Writings for Brear

The children, asleep in the back after a 4 am start, aren’t missing much. Dawn is cloud-cover filling slowly and greyly with light. Driving west across Cornwall, the A30 grows each year a little straighter here, wider there. The ferry this time batters and bludgeons its way through a heavier sea than normal. Passengers bend double, recklessly, voluptuously abandon themselves to being ill. I disappear into my binoculars, see no dolphins, am stoical. Waves foam and pitch, cross-hatched with the annual flickering of shearwaters.

Every August we do some (generally more pleasurable) version of this. The ship between Penzance and the Isles of Scilly is still the same one I first boarded about the age my son is now. I liked one island straight away. To describe Bryher as England’s westernmost settlement makes it sound too bleak. Tresco, to its east, lies across a sheltered strait, more or less a sandy lagoon. The sea to its north and west, by contrast, is indeed jagged with rocks all the way to the horizon. The rest of the island group is to the south.

The Godolphin Report of 1579 takes up the story: ‘The Isle of Treskawe with som others… did belong unto the Abby of Tavistocke, it is said that Mr Christopher Coplestone canne show writings for the isle called Brear… The auncient rents I know not but if any were paid they were but puffyns or like small value.’ Puffins still pay the rent, after a fashion, or are a chief attraction of the ‘wildlife tours’ which carry visitors, weather permitting, in brightly coloured launches to those rocks and uninhabited islands out on the horizon.

Exactly four centuries after Godolphin reported, a dedicated teacher brought a small group of pupils here on a school trip. It made at least one of them a birdwatcher for life. He badgered his parents to book a holiday on Bryher, as now his own children badger him.

The ferry docks at Hugh Town, on the main island of St Mary’s. The pavements of its high street are agreeably solid this year. An open-air production of The Tempest is advertised. We add it to the long and greedy to-do-list with which we always begin our week here. What we have just sailed through was, it turns out, the leading edge of an actual tempest which arrives later, after we have transferred to our destination.

There, we have more or less slept off the early start when through thin walls familiar intonations are detectable. We don’t have Netflix at home so sibling rivalries sharpen as soon as we go anywhere. Especially the first evening. We settle in the end on something with an environmental theme. Heavy rain drums and the wind gusts. I am dimly aware, as we watch, that it has been drumming and gusting for some time. It takes a lightning flash and a rumble in rapid succession, though, before we finally pause our choice and go to the window. We start paying belated attention to what is going on while we slumber here.

The entire archipelago and the sky above it have turned different shades of the same dim green-gold. As if the islands had all been recast in bronze. This was more like a transmutation than a weather event. What could be behind it? Is this the kind of light which warns, in the tropics, of a hurricane’s approach? As if something has slipped an apocalyptic filter across the sun’s disc: it feels closer to an eclipse than anything else.

By the time I reach the top of the island, the tempest is a dark receding smudge, but still taking up most of the eastern sky. Over the western horizon hangs a calm glow: maybe that eerie earlier light was created by horizontal rays from the sun as it set, passed through a downpour. Such explanations feel inadequate to the sheer strangeness of our welcome.

One-off special effects notwithstanding, I experience every year a low-level anxiety about this trip. Is it really planet-saving defiance of Easy Jet and all its works that brings us here? Or is this merely a symptom of slow-down, of laziness disguised as loyalty? Are we opposing to the instant gratification of cheap flights some slower principle of growth? Or fixating on our lucky, limited corner of the planet, because it is our corner?

Well, we have a week each year to buy in groceries and work it out all over again. After that freakish start, everything goes back politely inside the parameters of normal. Rock pools are unaffected by fog. The heron on its pond is indifferent to drizzle.

You can march around Bryher in a couple of hours. Lots of people do, though the qualities of the isle may not reveal themselves to that kind of examination. I’ve often watched the early morning transatlantic jets flying in, for all I know already on their descent into whichever European city it will be. All those options. I’m reluctant to fly but most ‘slow travel’ is premised on the kind of time and money almost nobody has. So what about its less thoroughly written-up relation, then, namely travelling hardly any distance?

