A Sea Full of Selkies by Steve Gladwin and Co - "I Speak Animal" - with storyteller Sharon Jacksties.

 

 

 

I hope everyone has enjoyed this series of blogs on the theme of Selkies as much as I have, but I think I've saved the best until last. Sharon Jacksties is a Somerset based storyteller, pratitioner, teacher and writer, who - along with her partner Jem Dick I have known for a number of years, beginning on the famous Ty Newydd storytelling retreats and leading to a collaboration with them both on 'Spintales' double CD adaptation of John Matthews marvellous collection of stories 'The Song of Taliesin' (many copies of which are still available from my garage!). Sharon is an active community storyteller who also runs workshops and residentials. She has recently been made English Ambasssador for FEST, (the Federation of European Storytelling Organisations), where her role involves promoting oral storytelling and networking between organisations. Her books, 'Somerset Folk Tales', 'Somerset Folk Tales for Children' and 'Animal Tales of Britain and Ireland' are all published by 'The History Press'.

Sharon was an obvious person to talk to about selkies, but in a wide-ranging chat I was haunted by one particular anecdote of hers. Before this extract from the interview we were laughing about Sharon's love of David Thompson's famous book about seals, 'The People of the Sea, which Sharon thinks of as her bible

 'If you cut me', 'I would bleed that book.'

Then we moved on to her love of swimming and her need to find a place to swim wherever she could.

Jem and I used to go to Cornwall quite a lot. If I can continue to be swimming around in the water, I will. So there I was in Cornwall and Cornwall's very cold for me to swim in. I'm very spoilt. So it was really cold, and the day had turned and I thought I'm not going to swim. I'm not going to sunbathe. I'm going to get a soggy English day, get dressed and go back to the car.

And then - I don't know what drew my attention- I looked back and it wasn't even a bay. It was a gully. A gully on the beath that reached into the sea. There was a huge bull-seal, really massive, swimming with a man and they were playing together. And I thought, if he could do it, I could do it. It's like this thing of people swimming with dolphins. I'd love to swim with dolphins, but I have always had this thing about swimming with seals.

So, I tore my clothes off. Getting into the water was an ordeal. Because it was a gully and not an open beach. It was really horrible to get into the water and ten-foot deep, like slimy tentacles, you know. And that's normally the sort of thing I'd tolerate for about two and half seconds, but I thought it's now or never, Sharon. This is your chance. So, I did get in the water and the man came out. Jem, (Sharon's partner) - not a water person- was walking along the rocks towards the seal. I swam I would say maybe within fifteen feet of the seal and - we played together, and yet he would only let me get so close. 

 

 

 

And then Jem started whistling to the seal and the seal swam up to the rocks - and you have to remember these huge whiskers, because this was a huge male seal - quite walrus-like, and they started this conversation and the seal was sort of making these whistling sounds through his whiskers and Jem was whistling, I mean, he's a flautist. (NB I'm also a flautist, so I know the skill of both blowing deep into the flute, as well as across the top, which is more likely to be the sound that Jem was making!)  And I had this encounter and I played with the seal for a bit longer and eventually I had to get out because I was so cold. And I went to the car-park and in the car-park was the man who had been playing with him originally. And he was egg-shaped. He was like an egg-shaped person. He had these huge brown eyes and his hair was just plastered to his head. I mean, yours and mine have got texture. But his was just plastered to his head and feet were like in that shape on the ground, (Sharon indicates splayed feet).

I said "Are you the person who was swimming with the seal" and he sort of looked at me and said. "Oh, yes, I swim with him every day". And he told me how the seal is always there and -it's not a beach there, it's more like rocks - and he comes to swim with the seal every day. And then he kind of waddled into his car and I thought who was that. (Laughs)

How extraordinary.

I thought you'd like that.

 

 

So reflectively then, when you got back home and were able to look back on all that, what did you think was going on.

I think that he was like me. He has a thing about seals and the sea. I, I don't know what was going on for him?

That's what I was wondering. I mean what did he see when he saw you, for example?

You mean swimming in the sea.

No, I mean in the-park. When you saw him you thought of him as having that anthropomorphic shape. But what did he see when he saw you? Did he perhaps see you as kin of that type? It's an interesting thought.

Mm. I, I don't know! There was some quality. When he spoke! It seemed to come from a long way away. Not in the way it sounded, but from deep inside itself. It wasn't - There was something otherworldly about our conversation.

There's something that's quite eerie about it - hearing you tell it - and I'd imagine it would be something which would really stay with you.

Well it has! Because this was years ago, and at the time I thought this was so wonderful because this had happened in a car-park. I mean what could be more mundane than a car-park. That magic, that can survive in that environment.

