Names for the Sea, page 17
Max and I put on all the clothes I brought and pull up three hoods each and put mittens over our gloves. Take a deep breath, I tell him, and we jump down into the cold. The wind funnels up the valley. But there’s a sulphurous red glow now at the bottom of the speech-bubble of cloud, exactly the colour of my grandparents’ living-flame-effect electric fire, and we set off on foot, across a makeshift bridge over the river which leaps and flexes with every step, jumping and paddling over a shallower tributary and across the boulders in the fading light towards the grassy side of the hill. Icelanders in snowsuits, ski-masks and moon-boots are spreading like ants up the mountainside, while tourists, like us cold and like us inadequately equipped, hover within sight of the lights from the car park. On and up. As long as we keep moving, we can keep moving. If we stop, we’ll get too cold. I glance back, measuring our progress against the setting sun and the distance from the jumble of headlights and the silhouettes of photographers in front of them. Max notices what I’m calculating and gets anxious. Mummy, how much further, how long will it take, when do we need to get back, what time is it? Never mind, I say, look at the volcano. Look! Red light leaps into the fading sky, and as the sun slips away the cloud of steam is lit from below by the orange glow of the lava. The flame begins to slide down the hill, slow as tar, and a cloud of helicopters and light aircraft dances like midges in its light; richer tourists, who have paid a few hundred pounds for a closer view.
There’s another half-hour ‘technical stop’ at the same petrol station on the way back, and again all the doors are left open so that the passengers, having just begun to warm up after standing outside to watch as much volcanic action as the body could stand, huddle shaking in our seats again. Even Max doesn’t complain; as tourists on a bus we seem to be powerless, vulnerable as babies to the negligence of those charged with our care. At last the tour guide reappears and we set off. Max dozes as the temperature rises. The driver turns the lights off. People wrap themselves up, recline their seats and close their eyes. Max’s head settles on my shoulder. I reach up the other arm and turn my reading-light on, find my page and continue re-reading Adam Bede, which I’m teaching next week. Adam discovers that Hetty has been seduced. There’s a summer house, an English woodland. The sound system twangs and the guide starts talking again. Just before you all settle down for a nap, she says, and tells us when and by whom Route 1 was widened, before outlining other tours offered by the company in the coming days. Brits up and down the bus go so far as to murmur at each other, the Polish man turns up his collar as the expression of one who has a weapon and will use it later settles on his face and an Australian voice from the back swears. Max opens his eyes and gazes startled into my face. Don’t worry, I say, it’s nothing. Go back to sleep now. And he does. Darkness settles again. We’re coming back through Hveragerði, where the geothermal greenhouses shine all night, alien spaceships between the road and the mountain. Just to let you all know I think I see the Northern Lights ahead! says the guide. Oh, just fucking fuck off, says the fat blonde, giving up all pretence at civility and tolerance. Just fuck the fuck off. But a ripple goes down the bus and we all crane to see out of the windscreen, where there’s nothing but our reflected hope and the greenhouses. The bus climbs the switchbacks out of Hveragerði and pulls into a lay-by. The doors open. The blonde demonstrates the limits of her vocabulary until her friend tells her to shut up, there’s a kid there. But Max is still asleep, and I leave him there while I get out and stand at the roadside. There they are, bright green, flickering across half the sky. Everyone’s trying to take pictures, flashes grazing the dark. Just look at the damn things, I think, buy a postcard later. The aurora hang low over the mountain, lunge into the west, sweep the northern horizon. Late March, probably the last time I’ll see them. I salute them and get back into the bus, where Max is still fast asleep.
A week later one of the students on my writing course hands in a story about growing up on the Westman Islands. Teddi’s grandfather used to take him up onto Eldfell to feel the warmth of the ground, and once or twice to bake bread by burying it on the hillside. For a boy who preferred reading to football and walking to fishing, Heimaey was not an easy place to grow up. It was beautiful when we were there, I say wistfully, liking the idea of living on an island. It’s all right, he agrees, in summer, for a visit. But no-one thinks about anything but fishing, there’s nothing to do except fishing, and if you want to leave it’s always too windy to fly so you have to get the boat and watch people puke for three hours except that it’s always too rough to sail. Teddi is an older student, even for Iceland where most people are twenty before they leave high school, but not old enough to remember the eruption. No, he says, I wasn’t born then, though my sister was two. But my grandfather carried people away in his fishing boat. A few weeks later, Teddi’s grandparents are in town, staying in their Reykjavík flat for some medical treatment and he invites me over to meet them.
The flat is behind the mall, a nondescript part of town between Route 1 and the retail parks, apartment blocks inaccessible except by car and unrelieved by even the corner shops and fast-food outlets that punctuate the more desolate urban landscapes at home. We ring at a communal door with paint flaking around corrugated glass panels, and go up a flight of stairs covered in worn carpet. Teddi’s grandfather, also Theódór, comes to the door. Inside, a wooden floor gleams like still water and white walls reflect on a kitchen so tidy that you would need to introduce artful disarray for a photo-shoot. It is the home of someone who has spent his life on boats; a place for everything, as if anything not fastened down or shut in would fly around in the next rough gust. Come in, says Teddi’s grandmother Margrét. Sit down. Eat.
