The Monkeys Want an Autograph

By Nicola | Published: October 9, 2012


There’s so much I want to write about my trip to Borneo, but as Im off to research dancing bears in Bhopal tomorrow I haven’t time for it all yet. So this is just a start…

 

 

 

 

When it comes to seeing wildlife I’m not lucky. I’m like the guy in the kit kat advert, patiently watching for days to get a shot of the pandas, which emerge for the one moment when he turns his back.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmmieeHlZvQ I am usually getting dust out of my eye, sneezing, in the loo or on the bus home when something exciting turns up.

But the trip to Borneo from which I have just returned was different. I was there with my World Land Trust hat on, to look at the forest conservation projects that WLT sponsors and to meet some of the wonderful people working for its partner organisations in Sabah, HUTAN and LEAP. The crucial factor though, was that I wasn’t wildlife spotting alone but part of a group that have been helping conservation projects world wide and so clearly packed a powerful planet-karma-punch: Bill Oddie, (birder extraordinaire and gibbon funk artiste), Simon Barnes (wildlife columnist for the Times), David Bebber (Times photographer and frog enthusiast), Astrid Munoz (photographer, supermodel and WLT supporter), Mary Tibbett (WLT Project Coordinator) and Emma Becket (PR consultant and rainforest defender). Not only were they all fabulous, and frequently hilarious, company, but their wildlife attracting aura meant that we actually saw things.

Our first stop was at the Tangug Eco Lodge, run entirely by local organisation MESCOT, and consisting of a set of tree houses that a ten year old would dream of, on the bank of a lake. Within seconds of arriving, Simon and Mary had spotted a snake bird, two species of kingfisher, a bee eater and an Indian roller. We didn’t even have to move, the lake and the forest around it were like a stage that animals just appeared on: a crowd of Bushy Crested Hornbills flopping around in the tree tops like drunks chucked out of a pub; a huge monitor lizard swimming malevolently into view; a pygmy squirrel running up and down a tree trunk like something out of Sylvanian Families on a zip wire. In the dark we caught, lorises in our torch beams, a lantern bug with a big blue snozz and bats, bats, bats. All around us, all the time, there were sounds of wildlife we couldn’t see, frogs, cicadas and who knew what else. An unidentified percussion section of zips and peeps, plunks and wee-oo’s. I woke in the night and tried to write down the sounds on a time line, but the rhythms were far too complicated for anyone short of Evelyn Glenny to get a handle on. Best of all for me, was waking to a sound I’ve wanted to hear all my life, distant but distinct, the morning songs of gibbons fluting through the misty air.

The next two days we tootled up and down various stretches of the Kinabatangan river and I couldn’t help wondering if the animals, like some of the guides, were ‘Goodies’ fans, keen Times readers, or followers of fashion; everything wanted to sit in the trees and look at us as we passed. Were the macaques trying to summon up the courage to ask  Bill for an autograph? Were the six different species of hornbills there just to make sure Simon wrote a column about them? Did the herd of elephants cavort in the water yards from our boat to be sure of a double page spread in the Sundays? When a fully adult male orang utan peered at us seductively, as he made his bed in a tree top, I felt sure he’d seen Astrid’s Vogue covers.

 

 

 

Our last night was spent down river, near the mouth of the Kinabatangan, where the forest turns to knot-rooted mangrove, in a house in a village called Abai.

We arrived at our homestay hosts as the sun went down. It was so cosy and welcoming, our hosts so smiley and kind, that seeing more animals felt almost like too much chocolate cake. But we saw ‘em anyway. Another group of proboscis monkeys, like fat furry fruit dripping from the trees, and, after dark, firefies flashing en mass in the trees, like sets of fairy lights on a dodgy plug.There was a fishing owl, grumpily looming at us in the torch light and a fishing cat, the marvelously named Flat Headed Cat. We were so light headed with it all that Bill began humming possible blues tunes featuring flat headed cats. My favourite line:

‘Nobody tells the flat headed cat where to go…’

I won’t tell you about all the other things. You’ll only be jealous if you hear about the silver leaf monkey and her tiny orange baby, the rare endemic Storm Stork or the Irrawaddy dolphin we spotted from the boat to the airport. Not even our guides could believe it. Instead of saying what guides normally say when I’m around, things like “You should have been here last week”,  they grinned and shook their heads in disbelief. Minchu, our wonderful guide from the community based wildlife tour outfit Red Ape Encounters summed it up “You guys are so lucky, you should buy a lottery ticket.”

But of course it wasn’t just luck. The Kinabatangan river is extraordinary. It’s described as the best place to see wildlife in South East Asia, and what makes this even more extraordinary, is that the forests that support this ridiculous abundance aren’t undisturbed tracts of primary forest, with huge trees and a canopy at 70 m, but beleaguered strips and patches of secondary forest – that is, forest that was logged to hell and then left to get on with it as best it could. The good news is that wildlife thrives in secondary forest so long as it’s undisturbed and extensive enough. The bad news is that all around these surviving bits of forest are palm oil plantations in every direction, always threatening to engulf them.

 

There is no magic solution to this situation, we can’t wind back the clock to the 1950’s when there were still huge areas of

untouched primary forest. We must deal with the situation pragmatically: palm oil  has brought money to Malaysia and transformed the lives of many people. As Sam Mannan, the Director of Forestry in Sabah, told us ‘We must not be green beggars’. So oil palms are here to stay. To keep some forest, and the biodiversity it shelters, we have to negotiate with the plantations: enforce best practice to keep forest strips beside rivers and on steep slopes, protect the most diverse spots by private ownership or gazetting as reserves and replant bare patches to join up the mosaic of plots into continuous cover. This is what WLT with its partners, LEAP and HUTAN have been doing. Luckily Sam Mannan is fiercely proud of Sabah’s forests, and although a great pragmatist, as his remark about ’green beggars‘ demonstrates, he’s happy to help and do some pretty tough horse trading to protect as much forest as possible.

WLT and partners have just closed the deal on another two small but crucial patches of riverside forest, that go further towards
closing up some of the gaps, but to safeguard the future of the finest wildlife spot in South East Asia, they need to buy up, bit by bit, plot by plot, another 25 thousand hectares. Land in Sabah is expensive so it’s going to take a great deal of money to do this;  around million quid just to safeguard the next 80 acre piece of the Kinabatangan mosaic. But it can be done – bit by bit – so if you put your hand down the back of a sofa and find a tenner, or you have a book whose PLR you could donate you could be part of the story of Kinabatangan’s forests. Like my mum always told me ‘little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean, and the promised land.”

 

 

 

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An Inordinate Fondness For Pangolins

By Nicola | Published: September 21, 2012

I’ve tied off all the work ends that needed tying, I’ve found my mosquito net and worked out a way to get hold of a pair of functioning binoculars (my beloved Bausch and Lombs had an uninsured collision with a marble floor) so, bar the malaria tablets and the leech proof socks (no, I’m not kidding), I’m almost ready.

A week tomorrow I’m going to Borneo.

Let me just say that again, more slowly this time. A week tomorrow I’m going to Borneo.

