I lie in the ward through the night, watching wild people in their beds, caught in their uncurtained dramas. A ninety-two-year-old man cries out for someone to come and relieve the pain in his neuropathic legs, when he has already been told there’s nothing they can do for him. His reiterated groans are awful to hear, but you get used to them after a while, you even switch off, like the nurses do as they get on with their jobs, logging our data onto the computer, waking us up at regular intervals to shine torches in our eyes and ask if we know where we are. I don’t even know what floor of the building I’m on. Am I on the top or down in the basement? It could be day or night or neither in here. There are no windows to betray the natural world; only the hermetic world of medicine, a sealed culture unto itself, responsible to unspoken codes designed to perpetuate as much as to minister.
When it first happened, time stood still. Or perhaps it went into reverse, rewinding to wipe the precise moment of impact from my memory, even before I’d experienced it. The progress of my life stopped; and restarted. Whatever occurred in between was lost, dissolved by the adrenaline speeding up my heart to hasten me out of the trauma. Entire spaces fell out of my brain. I knew I had a good friend in the same city, but I couldn’t remember her name or even her face. My eyes swam. Yet I felt no pain, standing there over the dark pool that my head had left behind in the gutter as a Polish woman, the first on the scene, said, ‘Oh no oh no oh no.’ I asked urgently for water, and when it came I used it to try and wash the blood out of my favourite stripy shirt.
Later, an investigator would examine the CCTV footage of the accident, a playback in grainy slow-motion. Hurtling through a kind of tunnel created by a pair of tall buildings, I do not notice the low barrier slung across the road. My new brakes are all too efficient. I see the obstruction too late, but not too late to brake. And as I do, my bike is left behind and I carry on, tumbling like an acrobat over the unlit barrier and landing on my head, hitting the tarmac with my brow.
The fact that all this takes place in twilight only makes it more cinematic – and not just in retrospect or in the film I’ll never see, but in the unscheduled performance outside which I stand, stranded, pulling myself to my feet and feeling only annoyance that I’ve missed my train home and worrying about my bike lying abandoned on the kerb. I want to see it all rewound, from another angle, in the way that I witnessed my first accident, standing at the bus stop under the butcher’s clock on the way to school one morning, when a boy and his bike collided with a car at the busy junction, his body flying through the air, tumbling over the bonnet with a bounce as he shouted out ‘Mummy,’ much as deserters called for their mothers when they were shot at dawn.
The darkness of the night seemed to swallow up what followed. I don’t remember how I got to the hospital, although I do remember a security guard by my side in the car and wanting to be held, to stop the momentum of the crash still reverberating through my body. I felt utterly abandoned and alone. As I waited to be seen in A&E, the geriatric woman opposite me sat up in bed, having taken off her blouse – it was one of the hottest nights of the year, in a heatwave that had lasted for weeks – exposing her yellowy breasts. She too was calling. ‘Why won’t someone come and help me?’ And I thought of my mother in intensive care in the last week of her life, wired-up in a darkened airless ward, the instruments around her beeping out the fathoms of her descent as she sank into some unknown abyss. A young nurse stitched up my eyebrow, sewing it back together. I wished she wasn’t chatting as she remade my face.
Wheeled into the ward for overnight observation, everything is twilit, warm and womb-like. It is comforting to be among strangers. During the night I get up to piss, but almost faint as I do, a result of my low blood pressure, compressed in this bathysphere. The doctor orders that I should be hydrated. A handsome nurse tries to stick a needle in my thin arms. Unable to find a vein, he repeats the procedure again and again, digging around in my skin. I apologise. Then I feel the cold flow of the saline, the sea inside of me.
‘There’s not much of you, is there?’ says Sue the ward nurse, altogether too breezy for 3 a.m.; she talks and laughs out loud with little concession to the hour or her sleeping patients. Lying in pain I can’t quite discern, I do not hold it against her. Three hours later the light levels shift, as they do at the end of an overnight flight, and I receive two slices of toast, my reward for having survived.
All the rhythms of this place are removed from the world. It is a surrogate society to which anyone might belong yet where no one really does. It offers a kind of physical transcendence, a halfway house; a state suspended between bleeping machines and human bureaucracy, where bodies are more important than people. As a boy in the nineteen-sixties I feared hospitalisation almost as much as I feared conscription, sucked into soulless organisations bent on my suppression. I remember visiting my father in an old brick hospital on the other side of the city and seeing him lying in the men’s ward. The room was gloomy and oppressive. He was suffering from a suspected heart condition; he told us how one of his fellow patients had blister burns the size of tomatoes. The redness and roundness and the ripeness lodged in an interior from which one might never escape; although now I wonder if I ever saw that scene, instead of imagining it from our car parked outside.
In the morning, I’m wheeled out again, not into the light, but into the darkened x-ray room, where I’m spread out on a table, unetherised. There I’m examined for breakages and whatever else might have happened to all that stuff crammed inside my skin. My ribcage is briefly irradiated; I think of it lit up inside me. Then my arm is stretched out on a leaded mat marked out with white lines like a miniature tennis court. I’m being squared up and sectioned. The radiographer delivers the news sympathetically: my left hand, with which I write, is fractured, and will need a cast.
When you are young, you are conscious of your body’s perfection; the little god that you are. The older you get, the stranger your body becomes; a covert, skin-covered landscape of yourself, supported by your own scaffolding. I remember something Mark said about how your skeleton falls into place as you get older, getting comfy in its positions; he wriggled his shoulders as he told me this. I fall in with a pattern set by myself and my parents; I might or might not be recognised from my interior as much as anyone might or might not know me from outside. You know your own body as much as you know the wiring in your house. We all carry our selves as if we were burdens rather than miracles.
And what seems so familiar is nothing of the kind. I was once told that my shoulderblades were unnaturally far apart; that one shoulder was inordinately developed compared to the other; that one leg was longer than the other, too, and that my spinal column was bent in a sort of S shape. And complaining of shortness of breath after a long cold winter, I saw another doctor type on her screen that I had ‘air hunger’, as though I was greedy to live, taking up other people’s oxygen. So I wasn’t the same person I thought I’d been, all these years; I was as different as we all feel we are. After all, I’ve had at least six or seven skeletons in my life, my bones continually replaced. Like you I am a wonder of regeneration. Perhaps I might yet metamorphose and my scapulae grow those wings; or maybe being so strangely formed accounts for why I feel happier in the water – if only I could breathe there, too.