That is what we generally now do. Sea anemones. Open-air Shakespeare. It can feel terminally quaint, like playing at 1860. Or isn’t there a place, I’ll argue back, then, for places where the present has not swept all before it? Doesn’t anywhere you take the trouble to know well eventually begin to open up this question? I reproach myself on bad days with falsifying this place, with trying to bring it to a halt. The mood usually, thankfully, passes and the unfairness with it.

Paul Goodman long ago both ironised and admired ‘the courage with which we human beings soon root ourselves in a new home, in an unlikely place, and decorate the place, and are patriotic once more’. We ‘decorate’ Bryher this year with, among other things, our first dahlia anemone crowned with several rings of brilliant white tentacles. But I’ve done something like this for as long as I can remember. I ‘decorated’ the whole of the West Country as a child, after our move there, by making myself encyclopaedic about birds and Elizabethan explorers. With rocks and ocean all around, with an intrepid sea journey to reach them, the Scillies were readily co-opted.

I didn’t then know about the Godolphin Report, which puts it like this: ‘Within the circyt of these isles are sundry good Roades [i.e. anchorages] and Harborows for shippes veary commodious and needfull unto divers her majisties subjects and neighbours… As for the harmes that would ensew if any enemy should achieve [i.e. occupy] the same I judge myself unsufficient to [unfold]…’ Read this and the remains of sixteenth-century fortifications here cease to be blankly stared-at end-points of after-supper walks. Their presence begins instead to make more sense, to feel less ‘unlikely’. Yours too, even.

There is more to this. Ships venturing into the Atlantic before the eighteenth century had to rely on latitude, measured from the height of the sun or pole star. The 50th parallel was the most convenient for English vessels to follow. Because Scilly lies so close to it, the islands often occupy a special place in accounts of voyages, either as the last sailors saw of England when they left or the first of it they saw upon their return.

Carl Schmitt began his story of ‘unencumbered technology’ with the ocean-going vessels used by early modern explorers. Life on such ships, he argued, was life more absolutely reliant on technology than it ever had been before. The technology was ‘unencumbered’ because its application was no longer embedded in society, as technological innovation on land must still be. Its users were ‘liberated’ from the kind of ethical precepts which might have held them in check at home. How thoroughly they explored and exploited this ‘liberty’ of theirs haunts us yet. Schmitt saw here, and surely he was right, technology striking out on a new path, dispensing in a new way with the past.

Their astrolabes, quadrants and compasses may be remote ancestors of the on-board computers which guide today’s aircraft to their destinations. But the line of descent is direct. The technology now tracking and directing us everywhere did not come from nowhere. Its spirit long preceded the invention of computers. The first accurate survey and mapping of these islands, as we’ll see, were unintended by-products of a sixteenth-century expedition to China. I well recall my astonishment at this discovery, as I added it to the store of everything Scilly has meant and still means now.

We make the most of clear skies one morning and hire kayaks, paddling to a nearby uninhabited island. Samson is famous for the cowrie shells that wash up on the blazing white of its beaches. Tradition has it that if you find one you’ll come back. It appeals to me that such a decision is said to depend on a small thing that is quite difficult to see. On some days, especially when you find one, the tradition feels true to a secretive something about this place, the same something that is lost on those who march around one island before lunch, then another launch, and then another island. On other days, especially when you don’t find one, this ‘tradition’ feels more like the astute invention of a guesthouse owner.

Today it is the former. The tide is right out, sand flats exposed, and I am in luck. Pocketing this year’s finds and their message, I become aware also of being shadowed by a flock of birds. Sanderlings are small waders, almost white, almost silver in some lights, as if they took their colouring from the beaches here. A favourite of mine on those early visits.

All twenty or thirty of them scarper before each breaking wave, then turn as one to pursue the same wave back down the beach. As if set to track forever the exact, shifting point where sea and land meet. A work-shy party now breaks away and heads toward me. Standing barefoot in my private pool of solar-heated water, I watch them encountering similar pools themselves. Three or four promptly start bathing so vigorously it looks more like a water fight. They leave behind a few feathers on the water. One of those is on my desk as I write.