I am very excited. And I don’t mean ‘excited’ in the way that grown ups usually mean it: a- bit-more-interested-in-my-day-than-normal. I mean excited, like kids mean excited. Excited like-you-are-when-you-are-seven-and-it’s-Christmas-eve, excited, is how I mean.

Excited! Because there are lots of animals in Borneo. LOTS. Two hundred and eighty eight species of mammals before you even begin on birds or reptiles or ‘God’s Favourite group’ beetles (see below). How many British mammal species can you name? Foxes, badgers, otters, squirrels, red ones and grey ones (and one of those doesn’t really belong here). ‘Bats’ you might say – or you might actually know we have more than fifteen species of bats in the UK. In Borneo there are thirty four species of squirrel and fourteen of them can fly! There are 94 species of bat…9 Rhinolophids, members of the genus whose UK representative I used to study. There are monkeys with bright red fur and little black faces, there are pygmy elephants, there are gibbons, there are orang utans.

And pangolins. Pangolins- animals I’ve longed to see since I was three: long pine cones made animate. Short clawed otters – the cutest otters on Earth.

Today (late I know but I’ve been crazy busy) I started trying to learn about some of the animals I might see (oh yeah Lorises…did I say lorises??) and my heart raced so much and my mind jumped with delight so much, the information wouldn’t go in. I want to know it all, and I want to know it now, so that I won’t miss anything when I’m there, so that I’ll be able to identify what I see and soak it up. (sun bears…imagine? there are sun bears there!!). Scratch any naturalist and you’ll find a desire to label things, and list them. All my wildlife identification guides have nerdy little notes in them, ticks and dates and places showing where and when I saw particular species. This isn’t just train-spotery; a name is the hook you can hang other information on; it gives you a start, a way to begin to fit individual species into the mosaic of a habitat. But if I’m honest it’s more primal than that, more personal. Knowing the name of something helps to stamp it onto your soul; if I can name a creature when I see it, my experience of seeing is made more vivid, more mine. In some tiny way I posses and carry with me forever that animal. Being in a place where I can’t name anything makes me feel a bit panicky, as if my life is slipping through my fingers and I won’t hold on to any of it.

So I began today with mammals, because although birds were my first love as a child, my heart was stolen away by mammals at university and they’re the things I know most about. Also they are a kind of cop out because there aren’t very many of them relative to say, beetles. But when I saw that figure, 288 species, I knew I didn’t have a chance (provost’s squirrel…a squirrel with a bright red tummy!). I knew that I would just have to go to Borneo ignorant, label-less and I’d have to find another way of stamping things on my soul (Pink necked green pigeon – yes that’s its name, does what it says on the tin) another way of experiencing and expressing this astonishing level of diversity.  In a rain forest, where there are hundreds of different species of trees, where many of the smaller species of animals and perhaps some of the larger ones too, may not have been described by science I have no hope of being able to put a label on everything I see.  And in a way that’s a good thing because most of the people to whom I wish to communicate the life-enhancing, joyful, gorgeousness of biodiversity, would not know a latin name if it fell on them from a supermarket shelf. So if I can find a way of imprinting it on me without labels, then I have a chance of imprinting it on them without their ever having to remember anything as difficult as Vivera tangalunga (its a civet…lovely spotty, catty kind of a thing).

Because for me, and for the World Land Trust, who are sending me to Borneo to see their fantastic work there, the whole point of my trip is to share what I see when I get back with as many people as possible…people who’ll never know what mycorrhiza are or care about food webs or primary producers or subspecies or Mullerian mimicry. I need to tell the story of the world without labels, but with all the joy, all the delight, all the twenty five carat, seven million watt excitement.

Watch this space…

(just a few labels though…I mean Rhinocerous hornbill? Isn’t that another one that does what it says on the tin? Listen, you can hear my heart beating from there.)

Re Beetles…

The famous naturalist JBS Haldane, when asked what the study of nature had told him about the mind of God, replied that God clearly had ‘an inordinate fondness for beetles’.

Which is almost enough to make me enthusiastic about God… 

ALSO : When rootling around for something else I found this fabulous Pablo Neruda quote…which I’d like as an epitaph

‘I has never occurred to me to speak with elegant animals. I am not curious about the opinion of wasps or racing mares. Let them settle matters whilst flying, let them win decorations by running. I want to speak with flies, with that bitch that has recently littered, and to converse with snakes….I want to speak with many things and I will not leave this planet without knowing what I came to seek, without investigating this matter, and people do not suffice for me, I have to go much further and I have to go much closer.’

Actually I’d love to hear what a wasp’s opinion of the world was, but I get what he means…

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Mother Cary’s Butterknife

By Nicola | Published: September 20, 2012

 

So, no pictures in this and almost no conversations so Alice wouldn’t like it. But given that it won’t get an airing with an ISBN number on it, I thought I’d put it here. Part of my ongoing love affair with selchies and mermaids and my sneaking suspicion that I might be one or the other. The core of this is a ‘trad’ story I read in a wonderful book called ‘The People Of the Sea.’ I havent read the original story for a while so I’ve sort of forgotten which bits I made up and which I didn’t. Anway, hope you like it…

MOTHER CARY’S BUTTERKNIFE

A hundred things can go wrong at sea, there are so many ways to drown. And when there’s a storm running with waves as high as your mast top, that hundred becomes a thousand. A boat is a fragile refuge, little more than a veil of thought, against the cold and anger of the ocean.

So fishing is job for heros; or fools; or dreamers and there was a little bit of all three in young Keenan Mowat

He was the youngest of three brothers. The youngest by a long, long mile. His elder siblings were big men with chests as broad as doors and arms like plaited ropes. Useful, that’s what folk called them. Useless is what they called Keenan. But his brothers knew better. Keenan might be too weedy to take the wheel or haul a line, but he had a special talent: he loved the sea. Not the way most fisherman love it, like a difficult girlfriend who they don’t understand but can’t resist, or a nagging wife who pushes their nose against the grindstone. No, Keenan loved the sea as if he and it were two halves of the same creature, and the sea loved him right back. His brothers knew that, with Keenan aboard, somehow they would always come home safe, with fish in their hold.

On the night our story starts, Keenan was sitting on the harbour wall where their family’s boat, ‘The Goose’, was moored slowly riding up on the tide. His brothers were in old Mother Cary’s pub, getting a hot dinner and few pints inside them before the cold night’s fishing. But Keenan preferred to be outside in the smell of salt water, with the sigh of the swell washing up the quayside.

The first stars were out and the sea was so calm that they showed on its surface like jewels against a silk gown. All along the harbourside, the lights came on, yellow in the blue of the night.

It was almost time. Keenan was about the step into the pub and give his father the nod, when a car drove up along the quayside. Not a fisherman’s car, some old banger with half the body work rusted away, or a clapped out sports job that only started every third Saturday night. No, this was a swanky car, with paint as pale and neat as foam. A convertible too, with its top down and all the chrome gleaming. It was wide and stately, like a whale and it came to a stop right where Keenan sat, with his legs dangling over the water.

A great, tall man with a tower of tangled white hair got out. Well, not so much got out, as unfolded, and stood upright, looking down on Keenan. His face was as wrinkled as a map of the western isles and his eyes, blue-green, like a wave with the first low light of morning shining through it.

