The Darkening
Katrina Porteous listens to the thunder of the sea as a storm rolls in
It is dusk, ‘the darkening’ as we say here in Northumberland. The tide is flowing, a fierce gale blows from the north, sending curtains of rain to lash the windows and, beyond, the sea sounds one endless, low bass roar as it creeps toward the breakwater. Out there, the air tastes dank and salty. It is difficult to tell where rain begins and sea spume ends. Little black and white flocks of oystercatchers huddle, almost invisible, at the breakers’ edge, their sterns to the wind, their scarlet beaks the only splash of colour. Although it is barely 3pm, these ‘back-end’ days shorten towards the winter solstice, and the sky is iron grey, a shade or two lighter than the sea that merges with it at the horizon. Away to the north-east, Longstone Lighthouse, unmanned, its power dimmed, is swallowed up in rain.
I stare out from my window onto a world of white water. The breakers thunder in, formidable, countless, surging over the rocks in an indecipherable rhythm. The inlets between them are combed smooth in herringbone patterns. Hypnotically, unhurriedly, time after time in great pulses, the surges smash onto the rocky headlands, engulfing them, sending slow explosions of white foam to stream away like hair and cascade back, as each new heave and roll follows the last. As a child I would lie in bed at night and listen to this ceaseless rumble, feeling close to something immensely powerful and dangerous, knowing I was safe.
The rocks vanishing under the furious salt white foam all have names: Ebb’s Sneuk, the Roarin’ Rock, Blyth Bus, the Black Rock, the Nacker Hole. Beyond, seas break over the invisible Shad. The names are ancient. Nacker Hole is derived from the name of a Scandinavian sea monster, Ebb’s Sneuk from that of an Anglo Saxon saint. Embedded in them is a two thousand year history of migration, trade and settlement, Dutch, Norse, Anglian, Celtic, a maritime culture that is being forgotten, vanishing as surely as the rocks beneath the incoming tide.
Although much of that old culture and its language has gone, the shore where my grandparents built this house remains much the same: the same rocks, the same rhythm of low and high, spring and ‘deed’ tides, following predictable patterns. I don’t need convincing about global climate change or sea level rise: my work has brought me into contact with scientists who measure carbon dioxide in ancient air bubbles from Antarctic ice cores; or examine sediments that show that, 90 million years ago, Antarctica was entirely without ice. But the storms that come and go outside my window are not noticeably more frequent or furious than in the past. Although there has been some erosion, and attempts to mitigate it, the retired fisherman next door reckons that, in his nine decades, the sea level has scarcely altered. An occasional high spring tide will wash stones and weed onto the road at the Nacker Hole, where it always has, and on low-pressure days, with an east wind behind it, a spring tide has been known to run from there down to the car park, temporarily cutting off – in theory, at least – the harbour headland; although you would barely notice the thin stream if you stepped across it. In his father’s day, over a hundred years ago, a gale like this one blew a herring shed so far into the bay it was never seen again.
“A fisherman called Old Weir joked that his mother’s kitchen flooded so regularly, she rocked his cradle on the water like a boat”
That long bay stretches to the south, invisible now through the rain. A mile away across the empty sand a burn twists down through the dunes into the sea. Its name is the Long Nanny; a Celtic name, pre-dating Anglo Saxon settlement. In storms like this, the Long Nanny’s landscape is invariably transformed. The little burn carves the sand overnight the way a great river gouges rock over millennia. Sometimes the rusting hulk of an old car abandoned during the War washes up out of the sand like a memory.
As a child I often played there, or among the sour, dusty nettles which filled the ruins of a row of cottages on the seaward side of the road in front of this house. Built in 1766, the ‘Old Steads’ were replaced in 1902 by new cottages on higher ground. The older fishermen remembered their elders, born in the Old Steads, who must have lain awake at night, listening to the sea. The cottages were abandoned, it was said, because they were so often ‘washed out’. A fisherman called Old Weir joked that his mother’s kitchen flooded so regularly, she rocked his cradle on the water like a boat.
The darkening is almost complete. Three hours to high tide. The sea’s immense engine roars on, implacable. Already it thunders against the breakwater, sending up towers of white foam which collapse across the road. Its dull, repetitive thud shakes the house. It seems ironic that this enormous force should dissipate in sound and fury, rather than be harvested for the clean energy we so urgently need. But wave power is notoriously difficult to harness.
The lights flicker in my room. We often experience power cuts here. At such times, I think of Old Weir’s mother, the fishermen, the people who first named the Nacker Hole and the Long Nanny, generations of them, stretching back thousands of years, whose material needs were simple – food, warmth, shelter – and whose energies and complex, ingenious lives were devoted to meeting those needs. It is easy to forget that our own demands for material comfort, health, longevity, education, entertainment, distraction, are an unprecedented privilege. Now, as the lights dip, unsteady, the wind and waves’ uproar makes me think, not of the safety of the sea’s predictable limits, but of nature’s immense, ineluctable, self-correcting power.