The Sea Inside. Philip Hoare

      But you can’t keep a beach in your house, despite the teetering piles on my shelves, a terminal moraine of memory, accumulating dust composed of the decomposing me. Deformed oyster shells grown around odd pebbles, smooth grey wooden shapes with knots for eyes, sand-blasted shards of Victorian glass, chunks of marmalade pots, soft stems of clay pipes once sucked between moustached lips and discarded like cigarette butts, and bits of blue willow-pattern plates awaiting ceramic resurrection; all of them tumbled together by the tides. As a boy I listened to the rushing noise inside shells; the same sound has been in my ears for years now, a perpetual ocean in my head.

      In Iris Murdoch’s strange novel The Sea, The Sea, published in 1978, the celebrated actor Charles Arrowby retreats from London to write his memoirs. He lives alone in a ramshackle house on an unidentified English coast, having come to the sea in search of ‘monastic mysticism’. The events that follow – a series of impossible coincidences and fantastical happenings played out in a Shakespearean manner, with Arrowby as a kind of Prospero – take place over one summer. They occur in an indefinably apocalyptic time and place, as if society were on the verge of disintegration – as indeed it seemed to be at the time – although ostensibly all is normal in the world beyond Arrowby’s coastal retreat.

      As he relishes his solitude and the splendour of its setting – swimming off the rocky shore, ordered by its tides or the way he gets in and out of the water via a rope – Arrowby’s idyll is broken one morning by what he imagines or perhaps actually sees: a maned and toothed leviathan. ‘I saw a monster rising from the waves,’ twenty or thirty feet high, coiled and spiny, its head crested and with sharp teeth and a pink mouth. ‘I could see the sky through the coils.’ Although Arrowby puts this terrifying vision down to an acid flashback, a legacy of his misspent youth, the beast is an omen of all that happens afterwards as his former lovers and enemies come back to haunt him. Nor was it coincidence that this unsettling apparition is an echo of a scene in Racine’s Phaedra in which a sea monster appears, so fearsome that it infects the air and causes Hippolytus’ horses to drag their master to his watery doom.

      Throughout Murdoch’s tragi-comic drama, the ever-changing sea abides, a character in itself, a mindful reminder of her hero’s impotence to change his fate and manipulate his friends, despite his deluded attempts to do so. He seems locked into what is happening, all the while documenting each oddly concocted meal, even at moments of great crisis. He eats: tinned macaroni cheese ‘jazzed up’ with cold courgettes, ‘Battenburg roll and prunes’, ‘boiled onions served with bran’, ‘poached egg on nettles’, ‘a little cold jellied consommé straight out of the tin’, all washed down with Spanish wine bought from the nearby Raven Hotel. Such details serve only to make the story more bizarre. Having abducted the woman whom he had loved as a boy, and who, by extraordinary circumstance, he suddenly discovers to be living nearby, the book ends with Arrowby – who has nearly drowned, violently, in the sea in typically mysterious circumstances – experiencing an epiphany in the shape of four seals bobbing in the water, ‘their wet doggy faces looking curiously upward … And as I watched their play, I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me.’

      Murdoch took her title from the cry of the Greek warriors who finally saw the Black Sea after fighting against the Persian empire, a sight that heralded home. As a writer, she was criticised for her apparent belief in myth and monsters: in person, as in her work, her fierce intelligence contrasted with a faint naïveté. She ended her life losing her senses in public, suffering from dementia and yet being taken everywhere by her writer husband. I’d often see her at literary launches: a ghostly, silver-haired figure with flickering eyes and a fixed smile, lost in a corner of a room that might have been any room, anywhere, with anyone in it.

      The sea sustains and threatens us, but it is also where we came from. Some consider that the relationship is closer than we think. Callum Roberts, among other scientists, has noted that the ratio of subcutaneous fat in humans is ten times that of other primates, nearer to that of a fin whale. From an evolutionary point of view, such human blubber would make little sense for a land hunter, but it would be eminently useful for an ‘aquatic ape’ which developed by the sea. Equally, we cannot fly or even run as fast as other animals, and we lack hair to keep our bodies warm, but we can swim and dive – skills which would not make sense, some say, unless we were made for or at least shaped by the water.

      First proposed by Desmond Morris and subsequently explored by Elaine Morgan – who saw a certain prejudice in the way in which her ideas were rejected – the ‘aquatic ape’ theory is controversial, dismissed by scientists suspicious of its simplicity. Perhaps there is something a little too perfect about the notion that rather than descending from the trees to hunt on the savannah, we gravitated instead to the shore, not least because it argues against the idea that we are defined by our ability to kill. Yet new evidence suggests that a diet sourced from the ocean may have provided the fatty acids that enabled our brains to grow, and that we stood on two legs to wade as we scavenged for shellfish on the shores of our earliest home in sub-Saharan Africa. That we were, and are, intimately linked to the sea.

      Other factors have been marshalled to support Morgan’s argument: that we are prone to dehydration in a manner which would not be helpful to savannah-dwelling animals, and that we exhibit an instinctual breath-holding reaction when we plunge into water: other terrestrial mammals cannot regulate their reflex breathing. Does this mean that we were once well used to entering the sea, perhaps sticking our heads in to search for food, or even spending longer periods there? The Belgian anthropologist Marc Verhagen and his colleagues believe it is possible, arguing that our wide shoulders are more suited to swimming than running, and that we might owe our long legs and long strides to forebears who foraged in the shallows.

      Our vestigially webbed fingers have also been claimed as an amphibious refinement of this watery life – just as the seabird hunters of St Kilda developed broad feet from climbing the cliffs, and the sea gypsies of south-east Asia, used to diving in the shallow seas, have eyes that appear to focus as well, if not better, underwater. Even our organs contain a memory of the sea. Our kidneys evolved to deal with excess salt, to which our evolutionary ancestors were subject; being fifty per cent water, we all contain the sea inside us.

      While many scientists dismiss the notion of an aquatic ape, the proposal is intriguing: that we owe our development and our dominion, our intelligence and even our souls, to the water, although we live out our lives on the land.

      We cannot resist; we are all watergazers. And like so many others, my own, more recent ancestors also felt the urge to travel over the sea, in search of something new.

      My great-great-great-uncle, James, the eldest of William Nind’s thirteen children (of whom at least three died in childhood), was born in Ashchurch, a hamlet near Tredington in Gloucestershire, in 1782. The Ninds had been farmers since at least the sixteenth century, living in the same small triangle of fertile land at the foot of the Cotswold hills, moving between villages such as Beckford, Walton Cardiff, Ashchurch and Alstone, near the towns of Tewkesbury and Cheltenham.

      As the eldest son, James was expected to follow his father, working the land. But in the family tree she