It wasn’t comfortable to be sitting looking up at such a great height of a man. So Keenan stood up, though his small stature made little difference to the situation.

The man stared, stern as a church steeple, into Keenan’s face while he spoke. His voice was strange, like storm waves rumbling in over a rocky shore. It was the sort of voice that made you listen.
“The sea looks fair tonight,” the man said, “ does it not?”
Keenan nodded. He wasn’t sure where his voice might be, but for sure it wasn’t in his throat at that particular moment. The man rumbled on
“It looks fair for a reason.” he said, “ It’s full of wanting. Many men will go to the bottom tonight, you and your brothers with them, unless you heed me well.”
The man’s eyes burned blue and his voice rolled so deep Keenan felt it coming up his legs through the stone of the quayside.
“Take with you a hook, an axe and a silver sword, and be ready. “
Keenan nodded again, but that didn’t seem to be enough,
“Tell me boy,” the man demanded, “what must you take?’
Somewhere down in his belly Keenan found a shrivelled shred of voice and stuttered out,
“A hook, an axe and a silver sword.”
The man tipped his head, grimly. Then he folded himself back into his car and drove over the quay and into the water without splash.

Keenan’s knees went to jelly and he sat down fast. He looked out at the ocean sighing under the starlight. The man was right, it was full of wanting. Its surface seemed velvety like skin that wanted to be touched. Keenan could feel the lonely heartbreak of it, pulling at him. For the first time in his life, he was afraid of the sea.

At that moment Keenan’s brothers burst out of the pub, scolding Keenan for not having called them earlier, eager to cast off on such a fine, calm night.

No use, Keenan knew, to try and tell them about the man in big car, and the warning he’d given. No use trying to stop them going fishing when the weather seemed set fair and the tide was right. All he could to was take the man’s advice and be ready.

But there was so little time. Already the two men were onboard, clearing gear, starting the engine. In a moment Keenan would be expected to cast off and jump down onto the deck .

In his mind Keenan raced through the man’s list trying to match it up with things he knew were already on the boat
A Hook : plenty of those: hooks for catching fish, hooks for gaffing them, two or three boat hooks.
An Axe: two of those, one lashed to the wheelhouse door to cut fishing gear free in a hurry if it caught in the propellor, another at the bottom of the rear locker.
But a silver sword? Keenan was pretty sure a rusty penknife wouldn’t do. His brain rushed through an inventory of every object he knew to be on board. Nothing, nothing, nothing, was in the least bit like a sword made of silver.

And then: Mother Cary’s butter knife popped into Keenan’s head and hung there, gleaming. It had a blade with two sides, just like a sword, and a handle inlaid with twining patterns. And it was real silver, Mother Cary always said so. It hung in a glass case lined with velvet over the bar, all that remained of Mother Cary’s life as a servant in a grand, grand house when she was a girl.

It wasn’t the size of a sword, but it would have to do. Keenan gave the mooring line another turn around the stancion, yelled to his brothers to wait, and raced into the pub.

There was no time for any sort of explanation, Keenan ran through the astonished drinkers and snatched the glass case from over the bar. He smashed it on the floor. Before Mother Cary could even begin to scream, he was out of the door, down the quay and leaping for the deck with the mooring rope coiled in his hand, and the silver butter knife, safe, next to his heart.

Keenan’s brothers set a course straight out over the silk smooth sea.
Further and further from land it took them. The calmness of the sea seemed to have put the two big men into a trance. When Keenan asked where they were going, and when they were going to set their nets, they just smiled and smiled, and kept the boat chugging on.

Keenan stood in the bow, watching the Goose’s white breast push the water aside, and hearing it sigh in return. Out and out they went until land wasn’t even a vague smudge on the horizon. And every time they went to set their nets, the fish moved on, luring the boat further and further from the shore.

Then, when they were too far out for there to be any hope of running for a safe harbour, the change came as sudden as the spring of a trap. A wind howled down from the starry sky and the sea leapt up like dragon’s teeth. In moments, the Goose was surrounded by waves bigger than any Keenan had ever seen before. They punched the little boat like the fists of a giant, swamping her decks, threatening to break her apart.

And the worst of it was that Keenan’s big, brawny brothers stood idle while the Goose floundered in deadly peril, as if the sudden storm had struck them still and stupid. So it was Keenan, little Keenan, too weak to take the wheel or haul a line, who found the strength to lash his brothers to the mast, so they could not be washed over board and to wedge a boat hook through the wheel to give him leverage enough to steer. He fought the storm alone, keeping the Goose from being broadside to the waves, steering her straight up and down their towering sides. Each time the Goose was swamped with water heavy and cold as ice, Keenan wiped the salt water from his face and clamped his shivering body to the wheel again.

The little Goose would not go down. One giant wave after another tried to clip her wings and still she flew. And then, as if the sea was tired of playing and wanted now to finish this long game, a wave came, twice the size of any that had come before. Keenan saw that there was nothing left to do, but hope the end would be quick.

“Take with you a hook, an axe and a silver sword, and be ready. “
The old man’s voice rumbled up in Keenan’s heart, and with it a great foam of fury. What good were hooks and axes, a sword of silver against the sea? He pulled the boat hook from the spokes of the wheel and with a roar of anger, threw it into the dark face of the approaching wave.

Like a popped balloon or a puppet whose strings are cut, the wave collapsed into a splashy calm, no more deadly than a paddling pool. The Goose bobbed, light as a toy on a boating lake. But Keenan had no time to stare in wonder for another wave was coming, a moving cliff of water, approaching fast and purposeful.

Keenan wrenched the axe from behind the wheel house door and held its long handle in his two hands. Round and round he spun on the Gooses deck, building speed and force. Faster! Faster! Faster; then, let go! The axe flew arching through the spray and salt, showing its bright steel-shine like a tiny spark against the dark face of the wave. It vanished with a splash too small to see and instantly the wave was gone: fallen, soggy as a failed cake. Keenan laughed aloud and danced screaming and half mad upon the slippery deck but the sea was not quite done.

The third wave was something out of all imagination. As if all the water of the deep below the Goose’s keel had gathered up and up, to push her down at last.
It rose and rose, blotting out the pattern of the stars, until there was nothing left in all the world but one small boat and the wave-mountain, black as rock, bearing down upon her.

Keenan stood amazed, and looked at the deadly wave: It was beautiful! Smooth and lovely like dark-blown glass. He felt an aching to be engulfed by it: utterly taken and consumed. But his brothers’ stunned idleness had gone and they screamed in terror at the sight of this third and greatest danger. Keenan woke from his trance and pulled the silver-sword-butter-knife from where it lay, warm by his heart, drew back his arm and flung it towards the wave.

It flew like an arrow small and true, impossibly high, and pierced the wave just below its foaming crest. The solid wall of water shivered, sighed and turned to rain, which fell soft as a kiss on Keenan’s upturned face.

The sea did not calm entirely but waves and wind grew smaller, more familiar and manageable. There was water in the engine and the propellor had sheered clean off. Keenan’s brothers, brisk and burly once again, fashioned a sail from an old tarpaulin, and nailed a plank to the broken rudder. They steered the little Goose through the night, but as the lights on some unfamiliar shore showed land was near, she began to take on water. They left her drowning on a sandbank and swam for their lives.