Later, I’ll open the envelope I’m given by the radiographer and look at the images illicitly, as if spying on myself. Sliding the disk into my white computer, I see my inner space: the shadowy me, the me-ness of me no one can see, not even me. It might be a photograph of my soul, or a sea creature with a wonky spine, all flickering and glowing, all clouds and bones, skeins and roots, growing into ghostly coral and pearls.
Back home I photograph myself in the mirror, through another lens. My pale eye looks out through the lurid bruises as they ripen, in the same way a piece of fruit ripens and decays. My face changes over the days, sequencing like a time-lapse film as it seeks to repair itself, to return me to me. I look closer at my eyes, as if I’d never seen them before or known what colour they were. I think of my mother’s eye, which was not the eye she was born with but a graft, a cornea taken from a young man killed in a motorbike accident in an unsuccessful attempt to treat her glaucoma. It was his eye, stitched into her own, that I looked at when I kissed her goodbye, on another hospital bed, her red hair turned silver, and splayed on her pillow.
I’m left with the altered topography of my body. A new natural history. My wounded eyebrow is restitched with electric-blue sutures, the spreading stain like badly-applied glam make-up, the bruises blushing pink and methylated purple and iodine-yellow like some decadent flower beneath my skin. I yearn with sympathy for my stupidity. And I think, this is my last transformation, the last time I looked beautiful. The first was a long time ago.
In Edwin Ernest Morgan’s glamorous painting from the nineteen-thirties, Beacon Cove is alive with radiant sun-worshippers. They are arrayed along its semi-circular tiers which lead down to the sea like a temple to health. Men in soft white shirts and flannels, their collars upturned to signal their sporty appeal, chat with young women with bobbed hair, wearing tight bathing costumes that show off their lithe bodies and tanned legs. Agatha Christie liked to swim off this Torquay beach as a young girl, although on one occasion she nearly drowned here.
Books are read, children play. Emerging from the half-timbered, green-and-white-painted tearoom, once a lifeboat shed, an aproned waitress with a white headdress, looking a little like a nurse, serves tea to her customers sitting on cane chairs. Others lounge in shaded deckchairs. There’s a faint air of the interwar sanatorium; the artist painted his picture from the vantage point of the medicinal baths set on the rocky headland overlooking the cove, an establishment which contained and concentrated the elements of the resort, offering seaweed, sulphur and pine baths, and a Vita Glass Sun Lounge, complete with ‘the latest apparatus for administering ultra violet rays’. Like a railway poster or a postcard, continually reprinted to sell the sea, Morgan’s painting dates the eternity of a resort; the way it doesn’t change and always does. These people are the same people, always, only in different clothes. It doesn’t matter that when I visit Beacon Cove in the evening, its only occupants are a group of teenagers doing drugs, looking up at me shiftily from the concrete steps.
We’d set out at four o’clock in the morning, long before the sun rose, the family car fully packed. We were fourteen-night refugees, fleeing the fifty weeks my father worked in a cable factory on reclaimed land by the docks. Halfway there we’d stop in Lyme Regis for tea from a flask and white rolls warm from the bakery, eaten as the car’s bonnet creaked with the heat of its exertion, getting its breath back. The sea was beginning to lighten into day. I was still in shorts. My two younger sisters wore matching dresses. When we lined up for photographs, our knees were the most prominent feature: the bones of three thin children, products of a post-war world.
It was only when the earth turned red that we really knew we had left home behind. The car rounded the last hill to reveal the turquoise sea and exotic palms and a place geared not to industrial production, but to the freedom that the water allowed: from time-stamped work, from never-ending housewifery, from the terrors of school. It was all caught up in the sweep of the bay, all there for us: from the posh houses on the far hill, working round the harbour and past fish-and-chip shops and the park to its southern end with its amusement arcades.
Our big old car would climb out of town, past the beaches and up the steep hill, into the gates of the caravan park. It was an alternative, semi-temporary settlement; for all we knew, it only existed for the two weeks we spent here. With its rows of tin caravans moored on the hillside and linked by concrete paths and wash-houses, it hovered between holiday camp and prefab site; another legacy of the war. At the office, we’d collect the key for our caravan and install ourselves in our narrow bunks, above which were little plywood cupboards with sliding doors where we’d store our possessions. We were in a boat moored on the grass.
My mother would prepare an ‘emergency’ dinner assembled out of tins, a luxury and a necessity of the hour: new potatoes, pale and round, bobbing like definned fish in the pan, and garden peas, olive-green and sweet in soupy liquid, all released by a cow-headed tin-opener brought from home, so hefty it could have opened the caravan itself. Its bovine knob turned corned beef out of a third tin, a grey-pink brick of stringy muscle, fat and corn, ready to be sliced onto our plates. It might have been a meal served in an air-raid shelter.
Our holidays were spent in such intimate spaces; only now do I realise that, born in May, I was probably conceived by the sea. This was where I grew old and when I stayed the same, since it was only then that we were photographed, caught in the colour of childhood from one summer to the next. We had a dog then, too, or at least my brother did, a wild dark mongrel named Bimbo. He lives only faintly but physically in my memory, as if he were my age. He was run over on holiday, a trauma which I do not remember at all, perhaps because he survived the van that drove over his belly and only died weeks later. He looks up at me from my brother’s side. Dogs in photographs are always already dead, lost in time.
Off the top of the wardrobe, in our nineteen-twenties house, I pull a box of transparencies taken by my father on his Instamatic, always housed in its brown canvas case and slung across his shoulder like a military accessory; it was part of his jaunty holiday outfit, along with his blue shorts and his bright red short-sleeved shirt with its print of blue-and-yellow yachts. He liked clothes, as did his tailor father, whose voice Dad echoed when he said, ‘Quite the fashion plate,’ if I were wearing something new. He detected the pride. But he was a particularly bad photographer.