A few are in summer plumage: their numbers around Scilly rise in August because the islands are a stop-over between the Russian Arctic or Greenland, where they breed, and their winter range around the Mediterranean. It’s their small experience of humans which makes them so trusting. I like that about them, too, and the thought of where it comes from.

At the maximum extent of ice cover, around 24,000 years ago, a single glacier stretched from the mountains of what is now Wales across to the east coast of what is Ireland. Part of its southern rim ran across the northern edge of Scilly – Bryher’s northerly half was buried under it. Sea-level was then 120m lower than today and the view from here was mainly of a colossal ice-flow. The glacier carried with it rocks and pebbles from hundreds of miles to the north. These ‘erratics’, left behind when it retreated, still occur on beaches here.

Today’s temperate Europe was then tundra. The staggering distances covered by migratory birds today are traceable to that time. As the ice retreated, breeding grounds on that tundra edged every year a fraction farther off from winter feeding ranges. Each year the birds must travel a little further between them until they were travelling, as they do now, thousands of miles. The migration of sanderlings evolved in response to this change.

To be put in mind of such timescales then becomes in turn part of why you go back. The erratic flint which tells you how far south the ice extended then. A few birds picking their way along the shore can fill you in on its present whereabouts. Are we and our personal timescales mere trifling intruders in this landscape, mere ‘erratics’? Yet they persist in mattering and why should they not? That twelve-year-old, forever peering through binoculars into the middle distance, inevitably missed a good deal. He has tried to make up for it since but the Irish Sea Glacier, for all its thousands of square miles and billions of tonnes, sometimes feels like a relatively small part of what he didn’t know.

To the man he has grown into, the Scillies seem a ‘smarter’ destination than they were. A decade before his first visit, a Labour leader could signal his commitment to Everyman by holidaying here. A pair of binoculars round your neck once signalled membership in a sort of benign masonry. Good binoculars don’t have to be expensive and knowledge about wildlife can be acquired pretty much for free and at any age. The social levelling came built-in and was a part of what I always liked about it.

On a recent visit, the passenger next to me in a launch had a pair round his neck. So I asked, seventies style, if he’d seen anything interesting. He looked me up and down: ‘Not really’, he answered. ‘I did see the Duchess of Cambridge’, he went on. ‘That was interesting.’ I searched his expression for an ironic glimmer. All I could find, if I’m not mistaken, was a hint of spite.

I hesitate to draw the obvious inference. The Scillies have not escaped the wider gentrification of Cornish tourism. Confirmed sightings of film stars grow more frequent. But is it really the world that has changed? Because the Royals have a fan? Or rather that I see it now with clearer eyes? Both, both, knowledge, self-knowledge. Each visit adds to a kind of sedimentary formation in which layers of the personal, historic and prehistoric alternate. Upheavals of every kind leave their trace. Bryher’s northern hills scarred by the weight of ice. The cottage we stay in built for flying boat crews stationed here during the war.

The first accurate map of Scilly is a good example, drawn just as human restlessness finally caught up with the sanderlings’. John Davis undertook three voyages in search of a route to China in the 1580s. He discovered instead the strait between Greenland and the Canadian Arctic which is still named after him. But setting out on the first of those voyages, in July 1585, bad weather detained him on Scilly. His ships, The Sunshine of London and The Moonshine of Dartmouth, were tied up for two unscheduled weeks in a little port on Treskawe, directly opposite Brear.

New Grimsby is still watched over by the ruins of the fort which guarded it then. Strategic concerns, as we’ve seen, were keenly felt in 1579 and rightly so. Within a decade the Spanish Armada did indeed aim to rendezvous off Scilly and only the weather prevented it. The archipelago is noticeably absent from the maps of England which William Saxton drew and published between 1574 and 1579. Davis therefore used his fortnight, his fly-boat and the instruments brought along for New World discoveries, to accurately survey and map these islands for the first time.

