The Sea Inside

Tennyson said. He retreated to Farringford, his house in Freshwater, and retitled his portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron ‘the dirty monk’. But he soon realised that nature could not protect him; that despite the woods around his house and the buttresses of the sea and its raven-haunted ravines, he was also surrounded by his words, as ensnared as a wheatear, unable to escape the place he had assumed in the imperial pantheon. By 1869 the sightseers had become too much, and Tennyson left Farringford for Surrey, where, twenty years later, he would receive the news that his son had died at sea on his way back from India.

    By then his former neighbour had long since de-camped. After years persuading ungrateful great men to pose for the plate-glass negatives which would indeed immortalise them, Julia and her ailing husband sailed from Southampton on the P&O ship
Mirzapore
in the autumn of 1875, bound for Ceylon. With them they took their coffins, packed with their possessions, knowing they would never return.
    On the island’s western coast at Kalutura they set up home, covering their bungalow’s walls ‘with magnificent photographs’ as a visitor, Marianne North, recorded; ‘others were tumbling about the tables, chairs, and floors with quantities of damp books, all untidy and picturesque; the lady herself with a lace veil on her head and flowing draperies. Her oddities were most refreshing.’ Julia photographed local people in the same style in which she had posed the great and good of British society. But her new island idyll – as if she had finally accomplished the feat of towing the Isle of Freshwater to the Indian Ocean – was only fleeting. Four years later, having moved to a house high in the tea-growing hills of Nurawa Eliya, then known as Little England, Julia died, looking up at the stars, uttering her last word, ‘Beautiful.’

    As I resume my climb, I’m forced to stop every now and again – not because I’m running out of breath, but because the view itself is breathtaking. Behind me is the landscape I have known all my life, levered up and flattened at the same time; a three-dimensional map of my hinterland, from Bournemouth’s beaches to Portsmouth’s towers, signalling the south-eastern sprawl towards London.
    Everything falls away, as if seen from a lurching helicopter. At the feet of the cliff, the sea is turned cloudy, as though scattered with bath salts. Beyond, its open surface is pooled with shifting shafts of sunlight and mercurial upwellings. It seems to move under itself, inexorably, a great slow mass beneath a rippling skin. The quiet is unnerving. You’d think such a vast vista would evoke an awful noise, echoing with what Tennyson called ‘the moanings of the homeless sea’. This is as far as I can go. Any further and I’d have to take to the water. I feel a sudden surge of inexplicable homesickness, perhaps because I can see my home, near and far away.
    I think the silence is getting to me.
    William Davenport Adams bellows – it’s the former schoolmaster in him. ‘Oh, there is such a glorious prospect from this bold headland!’ he shouts, making himself heard over the long-departed wind, ‘a vast sweep of the Channel blends strangely in the distance with the deep-blue sky, and when you turn, lo, beneath you lies the silent peninsula-plain, with its villages, and wooded knolls, and sequestered farm-houses, and sparkling streams.’
    I’ve reached the top, staked out by a grandiose granite monument, erected in 1897 –

    IN MEMORY
    OF ALFRED
    LORD TENNYSON
    THIS CROSS IS
    RAISED A BEACON
    TO SAILORS BY
    THE PEOPLE OF
    FRESHWATER &
    OTHER FRIENDS
    IN ENGLAND
    AND AMERICA

    – while the etched aluminium plate of a range-finder at its feet tells me that if I sailed due south-west from here, I’d reach the Azores. The world below is dazed by the light, as if everything had evaporated into the ether. Except that someone has neatly used chalk fragments, all of a size, to spell out the word
Google
on the grass. Next time I come by, the word will be replaced by a pair of lovers’ names.
    The clouds are rushing under the sun, casting shadows on the sea, creating fluffy stealth bombers. Their shapes seem to slide under the surface as underwater islands. I’m ever more aware of the tentative land on which I stand, a white wound gouged out of England’s underbelly, studded with flint and sutured by grass.
    The chalk hurts my eyes. I lie back. The turf is springy and