Every pose of the four of us was erratically framed: my mother in her succession of hairstyles and her own bright holiday clothes, as bright as her red hair, and we three children, my youngest, blonde and freckled sister smiling gappily for the camera through her missing front teeth; my older sister, taller, with her long dark hair, looking more solemnly at the lens; and me, in my grey shorts and long socks and brown crepe-soled sandals and my red-and-white-and-grey-striped shirt with a floppy red collar. I can still feel that shirt now, feel the joy of pulling it over my head. All of these snaps show us with our heads or limbs cropped by Dad’s steady finger on the shutter button, clicking through the years: standing on a Dartmoor tor, sitting on the car’s bonnet outside our caravan; crouching on a red beach, my skinny shoulders, my shiny green trunks; successively growing apart from the world.
I slot the slides into the clunky viewer. They’re Kodachrome windows into my past, the holiday sun still shining through them; each a cell of slowed-down time, scenes from a documentary no one ever bothered to make. The sliced-up suburban movies synopsise my history in an edited sequence: from my smiley face sitting in a fold-up chair, to my sulky teen scowl. My badly-cut hair grows longer, directed by my hormones; my legs grow longer too, out of shorts and into trousers. My clothes are no longer a different-coloured version of my school uniform. One slide shows me in white shirt and wide white jeans on a campsite outside Paris, the only time we went abroad; a pair of teenage French girls said to me, ‘Vous êtes un homme de L’Orange Méchanique?’ Holidays take on a new significance; songs on the car radio acquired a new importance as we pulled onto the promenade in the early morning, the seventies light flaring on the scene as a sleek performer with hair so black it looked blue sang about being in with the in crowd. The windblown cordylines and peeling stucco of the English Riviera melded into the Côte d’Azur or Bel Air, and I dreamed of blue pools and white tuxedos and invitations from famous writers in the nineteen-twenties.
At the caravan park’s pool – a concrete tank surrounded, not by blondes in long dresses and art-deco palms, nor even filled with performing dolphins and an abandoned orca, but lined with pink and yellow paving slabs, plastic chairs and an ice-cream kiosk; an intimidating place to a boy who could not swim – I’d loiter in the shop, looking along the rows of holiday reading. Beneath the sunned spines of romantic novels were the publications that fed my own dreams: double-page posters which opened up into pin-ups of pop stars in black sequins and slick quiffs, or a god in a powder-blue suit and eye make-up to match, set next to women’s magazines with artfully photographed fashion spreads. In one, inspired by that year’s film of The Great Gatsby, cloche-hatted models in ivory satin clutching long cigarette-holders were escorted by languid young men in white linen suits, their golden hair swept back immaculately. They strolled in an airy limbo, these careless people, to the half-mocking strains of ‘What’ll I Do?’ and ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’.
I cannot express what those images stirred in me. Something beyond desire. Something compulsive. Something far removed from my surroundings and yet part of them, too. They still make me ache.
In the summer of 1838 a young woman arrived in Torquay, sent there by her father to alleviate an illness no one could name, but that had rendered her an invalid since she was a teenager. For her this seaside resort was just that: a resort, perhaps her last.
Elizabeth’s family, the Barrett-Moultons, owned slave-run plantations in Jamaica. Sugar had paid for the house in which she grew up, an ornate, oriental-styled mansion in Herefordshire resembling Brighton Pavilion, complete with concrete minarets, doors inlaid with mother-of-pearl and a tunnel that led from the house to the gardens and their grottoes. Ominously named Hope End, its fantasy was bought by the toil of stolen people; it might have been built out of sugar. Set against its refined whiteness, Elizabeth believed herself to possess black blood, a result of her ancestors’ liaisons.
At fifteen, Elizabeth begun to suffer chronic ill health. She took opium to relieve her symptoms, and would do so for the rest of her life. But her true solace was poetry. She was already writing and publishing her work while Keats, Shelley and Byron were still alive, and she fell under their influence; the onset of her illness coincided with the appearance of Shelley’s Adonaïs. She was, in her mind, heir to Shelley, fated with his spirit, as if with his watery death his power were to pass on to her. In her fragile state she held fast to his ‘perfect exquisition’. It was her article of faith, her destiny. ‘I always imagine,’ she wrote, ‘I was sent on the earth for some purpose.’
And as with the contrast between Shelley’s physical body and his ferocious spirit, so it is difficult to reconcile Elizabeth’s fierce ambition with the shy face that peers out from her dark curls, their weight making up for the weakness of her bird-like body. No one was ever sure of the nature of her suffering, not even Elizabeth herself. She was subject to that uncertainty. She spent months suspended in a ‘spine crib’, a hammock hanging four feet off the floor as though she were on a hospital ship. Heated glass cups were used to bring her blood to the surface, leeches applied to suck it out, and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, setons were employed – silk sutures or strips of canvas threaded on needles through pinched folds of her skin, as if she were being sewn up. Cupped, bled, pierced and suspended, her treatments amounted to an exorcism, drawing out bad spirits or ectoplasm. It was as though the century itself, all its appropriations and abuses, was impacting physically on her body, her frail flesh martyred to the Industrial Revolution.
In 1832 a black rebellion in Jamaica and the impending abolition of slavery forced the Barretts to abandon Hope End and its domes. Their fortunes reduced, they moved to Sidmouth on the Devon coast, partly for Elizabeth’s health. She was entranced. She declared the sea to be visible poetry, ‘the sublimest object in nature’, where ‘the grandeur is concentrated upon the ocean without deigning to have anything to do with the earth’. She loved the moonlight on the water by night, and her sister Arabella swam in it every day, even in December.
The sea was an opening more effective than any suture. And Elizabeth’s happiness was complete when her beloved younger brother Edward came back from the family’s estate in Jamaica, his return made more dramatic when he’d ‘nearly died a glorious death’ on the way home across the Atlantic, supposedly poisoned by ‘a dolphin which had hung in the moonshine!’ It was a vodou-like notion, evoking the watery spirits of the Caribbean, where I once saw a boat rowed out with a Haitian mambo priestess sitting in it, her head wound with a white turban, casting offerings of cigarettes and rum to the lwa, the spirits of the deep who were thought to drag the unwitting down into their domain. ‘The moonshine poisoned the dolphin, and the dolphin poisoned Bro,’ Elizabeth reported, unaware that in the Caribbean, the dolphin was also a fish, ‘and poor Brozie grew quite black and swollen in the face. Would it not have been a glorious death – to die of a dolphin and moonshine?’
