic film that imitated stained glass in the fanlights. As it comes away, with a final yank that sends me flying backwards off the stool on which I’m balanced, the light pours in.
    All the things I imagined as a child, all the things I feared; they’re not at the end of the world, and they’re not here, either. I close my notebook and put it on the shelf, along with all the others.
    There’s no such place as home. And