The three brothers crawled up the beach as the sun crept pearly grey over the horizon. To right and left along the tideline were bits of boats, boats Keenan had known all his life. And bodies, men and boys, from his village and every other village along the coast. A harvest of ships and manhood taken by the sea. More dead than alive themselves Keenan and his brothers lay in the marram and closed their eyes.

It was night again. Headlights blazed. Somehow a car was driving over the sand and pebbles, the driftwood and the wreckage. Closer and closer it came until Keenan was caught full in its beams. Half blinded he stood there and found his brothers standing right beside him.

A voice came from behind the wheel of the car. The voice of the tall man with the white hair.
“Get in lad, you and your brothers both.”
They got into the car, Keenan in the front seat and his two brothers crammed in the back, their knees up to their noses.

Keenan couldn’t tell how long they drove, what they passed on the way, or even, when they got there, what town it was. It was like every town he’d ever been to and yet not like any one of them at all. Men and boys he’d just seen washed up, dead as cod, on the beach, walked the streets. Their faces were pale under the streetlights but with each one was a woman – some dusky dark, some fair as Spring, some flaming red. And all of them beauties, women who you’d turn your head to see and not care who saw you looking.

The car drew up before a hotel, lit up from top to bottom like a Christmas tree.
“Out now boys, “ said the old man, “ Time to pay your bills for this night’s work.”
Inside in the bar, they sat round a table the four of them. Keenan had a drink of whisky before him just like his brothers.
The tall man turned to the eldest brother.
“Up the stairs with you lad. Into the room to the right. And do what you’re told when you get there.”
and to the next brother he said
“Up the stairs with you lad. Into the room to the right. And do what you are told when you get there.”
and then he turned to Keenan.
“And you my fine lad, go up ‘til you can go no further. Then, through the door with you.”

Up the stairs they went, with all the hullabaloo of the hotel bar falling away below them. The first brother to the right, the second to the left leaving Keenan alone on a long, long dark staircase. Up and up he went as if he were climbing to the top of the world from the deepest ocean depths. And there at last was a door, a sea-blue door, with flaking paint, and woodwork faded by salty winds. Keenan turned the handle and stepped through.

It was beach hut! Flooded with Summer light and the sound of a soft surf whispering. At the end of the room another door opened onto the sunlit beach and a girl of about Keenan’s age sat looking out at the sea. She was dressed in shorts and an old T shirt that Keenan thought might once have been his own. Her bare legs were tanned and her bare feet pushed into the sand.
Keenan had the strangest feeling that somehow he knew her.He sat down beside her in the doorway and as she turned towards him he knew he’d known her all his life.

She smiled at him and lifted up her chin. There stuck in her chest, just at the top of her breast bone was Mother Cary’s butterknife. Keenan knew at once he’d put the knife in the girl’s body. He was appalled but when he started to say that he was sorry, she only smiled sadly and said
“It’s not your fault Keenan Mowat. You only did what my father told you. The old rogue wants to keep his daughters forever. But you could take it out for me.”
The knife was buried up to its little patterned hilt. A wound that should surely be fatal. Keenan had heard of people surviving stabbing only to die when the weapon was pulled out. His hand hesitated and pulled back.
“You won’t hurt me, “ the girl told him gently, and laid her long fingers on his bare arm. ”Just take it out.”
Keenan took hold of the knife’s hilt and the girl looked into his eyes, as slowly he pulled the knife free.
“Put your hand on the wound, “ she told him and as Keenan touched her cool skin, the wound closed beneath his fingers.

The hut began to fade. Keenan could feel that the girl was slipping away, as if the whole world was tilting so as to slide her from him. He wiped the butterknife on his trousers and reached out to hand it to her
“ It’s all I have to give you.” he said, “ Keep it so I’ll know you, again when we meet.”
The girl looked at him, slow and solomn, her look as dark as a great wave,
“Are you sure?” she said
“Quick,” said Keenan, “take it before I lose you.”
Her fingers wrapped around the butterknife, and green salt water closed over over her smile.

Keenan found himself falling down the long staircase with the old man’s voice booming around his head
“Keenan Mowat, you and your brothers must never go to sea again. Do you heed me lad?”

Gulls and crows calling over the corpses brought Keenan back to the world. The sun was up and beside him his brothers lay sleeping. The oldest held a boat hook and the other an axe, their arms cradling the tools tenderly, like lovers. When at last they woke, there didn’t seem much need for talking.
“Fishing never did make much of living.” said the oldest brother
“A shop” said the other, “there’s money in retail I reckon.”
“Keenan can go to cousin Andrew in Wisconsin. “ said the oldest,
“That’s a good long way from any sea!” said the other.

Keenan made a fine doctor. Emergencies were his field. Taking prompt action under pressure. Staying calm with a storm raging all around him. His work engulfed him, saving lives and sometimes losing them was all his world. From where he lived his life, in the middle of a continent the fishing life he grown up with seemed as distant as the ocean. Only in in his dreams did the sea come close, green and cool, whispering clear up the long shore of his soul.

And then his brother’s died. Together all their lives they passed within a day of each other. Keenan took a plane to go to their funeral but when he reached the little airport for the hop over the sound to the island, the flight had gone.
“If you hurry, “ the lady at the tourist booth told him, “you’ll get the ferry.”

It was a calm night. So calm the frosty stars reflected in the silky sea. Keenan breathed in the cold salt smell of the sea, and felt his heart turn in his chest. He wondered if it might be time for him to retire from being a doctor of emergencies.
By the time the call ‘Abandon Ship!’ went through the ferry there was water almost lapping into Keenan’s bunk. He climbed out on deck in his bare feet.
It was chaos. Lifeboats launching, people shouting and wild sea like dragons teeth leaping all around in the howling wind. The ferry was going down it was clear.

Keenan ignored it all. Out in the bow, leaning on the rail as if taking the air on a sweet summer night, was a woman. Her back was to him, yet there was something in her silhouette he knew, and when she turned to him as he approached, she said his name,
“Keenan Mowat, I thought my father told you never to go back to sea?”
She laid her long fingers on his arm and he saw, gleaming in the neckline of her coat, Mother Cary’s Butter knife held on a silver chain. Keenan smiled and took her hand.
“I’ve always loved you.” he told her,
“And I’ve always loved you right back.” she replied.

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Festivaletteratura…The Best Literary Festival in the World

By Nicola | Published: September 10, 2012

I’ve just got back from four days at the festivaletteratura, the most wonderful literary festival – I’d be tempted to say – in the world. Not only an amazing line up (well ME… oh yeah and Toni Morrison, Neil Macgreggor, Roddy Doyle, Luis Sacher and a whole long and gorgeous list of writers from Italy and around the world) but the most ravishingly lovely setting, Mantova, the city Romeo ran away to when he quit Verona,recently designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Mantova sits like a queen on a throne, in the middle of a lake in the Po valley. As you approach the city, rushing across the long bridge over the silk-smooth water, the vast 15th Century walls of the Ducal palace, meet you, grand and solemn. Behind them is a world of internal courtyards and towers, colonnades and gorgeously frescoed halls. Mategna filled a room with ‘La Familia Gonzaga’, whose expressions and clothes are still as fresh and clear as if the paint had only just dried. Pisanello roughed out a fresco the size of a tennis court but never finished it (I like to think he was wooing some local beauty who he wasn’t supposed to be wooing and had to make a quick gettaway). The Ducal palace is just the start of Mantova’s delights – there is grand and domestic architecture from 600 years of Italian invention, plus all the usual happinesses of Italian street culture – fabulous food, loud conversation and a general delight in being alive and in the moment. Oh, and did I mention the sunshine? After the long, wet punishment of this last Summer in the UK, it felt like a personal blessing to have to wear sunglasses.