After three years in Sidmouth the Barretts resettled in Marylebone, London, in whose airless streets Elizabeth’s health relapsed. Suffering from affected lungs, it was decided that she must return to the sea, and so she was sent to Torquay, where her aunt and uncle lived. Unable to bear the motion of a carriage – one modern diagnosis of her condition suggests that she suffered from spinal tuberculosis, causing extreme sensitivity and twisting to her vertebrae – Elizabeth sailed from London to Plymouth, along with Edward and two of her sisters. She feared the journey more than going to the North Pole, but she was the only woman on board not to suffer seasickness, and boasted of her ‘oceanic reputation’. After staying with their relatives, Elizabeth and her siblings moved to a tall townhouse on Beacon Hill, overlooking a signalling point on the harbour at one end of the great curving bay. At the other, in the distance, was Berry Head, in whose deep waters dolphins swam and gannets dived and where, in 1815, sightseers had flocked to catch a glimpse, not of a whale, but of the Emperor Napoleon on HMS Bellerophon, on his way to exile on St Helena.
Torquay was newly fashionable; Tennyson, who visited in the same year that Elizabeth arrived, called it ‘the loveliest sea village in England’. Backed by the wildness of Dartmoor, set between the Dart and the Teign, its climate was dry, and its hills strewn with white villas and terraces. It was as close as England could get to the Mediterranean. The blue sea clashed with the red cliffs, scorched when prehistoric Devon had lain under equatorial sun. At last, Elizabeth was back by the sea. ‘Here, we are immediately upon the lovely bay,’ she wrote in a letter, ‘a few paces dividing our door from its waves.’ Their windows looked onto the water, ‘and our ears are as familiar as its rocks are, with the sound’. Like her hero Shelley at the Casa Magni, she was in direct communion with her muse.
‘Our house here is in the sea,’ she told another friend. ‘At least to my imagination it is – which is the same you know as its being so actually.’ Whenever the steam packet entered or left the harbour her bed shook; the building at the end of their terrace was actually flooded by the sea, by invitation. The Bath House, established in 1817 during the Regency craze for sea bathing, allowed the tide to flow ‘through the wall of the pier into a spacious reservoir’, where it was filtered to remove weed and other organisms. In this therapeutic machine, a human aquarium, Elizabeth could take the salt-water cure without having to brave the open sea. Yet she was determined to experience the water, and despite her frailty she often went sailing, accompanied by her maid Crow, perhaps on loan from Nightmare Abbey.
Suspended from the land without medical aids, Elizabeth discovered a new vision of delight. ‘My love of water concentrates itself in the boat,’ she said. But there were plans to upset her idyll. When her aunt and uncle moved to Merry Oak, on the outskirts of Southampton – half a mile from where I am writing this – it was proposed that Elizabeth should go with them. She was horrified. It may have been a fashionable spa, but Elizabeth had ‘taken a great dislike for Southampton … on account of the dampness of the place, occasioned by all the wet mud of the river’, even though she had yet to visit the town. Her physician, Dr Barry, supported her prejudice, and expressly advised against the move as potentially injurious to her health. Just as Sylvia Plath was never sent to Provincetown, Elizabeth did not go to Southampton; she was allowed to remain in Torquay – despite the fact that, ‘as to its human aspect, it is much more like a hospital than anything else’.
The sea’s promise of life was undermined by the presence of death, here at the termination of the land. And although the water was always in view, Elizabeth was confined, like those sea baths; sometimes she would not leave her room for weeks on end. Her days were only relieved by the presence of Bro, who would bring her presents such as a ‘very beautiful silver remember medal’ of Byron, and who lay talking on her bed for hours. She may have disapproved of him attending parties at which laughing gas was inhaled – worried that, at the age of thirty-one, his talents were being dissipated in a seaside place, where life seemed so much looser – but Bro was more like a lover to her, filling the space a suitor might have occupied.
Despite Bro’s attentions, Elizabeth became bored and depressed. The household moved to 1 Beacon Terrace, a cheaper lease. She had lost faith in the sea, relying on a different drug. ‘Opium – opium – night after night!’ she wrote, ‘and some nights even opium won’t do.’ Her lungs began to haemorrhage; her skin was constantly blistered by her doctor. After two years in Torquay her health did not seem to be improving at all. Rather, the reverse: she was convinced that death was near.
As it was: but not hers. In February 1840, Elizabeth received news that her younger brother Sam had died of a fever in Jamaica. She was still recovering from the shock when five months later, on 11 July, Bro, along with his twenty-one-year-old friend the Honourable Charles Vanneck, went sailing on La Belle Sauvage. Also on board was the thirty-five-year-old Captain Carlyle Clarke of the Indian Army, and an experienced young sailor named White. None of them returned alive.
The yacht was last seen that Saturday afternoon, two or three miles off Teignmouth. It was a summer sea with only a brief squall. The witness, the aptly named Richard Wake of Heavitree, observed that the boat was ‘sailing under a heavy press of canvas at the time she went down’. She seemed to sink in seconds, as if a hand had reached up from below. One of Wake’s sailors saw the mast sticking out of the water – all but with a cormorant perched on its top – ‘and that disappeared’. When Wake arrived on the scene there was no trace of the boat or its crew; ‘not a hat, oar, or any other vestige remained’. Boats sent to drag the bottom with grapnels found nothing either.
As Mary Shelley had awaited news of her husband, so this lack of evidence created a terrible absence. It was as if Bro had been taken by the spirits of the sea. The cruelness lay in the water which Elizabeth could see from her window: ‘he had left me! gone! For three days we waited – and I hoped while I could – oh – that awful agony of three days! And the sun shone as it shines to-day, and there was no more wind than now; and the sea under the windows was like this paper for smoothness – and my sisters drew the curtains back that I might see for myself how smooth the sea was, and how it could hurt nobody – and other boats came back one by one.’
