The Sea Inside

refuses to give me a sitting, he says it’s a kind of
Inferno
! The
greatest
men of the age (with strong emphasis), Sir John Herschel, Henry Taylor, Watts, say I have immortalised them – and these other men object!! What is one to do – Hm?’ (Her conversation was constantly punctuated with ‘eh?’ and ‘hm?’).

    Julia presided over an unlikely irruption of bohemianism on this islet. ‘Everybody is either a genius or a painter or peculiar in some way,’ complained one visitor, ‘is there
nobody
commonplace?’ With its perpetual parties and play-acting, Freshwater was one long performance, and Dimbola its proscenium arch. Such was the throng of art and letters that one writer compared it ‘to Athens in the time of Pericles, as being the place to which all the famous men of the reign of Queen Victoria gravitated’; another considered its society closer to a French salon than any English gathering.
    It’s hard to imagine now that this sleepy village should have been filled with such fanciful displays. Leaving Dimbola and its eccentric cast behind, I push my bike up the hill – and nearly blunder into a skylark at my feet. Ahead of me, the island rises, ‘walled up from the ocean by a bulwark of immense cliffs’, as Adams writes, caught up in the spirit of the sublime. ‘A mighty barrier, truly! but yet not altogether impregnable against the assaults of the sea. Their glittering sides are strangely branded, as it were, by dark parallel lines of flint, that score the surface of the rock from misty ridge to spray-beaten base. Huge caverns penetrate into their recesses. Isolated rocks frown all apart in gloomy grandeur. Immense chasms yawn …’
    Couched in such breathless terms, the terrain takes on the air of Julia’s amateur dramatics: the celadon sea, the lime-lit cliffs, the sun switched on and off by a shifting curtain of clouds; a Victorian stage on which an over-made-up Edgar might be telling his blinded father Gloucester, ‘How fearful/And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!’ This is a place used and shaped by every species that visits it. The turf is as clipped as a bowling green, the work of rabbits whose burrows riddle the soft chalk. Violets and gentians stud the grass like purple stars. There’s barbarity here too, invoked by a raven perched on the edge, but it is upstaged by an altogether more diminutive bird: the wheatear, newly arrived from the other end of the earth.
    I say wheatear, but that is a prudish corruption of its wonderfully common name, white arse, one which reaches back to the Old English
hw ī t
, and
ærs
, its distinctive tail. Its binomial,
Oenanthe oenanthe
, is almost bigger than the bird itself, and derives from the Greek for wine flower, since its bearer’s arrival in southern Europe from Africa coincides with the blossoming of the vines. Weighing barely twenty-five grams, the northern wheatear accomplishes a migration among the greatest of any songbird, round trips of up to eighteen thousand miles from South Africa to Alaska. Those that land in southern England, however, choose to nest here, using abandoned burrows.
    Under the cover of a hollow created by subsidence, I crawl along to get a better look. They’re exquisite birds. I focus on one male as it hops about on the precipice. Its bluish-grey back reminds me of a guardsman’s greatcoat, and its pale belly is blushed with a seductive peach tint. Its face is pharaonically masked by a black eye stripe. It stands on an outcrop of chalk, proud and alert on surprisingly long legs, the light reflecting up at its breast. As it runs along, it launches into short skittering flights, flaunting its white arse. It is loyal to the downs, a welcome resting place after all those thousands of air-miles, but a fateful choice for its predecessors, which were rewarded for their efforts by being baked in a pie.
    According to Gilbert White, writing in the 1770s, wheatear (as a respectable cleric, he was bound to use the bird’s less indecorous name) were ‘esteemed an elegant dish’. ‘At the time of the wheat-harvest they begin to be taken in great numbers; are sent for sale to
Brighthelmstone
and
Tunbridge
; and appear at all the tables of the gentry that entertain with any degree of elegance.’
    To supply such slender fare, shepherds left their flocks every summer – to the annoyance of their employers – setting their snares on the feast of St James, 25 July. Thomas Bewick, writing two decades after White