The Mantovani LOVE the festivaletteratura. They flock to it from every street, from every town and village for miles around. It’s like Bethlehem Dec 24th in the year nought – if you want a bed and you haven’t booked it, you’ll be sleeping in a manger. Cars and bicycles are left parked in drifts and odd angles, as if their owners just couldn’t wait to get out and hear what writers have to say. The book shop is stuffed with people and by the time the festival ends, the shelves look like fields after a swarm of locusts has passed through.

To be in the company of such book lovers, in such a place is beyond wonderful for a writer. All those cold, dark days alone in front of a sullenly blank screen, with your feet in four pairs of socks because the advance is late and you can’t afford to turn the heating on; those days when stacking supermarket shelves seems a more justifiable way of spending your time or when a beloved title goes out of print like a child dying in the night. ALL those days don’t matter any more: you are in the sunshine and these lovely Mantovani want to hear what you have to say, want to read your words.


For me, and I suspect almost every other writer who comes to Mantova, there are more direct inspirational benefits too, things about the place and the people that feed directly into your work. When I came to Mantova for the first time six, perhaps even seven, years ago, I found the location for an image which had been sprouting in my head. This is the way stories always begin for me, with a single, emotion-charged picture swimming into focus in my brain. The moment I stepped into the Piazza in front of the Ducal palace, with its high rows of pigs-trotter battlements, I knew I had found the location for the final scene in my story, although I wasn’t sure what the rest of the story would be. The wide old spaces of Mantova’s piazza’s haunted my dreams, and over several more visits to Italy, the vivid images began to join up into a narrative that became a book, written but not yet published.


So far it’s called ‘The Silent Circus’ – although I’m not great with titles and that may change. It’s set in a fairy tale world, based on Mantova, the Po valley and the Dolomites, in the early 15th century. It’s about a child called Mite, his friend – a bat called Sneeze – and their companions in a troupe of traveling acrobats and performers. All are children, bought or stolen from poor familes, by the beautiful but wicked circus trainer and owner, Manco; all the children are dumb, voiceless from birth or made so at the hands of Manco’s cruel sidekick Guido and his white-hot iron pincers. Manco presents a lovely face to the world, handsome and charming, a kind benefactor to orphans, giving the children in his care a skill and a chance to live a glamourous life on the hire wire above the flame-lit piazzas of towns and villages all over the province. But there is a terrible, dark secret at the heart of The Silent Circus: Manco hires out his young agile performers as thieves and slaves; any child returned to him damaged, is simply killed.The children live in fear and sadness, poisoned by cruelty and misuse and kept captive by their own inability to speak out. But Manco is greedy and when he comes to Mantova to collude with corrupt Nobility and merchants and pull off a great and daring crime, he over stretches himself. In the Mantova of my story, as in the real Mantova, there are ordinary people who can read, who can write and who can think, people who have rejected ignorance and slavery. With the help of a young Mantovani musician, Mite and Sneeze find a voice for the voiceless children and reveal the dark heart of the Silent Circus and of the city’s rulers. The poison of Manco’s lies and deceit, and the corruption of the ruling nobility and officialdom is revealed to the Mantovani, who take the children to their hearts.

I finished the book three years ago but when I came back to Mantova this year, I found that, as so many times in my writing life, things which I thought I’d made up, turn out to be true. Just as there is a dark secret at the heart of the Silent Circus and the Mantova of my story, so the real, modern Mantova has a dark secret: I learned from a group of local Mantova mums that there is an underground wave of deadly pollutants – benzene and other powerful carcinogenic petrochemical leftovers – making its way through the aquifers around Mantova towards that silky lake. Its secret, invisible presence can already be discerned in the foods of which the area is so proud – the dairy products and meat, raising the incidence of tumours in the local population and showing its ugly face in human breast milk: Mantovani babies are being poisoned by this deadly secret on their mother’s breasts.

Once the wave progresses through the aquifers and makes it into the lakes, there will be no stopping it. It will explode through the ecosystem and the food chain of the region, poisoning everything faster than you can say ‘World Heritage Site’. When people hear the word Mantova they will no longer think of Romeo or festivaletteratura but of Bhopal, Chernobyl and Serviso.

Fortunately, while it is still relatively contained in the aquifers, the dark secret poison can be stopped. It won’t be cheap, the equivalent of four euros per head of the Italian population – one less slice of pizza per person. But at the moment the solution and the terrible irreversible consequences of not financing it, are being lost in a sea of pointless bickering over who is to blame. No one is prepared to take responsibility and act. And while local industry and government squabble, the silent, secret poison creeps ever closer, bringing lovely Mantova closer to ruin, every moment.

A local doctor Gloria Costani,(who uncovered the high incidence of tumours in the region) her husband, Paolo Rabitti, a scientist and legal advisor, and a group of parents, scared for the future of their kids, ‘The Mantua Mums’, are trying to spread the word amongst the ordinary citizenry of the city, but they are faced with a wall of denial and silence.

I’m hoping that once more my story will prove to be true. That the good, book-loving Mantovani, the readers who reject ignorance and like to think, will pull this dark secret out into the light. Will describe it clearly, in words so they can understand the threat it poses to the life of their City and then they will act, to reject darkness and lies and poison and safeguard the future of the children of Mantova.

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writing in the hubbub

By Nicola | Published: August 20, 2012

It’s a weird thing, at home in my study I can’t stand the slightest sound. I have a tin of fly spray beside my computer because I can’t even work through a buzzing fly. When I lived in the Devon countryside, I had to wear my partner’s chainsaw ear defenders to keep out the sounds of our sheep baaing. But when I’m out…on trains, in cares and now sitting in the Author’s Yurt at the Edinburgh Book Festival I can work in amongst all sorts of distractions that would normally drive me nuts. I’ve sat here for more than an hour now, with a printout of Whale Boy on a cushion on my lap, happily editing. Around me there are conversations of all sorts going on, presenters and authors taking about their forthcoming sessions, authors catching up with old mates who they only meet up with on the literary roundabout of festivals. It’s sunny outside – I’ll just say that again shall I – it’s sunny outside (last time I was here three years ago the central area between the marquees was a lake and I wore all the clothes I’d brought with me, all at once) and as it’s warm I can hear more conversation coming through the walls of the yurt. The voice of one of my writing idols is right next to my head. But I’m not really listening to any of it…just looking at the words in front of me, scribbling in the margins engaging with the story I finished last week and seeing it from the distance I need to improve it ( well that’s the theory).

Its odd. I think it’s because none of the noise here, is anything to do with me. There is not a single thing here that’s mine. It’s a bit like other people’s babies crying – I don’t even hear them and I could tune in to my own making the slightest squeak from the other end of the house.