All in the party could swim, save the sailor. Perhaps Bro had made it ashore? Their father, arriving to deal with the disaster, indulged in the hope – ‘billow upon billow pass over me’ – that his son might be found alive. But the local paper was hardly encouraging – ‘Fatal Catastrophe off our Coast! Four Lives Lost!’ – quoting, with further melodrama, from William Falconer’s ‘The Shipwreck’, ‘The hostile waters closed around their head | They sank, for ever numbered with the dead’, and publicising rewards for anyone who found linen cast ashore ‘marked with the initials of the beloved dead’.
Six days later, Captain Clarke’s corpse was pulled from the water by a Brixham trawler crewed by the two sons of the fishing port’s vicar, Francis Lyte, the composer of the hymn ‘Abide With Me’. Clarke’s body was unblemished, his buttonhole still in his lapel. It took three more weeks before Bro’s body was seen, floating a mile and a half out in the bay. ‘On being examined it was found a little mutilated in the face and hands.’ His gold watch, a purse containing sixteen shillings in silver, a pencil case, cigar box, gold ring and pocket handkerchief marked E.M.B. were still about his person: all the accoutrements of a carefree young man about town.
To lose a brother and a son dismantles a family, throws the future into doubt. At the age of twenty-three, my brother crashed his car and lay comatose in hospital for a week. We too experienced days when he was neither with us nor we without him. I watched through the banisters as my father wept, an awful sight; and at the age of eleven, I refused to accept that Andrew was never coming back, partly because I still saw his fuzzy shape outlined in my bedroom doorway, like an after-image from the sun.
Elizabeth was racked with guilt, because her father had disapproved of Edward going to Torquay. She was being punished. The sea which had summoned her in hope had taken her hope, the one person for whom her life was worth living. Now she could not wait to get away from ‘this dreadful dreadful place … These walls – & the sound of what is very fearful a few yards from them – that perpetual dashing sound, have preyed on me. I have been crushed, trodden down. God’s will is terrible!’
Later, after she had become the most famous female poet of her age, legend would create an impossible scene of Elizabeth on a balcony, looking out to the bay as Bro perished in the waves, as if she had watched him being dragged down below. ‘The associations of this place, lie upon me, struggle as I may, like the oppression of a perpetual night-mare. It is an instinct of self-preservation which impels me to escape – or to try to escape.’ The sea evoked weird, woozy images that seemed to be products of her addiction. In an essay on the Greek poets published soon after Bro had drowned she discussed dead word ‘pang by pang, each with a dolphin colour – yielding reluctantly to that doom of death and silence which must come at last to the speaker and the speech. Wonderful it is to look back fathoms down the great past, thousands of years away.’ Transported in time and space as Virginia Woolf would be, she too associated her loved one with a cetacean: ‘Faint and dim | His spirits seemed to sink in him – | Then, like a dolphin, change and swim.’
As soon as she could, Elizabeth left the sea behind. On 1 September 1841 she was taken from Torquay in a specially sprung carriage with a bed to allow her to remain supine; it took ten days to reach London as they had to stop frequently to allow her to rest. The sound of the sea was now hateful to her; she retreated to her dark bedroom deep in the city to drown out the noise. ‘I cannot look back to any month or week of that year without horror, & a feeling of the wandering of the senses,’ she would recall. ‘Places are ideas, and ideas can madden or kill.’ She told John Ruskin, ‘I belong to a family of West Indian slaveholders, and if I believed in curses, I should be afraid.’ She would give anything ‘to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave! Cursed are we from generation to generation!’ It was as if she were labouring under a vodou hex; as though Bro, heir to those estates, had died under a malediction.
Elizabeth’s own life had ended; her illness would never be dismissed. All she faced was a reduced existence. Dressed in black silk, her tiny pale-dark face and huge eyes and strangely wide mouth framed by her thick brown curls – ‘Of delicate features, – paler, near as grave’ – she seemed unnaturally preserved by grief and seclusion, all but tattered and frayed. Immured in her mourning room, she lived on ‘obstinacy and dry toast’. She was thirty-three but seemed more like a teenager; a modern doctor might diagnose an eating disorder, another kind of dysfunctional consumption, an absolute sensitivity to everything. ‘The truth is I am made of paper and it tears me,’ she said. (A century later, Woolf, who became fascinated by Elizabeth, would claim, ‘Cut me anywhere, and I bled too profusely.’) Her only companion now was Flush, a red cocker spaniel given to her in consolation for Bro’s loss. He was as loyal as Byron’s Boatswain and constantly at her side – save when he was three times snatched in the street by dognappers, and Elizabeth had to brave the terrors of Shoreditch to retrieve him. Perhaps he was Bro reincarnate.
They looked extraordinarily alike, these two, poet and dog, with their silky ringlets and expressive eyes. She imagined Flush ‘as hairy as Faunus’, and thanked ‘the true PAN, | Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love’. A century later, in her biography of Flush, Woolf imagined the poet in her bedroom, the dog’s face and bright eyes close to Elizabeth’s: ‘Was she no longer an invalid in Wimpole Street, but a Greek nymph in some dim grove in Arcady?’ But Flush, who had once hunted rabbits in the countryside, was reduced to lying in a patch of light that moved across the carpet as the sun swung over the city, day after day.
Woolf would claim that years of reclusion had done irreparable harm to Elizabeth as an artist; that she had been somehow maimed. As an invalid she was rendered invalid; like other Victorian women, she responded to constraints with withdrawal. Yet in her immobility she lay open to the world. As Virginia sent her Imagination over the ocean, and as Stephen travelled in his reveries, so Elizabeth reached out of her window like Odin’s ravens to bring back news of the world beyond. ‘Religious hermits, when they care to see visions, do it better they all say, through fasting and flagellation and seclusion in dark places,’ she noted.
With her morbid intensity – ‘I am Cassandra, you know, and smell the slaughter in the bathroom’ – influenced by her fellow addict, Coleridge, and influencing in turn Edgar Allan Poe (who dedicated ‘The Raven’ to her), Elizabeth became a mythic figure. Confined, she rejected convention; her letters and poems burst with passion and outrage, conjuring up images and visions and self-drama. Restricted by reality, she looked to the other: she became fascinated by the occult, by spiritualism and animal magnetism, while looking like a black-clad Miss Havisham or Kate Bush in a crinoline. In another age she might have stood accused of being a witch, with Flush as her familiar.