There are so many aspects to that encounter and one of them is Jem the flute player. He's almost adding his own very distinctive non-swimmer but air thread to your encounter and he'd obviously at the same time communicating with the seal in a completely different way.

I'm so glad you said that, Steve, because we have all the elements there. I mean the air, and blowing through his whiskers and it was such a conversation. Creatures from outer space could have recognised that as a conversation. I was doing it physically through playing with that distance between us.

I tell you what I didn't do!  I was too scared to do. And this is again a little bit selkie-ish. I don't know whether you know this, but when you dive you can quite often swim more quickly underwater. I was very tempted to dive and swim up to him underwater. But I was too frightened to because I would be totally in his element. I didn't know how to react to that. I didn't know whether he would see that as a threat because, you know, I speak animal. I'm good with animals and I didn't know if that would become something else for him. I would have to have done it on his terms. I mean you would never put yourself in a position where a seal would feel threatened by you. I mean one bite and you're gone!

You've sort of brought all the elements together for me, because we've got the air, we've got the water, we've got the rocks for the earth. And the fire I think is the communication. The awen!

Thank you, Sharon. That is an amazing story.

My pleasure!

Everything else that Sharon and I talked about will be included in the book 'Land in Mind'. 

This is the end of this series of blogs on the figure of the selkie, and I'd like to thank Sharon, Sophia Carr-Gomm, Kath Langrish, and especially Kevin Crossley-Holland, without whom I would never have discovered the selkies!

In the next 'Land in Mind' interview on 8th August, I will be chatting with historian, expert in paganism and TV personality, (although he'd probably hate that!), Professor Ronald Hutton. See you then.

You can find all three of Sharon's books on amazon and the usual places and more details of the latest and a whole lot more on this website.

https://www.sharonjackstories.co.uk/

 

A Sea Full of Selkies with Steve Gladwin and Co - Kevin Crossley-Holland

In the first of these blogs I talked about 'The Woman of the Sea' a selkie tale of Kevin Crossley-Holland's which, in the most unexpected way first gave me the gift of storytelling. Asking Kevin to talk about that story and the subject of selkies in general for this series, I sent him a load of questions, which he then very sensibly ignored. Instead he responded to the essence and intent of what I wanted, through the prism of his own experience and enthusiasms. Below you can see not only what a fine decision that turned to be, but in addition Kevin's own version of the story of St Cuthbert and the Seals, a favourite of his. Thanks to Kevin for being such a regular and willing contributor to my blogs and I'm sure you'll enjoy what he has to say.

 

One evening, when I was ten or eleven, my father sat at his piano, and played and sang a simple tune.

 

 

 

 My father told me that it had been noted down in Orkney just a few years before, and that 'Sule Skerry' (or Skerrie) was a rock out in the Atlantic, all of fifty miles west of Hoy, frequented by a colony of sea

There are rare moments in one's life when something completely changes; when your head buzzes and your heart lurches, and a film lifts from your eyes. . .   This was one of those awakenings, more common perhaps in childhood and old age than in middle age, and it has led to a lifelong interest in and familiarity with seals, as well as to some small experience of shape-changers and stories about them.

 

Once upon a time, I returned from the island of Tory off the coast of Donegal, devastated by having just seen an old woman appear through a wall - there's almost no one on that island who has not seen ghosts - and attending a wake where the deceased was propped up and holding a hand of cards while four men sat around him, playing and smoking, and where I heard over and again the unforgettable wailing of newborn seals, so like the cries of human babies.

 

And once, on the island of Rousay, I engaged in a kind of antiphon with a grey seal, who followed me as I walked up and down a strand, always keeping her distance, never far away.  I called out; she replied.  She called out; I replied.

 

And again, when my own older daughter (aged eleven) was swimming alone off the tidal island of Scolt Head, wearing a black costume, I watched concerned as a single seal approached her, as if to verify that she was not one of her own, and did not wish to be.

 

As you'll imagine, I've sought out stories old and new about encounters with seals, actual and fictional.  Do you know, for instance, Bede's account (in his Life of Saint Cuthbert) of how the saint used to pray all night on a beach and how at dawn two seals or sea-otters 'bounded out of the water, stretched themselves out before him, warmed his feet with their breath, and tried to dry him on their fur'?

 

*

 

Have you come across the wildman or wodwo of Orford?  As Ralph of Coggeshall reported in his Chronicon Anglicanum, the fishermen who caught him during the reign of King John didn't know what to make of him.  Was he a human or a seal-man or an incubus or what?  And why did he prefer the company of humans, who tortured him, to a solitary existence?

