Siren Song

I stand at the edge of the sea & she sings to me of home. One wild rocky shore connected to another by this body of water.

I am a body of water.

I have always been a water baby. Never forgotten perhaps the amniotic sea of my beginnings, in her embrace is where I feel most myself, most alive, sense of life keenly sharpened by the edge of fear of the nearness of death that wild waters always bring. Why do the waters sing to me of life and death? I wonder but I do not know.

I grew up by the sea. Car boot sandy from weekend trips, beach gear permanently on standby, every Monday morning an exfoliation from Sunday’s ablutions. 

I could swim like a fish by the time I was four, doing laps of the pool in which I would later train as a lifeguard, my mother holding her breath in fear and awe.

At the sea, I would beg my mother to let me go beyond the breakers. Only with your father, would come the reply. I knew I could swim better than he, every generation’s opportunities urgently richer than the last, but dutiful daughter I mostly obeyed, except sometimes the siren song of the mermaid deep would call me out before my realising. I was too naive to understand the danger of its lure.

My mother tells me stories of family trips to the wildest coasts of the island in my babyhood. I remember the regular pilgrimages of childhood; Easters & summers marked by our return to the same sea-scarred coastlines. I revelled in the lashing winds, the salt deposits on my tender skin. The sea opens me, no wonder the site of pleasures first openings.

When I took my son to meet the sea, he who calmly surfaced from within me in a glowing pool of water deep in the hospital's belly, I understood my mother's fear for the first time. He was fearless, in his element, pulling at my hands, seeking to go ever deeper, ever further into the wilds. Visceral fear gripped me as I gripped him. Slippery fish, this water baby. 

We were revisiting this favoured childhood coast for my very grown up birthday, my heart cracked open by watching the tenants of my own amniotic deep relive my childhood delight, when the revelation came. Home. Come home. We had been floating untethered too long, it was time to find our secure ground. I listened, & we landed, hard, just before the world’s storms broke.

I have come to this place following the lure of free plants. An email sent to the newsletter of a plant society that I joined when we moved here about a garden outgrown. I respond with my interest, thinking of the sea of mud at the bottom of our garden that we must rehabilitate now that the heating works are done. Some dates in return, a map, a catalogue of daylilies. I look up the place to which I will be journeying, learn that she is a Lady, an author, a botanist and former nursery woman. I feel intimidated now, and wonder how she will greet my incursion to her garden.

We meet warily at first. Polite exchanges about the necessity of masks, gloves, and the very unsocial distancing, then get down to the business of plants. Her garden is beautiful, wild, full of weeds and wildflowers which she tells me are her specialty, among the carefully labelled overgrown clumps of hemerocallis. She tells me of the horrors of writing her book, the pleasures of giving talks at local plant society meetings, now sadly suspended. I admire a colourful display, tell her it reminds me of the colours of home. I tell her why we are in search of plants, about our frozen winter of ground source heating installation and the sea of mud left in its wake. She is generous. Plant reparations. 

My boot full, I retreat to this nearby shore, walk to the beach, strip my hot, sweaty feet and dip them with relief in the cool water as the winds blast through me. Refreshed, I sit and check my phone. There lies an email from the Lady. What a pleasure it was to meet me, what a shame that we couldn’t sit and have coffee as she’d love to hear the tale of how I came from the Caribbean to these shores. I smile, and then look at the sea singing its siren song of life and death. I am at the edge of the Bristol Channel, and unbidden, like Colston’s toppled statue thoughts rise from the deep of the enslaved people at its depths, of my ancestors of all sorts who survived the sea’s crossing.  

I sit on this rocky sister shore to the one of my childhood, feet drying in the stiff onshore breeze, crashing roar of the waves wiping my mind clean, and I am grateful to be alive. I feel at home. The sea sings me home to myself.