The Sea Inside

useful locals recommended by my guide – and a younger woman who leans over the side and shouts at me, ‘Are you mad?’
    Back on the beach, she produces a blue plastic bucket. Inside is a slithery selection of still-twitching fish: whiting, catfish, and other brown-bodied, slimy species. Warming to her audience – a man and his young son have come up to peer into the bucket – she says that the sea is two degrees warmer than it should be at this time of year, that fish are appearing which ought not to be here. I ask if they ever see any dolphins out there. She defers to her captain, who says yes, a few miles out.
    ‘The
Common Porpoise
,’ Mr Adams reassures me, ‘occasionally passes along our southern shore in small shoals.’ But even bigger cetaceans have been found here. In 1758, a Royal Navy ship captured a sixty-six-foot fin whale which had been seen floating dead in the water, only to leave go of it off the Needles, from where it washed up at what would become known as Whale Chine. It took a century for another fin whale to appear at the feet of Tennyson Down, in 1842; it ended up in the amusement park at nearby Blackgang Chine, where its enclosed bones became a kind of cavernous shopping-bazaar-cum-boatshed, lined with plates, baskets, pictures, shells and glass lighthouses filled with coloured sand from Alum Bay, while its empty jaws pointed forlornly to the window and the sea beyond. It was still there when I visited the island as a boy, although I remember being more excited by the plaster gnomes and toadstools outside.

    Leaving the beach, I turn inland, passing a pair of bay-fronted villas at the foot of the downs – the sort of seaside houses that offer bed and breakfast, polyester chintz and cracked shower cubicles; but a crenellated tower and oriel windows suggest another story.
    Dimbola Lodge was the home of Julia Margaret Cameron, who, swathed in purple paisley, her hands stained ‘as black as an Ethiopian Queen’s’ by silver nitrate, created alchemical images in her greenhouse, having summoned subjects spotted in the streets from her eyrie. As the name of her house suggests, she too was a migrant, an exotic bird blown onto the island’s shores.
    Cameron was born in Calcutta in 1815. Her family name, Pattle – close to the Hindu ‘Patel’ – indicates an Asian ancestry, evident in her broad forehead and ‘Pondicherry eyes’, the same features seen in her great-nieces, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Theirs was a family which looked east. Julia’s husband Charles, twenty years her senior, had fallen in love with Ceylon as a young man, and continually returned there. Their house in Freshwater was named after the family’s coffee plantation, while the subcontinent’s influence was reflected in its Indian gothic arches.
    Writing from Dimbola, Julia tried to entice Charles back with her fanciful comparisons. ‘This island might equal your island now for richness of effects,’ she declared, as if West Wight had somehow magically moved to the Indian Ocean, or at least been towed there in her imagination. ‘The downs are covered with golden gorse & beneath them the blue hyacinth is so thickly opened that the valleys look as if the “sky were upbreaking thro’ the Earth” … The trees too are luxuriant here – far more flourishing than they usually are by the sea – and Alfred Tennyson’s wood may satisfy any forester.’
    Here Cameron pursued her art. Her photographic images show only human faces, but they’re lit by the chalk downs and the limitless sea around them. With their shifting focus and depth, their draped shawls and tresses of hair, they resemble underwater scenes. They are worlds of their own, more organic scenes than portraits. On her way south from London, Julia would change at Brockenhurst, where her photographs of Darwin, Browning, Tennyson and others still hang in the booking hall, along with a hand-written sepia inscription:

    This gallery of the great men of our age is presented for this Room by Mrs Cameron in grateful memory of this being the spot where she first met one of her sons after a long absence (of four years) in Ceylon. 11th of November 1871.
    She must have made for a lively travelling companion. Henry Allingham encountered her at the station, ‘queenly in a carriage by herself surrounded by photographs … talking all the time. “I want to do a large photograph of Tennyson, and he objects! Says I make bags under his eyes – and Carlyle