She pours coffee. There is cheese and biscuits, a stack of flat Icelandic pancakes and a plate of folded pancakes bulging with something that will probably turn out to be whipped cream. I can’t work out the Icelandic lunch hour, which is sometimes half past eleven, and have just eaten a sandwich and too much chocolate. Theódór apologises repeatedly for his clear but heavily accented English, picked up while landing fish in Aberdeen and far better than my Icelandic, which isn’t improving as much as it should. Occasionally we drop into German, which he speaks better than English and I better than Icelandic. I can usually understand Margrét’s Icelandic and she follows some of my English. Between times, Teddi translates.
‘He was just telling me that he’d bought a new boat the day before the eruption, actually got it at 8.30 p.m. And then four hours later they were woken by the telephone. That’s how it was done: they called people to say that the eruption had started. Everybody went downtown, to the harbour, because that was the only way out. The airport was too close to the eruption site. Many of them were wearing only their pyjamas and bringing nothing, no belongings. A few had a suitcase, maybe, with some small things. And he was saying that many people went straight to his boat, because it was freshly painted and looked smart, and he didn’t stop people coming, just let everyone in. He had 430 on board in the end, one tenth of the population. That’s how it was done. He took them all over to Þorlákshöfn where there were buses waiting to take them to Reykjavík, to the big school there, and it was only there that everyone registered and was counted. But when the eruption began, people just went down to the harbour, and got away.’
I’m still trying to imagine this scene. I’m seeing, I realise, my own grandmother’s wartime memories, mothers and children running for shelters that were often no refuge at all while the bombs rained on York and houses flamed out around the cathedral. ‘So no-one organised it?’
‘Not really. Everyone just got in the boats and left.’
Someone must have taken charge, I think. Someone made those phone calls.
Theódór and Margrét have followed this. ‘No. It was just people calling their family and friends. People who noticed something was wrong. And then the fire-trucks started driving around with their sirens.’ Margrét speaks. Teddi translates. ‘She’s saying that they went out half-dressed. My mother had a sweater and pants but no socks. My sister was only two.’
‘It sounds very frightening,’ I say. For the first time, it does.
‘No,’ says Theódór. ‘Not for me. Some people were very afraid, but I have lost four ships. Three ran aground and broke up, one sank. I have many, many times gone to sea in bad weather. I sailed for years between England and Iceland, first in small boats and then in a bigger one. I have never been frightened.’
Theódór is a slight man, his pink cheeks and crisp checked shirt reminding me of my grandfather, who was an accountant who liked shopping and holidays and garden centres. Theódór looks as if he’d smell of Imperial Leather, not like a Viking at all, and yet I’ve never heard Icelandic masculinity so plainly articulated. I don’t see how anyone who didn’t want to die could fail to be frightened by the North Atlantic even without the volcano.
Margrét puts down her coffee, urges her men to take more pancakes. ‘I was frightened. I grabbed the children, six children, just put them into whatever I could find and ran for the harbour and I didn’t feel safe until the boat was outside the bay.’
It’s a reversal of order for Icelanders to feel safer at sea, certainly for the wives of fishermen to feel safer at sea. How can you rest once you understand that the earth itself can explode under your feet at any moment?
I sip my coffee. ‘Was there any warning?’
‘No,’ says Margrét. She looks out of the window. ‘There was no warning. Nothing. There were no monitors then. There was no warning. It just happened.’
‘Did you know it was a live volcano?’
‘We knew the islands were volcanic,’ says Theódór. ‘We had a big eruption in 1963, when the new island, Surtsey, came up. My father was the first to see that one. He saw fire and smoke on the water and thought it was a ship burning, but when they steamed off that way they found that it was flames coming up out of the sea. And then the island came up, 123 metres high.’
‘So was it still a shock when the volcano blew?’
‘We hadn’t thought it could happen on Heimaey,’ says Theódór. ‘Not until it did.’
‘They never thought it would happen on the island,’ adds Margrét. ‘Even though it happened at Surtsey ten years earlier. They didn’t think it would come this close.’
Theódór starts moving coffee cups and saucers around, a pancake for a volcano, a biscuit for the town. ‘The fault just goes along like this. It’s all in a line. Surtsey, Eldfell, Eyjafjallajökull. And then Katla. Just one line.’ He looks up and switches to Icelandic. Something about a shipwreck. Teddi takes over. ‘He’s saying that as the eruption began he made five trips back and forth, first with people, then with people’s furniture and belongings, and then for the fishing equipment. Five trips in six days. But the first trip was the hardest, of course. He was meant to take care of the engine, because he was the engineer, but there was no time to do that and the ship was so crowded it was hard to move around, so instead he was trying to take care of the people, everyone standing crammed close together, down below where the fish go and in the front and everywhere people pushed against each other. The weather was not that good and the boat was rocking and everyone started vomiting, so close together, so he was handing around buckets and bags but anyway they all got full up. And he remembers, there was a woman there with two small children, and they were on the floor in a cubicle with a toilet. It had a very heavy iron door, and as the boat rocked she was trying to keep the door open to keep her children warm, because there was some heat coming from all the people and the children weren’t really dressed. But the waves got bigger, and then one time she couldn’t keep it open and it slammed on the finger of her two-year-old and snapped the top right off his finger. My grandfather tried to wrap something around the finger, to stop the bleeding. The child was screaming and screaming, so my grandfather mashed up some painkiller and gave it to him in a drink. The kid drank it and went out, unconscious. So my grandfather was a little bit worried and he called up a doctor, on the radio, and the doctor said, no, it’s OK, it’s better the child sleeps through this. So that’s one of the things he remembers best, trying to bandage this small finger and then the child going out like that. It was rough, a very rough trip.’
