The Sea Inside

‘little daughter’; it may also refer to ‘that which is raised over the sea’ – an echo of the island’s Roman incarnation as Vectis, or lever. Although none of these is certain, such names seem to express the physical separation of this fragment which rises out of the sea, the geological end – or beginning – of the soft spine of calcium carbonate which twists through England. The island was formed when the river Solent rose after the Ice Age; from its sea bed the bones of aurochs and woolly mammoths have been recovered, along with the stumps of petrified forests. Now the island stands between the mainland and the Continent as a last vestige of Englishness; in his eccentric essays on
Desert Islands
, Walter de la Mare saw it as a doormat ‘very dear to the eyes of an Englishman on his way home’. Although its megafauna have been replaced by cows and its megaliths by bungalows, its gentility is a mere veneer. Like all islands, this is a place defined by feral forces.
    At Lymington, on the mainland, the island is at its closest, only three miles distant, although that narrowness causes the water to surge in a race enough to intimidate the most experienced sailor. From my blustery vantage point on the top deck of the ferry, where the wind whips my hood and forces me into fingerless gloves, I watch the western end of the island approach. Here it rises highest as it enters its final act of disintegration, sending bits of itself out to sea, rocky icebergs calved from a glacier of chalk.
    As the ramp hits the hard at Yarmouth, I’m let loose like a sheep from a truck. I ride along the low river valley that almost entirely divides the extreme, prow-shaped tip of West Wight from the rest of the island. My 1950 Ward Lock guidebook – bound in red cloth and filled with airy advertisements for a place that has barely changed in sixty years – tells me that ‘in stormy weather the sea has been seen to break over the narrow ridge of separation and mingle its salt waves with the fresh waters of the river-head’. Far from seeking to bolster this slender bar, the islanders sought to increase the gap. In an earlier guide, published in 1856, William Davenport Adams, a former teacher, noted that the strand of shingle was ‘formerly … much less; so that the inhabitants of the island proposed in the reign of Edward I, to cut through the isthmus, and thus to form for themselves an almost impregnable retreat, when the island was invaded by hostile bands’. This insular wedge of land even aspired to its own status as the Isle of Freshwater, an island-within-an-island. But then, the Isle of Wight itself has always resisted attempts to link it to the rest of England; having long loosed its moorings, it prefers to float free.

    I swim off Freshwater Bay, overlooked by the same Albion Hotel from where Adams began his tour. ‘Though the beach is pebbly and rocky, bathing is good, the sea being in calm weather remarkably clear,’ my 1950 guide informs me. ‘Boating under ordinary conditions is quite safe, but for trips of any length, a man who knows the coast should certainly be taken.’ The water is salty and buoyant. I’d been looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. There’s no comforting land on the horizon, only the steely sea. Around me old plastic containers bob, tethered to lobster pots below. The cliffs rise as a backdrop, their soft chalk embedded with flints like nuts in a bar of nougat. Grey and white pebbles as big as tennis balls roll under my feet. The water is cold and my swim is brief, although it has the usual effect of washing my sins away.
    I’m warming my hands on my flask of tea and thinking about leaving when the German students arrive. One of them leaps onto the promenade railing and, in an acrobatic defiance of gravity, holds his body vertically for a split-second, supporting himself on one hand. Another changes into brash shorts and black goggles and strides into the water. He swims straight ahead, disregarding the weedy rocks. Having reached his appointed end – his route might as well have been marked out in the lanes of a public pool – he swims back to his friends’ applause.
    After these breezy exertions the students pack up and go. Emboldened, I plunge back in, following the channel the boy had pioneered. As I swim, still wary of the rocks, a black-painted ketch sails into the cove and straight at me. Its crew comprises a long-haired man – perhaps one of those