Davis was born in Devon but lived for some years at Mortlake, in the home of John Dee, the Queen’s advisor on maritime exploration. Dee instructed him there in the use of his ‘paradoxal compass’, later described by his pupil as an ‘instrumēt portable, of easie stowage and small practise’. The compass was Dee’s proudest achievement, but his account of exactly what it was and what it did is lost. It was some kind of navigational aid for explorers in the higher latitudes. First invented for earlier missions to the Russian Arctic, also in search of a route to China, Davis would certainly have had one on board with him here.

Dee was a significant presence at court and deeply versed in many branches of the new learning. A figure of daunting complexity, he was a mathematician, kabbalist and an alchemist at a time when boundaries between religion, emergent science and the occult were notoriously blurred. He is widely regarded as an inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero.

Which brings us to that poster of which we had taken note on arrival. The week is usually half gone before we begin to make serious inquiries about our plans. The Tempest, though, looked as if it might come to something: the play would transfer to Tresco on our last evening, for its final performance on Scilly. The launch booked to carry the cast back to St Mary’s afterwards could drop us on Bryher. It only remained now to arrange for the right weather.

A bundle of hangings embroidered with strange emblems was visible in the storage area as we crossed to Tresco earlier that day. A long and curiously carved staff lay nearby. Looking about us on the crowded boat, I tried to guess which the actors were. They were none of them film stars so I couldn’t, but that only added to the strangeness.

After picnicking on a beach, there was plenty of time to disagree over which footpath led to the ruined fort. When the wind picked up, we took refuge in a pub and read. Towards evening, though, the sky cleared and the wind dropped. The play was to be performed in the Tropical Gardens, which are extensive. Unsure of the exact venue, I went ahead with my son to locate it. Wandering through the exuberant vegetation, a young man we met introduced himself as Ferdinand and showed us the way.

Having seen a couple of film versions and read it as a graphic novel, my son was keen to try out his ideas. The play was surely too harsh on Caliban, he maintained: ‘This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother’. Caliban was born there. Everybody else leaves at the end. If the island is anyone’s, it’s his, surely. Prospero is an intruder. What did Ferdinand think?

I walked behind, texting our whereabouts while I eavesdropped. Is Caliban’s insistence upon his right to the island, it occurred to me now, an early example of ‘survivance’? It’s a term for the many forms indigenous resistance can take – ‘an active sense of presence over absence, deracination and oblivion… the continuance of stories…’. I wondered further, as I eavesdropped: why does my son home in on this time after time?

Caliban was probably inspired as much by the ‘wild man’ of European folklore as by anyone encountered by the explorers. Gerald Vizenor, the Native American writer who first used ‘survivance’ in this sense, calls Caliban the ‘great white mongrel’ in his fiction, as if to acknowledge his European heritage, but also includes him among indigenous story-tellers. Does any ten-year-old, I reflected now, especially one strongly connected to a place, share in a kind of faith? Is he, through that faith, already aware intuitively of an outside world that will seek to requisition that place, and him, for use as a backdrop to its own dramas?

We are the first of the audience to arrive where the stage is set and the cast is gathered, chatting. Rows of chairs stand empty. Ferdinand turns to me with a quizzical look: it appears I have run up some vicarious credit. So I ask whether he knows about Tresco’s Tempest connection, tell him about Dee as inspiration for Prospero, as a trainer of sea pilots. He wears a ‘curiouser-and-curiouser’ expression as I tell him of one such pilot, departing for China, as he hoped, from a stone quay not twenty minutes’ walk from where we are standing.

Take as many years as you need with a place, build up all the associations you like. Communicating their charm may be less straightforward than you imagine. I finish my summary and watch Ferdinand hesitate. He is about to say something tactful. And then he does.

‘I’m – er – not sure I’d be able to repeat all that and do it justice but Prospero, as it happens, is right behind you…’

I turn and the Duke of Milan smiles absently, pleased with being mentioned and wanting to be polite, but sticking for now with the conversation he already has. The director just then calls on them all to get into costume. Prospero and his future son-in-law excuse themselves and so the chance to deliver my message to the ‘personified type of the creative’ melts into air, into thin air.