In her bitter poem of 1848, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’, a strange meeting of New England and the Caribbean, Elizabeth imagined a young black woman standing on the shore of Cape Cod Bay, listening to ‘the ocean’s roar’ and cursing the white land. Raped by a gang of slave-owners, she suffocates her bastard child for its whiteness and evokes vodou lwa: ‘Your fine white angels … sucked the soul of that child of mine.’ There was, as Elizabeth admitted, a ‘deathly odour’ to her work. Its power lay in her protest at modern evils: slavery, child labour, and the enshacklement of her sex. The future seemed to offer only bitterness.
But on Saturday, 12 September 1846, all her expectations were overturned. Aged forty, she defied her father and secretly married Robert Browning, scion of another slave-owning family, himself part Creole. The following Saturday, Elizabeth snuck out of the house like a teenager with Flush in her arms and her new maid Wilson at her side. She met Browning at a nearby bookshop, then took the five o’clock train from Vauxhall to Southampton. They sailed at nine o’clock that night from the Royal Pier on the South-Western Steam Packet Company’s ‘Splendid and Powerful STEAM SHIP’ to Havre-de-Grâce, ‘main cabin, twenty-one shillings, dogs, five shillings’.
Robert worried that the evening voyage would present new dangers. On board, Elizabeth and Wilson loosened their stays, enduring every pitch and roll. Flush, too, suffered. Despite his five-shilling ticket he was turned out and treated, well, like a dog, ‘inasmuch as people have a barbarous mania for chaining dogs upon deck all night’. Defiantly, Elizabeth brought him into the cabin, but a woman with six screaming children objected, ‘and delivered him over to the tormentors though he had escaped from them to me for the third time’. Weathering the storm, the exhausted refugees – two newlyweds, one maid and one dog – made it across the Channel. No one came in pursuit. Elizabeth’s father never forgave her; he returned all her letters unopened, even those bordered in black. She was already dead to him.
As Mrs Browning – an oddly ordinary title, given its extraordinary achievement – this black-clad butterfly would open up in Italy, in the way her heroes had done. It was as if she had been born for this. She basked in the sensual heat, wearing the loosest of gowns. In 1849, aged forty-three, Elizabeth gave birth to a son, whom she called Pen, a neutral name. She would keep his long hair in ringlets and dress him in romantic clothes, black velvet tunics and breeches, declining to define his gender – ‘If you put him into a coat and waistcoat forthwith he only would look like a small angel travestied’ – and told her brothers not to instruct him in manly ways. As he grew up, Pen came to resemble Bro, too; perhaps that was why Elizabeth disliked the idea of him learning to swim.
This trio had a faerie, androgynous air about them; even Robert ‘resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes’, according to Elizabeth’s friend Miss Mitford. ‘He had long ringlets & no neckcloth … Femmelette – is a word made for him.’ Although Elizabeth often appeared pale, both she and Robert were described as having dark complexions: Elizabeth herself said ‘I am small and black.’ William Michael Rossetti said they took up almost no room in a railway carriage, and barely needed a double bed at an inn. All three seemed out of time and space, sex and race. ‘When I look in the glass,’ Elizabeth told a friend, ‘I see nothing but a perfectly white & black face, the eyes being obliterated by large blots of blackness.’ To Nathaniel Hawthorne she was ‘that pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all … her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look white by their sable profusion’. Hawthorne, whose interest in the supernatural reached back to the Salem witches whom his own ancestor had tried, regarded her as one might examine an animal or a myth: ‘I could not form any judgement about her age, it may range anywhere within the limits of human or elfin life.’ Meanwhile, the thrice-ransomed Flush ran wild and learned to speak Italian, according to his mistress, and took to the water with ease, having been baptised in the river ‘in Petrarch’s name’.
Out of Europe’s revolutions came Aurora Leigh, a sprawling poem with its heroine based on Elizabeth, and its hero, Romney Leigh, on her brother. Intended to be ‘intensely modern’, as she believed herself to be, she called it an ‘art-novel’, its power drawing on the same stormy mid-century disruptions that would influence Emily Brontë and Herman Melville. The poem explodes with Promethean myth and Shelleyan imagery. It cites The Tempest, New England utopias and the Irish Famine, and invokes Tahitian queens and Haitian presidents, set next to science-fiction scenes of stars as ‘overburned’ suns, ‘swallowing up | Like wax the azure spaces’. Underlayered by ‘marine sub-transatlantic railroads’ and fossil mastodons, this is a fearsome vision of a brave new world: Elizabeth had heard accounts of Brook Farm from Hawthorne and her American friend Margaret Fuller, although she disapproved of its socialism, saying she’d rather live under Tsarist Russia ‘than in a Fourier-machine, with my individuality sucked out of me by a social air-pump’.
Hyped-up and heretical, Aurora Leigh fed on the Hungry Forties, as starvation, revolution and disease swept across Europe, defying the industrial, capitalist age. Aurora is accused of writing ‘of factories and of slaves, as if | Your father were a negro, and your son | A spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you, – | All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise | Just nothing to you …’ All the while, the sea flows through the blank verse – ‘the bitter sea | Inexorably pushed between us both’ – with awful images of shipwreck: ‘… some hard swimming through | The deeps – I lost breath in my soul sometimes | And cried “God save me if there’s any God.”’ In fact, the manuscript of Aurora Leigh was itself nearly lost at sea, going missing as the Brownings sailed to Marseilles, although Elizabeth claimed, flippantly, to be more concerned at the loss of her son’s clothes in the same trunk, ‘all my Penini’s pretty dresses, embroidered trousers, collars, everything I have been collecting to make him look nice in …’
Her poem may be almost undecipherable now without resort to historical notes, but it had an electrifying effect on her peers. The Pre-Raphaelites worshipped it as an alternative Bible, and saw its author as a kind of patron saint; Ruskin believed it as good as Shakespeare’s sonnets; and his pupil Oscar Wilde declared it ‘much the greatest work in our literature’, ‘simply “intense” in every way’.