 

Painting of Scolt Head by Gillian Crossley-Holland

 

When I compiled an anthology of British folktales and included their most celebrated collectors and retellers (Folktales of the British Isles, 1985), I wrote that 'The natural affection that exists between humans and seals has given rise to many folk-tales and folk beliefs, none of them more haunting than that of The Woman of the Sea, a story claimed by a number of the Northern Isles and here attributed to Unst in Shetland.  The tale-type has affinities with The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach, for here is another union between male mortal and female fairy that is not destined to last, while in some versions the seal woman also returns like the lady of the lake to give her children medical knowledge.  The tradition that there are still a few families with webbed fingers or toes, or horny skin on their hands and feet, indicating descent from a seal-woman is still current in the north of Scotland.

 

Already aware of the work of Helen Waddell (1889-1961) as historian, novelist and translator, and of her enchanting Beasts and Saints, I included in my anthology her version of 'The Woman of the Sea', so simple and so graceful.

 

For my own version, 'Sea-Woman' (British Folk Tales, 1987 and Between Worlds 2019) I used Thomas Keightley's story of 'The Mermaid Wife' in his The Fairy Mythology (1828) as my starting point.  At the time, I was interested - less so now, I must say - in whether I could make a version that somehow straddled oral and literary traditions.  And as I noted, 'I have chosen to retell this story as a tale-within-a-tale in which. . .  the voice in the shell is a kind of externalisation of the girl's own memory and sense of loss'.

 

 

 

Sheila Disney, our own seal-woman here in the Burnhams in north Norfolk - the subject of my poem 'Diz' - did catch her breakfast (dabs and the like) in the creek with her feet, and it's true she was rather whiskery, and that she told me that she was the 'last child of a seal-woman', but some components of this short poem are imaginary.

 

https://www.blakeneypointsealtrips.co.uk/

 

 

But many times in recent years I've gone out to Blakeney Point to see the ever-growing colony of grey and common seals, swarming around the boat and lazing on the sands, as well as visiting a small rookery (or herd, or harem, or bob, take your pick) who have established themselves in a saltwater lagoon, sheltered from those who do not intend to find them.

 

How strange that on land, seals prefer to crowd together, when there is no obvious reason for them to do so.  And how predictable that their endless waddling and jostling leads to stress and aggression.

But I'm no sociologist or environmentalist, and leave it now to others to show all we humans can learn from the behaviour of seals.  But what will never be in doubt is their haunting appeal to our imagination.

 

 

SAINT CUTHBERT AND THE SEALS

 

Up on this cliff-top, there's always a storm of seabirds - whirling and swirling around the ruins.

            I met an old priest up here and he told me that maybe they're the souls of children like me, the ones who became nuns and monks, and stayed here all their lives.  That was hundreds and hundreds of years ago, before the monastery fell down.

            Saint Cuthbert used to come here.  He walked all the way up the coast from the island of Lindisfarne, and that's miles and miles away.

            'When the monks and nuns went off to their beds,' the old priest told me, 'and you bet they were lumpy ones, narrow and lumpy, Cuthbert used to steal out alone. By moonlight and starlight, he scrambled and slithered down that steep path there to the beach.

            'One night, a young monk followed him to find where he was going, and do you know what?

            'He saw Cuthbert walk straight into the water, right up to his neck.  All night he chanted loudly, and his song sounded so like the waves swelling and singing around him that you couldn't tell which was which.'

            At the first sign of dawn, Cuthbert waded back to the beach.  He knelt down on the pebbles, and began to pray.

            'Two seals followed him,' the old priest told me.  'They lay down in front of him, and panted loudly to try to warm his cold feet, and then rubbed their fur against him to try to dry him.'

            Well, when he had blessed them, the seals slipped back into the dark waters, and Cuthbert slogged up the path there, and got into the monastery just in time to sing dawn-prayers with the nuns and monks.

            The young monk following Cuthbert felt guilty.  He knew he had witnessed a secret between the saint and God - he'd witnessed a miracle.  And worse, he was sure the saint had heard him because he kept tripping over roots and stuff and cursing in his hurry to get back to the  monastery.  So he went and found Cuthbert, and asked his forgiveness.

            'Promise me,' Cuthbert told him, 'promise you'll never tell anyone what you saw until after my death-day.'

            'I promise,' said the young monk.

            The old priest stared at me.  His eyes were grey. 'The holy man who told me this heard it from a monk, and the monk said he had heard it from a nun, and she had heard it from. . . who. . .  heard. . .  heard. . .'

            Standing on the cliff-top, I felt quite dizzy. The priest was opening his arms, opening them, as if he were about to fly away; and when I closed my eyes and imagined, I saw nothing but surging salt-waves, and heard nothing but sea-voices, singing.

 

My thanks again to Kevin. Next month film-maker Sophia Carr-Gomm on the inspiration for 'A Wider Sun', her own film about selkies, and storyteller Sharon Jacksties gives us her own remarkable account of a selkie encounter. Thanks everyone.