There’s something liberating about being in a place that isn’t my study and working. As if any work I manage to do here is a bonus so it makes it into a kind of play, as if I’m not really trying to work at all. It takes the pressure off, suddenly after weeks of slogging away, being in a different place has given ideas the licence to seep through gently from the other side of the blotting paper in my brain. I finally understand why Alan Ahlberg works in cafes. Maybe I should try it on a more regular basis. I could visit public places and set up my laptop on a picnic table in a busy park, or the corner of an art gallery, or perhaps even a zoo. The idea spot is slightly elevated, a place overlooking activity and bustle but slightly removed, so you can look at details or a bigger picture. Perhaps that’s attractive because it mirrors the process of writing…visualising a bigger pictures but finding the tiny details that embody it, the little silver bullets of dialogue, description that carry the essence of a character, a moment, and emotion. A balcony over an Italian square would be lovely but failing that a tea room next to a very good haberdashery department would do nicely. So if anyone knows of a cafe like the one that used to be on the mezzanine of The old John Lweis in Bristol, let me know.

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Why Write Non Fiction?

By Nicola | Published: August 16, 2012

For a while now there has been terrible gloom amongst the writers of non fiction for children. almost no body gets paid royalties, just a flat fee, and that has been getting flatter and flatter, and is now so flat for many writers as to be a molecular monolayer. And it isn’t just the money, it’s the fact that the people who put non fiction books together are getting things in the wrong order. Instead of starting by seeking out an author with a track record in writing for a particular age group or with specific subject knowledge,  they are coming to the writers last. This means that, increasingly, writers are being asked to complete whole books in weeks, or even days, with no time to check, research, think and with no input at the start of the book. Of course a skilled writer can WRITE fast, but with no steering input at the start and with no time to think, the structure and function of the finished text will be a long way short of the best it can be. In some cases it’ll be toe curling, and the writer forced to churn it out, will put their head in their hands and wail.  This way of producing books is treating words as if they were something you could buy by the pound and squirt in like tile grouting (sorry those of you who’ve heard that phrase from me before).

Of course, as a writer of children’s non fiction all this makes me very, very, VERY cross. It’s a horrible negative feedback. Writers are not valued, so they are paid less, employed last with no time to do a good job, so the work they do is less good, so they are paid less, employed last. etc etc etc. But why does it MATTER?

Well, because there are number of casualties in this  situation. The first is, obviously, the writer: devalued, demoralised and – I’m not kidding here – in some cases forced out of a profession because it’s just no longer financially viable to stay in it. The next casualty is the book: abused and also devalued, it goes out into the world and gives a very poor report of itself, earning a poor reputation and making parents wonder why they are spending the price of two burgers on something they think they can get off the web for nothing.

But the third casualty is the most bloody. The one that makes me most angry: it is the intellectual and cultural heritage of a generation of children. Without good quality, creative, innovative non fiction – well researched, well presented, well written and age appropriate – children face a blank wall of information. A monolith of in-penetrable facts everywhere, like those dancing rows of figures that code for the world in the Matrix movies. What good children’s non fiction offers them is a door of the right size through the right bit of that wall. Without it, they are not invited into the world of knowledge, to open one door and then spend the rest of their lives opening others.

There is an even higher possible body count too, because for some children, typically male children, non fiction is a route into a more general world of the written word. Without it they face a life time of not being readers (like a male primary school teacher who confided in me not so long ago “I’m not much of a reader”) . Ok you shrug (well, no I know you probably don’t cos if you weren’t a reader you wouldn’t have found this blog…just imagine someone shrugging) So what? You aren’t a reader…well there are films aren’t there?

Deeeeeep breath for me here, because the argument that reading doesn’t matter is such obvious moronic nonsense as to make my veins fizz.

We don’t talk to each other in pictures. Pictures do tell a thousand words, but they tell a thousand different words to each person who looks at the picture. A picture is open to a number of different interpretations. Words are specific, precise, exact. And as long we desire communication that is precise, we’ll need to use them. And as long as we need to use them, then reading will be a skill essential to life.

Reading is the fastest, most autonomous way of growing the self. And why is that important? Well, when I was a kid at school we learnt that one of the characteristics of living things, how you tell something that is alive from something that’s dead in other words, is that live things grow.

So if you don’t read its much, much more difficult to distinguish between you and a corpse.

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Just Finished

By Nicola | Published: August 15, 2012

I don’t normally get covers of books before I’ve written them, but its happened a few times this year, and last week my lovely editor at Random sent me the ‘first go’ at the cover for my next book for them, ‘Whale Boy’. I’ve never had a cover that spoke so intimately to me whilst I was still writing…it plugged right in to all that I was feeling  and sort of validated it. I always tell people I’m like Tinkerbell, I have to hear people say they believe in me or I disappear in a puff of pixie dust, and this cover was the biggest ‘I believe’ I’d had in a long, long time. I was at a pretty low ebb writing last week, losing faith in my ability and in my story, but the cover renewed my belief in what I was doing. So by the time I sat down at my desk on Monday morning I could see the finish line and I resolved that I wouldn’t let another sleep get between me and it, so at half past midnight on Monday I wrote the last words and brought the story to an end.

‘Whale Boy’ has been the most painful, most exhausting writing I’ve ever done. It’s partly the fact that this book is the fourth I’ve written this year and the longest, and partly the substance of the story itself. When I start to write – and I’m sure this is the same for loads of writers – I think I’m writing about ‘x’ but when I get to the end of a story I find I’ve been writing about ‘y’ and probably ‘z’, ‘q’ and ‘h’ as well, and that my sub-conscious has been working through its own little agendas while my conscious was attending to technicalities – where the commas went and how much sub plot to put in dialogue etc etc etc. So whilst my conscious thought this was a book about a friendship between a boy and young wild whale, my subconscious was weaving in all sorts of things: my travels to the Caribbean and to drug ravaged Bogota, my friend’s relationship with a parent with dementia, my own past as a very solitary child with a sick parent…and making out of them a story about love and responsibility. I don’t want to give away the final scene, but my conscious and subconscious finally got together to write it and it isn’t ‘happy ever after’. It’s tough, because really loving and really taking responsibility for your actions is tough.

Of course, that isn’t the end of work on the book; in many ways just the start. Next week, I’ll start to edit. And the cover will help there too. I’ll pin it to the wall above my desk and it will help to tie in all the ends, take away any stray strands that aren’t working towards that vision. In an ideal world I would, like Stephen King, leave it in a drawer for a month or more before looking at it, but I have two more books waiting to be written this year and I can’t afford the luxury of a month. And in any case, this story is straining to be on its way out to the world, already feeling as if it has a life of its own.

I’m shattered. And of course I often am when I finish a book. It seems so daft and melodramatic to say that sitting and making stuff up is in any way tiring, but it is. I can’t  pretend it isn’t because in the few days after a book is done I’m honestly fit for the scrap heap. I look like death, burst into tears and have no physical coordination. Fell over a step last night on my way home and was digging gravel out of my knees at 2 am.  When I finished my manatee book earlier this year I reversed my car into my garage wall…the space that I drive into a million times with mm perfect precision. And this morning, when the proofs for my next picture book for Walker Books, ‘The Promise’ (about which more soon) arrived I was blubbing like a Bay City Rollers fan over a tartan scarf (you have to be 45 plus, to get that sorry).