That intensity came out of all those years in her upper room, ‘a sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage’ – a telling image, given that the presiding spirit of Aurora Leigh is an eldritch bird, its spread wings and open beak like Poe’s raven. ‘We are sepulchred alive in this close world,’ Elizabeth wrote. The opium to which she was addicted could induce synaesthesia, bending the senses, hearing colour, seeing music; it once sent me floating down the streets of south-west London by the river, visions flaring out of the brown suburbia around me. But in all her phantasmagoria, Elizabeth remained haunted by the water which had claimed her brother. And in 1850 that memory was stirred up by a new loss and another shipwreck.
She had met Margaret Fuller in Florence, and the two women became close; Fuller, a Transcendentalist and feminist, inspired the utopian passages in Aurora Leigh. About to sail back to New York with her husband, the Marchese Ossoli, and their young child, Margaret spent her last night with the Brownings. ‘She said with her peculiar smile that “the ship was called the Elizabeth, & she accepted it as a good omen – though a prediction had been made to her husband that the sea wd be fatal to him”.’
Elizabeth was nearing New York when, weighed down by a cargo of Carrara marble, she foundered in a storm, only a hundred yards off Fire Island. In the early hours of the morning her freight smashed through her sides. As daylight came, the waves ran too high to launch a rescue – although the land sharks had already arrived with carts to salvage the luxuries being washed ashore. ‘At flood-tide, about half past three o’clock, when the ship broke up entirely, they came out of the forecastle, and Margaret sat with her back to the foremast, with her hands on her knees,’ Thoreau reported. ‘A great wave came and washed her aft. The steward had just before taken her child and started for shore. Both were drowned.’ The philosophical receiver of wrecks had been sent by Emerson to search the shore, but he found neither her body nor the revolutionary manuscripts she’d been carrying; no sodden legacy lying, like Shelley’s notebook or Prospero’s books among the splintered timber and white marble.
Elizabeth received this news having suffered the last and most nearly fatal of four miscarriages. Her reaction was typically intense: ‘In sight of shore, of the home, American shore! Oh Great God, how terrible are Thy judgements! The whole associations have been more poignant to me that by a like tragedy I lost once the happiness of my life … the life of my life … the colour & fragrance of my soul.’ The sea had now taken three people from her – Shelley, Bro and Fuller – ‘the sea, that blue end of the world, | That fair scroll finis of a wicked book’.
Yet at the last, this fragile, resilient woman may have been reconciled to the waves. In 1858, three years before she died, Elizabeth went back to Le Havre. ‘We have come here to dip me in warm sea-water,’ she wrote, ‘for I have been very weak and unwell of late.’ While her husband and son swam every day, she was plunged for five minutes at a time into a hip-bath filled with salt water. She could barely get to the sea itself, let alone look at it. But then Robert found ‘a hole I can creep through to the very shore, without walking many yards … and the sea is open and satisfactory’. It might have washed away her grief. ‘We bathe & get strength, & sit close to the sea watching the animated ships & the swimming men & women.’ Even her son had become a water baby. ‘Peni bathes everyday & has learned to swim & swims, & looks like a merman, with his locks floating …’ In the warmth of the sun, looking back over the Channel, there was a sense of healing and a life yet to come.
Three years later, floating on her own opium cloud, Elizabeth opened her eyes in the hour before dawn and told Robert, ‘You did right not to wait – what a fine steamer – how comfortable,’ as if she were back in Torquay, before Bro left her; as though, like Thoreau, she were sailing away.
Moments later, she breathed her last word, ‘Beautiful.’
Early in the morning, before anyone is up and about, I leave my Torquay guest house for the harbour. I ride along the promenade, past the bandstand where I ate fish and chips last night as couples in deckchairs listened to a brass band while boys skateboarded round the park. I cycle up the hill, past the bird compound, its inmates held under a vast net suspended high over the headland, just as Melville described the rigging of a slaveship as ‘hung overhead like three ruinous aviaries’. Facing the black canopy, where the birds circle as if caught underwater, is the house where Elizabeth waited for her brother in her own captivity.
Unsettled by a glimpsed scene I would decline to pay for, I leave the avian prison and carry on, past Beacon Cove and the hotel where Stephen Tennant once stayed, half-believing that he was back in his beloved south of France. The sea is deep and turquoise. In silent black and white, a thirteen-year-old girl walks out of Morgan’s painting, climbs the rock and leaps into the void, her body curving as if, for a moment, she might fly upward to the sun rather than plunging down into the waves below. The inter-titles record her feat.
She springs forward, like a bird taking wing, and seems to hover.
Then, she dives amidst a splashing of luminous drops of water.
I ride on, ignoring the girl in the water. The road rises to another headland, where a house appears to be built into the cliff; its wooden balcony looks out to sea like a crow’s nest. It was here, in a room named Wonderland, that Wilde composed the letters which would send him to a prison cell.
In 1878 Babbacombe Cliff was rebuilt for Georgiana Mount-Temple, aristocratic patron of the Pre-Raphaelites and confidante of Ruskin, whom she introduced to spiritualism; she employed her own mediums to communicate with the dead and was caricatured in Woolf’s Freshwater as Lady Raven Mount-Temple. Her statue still stands nearby; fresh flowers regularly appear in its bronze hands, placed there by admirers of her championship of animal rights. In 1892 Georgiana lent the house to her cousin, Constance Wilde, so that she and Oscar could escape London for the winter. As dramatic as Babbacombe Cliff was from the outside, its interior was even more remarkable. It was hung with paintings by Rossetti, tiled by Morris and lit by stained-glass windows by Burne-Jones. This secular chapel was a fitting place from which Wilde would order his veiled Salome to be bound in Tyrian purple and lettered in tired silver. And although Oscar complained to his friend Robbie Ross, ‘Are there beautiful people in London? Here there are none; everyone is so unfinished,’ the sea offered him a sense of escape.
It always had. Wilde was an avid swimmer, and had been since his youth. As a muscular student he’d spent his summers swimming in Dublin Bay (in between reading Aurora Leigh), where the rocks of the Forty Foot were famous as a naked bathing place for men and boys – both Joyce and Beckett would swim here too. Oscar felt immortal in the sea, and ‘sometimes heretical when good Roman Catholic boys enter the water with little amulets and crosses round their necks and arms that the good S. Christopher may hold them up’.
