As I’m finding as I’m writing the pages that make up this book like grains of sand make up a beach, when you have to put your feelings about the coast down on paper, they somehow try to flit away and become oddly ungraspable. For me the coast, the sea’s sandy sleeve, is something that’s truly and fundamentally indefinable and so any rendering of it into prose or poetry will give it a solidity and narrative arc that maybe it doesn’t really have. That’s the glory and the frustration of art, I guess, and that’s why a description of a gull shitting on your chips isn’t as visceral as the actual chip-shitting moment.
If writing about the coast is one way of simultaneously capturing it and realising you can never capture it, then talking to a camera about it is another layer of that dilemma. For a start, you’ve got to light the chips properly and mic up the gull.
I made a few little films for the BBC show Coast and that taught me how to tell a place’s story succinctly and how to talk to a camera over my shoulder while not tripping up.
We went to Whitby to tell the story of the Rohilla Disaster, a tragedy that happened in the First World War when a boat sank just a few hundred yards off the coast but rescuers couldn’t get to the sinking vessel because of the terrible storm that rattled and raged and yelled across the sky. All kinds of methods were attempted to get people back to land but sadly many people died. Before the filming I met the director in a café far from the sea and I sipped espresso in an attempt to look more sophisticated than I felt.
‘How do you feel about heights?’ she asked. I said I was OK with heights, but at the same time wondering just what was coming next. She said, ‘How do you feel about zip wires?’ I drank my espresso in what I hoped was a nonchalant fashion, although the tuba-style gulping noises I was making might have betrayed my state of mind. ‘I’m OK with zip wires,’ I said, with a sob in my voice. She explained that one of the rescue methods they attempted in 1914 was to get people to sit in leather breeches and haul them from the Rohilla on a zip wire. I joked that I couldn’t see myself in leather breeches and that I’d probably look like Ross Geller in Friends when he tried some on. She glanced at her phone and the meeting was suddenly over as she went out of the café.
I told my wife about the leather breeches and the zip wire and she laughed more than I thought she would. I spent sleepless nights sweating about the zip and dreaming about it during nano-seconds of fitful slumber. I thought about pulling out. Of the filming not the breeches. Then the director rang and said they’d abandoned the leather breeches plan due to ‘health and safety concerns’ and in my palpitating relief I said ‘I didn’t want to breach those rules’ and the silence at the end was like that of a stuffed wading bird in a museum. Then she said that because I wouldn’t be zipping down the wire, I’d be required to row a lifeboat out to sea. I almost wept with relief.
So there I am at the very edge of Whitby Harbour speaking to a camera as a huge vintage lifeboat bobs in the water like an apple in that old Halloween game. Myself and the other stout-thewed volunteers are going to row the boat out to where the Rohilla sank; it’s to be a solemn moment at the end of a solemn piece but because we’re filming out of sequence this is the first solemnity. Whitby’s raucousness seems to dim as I speak to the lens and even the gulls seem to be mournful rather than sceptical. Luckily the sea is mournful rather than angry because I’d told a little white lie to the director when she’d asked me if I was a good sailor. My dad, the old salt, would have been ashamed of me, but I’m not. Even a slight bump in a carpet nudges me towards the foothills of biliousness. ‘As long as you keep your eyes on the horizon you’ll be OK,’ my dad used to say, and he’d kept his eyes on more horizons than most.
I climb down the steps to the lifeboat. My life jacket is bulky and the microphone is sticking to my back. I’m like an actor in a fat suit. I take up the oar, which seems like a caber or a mighty oak. I can hardly move it. One of the volunteers, a man much older than me, turns and says, ‘Don’t let us down, Ian.’ The director and the camera operative and the sound person climb aboard too. The boat shifts, grumbling.
We begin to row out of the harbour. I achieve a kind of stumbling rhythm as though I am the token older Z-list celebrity on Strictly Come Dancing but then, as we approach the harbour wall, I realise that somebody has set fire to my shoulders and arms. I deliver a piece to camera and I try to keep the grimace out of my voice. Here I am, explaining the sea to itself. Seasplaining. Iansplaining. We are almost out of the harbour, where I know, from memories of childhood trips on pleasure boats in Bridlington, the real fun will begin. I’ve stood on harbour walls many times watching families gaily laughing and drinking pop and eating crisps as they smooth their way to the open sea, where things change and the PG trip becomes an 18.
As we turn out of the harbour into the melee (and it’s not even windy, remember) I have to start asking the skipper some questions. The air is calm and that means that we can all hear my barber from Darfield, the late Mad Geoff, shout ‘Give him twenty lashes! Avast behind!’ The moment is shattered. ‘Did you get that?’ the director asks the sound man. He nods. Later, over a coffee, he will tell me that he is, like me, a fan of avant-garde music and found sounds. Maybe not that particular found sound.
We have to row in a circle (Seven words. Easy to write. Hard to achieve.) and then I have to ask the question again. Luckily, Mad Geoff has wandered off.
We row out to sea. It isn’t, in my memory, too bad. I don’t feel sick. I ask the questions and do a couple more pieces to camera. We turn round and, to the relief of my tortured body, we begin to head back. ‘Where’s the other boat?’ the director asks. The camera operative points it out, a tiny vessel like a toy in a bath. I ask what the other boat is for, which betrays my lack of deep knowledge of the film-making process. Of course there’s no point just filming on one boat because the viewers never see the boat in full, so my rowing prowess and interviewing skills have to be filmed from another boat.
In other words, we have to do it again. Not all of it; just most of it. Give him twenty lashes. At least I wasn’t on a zip wire.