It makes me realise that all the hippy-dippy stuff about spiritual/ creative recharging is actually true. My batteries are flat and part of my job now is to recharge them because nine am on Monday morning ‘Whale Boy’ will be back on my screen, to be polished and honed, made to match that lovely cover. What I really need is a month trailing my toes in the sea, swimming and dreaming. What I have is four days, one of which – tomorrow must be devoted to coming up with New Ideas so I have some books to write next year too and won’t have to stack shelves in a supermarket. Luckily, I know some recharging shortcuts: singing (rehearsal with my lovely guitarist mate this afternoon) and dancing which I intend to do ALL WEEKEND starting with the Seth Lakeman gig on Friday night. Ahhh. Feel better already!

 

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Walking on Skirrid Fawr

By Nicola | Published: July 1, 2012

I have terrible posture, physically and emotionally. I’m always looking down. This means I don’t trip up on the small stuff but I’m capable of walking into trees, walls, ditches, dark alleys and dead ends. The upside is that I notice and cherish details…a snail, grass, people’s hands, the corner of an eye, a kiss.

I’m involuntarily drawn to the edge of things, the places where one thing turns into another, fact into fiction, land into sea, love into indifference.

Of course boundaries are dangerous, it doesn’t do to be on the wrong side of them. My addiction to them means I am never safely in the middle of anything, a genre, a relationship, a family, a landscape. I’m always on the sidelines, the outside of everything, looking in, neither fitting or belonging. But even this has advantages, edges are interesting, two things for the price of one, and not being in the middle of anything means I’m free to walk away whenever I want.

Sometimes I think I’d like to change, learn to look up more and try to enjoy middles rather than sides. But I think it’s too late. If I look up now and take a long view in my life there is the ultimate edge, the last edge that will see me safely, at last, truly in one thing forever. And every time I think I’m in the middle of something, I find I was at the edge all along anyway.

So I think I’ll hang onto my predilection for looking down, enjoying the details, the little features of transition from one thing in to another, cherishing the small joys of a harebell caught in grass stems, the touch of a hand. I will go on finding myself in unexpected dark alleys, featureless plains, but also at unlooked for waterfalls, beaches with white driftwood in the twilight. I’ll always value unpredictability in all things, from landscapes to lovers.

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Dominica Diaries

By Nicola | Published: June 14, 2012

I’m back from the tropical wonderful-ness that is Dominica. Outside, here in Wales, the weather is doing comedy rain, rain so hard, so visibility-obscuring as to be faintly ridiculous and artificial looking; the kind of rain you get on cheap, made-for-TV movies when a guy with a big hosepipe is standing just out of frame and squirting the actors, in a shot that is other wise bright and sunlit.

Dominica, an island country with a population only slightly larger than Carlisle, is one of my favourite places on earth. It’s a little mountainous, forested jewel, surrounded by seas warm as bath water. I was there to help with a long term study of sperm whales, directed by my friend Hal Whitehead from Dalhousie University and to do some research for my next novel fro Random House. But things didn’t turn out quite as planned….

Here are some posts I wrote while I was there…

May 28th Roseau, Dominica

Thanks to my friend Hal (zoology professor, sailor extraordinaire and sperm whale supremo) and his excellent taste in shipmates ( I’m his one failure of judgement in 35 years) I have sailed with some wonderful people on a succession of boats from little leaky wooden Firenze in the late seventies, through swish Elendil in the eighties and now lovely fat bottomed, motherly Baleana.

One of the first people I sailed with was Patty. Patty had been first mate on a tall ship, the Regina Maris and was full of sail lore and sail skill. She was a fabulous singer and musician and taught me songs I still sing to this day. She also shared with me a surreal and silly sense of humour. I don’t really expect anyone else to understand why we found our impersonations of ‘The Happy Salamander’  – open mouthed, dead eyed expressionless – funny, but it made us giggle every time. We pored over books of cetacean identification to find our favourite, most wanted-to-see species (crack open any zoologist even a tiny bit and you will find a fact obsessional geek) and lighted on Pepanocephala electra. Who could resist such a gorgeous Latin name, so much like a command issuing from the end of a magician’s wand? But there was more to P.electra than that. In the illustration it looked pretty much like our impression of the Happy Salamander AND it had a wonderfully comic – or so we thought- English name: The Mealy Mouthed Whale; this because of the white insides of its lips. Patty and I of course took the mealy mouthed at its other meaning.

We never saw Mealy but ever since Patty and I have been the founders and  only known members of the ‘Pepanocephala electra Appreciation Society’ . So when I arrived at the bar of the Anchorage Hotel in Dominica on Thursday night and was told by Marina – another of Hal’s fine choices otherwise known as Marina the Ninja Warrior Princess – that they had been seeing, ACTUALLY SEEING , Pepanocephala I was delighted. (Marina is from the Yukon and I imagine all Yukon women to be able to say the things she does, such as ‘last summer a bear looked in my tent’ and ‘when I was canoeing across Hudson Bay…’ and ‘it would be useful if sperm whales were different colours like orange and pink’. Also to be able to operate a computer tracking sperm whale clicks, whilst taking perfect photographs, cooking dinner and cracking narrative comedy better than Eddie Izzard).

For me, the Mealy mouthed whale had become a kind of symbol of the promise of any voyage on Hal’s boat, the chance of seeing new and unexpected creatures, of experiencing the adventure and discovery that the ocean offers. So I boarded Baleana in good spirits. I was with my old friends, Hal and his photographer and explorer partner Jenny, with a beloved and bonkers shipmate Marina and two new partners in crime young biologists Mauricio from Brazil and Ashely from Ontario. I knew that I would have to go through my usual rite of passage, thirty six hours of seasickness, before finding my sea legs, but even that didn’t seem too daunting. After weeks at my desk and three years since I had last been to sea I had high hopes of my week on Baleana. New animals, new friendships and cementing of old ones.

I flopped in my usual bunk- port side, just forward of the galley – the bunk I have spent literally months in since turning 20, and slept.

And I woke up to the edge of a night mare. The vague niggle of infection in my right ear that I live with all the time now had stepped up an assault on my inner ear and given Seasickness, which normally only gets into my body, access to all areas. I had been taken over, possessed. There wasn’t an idea, a thought left in my mind, the blank gluey grey of Seasickness had erased it all. For the first day I couldn’t even stand.

On  the second day I rallied, the seas were a little calmer – meter swells rather than two meters – and I made it on deck to see sperm whales: first a little calf maybe four or five  meters long lolling a cricket pitch away from us, it’s round head loping along and coming shining from the water, it’s tail swishing the surface as it waited for mum to return; then adults in fits and starts of little groups of ones and twos and threes, lolling in the rough water, straight black backs like logs and forward pluming blows stolen by the wind. Noddy terns and wide awakes dotted occasionally over the white tops and the water sang in blue ness. But I wasn’t there. I tried to be. I stood in the bow, clinging to the forestay and sang and sang, trying to reconnect my self to myself.