Six years later in 1882, on a tour of America which would make him an international star, an Apostle of his own Newness – not least because he arrived in Manhattan in an oversized green overcoat lined with otter fur and collared in seal, almost as if he were a marine mammal himself – Oscar had spent days on Fire Island, newly fashionable as a resort for New Yorkers, where the press portrayed him in a daring costume, complete with sand shoes. He was a modern man, looking out over the ocean.
Now, after ten years of fame, he was taking refuge from his own celebrity in Torquay. With Constance called away, leaving him to look after their two young sons, he invited Lord Alfred Douglas to stay. Oscar played at being a decadent headmaster, ordering champagne and sherry and biscuits for himself and Bosie for morning break, with compulsory reading in bed for his boys at night. Tradition has it that he swam here too, in the same cove from which Elizabeth’s brother had set sail.
Despite his happiness at Babbacombe Cliff, Wilde detected a disturbance in the atmosphere. ‘But today the sea is rough, and there are no dryads in the glen, and the wind cries like a thing whose heart is broken.’ His lover’s true nature was emerging, tempestuous and petulant. There were angry shouts, and Douglas packed his bags, pursued to London by Oscar’s letter: ‘Bosie – you must not make scenes with me – they kill me – they wreck the loveliness of life.’ Wilde’s life would be wrecked by Douglas, as surely as if he’d been cast up on those rocks below Wonderland.
All of this happened with a speed that belied his own dramas. Two years later, in the summer of 1894, Oscar returned to the coast at Worthing. He was working on The Importance of Being Earnest, and spent weeks ‘doing nothing but bathing and playwriting’. He was a powerful swimmer, as his son Vyvyan recalled, ploughing through high seas like a shark. Evoking Byron’s feats, he swam from a yacht as he sailed from Worthing to Littlehampton, only for a sudden storm to stir ‘a fearful sea’ out of the pitch dark on the return trip; Oscar boasted to Bosie of being ‘Viking-like and daring’. The end of the land allowed the unallowable. In Worthing, Wilde wooed Alphonse Conway, a sixteen-year-old boy who wanted to become a sailor. He asked Oscar to take him to Portsmouth. Instead he was kitted out in a blue serge suit and taken to Brighton, a straw hat on his head. A year later, Alphonse’s name would be used against Wilde at the Old Bailey.
In London, facing the inevitable, Oscar was encouraged by his friends to flee before it was too late. Frank Harris had a boat waiting on the river, crewed and ready with a head of steam. Harris said extravagantly, ‘In one hour she would be free of the Thames and on the high seas, delightful phrase, eh? – high seas indeed where there is freedom uncontrolled.’
He tried to entice Wilde with the vision. ‘You’ve never seen the mouth of the Thames at night, have you? It’s a scene from wonderland; houses like blobs of indigo fencing you in; ships drifting past like black ghosts in the misty air, and the purple sky above never so dark as the river, the river like an oily, opaque serpent gliding with a weird life of its own.’
But the water would not save him. In court, the words which he had written from the privacy of Babbacombe Cliff extolling Bosie’s rose-leaf lips were read aloud to the audience in the public gallery. Sentenced to two years’ hard labour, Wilde was taken from Pentonville to Clapham Junction where he was spat at as he stood on the platform, his station of the cross. From there he was conducted to Reading Gaol. As prisoner C.3.3 he was subjected to a new transformation. He sobbed as they cut his hair. He was kept in his cell for twenty-three hours a day, and when he did leave it he was forced, like other prisoners, to wear a cap with a thick veil so that no one could recognise each other. Time had stopped for a man who had defined a new age. Like Woolf, he conducted a transaction with his time, only to be punished for his facility. In his pitiful letter, De Profundis, he told Bosie, ‘With us, time does not progress. It revolves.’ He had not realised that there was so much suffering in the world, or that he would experience it: ‘What lies before me is my past.’ In his cell, alone and kept in silence, he had ‘a strange longing … for the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.’ While the world thought his nature unnatural, he thought of the Greeks: ‘they saw that the sea was for the swimmer’.
When he was released after two years’ imprisonment, Wilde left immediately for France, as if he could not bear to spend a single night of freedom in the country which had disowned him. At Berneval, near Dieppe, he shook off his imprisonment by swimming every day – ‘breasting the waves, a strong and skilful swimmer’, according to his friend Robert Sherard, who wished he could take a photograph of the aesthete, ‘to show people in England that there’s a man in him’.
Oscar had a beach hut set up in which to undress, and told Robbie Ross that he wanted to build ‘a little chalet of plaster and wood walls’, in which he might live out his life by the sea. He soon found another chalet, with a wooden balcony overlooking the water. Far from Wonderland, it was as bare as Thoreau’s hut, its only decoration a carved Madonna salvaged from a fishing boat. He was happier than he had ever been, writing letters precisely timed and dated – ‘Thursday 3 June, 2.45 pm, AD 1897’ – but addressed from a ‘Latitude and Longitude not marked on the sea’, a nowhereness which would have appealed to Melville. Oscar had written in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at.’ He looked out from that atlas and saw his future in the sea.
With his now substantial bulk, far from the immortal student who’d swum in Dublin Bay with Catholic boys and their amulets and crosses, Oscar looked like an elegant elephant seal, his head held above the waves. He adopted a new identity, as Sebastian Melmoth. Surely he had half his life left to live? He was just forty-three. The opal sea washed his sins away while the gulls were blown about like white flowers. He had found his own utopia. Nearby, he’d discovered a chapel, of Our Lady of Joy – ‘It has probably been waiting for me all these purple years of pleasure’ – and he thought of the Virgin Mary as the Star of the Sea as he lay in the sea-grass outside, recalling the ‘strange beauty’ of William Michael Rossetti’s poem.
The sea is in its listless chime,
Like Time’s lapse rendered audible;
The murmur of the earth’s large shell.
In a sad blueness beyond rhyme
It ends.
‘Yesterday I attended Mass at 10 o’clock and afterwards bathed,’ he told Robbie. ‘So I went into water without being a pagan. The consequence was that I was not tempted by either sirens or mermaidens, or any of the green-haired following of Glaucus. I really think that this is a remarkable thing. In my Pagan days the sea was always full of Tritons blowing conchs, and other unpleasant things. Now it is quite different.’
But a month later he invited Bosie back, telling him that he had a bathing suit ready for him.