The weather is with them and they play to a full venue. To enter his world of Magian invention, the exiled Duke has only to thump the ground once with that staff which had accompanied us in the boat from Bryher. Once again, his project gathers to a head. His charms crack not and in no time Antonio and Alonso stand ‘spell-stopped’ as he moves among them, recalling, convicting, forgiving.

In this production they stand motionless, give no outward sign of hearing. To whom, then, or to what is he speaking in that scene? To their consciences? To their unconscious or past selves? Is Prospero Magus, priest, psychoanalyst, neurodivergent? What kind of words are they that truly reach the hearer, as Prospero’s reach Antonio in that scene?

A cast of travelling players, at the mercy of Cornish weather, bringing with them the simplest props and scenery, prove as well able to prompt such questions as any better-funded outfit. They are still humming about mine ears as we walk afterwards to the quay, Brear’s silhouette ablaze with the sun going down behind it and with everything that play has meant.

Our wait for the ferry on St Mary’s, the following day, would have been quite different had we not seen that play. Queuing to buy sea sickness tablets, I would not have seen Prospero waiting at the entrance to the supermarket, then walking towards the main square with Alonso. None of us would have seen Ariel returning from his solitary stroll along the coast path with an old-fashioned cine camera.

The sea sickness tablets are unneeded. Our return crossing is calm. Watching Gonzalo and Antonio disembark together at Penzance, our revels are not quite ended and neither are our travels. We break the journey home with a day or two where my parents live in the Devon countryside. Arriving well past eleven, we carry luggage in exhausted silence from the car to a silent house. Once everything is in, I go to a north-facing window and look out.

There’s a chance the aurora borealis will be visible even this far south tonight. All the time I was growing up in this house we never saw it. But that band of light along the northern horizon surely cannot be Bideford, unless it has grown meanwhile into a far mightier conurbation than the one I knew. Those two upright beams of light, for example – or are my eyes imperfectly adjusted to something? Even as I watch they are gone.

I lead my family by a promise, native here, back out under the stars. They are roughly half-convinced as we come to the gateway beyond which is a field with a clear view north. Whatever there is, if it is there at all, is sure to be visible from the top of it. A cut of sileage has just been taken and a smell of cut grass hangs in the air. Craning our heads back as we walk, we gaze up at night skies as dazzling as ever they were.

From the brow of that hill it is beyond question. Two, now three columns of blue-green radiance have unmistakably risen up out of that glow along the horizon that can’t be Bideford. My family believes me now. A pair of headlights turn a corner on the far side of the valley, appear ludicrously small then vanish, as if for scale. And many many were those, to judge by what was later posted online, who gladly accepted this invitation from the cosmos to explore night mode on their androids. Many cool pics uploaded.

Meanwhile that play is still running in my head: how would a Caliban have conjured by this midnight phosphorescence? How tricked it into revealing the secret, sacred story of how our world was brought to birth? To a Dee/Prospero, what would this have been if not a vivid manifestation of astral influence? An angelic communiqué insensible to the profane. The living signature appended to a letter from the universe.

If some such power to attend as Shakespeare could assume in his audience is lost or at risk, what practises might revive or strengthen it? Or how might a successor to it be found? If we cannot be reached by this, spell-stopped on our hill-tops, what words of Prospero or anyone else will ever reach us? There was even a meteor shower thrown in – one of them flew clean through the aurora as we watched. Mere matter hurtling to inevitable disintegration, or a heavenly messenger sent to blaze one final trail?

We must not mind too much, I think, how old-fashioned or idiosyncratic the answers we give to such questions seem to others. The columns fade, from three to two, back to none. We walk to the house and to our beds, another week on Scilly added to the store. As each past visit was present this year, so will this one be a presence next time. What the places I know best incrementally teach me, through these repeat visits, forms the core of my answer.