The Sea Inside

up its wonders like Prospero. Zed remained unnamed in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s remarkably frank biography of White, published in 1967. But it is tantalising to wonder if he is the same boy we see in that black-and-white film, under the summer sun; and to wonder if White saw him as his young self, the squire to his knight, the Wart to his Merlin.
    The relationship, which remained entirely ‘respectable’ on White’s part, ended unhappily. Realising its impossibility, he cut off all contact with Zed, and was left with a wounded heart. ‘All I can do is behave like a gentleman,’ he wrote at the end of the summer. ‘It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them.’ Despite the money and magic his books had brought him, they could do nothing to protect him from himself and his human emotions. His vivid imagination and innate sense of isolation – the essential unreality of his life which had produced them – only made matters worse. White’s retreat was nature. Animals do not answer back.
    Five years after this interview, White died on his way home from a lecture tour of America; he wrote his last letter as the ship passed the Azores. He was found in his cabin a few days later, having suffered a heart attack. ‘I expect to make rather a good death,’ he had told David Garnett. ‘The essence of death is loneliness, and I have plenty of practice at this.’ On 20 January 1964 he was buried in Athens. England would never have his bones. Nor would he live on in Albion, although, in some versions of the Arthurian legend, when the mythical king died, he turned into a raven, regarded in the West Country as a royal bird.

    High on the downs, I watch the water in which I’d swum. The sea writes its own story, forever coming in and going out, entering and exiting, remorseless in its attack, knowing we are ultimately helpless in the face of its power; the same helplessness to which we yield, like grateful lovers, softly eroded and worn down in its crumbling embrace.
    But this island is not a retreat for everyone. On another ferry journey, later in the year, I return to a high-walled prison complex, where men are held whose crimes are deemed so awful that their fellow convicts put broken glass in their food. They are confined in cells no bigger than a saint’s, while out in the courtyard, its garden beds bright with marigolds, stands a wire aviary filled with birds. Inside the prison chapel, its concrete roof slowly leaking rain into a bucket, I talk to the class about writing, and they perform their exercises like grown children. They write of birds and animals and the sea and the places they can sense, over the walls and in their past.
    As I ride back over the green ridge of rising chalk, the shadow of Tennyson’s cross falling behind me. In the distance, the descending sun sets off a semaphore flash from the windscreen of a far-off fishing boat. An hour later, the ferry delivers me back to the mainland. Terns wheel in our wake, continually plunging into the white water, and the light is fading fast as we pull into the dock.

The inland sea

Merely to be alive, indeed, is adventure
enough in a world like this, so erratic
and disjointed; so lovely and so odd and
mysterious and profound. It is, at any rate,
a pity to remain in it half dead.

W ALTER DE LA M ARE ,
Desert Islands,
1930



T he suburbs slip by in a succession of deserted stations, trailing disembodied voices from unheard Tannoys. Silver birch march beside the tracks, shiny as wrinkled tin foil. Plastic bags blow in sycamore branches. The train rolls on. A dead badger lies slumped between the rails; a fox ambles out of the undergrowth. Despite the splintered chairs and decaying mattresses dumped over walls and wire fences, it would take only a few weeks for nature to overcome it all, after we’ve gone.
    Ever since I lived there, leaving London felt like an escape. It frightened and excited me with its streets and alleys down which I might disappear, the soulless suburbs surrounding its dark heart, their entangling avenues like some voracious octopus. I used to think of how I’d get home if war was declared. How, once the sirens had sounded or the newsflashes came over the radio, I’d have to walk through the endless outskirts, along a motorway or down the back roads, trying to find my way south.
    I was defeated and enthralled by the scale and sprawl of the capital which spread like a