The Sea Inside

her each night to say, ‘Good girl: sleepy girl: go to sleep, Brownie’, familiar phrases to reassure her, since he half-believed that her consciousness might persist. It was almost madness, he admitted, ‘but that was the kind of chance I had to provide for’. ‘She was the central fact of my life,’ he averred; the only being he dared to love. He blamed himself for his absence when she died, for having failed her; for having killed the thing he loved more than anything.
    It was too late, too, to enter the fight. By now the war had passed, and with it White retreated yet further. He moved to the Channel island of Alderney, partly to escape British taxes, partly because it was the only island that would accept his new dog, Killie. There he discovered the sea: ‘You cease to be your own master, as you become a waiter-on upon the moon and sun, whose tides take no account of mealtimes or bedtime or times to get up.’ And there, in 1959, he was interviewed for BBC television by a precise young presenter named Robert Robinson.
    Forever smoking a pipe, White was now white-haired with a beard and a sailor’s tan, looking older than his years: he was only fifty-three. Living on an island had served to accentuate his peculiarities. He painted the interior of his house red, and often wore a cassock of scarlet towelling. He resembled a more epicene, English Hemingway: the film begins with a still of White raising a shotgun over his head; his eyes twinkle with mischief and teasing. He tells Robinson that it is part of his physical training as a writer every day to ‘swim underwater looking at fish’. He had recently taken advantage of a visit by an Admiralty diving vessel to don an old-fashioned helmet and rubberised suit, which reminded him of what it was like to wear a suit of armour.
    ‘I met another diver at the bottom and we leaned against each other like amorous manatees … It was enchanting to be mothered by these tough, tender, bronzed young men,’ he wrote, while the sailors dressed him in his suit like squires attending their knight. In the garden of his nineteenth-century villa he’d dug a great pit and built a swimming pool which he referred to as a gladiatorial arena and in which, in the film, we see two young boys diving. Close by he was constructing a temple to a Roman emperor – ‘I think Hadrian was a very fine fellow’ – and in between, besides recording the commentary for a film about puffins he’d made, took the time to paint vaguely surrealist canvases of female nudes and disembodied eyes. He seemed to be happy in his loneliness. Or at least, this is what the camera saw.
    White was a product of a particular breed, not unlike another naturalist, Henry Williamson, author of
Tarka the Otter
, who lived in North Devon where he slept in the open and swam naked and believed in an English race-memory of divine ‘ancient sunlight’, as well as the power of fascism (in which he sought to enlist T.E. Lawrence, who carried Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
on his military campaigns, and who was also a good friend of David Garnett’s). White, however, declined to declare for any political party. ‘I don’t think about myself very much,’ he told the camera, constantly jabbing at his face with the stem of his pipe as if in self-defence. ‘I don’t know what I am.’
    Admitting that he is a ‘childish man’, White complains to Robinson – his captive audience – of being typecast as a ‘whimsical’ writer. ‘When I was young, you had to be grown up,’ he says. ‘It was fighting talk to be an escapist.’ He was, he said, ‘a middle-class, Edwardian Englishman’. He had no need to kow-tow, as he put it, to the modern world, which he accused of forever banging on drums to drown out its fear of the atomic bomb. He was insular and insulated by the success of
The Once and Future King
, then in the process of being turned into a musical,
Camelot
, the words of which I’d memorise from an album bought for my birthday. In White’s case, he had Julie Andrews as a house-guest to sing its songs.
    To the BBC, White presented a contrasting but happy picture of himself, an English writer in island exile, outside the reach of the Inland Revenue. Yet his life on Alderney had become complicated by something beyond his control. He had fallen in love with a young boy whose family had been visiting him. White did all in his power to entertain the boy – known only as ‘Zed’ – on his island, conjuring