Out in the wheat field the sound mirror bloomed. Softened by the sea fret it was movingly lovely. The circular depression in its seaward side suggested that somewhere nearby hovered the enormous and comforting breast that had moulded it. I laid my cheek where it once had been and suckled on the sounds: the gull squeak and peewit, the distant groan of heavy machinery, the cries of children, the groans of the dispossessed, and the entreaties of those about to die. Were these the warnings of the deadly paravane, at that very moment being towed through the choppy skies towards me, passing over the silt that was once Northorpe and Hoton? I didn’t know, and besides, even — even! — if I were able to recognize these harbingers I still would not have heeded them, for in the four minutes it took for the zeppelin to arrive, I would’ve forgotten all about it.
5. The Struldbrug
‘D’you mind my asking, but what’re you fishing for?’
‘Dunno, it’s my first time here.’
Here being the tidal flats of the Isle of the Dead, exposed now that filmic civilization is ebbing away, and washed up upon them this marriage on the half shell — a blue nylon one, six feet across, ribbed with fibreglass poles. When I strolled past its lip, there they were — the meaty beings secondarily reliant on the suck of the current, siphoning it in through a taut nylon line and a long bent rod. They were in their fifties, she seated on a folding chair with truncated legs; he on the sand, his ankles boyishly crossed, a cigarette cupped in the half shell of his hand.
‘I thought your gear looked new—’
‘No, not my first time ever — I fish up and down the coast the whole time.’
Sturdy pride to buoy him up, the shell upended, a coracle now in which they paddle up and down the Holderness.
‘And what do you catch?’
‘This time of t’year, bass.’
Big-mouthed Billy-man, nailed to a plaque. Spasming at the waist, I walked away, my head hammering at the point of my shoulder, then, luminously ascended to a knoll from where I saw the reddest Nissan saloon parked in a sandy car park, beyond it a footprinted shore disappearing into the mist, and over to the right a line of telegraph poles and gorse bushes, the dorsal crest of a peninsula:
Spurn Head.
This much I did know: I had arrived at this wavering landmass, flipped this way and that by the sea for millennia, the tail of the East Riding lashing at Old Kilnsea, Ravenser and Ravenser Odd, so scattering their people on the face of the deep. Ravenser, or Ravensburg, or Ravenseret — it was once one of the wealthiest ports in the kingdom. It returned two members to parliament, held two markets a week and mounted an annual fair that lasted for over a month. ‘Away with me in post to Ravenspurgh!’ cries Northumberland in the opening scene of Act Two of Richard the Second; however, it’s Ravenspurgh that’s been had away, dissolved so completely that by the 1580s there was nothing left, and Shakespeare was name-checking an Atlantis. The last reference to the town was in Leland’s sixteenth-century Itinerary, and presumably by then, Richard Reedbarowe, the hermit of the chapel of Ravenserporne, was long gone.
As early as the 1350s, the chronicler of Meaux wrote, ‘When the inundations of the sea and of the Humber had destroyed the foundations of the chapel of Ravenserre Odd, built in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, so that the corpses and bones of the dead there buried horribly appeared, and the same inundations daily threatened the destruction of the said town, sacrilegious persons carried off and alienated certain ornaments of the said chapel, without our due consent, and disposed of them for their own pleasure—’
The rubber figurine, with the head of a pig, dressed in a blue Churchillian siren suit; the detachable penises and arms, carved from pinewood, of late Bronze Age votary objects; the neurofibrillary tangle and the amyloid visible as applegreen yellow birefringence; the UPVC windows and the water colours salvaged from the slidden studio at Skipsea; the madman holding a handful of individual UHT milk pots to his face — all mine, he mutters, all mine.
What brings you up here, to an area of land almost equal to that upon which London stands, but which has now been swept away?
Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring one anywhere? Eating as usual, I see, Algy?
Eaten up by introspection, I frogmarched myself on along the spit; the last few incisive nibbles would soon have done with the amyloid, the core of the present would be consumed, and the simple past would be all that there is, or ever can be. A line of wooden piles stood — stand — in the surf, spiny with iron spikes upon which seaweed and shreds of fishing nets have caught. What was — is — this, some futile attempt to fix the shifting mass to the bedrock? Or were — are — they, the staves of musical notation, a very late Romanticism of surging chords, gut-wrenching melodies and lofty crescendos, the entire gleaming metropolis of sounds long since sunk, church bells withal, beneath the shallow German Ocean?
A Struldbrug came towards me, his tattered clothing — hose, doublet, shirt and jerkin — as wispy as the sea fret. He paused fifty paces away, panting, one arm against a pile for support — his bent back and the curving upright parenthesizing the waves — then came on again, the black spot above his left eyebrow a gun barrel levelled at me. My impulse was to run, however… too late, he was upon me, his palsied claw rattling my shoulder, as he thrust his face into mine. Its features fell like wormy clods from the winding sheet of ancient skin.
From his clothing I judged him to be above 600 years old, but whether the mushy sounds that fell from his mouth were the authentic accents of the late medieval tongue, or only the consequence of toothlessness, I couldn’t say. There were a few words I could make out — playce, cum, stä — by which, combined with his erratic gestures, I understood that he wished me to accompany him to his abode. I was sorely tempted — my feet were killing me — but then, through the curtains of mist being swept up by unseen cables, there came hurrying a pair of attendants wearing blue siren suits.
They spotted me and the Struldbrug, adjusted their course and made straight for us, coming up puffing.
‘’E’s a sly wun, ’e is,’ the first attendant said, although whether to me or as a general observation was ambiguous. He had a piggy head, this fellow, and his wide nostrils quivered, sucking in everything.
‘C’mon ewe daft booger,’ his equally piggy colleague said. ‘Yul miss ewer soup, woncha.’
Taking the Struldbrug by either arm, they began to lead him away. Across their shoulders both attendants had the words DEMENTIA ADVISORY picked out in white letters. But the old man kept on babbling. ‘Playce! Cum! Stä!’ and trying to break away, so they stopped and the pig-headed figure in the Churchillian siren suit called back, ‘’E wants yet t’cum oop t’clinic. Willya, lad? It’ll mekk ’im ever so ’appy.’
On my walking tour — a journey I made without maps — I forgot who I was and where I was going. Nevertheless, I carried with me for the entire time a damp and writhing burden of guilt, together with the mental picture of a baby lying in the wrack at the high tide mark, with a kitchen knife planted between its shoulder blades. I acquired a handful of carved wooden penises and arms — late Bronze Age, I thought — that I made a gift of to some fishermen I met. And I bought an Agatha Christie thriller in a junk shop in Hornsea that I read a few pages of before discarding in a bin, beside the shower block in a caravan park.
The lead attendant explained everything as we padded along the beach, trying to maintain headway despite the Struldbrug, who kept veering off, his anachronistic clothes flapped mournfully in the breeze. On we went towards the lighthouse, which was climbing out of its humid raiment so that it stood, if not exactly proud, at least prominent against the fast-bluing sky.