All Patty’s old songs and all my new ones couldn’t save me. I was lost. For almost the first time in my life I had the sense that my dialogue with the world, my conversation with nature had fallen silent.

The thought of nights on watch, alone and in sole waking command of the boat and the lives it contained filled me with dread: how could I function reliably when even the voluntary lifting of a hand was becoming a burden?

My shipmates were so kind. Hal took my watches, everyone tried to make me feel better, said they too had felt this way it would pass. But I’ve been experiencing seasickness ever since I stepped on a boat at 20 and I know it well, and I knew this was an order of magnitude different from anything I’d felt before.

When on the third day, I felt even worse, and the presence of spinner dolphins didn’t even make me smile and by 8am I was back in my bunk dead as a stone, I knew it wouldn’t pass. That if I stayed aboard the nightmare would only extend and extend and I would become a liability to the rest of the crew.

So last night, bless their hearts Baleana’s captain and crew sailed me to land. Rosea came up in the evening sun as pretty and naively sweet as a box of crayons. Clouds sat on the green high tops and the water whispered a calypso on the shore. Hal, and Jen and Ninja and Mauricio and Ashely said goodbye to me and  Marina rowed me ashore. They had to inflate the dingy specially, take a detour from the transect survey of whales a few miles out and generally add to their workload to do it. A bagful of metal water bottles filled with piña coladas was a very small return. I couldn’t bear to watch them sail away and anyway, I was too grateful just to lie down on a bed.

We all carry within us other countries, other states of being into which we slip, or are pushed from time to time in our lives. And like any kind of traveling it can leave its mark. I have been in one of those other countries for the last few days and I feel changed by that experience of terrible blankness. Ravaged. For the time being at least diminished both mentally and physically.

I’m sitting up in bed as the sun rises, I can hear birds and cockerels and the sea on the beach below. I have an empty week in front of me and with a day of rest to recover and maybe some ear drops, I can fill it…I have research to do for my book and of course Dominica is the most ravishing of islands. But I’m filled with a sense of failure and of loss. Loss of being on deck in the early morning, loss of endless silly jokes ( though I did manage to teach Mauricio the value of the word Thingy, which I hope he remembers) loss of flying fish and the gorgeous weirdness of sperm whales.

The new notebook I bought for the trip and labelled with a drawing of a sperm whale is empty. I spent some of last  night reading a new report about the terrible state of the worlds seas, how we are in the midst of a much faster decline due to climate change and pollution than previously thought. And I have this awful fear that somehow Pepancocephala and I have fallen over some dreadful precipice, and will never now be in the same place and the same time.

But at least for now Dominica is still beautiful. In a day I will regain health. Blue, blue seas stretch out in front of me, still containing Patty’s lovely whale with its Mealy Mouth, and a  brown pelican has landed on the sunrise scattering water to fish for its breakfast. While there is life, there is hope.

 

SILVER LININGS. DOMINICA MAY 30th

Since having to leave Baleana five days early on Sunday night I’ve been experiencing the silver lining to that dark cloud.

The first glitter of silver was apparent even before I left the boat, because as we drew near to land, Dominica’s warm arms stretched out to wrap me: the spicy, cinnamony scent of the green hills behind Roseau her capital, floated out over the water and the colours of the houses round the bay gleamed in the sunset. It all promised me quietly that everything was going to be alright, just like Bob Marley always said.

And after ten hours of sleeping like a stone, and a day of schussing myself and saying ‘there there’ internally quite a lot, it was. I was ready for the next stage of my Dominican visit which I had planned all along and which had merely arrived a little early. I had to think about the setting for my third book for Random House, whale boy. I don’t want to tell you the story because it’s always dangerous to talk about either plot or characters before they are cooked, and in this case I haven’t even got the mixture out of the bowl yet, but I think the title gives you a bit of a clue.

I wouldn’t presume to set a book in a real version of anywhere where I hadn’t spent at least a year. So the island in whale boy won’t BE Dominica, it’ll be an imaginary place, but I want it to have a real FLAVOUR, of the a real Dominica. My task then over the five or six days I have is to soak up as much as I can. This isn’t as hard as it might be in other colder, stonier hearted places. In Dominica people sit on their doorsteps and chat, they lean over walls in the sunshine and watch the world go by, they ask ‘how are you?’ and truly expect an answer. So talking to people and listening to the musical pattern of their speech and the lovely old fashioned, poetic way they use English here, is an easily available delight.

‘ And what are you doing’ in my territory this morning?’ a tall gentlemen smilingly asks a lady in a flowery frock and a little trilby hat

‘Looking for you maybe?’ she replies with a kind of sweet flirtatiousness she has clearly possessed in all of the six decades since she turned fourteen.

And he replies, open, gallant and equally flirtatious

‘so you have had an easy time of it, for here I am!’

There are lots of other sorts of taking here too, a French creole, a modern rap and Rasta speak, neither of which I can follow or repeat, but I can let the feel of those kinds of talk wash around me and leave a little water mark.

Finding things out here is a pleasure too. People want you to know about their island. In the fish market yesterday I met Ishmael: greying at the temples and rather dashing. We began a discussion of the relative merits of being English or Dominican, both finally agreeing that to be Dominican was overall the better thing. When I said I wanted to know about fisheries on the island he whisked upstairs to an office where Harold, a very senior person in the fisheries department, cancelled his appointments and spent an hour answering my questions.

I found out how the ecology and marine geography of the island mesh with history, economics and culture to shape the lives of the islands fishermen.

“Small islands like Dominica”, Harold told me, “fish very efficiently. We don’t have any waste. Nothing is thrown back, there is no by catch. Everything is caught, brought to shore and sold or even eaten on the same day.”

Compared with the millions of tons of fish thrown away, the turtles, seabirds, cetaceans killed by the big scale fisheries of other countries Dominica is a model of good practice.

In Dominica no one can afford huge hydraulic winches and the other heavy duty gear that goes with big gill nets and longlines of miles in length. The poorest people fish inshore with a net that perhaps twenty people pull out into a bay and haul back. Everyone gets a share even if they don’t own the net. This type of fishery is still a big cohesive factor binding communities together and providing a livelihood for those who have no other source of income, women, the very young, the very old, the landless. A small boat with two people can put fish traps down in water as deep as sixty meters and bring enough fish to take to market or feed a family. More prosperous fishermen who can afford a boat big enough to get out five or ten miles from shore also fish on a manageable scale: using hooks and lines, out at dawn, back by tea time, sold out by supper and then home. Nothing wasted, nothing caught that you didn’t mean to.

And there’s another factor that makes Dominican fisheries safe as well as efficient. Even those fishermen with boats and outboards don’t go out to sea for days on end, and they are hardly ever out at night

“The women are the anchor here,” Harold told me with a smile, ” Dominican fishermen like to come home to their wives at night”

Like the flash of fish in a dark net, the ‘hundred cran of the silver darlins’ of Ewan McCols famous folk song, Harold’s words shone for me, in the dim office over the fish market. They lit up the things I had seen – the loop of a net in bay,  a battered row boat loaded with fish traps, two figures and the outline of a hull zooming to the horizon at dawn  – allowing me to understand some of  the meaning of the pictures on my camera and get a sense of the pattern of the lives I’d glimpsed. Another silver lining to my cloud.

 

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