The Sea Inside

earned them their name. The missing fourth, a narrow, hundred-and-twenty-foot pinnacle, fell in 1764. If there’d been a locked-off time-lapse camera running on their geological demise, we’d realise how reduced these stacks are in splendour. Now they appear as mere props to the squat, red-and-white-striped lighthouse, with its double-occulting light. Like its counterparts around the coast, it has its signature pulse –
eclipse two seconds, light two seconds, eclipse two seconds, dark fourteen seconds
– as cryptic as a cetacean’s clicks. It runs on autopilot, its tower flattened to accommodate visiting helicopters, watched from the neighbouring stacks by heraldic cormorants – once known inelegantly as eel-crows – and sleek black shags with aristocratic crests.
    Behind lies other evidence of human occupation: man-made barnacles clinging to this land’s end, relics of a past when West Wight was one big fortress, and when the entire south coast was studded with brick forts. Successive batteries were built into this slender white finger to defend all England from hostile bands, leaving it as riddled with concrete tunnels as the cliffs’ burrows. As I prop my bike by a chained gate, a pair of swallows swoop out of the darkness. Poking my head through the doorway, I hear insistent cheeping from a nest somewhere in the gloom.
    At the foot of the cliffs are paddling guillemots, sharp-beaked northern versions of penguins. As with razorbills and fulmars, the island marks their easternmost breeding ground. They lie long and low like miniature black-and-white battleships, built for the open water where they spend their lives, only coming into shore to nest. As members of the auk family, they have an antediluvian quality, evocative of ancient engravings. As they flutter down from the cliffs, their wings look improbably small and stumpy in proportion to their barrel-shaped bodies. I can just about hear them, at this distance. The guillemot ‘utters queer and eerie noises’, says my
Pocket Book of Birds
, published Spring 1936, ‘reminiscent of the moaning of a person in pain’. Like so many British seabirds, they have greatly reduced in numbers in recent years. Puffins too once made their nests here; they have long since vanished, although later that summer I see a sole specimen far out at sea.
    For centuries such birds were taken in their thousands for their meat, their oil, or their feathers. So great was the demand that the wings were torn off wounded birds which had been shot; like definned sharks, they were thrown back into the sea to die, in order that fashionable ladies could walk about with kittiwakes on their heads. They may have lacked a Cuthbert to defend them, but in my imagination I see spectral flocks pursuing those Bond Street dames, demanding the return of their rightful property.

    In the summer of 1936, as my
Pocket Book of Birds
appeared, T.H. White was busy training a goshawk. His friends found this ridiculous, and told him so. ‘ “Why on earth do you waste your talents feeding wild birds with dead rabbits?” Was this a man’s work today? … “To arms!” they cried, “Down with the Fascists, and long live the People!” ’
    White’s account of his relationship with Gos – which would not appear in print for fifteen years, and which went under the working title ‘A Sort of Mania’ – is a ferocious but oddly opaque account, quite as obsessive as J.A. Baker’s. It is bound up in medieval references and veiled allusions to the demons that drove this handsome man to become a poet and writer – as well as an artist, a hunter, an aviator and, perhaps most unlikely of all – and that almost by accident – a kind of pacifist.
    White’s journals of that testing time – which he called his day-books – are filled with loving drawings and tiny photographs of his goshawk. He even Sellotaped the bird’s moulted feathers to the pages, just as he fixed a salmon scale to an earlier journal about fishing in the Scottish Highlands (and proposed that every reader of the published work should receive a similar scale with each copy of the book). The fact that White lost Gos halfway through its training adds pathos to these relics. The bird flew off with its leather jesses around its feet, never to return. Unsentimentally, White concluded that the hawk on which he had lavished so much attention – to the point of staying awake for days and nights, ‘walking’ the bird so that in its own