Not Forgetting The Whale

by John Ironmonger

Papa Mikkel.

chilblains,’

blennies

gobies

butte...

the sky as grey as old linen,

‘The whale,’

lobtailing

This was his whale. His whale being dismembered before his eyes.

capstan.

The opinions of an aged Jewish banker

The switching-on of the lights marks the end of the Festival of the Whale. Villagers pull their coats tight around themselves, and they make their way out of the churchyard gate and back down the hill to their homes.

He remembered swimming, feeling the sea enveloping him like a monstrous, living being.

He could recall it scouring, cleansing, and bleaching away every last shred of stress and anxiety from his bones. But when he’d tried to turn around, his way had been blocked. For there had been the whale. And as she plunged into the depths, so he was drawn down with her. That was the way with whales. That was the way, he realised, with the bank. As it had plunged, so had he.

‘And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ ‘I’d forgotten how bleak Hobbes’s vision was.’

When Hobbes said that our natural condition was nasty, brutish, and short, he also showed us that we can rise above our situation and build societies that support each other.’

How strange it felt to laugh alone.

‘Just keep breathing, Mamma. Keep breathing.’ Sometimes when she was awake, she would purse her lips to let him see her exhaling, and the gesture would always look to Joe like the blowing of a kiss.

‘Make me proud,’ she said. ‘I will, Mamma.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I promise.’

chimera.’

Tuaregs

‘Then you need to know a saying that we have in Senegal.’ Aminata rose slowly out of the seat. ‘It is never good to be alone. But if you have to be alone, then be alone with a friend.’

proximity. That was Demelza’s word. Proximity. Jeopardy. And a generous helping of Time.

He found himself turning to follow her gaze. The string of Christmas lights was twinkling all along the harbour, and there were figures waving back.

Dozens of them. They lined the wall, and they were cheering. He recognised Mallory Books. What was he doing here? At six in the morning? And Kenny Kennet, and Casey Limber, and Charity Cloke, and Jeremy Melon. These were the people who had saved his life, who had carried his frozen body from the sea. The Higgs family were there, and Old Man Garrow leaning on his stick; and the Magwiths … a dozen or more of them. And the Bartles, and the Horsmiths, and the Anderssens and the Penhallows. Joe found himself lifting his arm and waving.

‘It was Martha,’ Aminata said. ‘She told me to tell you she joined up the dots.’

Two figures stood on the very end of the harbour – Polly and Alvin Hocking, holding hands.

He waved, and they waved back. And slowly the harbour fell away and dissolved into the darkness of the dawn, and the cries and whistles of the villagers of St Piran evaporated into the stillness of the ocean and the slap of the waves.

For a detailed account of the way that civilisations can collapse, readers with stamina might wish to try Collapse by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond.

The man who sequenced the virus that caused the 1918 flu epidemic was a US military pathologist called Jeffrey Taubenberger.

attempt to isolate the virus

I was drawn to the dark symbolism of short trading.

In Mevagissey (where I once lived) fishermen catch around 800 tonnes of fish a year, mainly haddock, sardine and pollack. St Piran has a far smaller catch.

Fin whales very rarely beach.

It is really not wise to eat the flesh of a stranded whale.

An account of Jonah and the Whale appears in both the Bible and the Qur’an.

and not forgetting a fin whale

It strikes me as odd that developed countries pay so much attention to defence (for example) and so little attention to food security.

Damon Runyon’s short stories.

But I knew I wanted to be a writer when I first read John Irving’s The World According to Garp, and I’ve been a committed Irving fan ever since.

2015

This ebook first published in 2015 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson