Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson

Author:Adam Nicolson [Nicolson, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-740270-0
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2004-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

These are the outer limits, the edge of the Ocean River, a desolate coast, where the only trees that grow are ‘tall black poplars and willows whose fruit dies young’. The waves break on a darkened beach. Hell has never seemed so beautiful.

I came bursting to the surface. As I rose, not knowing if I was rising or falling, I was looking with my fingers for the toggle on the life jacket, scrabbling in its folds with my fingertips, like a piglet or a lamb desperate for the nipple, some source of life. At last I found its little plastic berry, stuffed in between the Velcro it should have been hanging below, pulled it, triggered the canister of C02 and wwoohoosh - up came the wonderful life-giving life jacket around me like a meadow, a home, a bed, a pillow, a nurse, a life. I laughed aloud alone in the sea! Never have I felt so happy. My life jacket held me. I was safe in its arms. I was somehow free of anything the sea could do to me, more free than I could ever have been on land. Life in the arms of death. Escape from Hades.

What was this? Some adrenaline high? I don’t know, but I lay there ecstatic in my new buoyant state. The propeller of the outboard had stopped turning. I had to decide what to do. I thought at first I would swim to the shore, as if nothing had happened, and go on to look at the geology of Marloes as planned. The film crew I knew were on the beach. I could stroll out of the surf like Odysseus and start looking at the rocks. What else could this new-given life be for? And so, doing backstroke and my arms windmilling, I started heading inshore. The inflatable, upside down, stayed where it was because the anchor was now holding it in place. Occasionally, a big sea like the one that had overturned me came thundering through, but that was fine. My mother and father of a life jacket held me up on the surface. However broken the sea, I floated.

I was making progress shorewards when I heard George shouting. George! I had forgotten about him. He was something from the time before! Suddenly, extraordinarily nearby, but cut off by the body of a swell between us, I saw the very top of the Auk’s mainmast, a strangely unreal sight, just the radio aerials and the whirling cups of the anemometer, the rest erased by the bulk of the sea. It was about a hundred yards away. George had come to save me, bringing the big ocean-going Auk deep into the surf zone! The charted depth of the place he had come to get me was about eight feet. The Auk draws six. There was a real possibility that the swells could have dumped the boat, in one of their troughs, straight on to the bottom. God knows what would have happened; perhaps

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