Theódór nods, rests his hand on Margrét’s shoulder and tells his grandson some more of the story. ‘And then after that week, after those six trips to take everyone’s possessions, the captain said it was time to go out fishing again. So he was away for the next month after that, fishing and in and out of harbours all over the place to unload the fish. And then towards the end of the month they had unloaded at Grindavik, and although the weather was getting bad the captain wanted to go out again. So they went out again, but the storm grew and the ship stranded and broke up on the shore. That was the twenty-second of February, and it had come into harbour at Heimaey on the twenty-second of January.’
Margrét breaks in, contradicting something, and they all laugh. Theódór replies soothingly, reminding me again of my grandfather, who grew in calm in direct relation to my grandmother’s fluster, as if there were a limited amount of anxiety in the house and she had hoarded it all. Margrét shakes her head and pours more coffee and then Teddi translates. As everyone squashed onto the boat in the early hours of 23rd January, Theódór went back to the house. ‘Even though they hadn’t taken anything with them, he went back for his gun and his stamp collection. And my mother got really mad at him, wanted to know what he wanted the gun for.’ Across the table, Theódór sips, twinkles, shrugs. His gun, he wanted it. ‘And of course he took almost all his things, his clothes and his gun and his stamp collection, with him afterwards, to the fishing. But when the ship stranded, there was no chance to take anything, so he went to his cabin and put the gun and the collection into a special bag, a waterproof bag that they have for such times. And the cabin had used to belong to a man who had passed away, so as he left, as the ship broke up, he asked that man to take care of the bag for him and promised to come back and get it. And then he went out from the ship. Most of the men lost everything they had during that stranding, but my grandfather managed to get back to the wreck a few days later. He went to his cabin, and everything was completely upside down. The gun was bent and broken. But the stamp collection was in the bag, hanging on a hook, and the stamps were fine. Dry.’
Theódór still has the stamps, not here in the city but safe in his house on Heimaey.
‘So you lost everything?’ I ask. ‘Between the volcano and the shipwreck?’
Theódór nods, pats his wife’s hand. ‘A lot was destroyed.’
I wonder if I am beginning to understand why Icelanders seem unperturbed by economic collapse, the swine flu epidemic which has swept Europe over the winter and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. Amalia Lindal’s theory about fishing makes more sense after talking to Theódór. Fishing means that all plans and livelihoods are always dependent on the whims of North Atlantic wind and weather, and the alternative is farming on land that explodes from time to time. A limited sense of both responsibility and agency could be the only way of remaining sane in such a place; you can’t live in Iceland without discovering the limits of human power, and it’s not intelligent to try to take responsibility for what you can’t control.
‘Four hundred houses were destroyed,’ says Theódór. ‘And another three hundred filled up and covered over with ash. Two million tonnes of ash and seven million tonnes of lava went over the town. And then we had to clean it up. They took the ash away to the north, to make a new runway.’
‘What was it like while you were waiting to go back?’ I ask. I can imagine the night voyage, the emigrant ship making its way into harbour. But those months of limbo, watching television to see if your house is still there, if you’ll ever be able to go home . . .
‘We were one of the first families to go back–’ says Theódór.
Margrét interrupts, listing families who returned before them.
‘I said one of the first,’ protests Theódór. ‘We were among the first. Because our children were not happy at school in Keflavík. The people there were not glad to have families from the Westman Islands among them.’
Margrét speaks, telling something painful. Teddi translates. ‘The children got picked on while we stayed in Keflavík. Because the kids there had heard their parents saying that the people from the Westman Islands who were losing their houses and their livelihoods were going to get compensation, so they’d be rich. So the children were bullied and they really didn’t want to go to school there.’ I meet Teddi’s eyes. He knows about bullying. ‘I was surprised,’ he adds, shrugging. ‘No-one has spoken about that aspect.’
‘So they were treated like immigrants?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ says Teddi. Margrét speaks. ‘She’s saying that when they lived in Hveragerði, the first weeks after the eruption, there was a school just for the kids from the island. With their own teacher. They didn’t go to school with the Hveragerði kids at all, they didn’t blend in, and so they didn’t experience these problems there. They were never teased in Hveragerði.’
‘What was it like for the grown-ups? Were they able to integrate?’
