The Sea Inside. Philip Hoare
magnificent photographs’ as a visitor, Marianne North, recorded; ‘others were tumbling about the tables, chairs, and floors with quantities of damp books, all untidy and picturesque; the lady herself with a lace veil on her head and flowing draperies. Her oddities were most refreshing.’ Julia photographed local people in the same style in which she had posed the great and good of British society. But her new island idyll – as if she had finally accomplished the feat of towing the Isle of Freshwater to the Indian Ocean – was only fleeting. Four years later, having moved to a house high in the tea-growing hills of Nurawa Eliya, then known as Little England, Julia died, looking up at the stars, uttering her last word, ‘Beautiful.’
As I resume my climb, I’m forced to stop every now and again – not because I’m running out of breath, but because the view itself is breathtaking. Behind me is the landscape I have known all my life, levered up and flattened at the same time; a three-dimensional map of my hinterland, from Bournemouth’s beaches to Portsmouth’s towers, signalling the south-eastern sprawl towards London.
Everything falls away, as if seen from a lurching helicopter. At the feet of the cliff, the sea is turned cloudy, as though scattered with bath salts. Beyond, its open surface is pooled with shifting shafts of sunlight and mercurial upwellings. It seems to move under itself, inexorably, a great slow mass beneath a rippling skin. The quiet is unnerving. You’d think such a vast vista would evoke an awful noise, echoing with what Tennyson called ‘the moanings of the homeless sea’. This is as far as I can go. Any further and I’d have to take to the water. I feel a sudden surge of inexplicable homesickness, perhaps because I can see my home, near and far away.
I think the silence is getting to me.
William Davenport Adams bellows – it’s the former schoolmaster in him. ‘Oh, there is such a glorious prospect from this bold headland!’ he shouts, making himself heard over the long-departed wind, ‘a vast sweep of the Channel blends strangely in the distance with the deep-blue sky, and when you turn, lo, beneath you lies the silent peninsula-plain, with its villages, and wooded knolls, and sequestered farm-houses, and sparkling streams.’
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