The Sea Inside. Philip Hoare

hits the hard at Yarmouth, I’m let loose like a sheep from a truck. I ride along the low river valley that almost entirely divides the extreme, prow-shaped tip of West Wight from the rest of the island. My 1950 Ward Lock guidebook – bound in red cloth and filled with airy advertisements for a place that has barely changed in sixty years – tells me that ‘in stormy weather the sea has been seen to break over the narrow ridge of separation and mingle its salt waves with the fresh waters of the river-head’. Far from seeking to bolster this slender bar, the islanders sought to increase the gap. In an earlier guide, published in 1856, William Davenport Adams, a former teacher, noted that the strand of shingle was ‘formerly … much less; so that the inhabitants of the island proposed in the reign of Edward I, to cut through the isthmus, and thus to form for themselves an almost impregnable retreat, when the island was invaded by hostile bands’. This insular wedge of land even aspired to its own status as the Isle of Freshwater, an island-within-an-island. But then, the Isle of Wight itself has always resisted attempts to link it to the rest of England; having long loosed its moorings, it prefers to float free.

      I swim off Freshwater Bay, overlooked by the same Albion Hotel from where Adams began his tour. ‘Though the beach is pebbly and rocky, bathing is good, the sea being in calm weather remarkably clear,’ my 1950 guide informs me. ‘Boating under ordinary conditions is quite safe, but for trips of any length, a man who knows the coast should certainly be taken.’ The water is salty and buoyant. I’d been looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. There’s no comforting land on the horizon, only the steely sea. Around me old plastic containers bob, tethered to lobster pots below. The cliffs rise as a backdrop, their soft chalk embedded with flints like nuts in a bar of nougat. Grey and white pebbles as big as tennis balls roll under my feet. The water is cold and my swim is brief, although it has the usual effect of washing my sins away.

      I’m warming my hands on my flask of tea and thinking about leaving when the German students arrive. One of them leaps onto the promenade railing and, in an acrobatic defiance of gravity, holds his body vertically for a split-second, supporting himself on one hand. Another changes into brash shorts and black goggles and strides into the water. He swims straight ahead, disregarding the weedy rocks. Having reached his appointed end – his route might as well have been marked out in the lanes of a public pool – he swims back to his friends’ applause.

      After these breezy exertions the students pack up and go. Emboldened, I plunge back in, following the channel the boy had pioneered. As I swim, still wary of the rocks, a black-painted ketch sails into the cove and straight at me. Its crew comprises a long-haired man – perhaps one of those useful locals recommended by my guide – and a younger woman who leans over the side and shouts at me, ‘Are you mad?’

      Back on the beach, she produces a blue plastic bucket. Inside is a slithery selection of still-twitching fish: whiting, catfish, and other brown-bodied, slimy species. Warming to her audience – a man and his young son have come up to peer into the bucket – she says that the sea is two degrees warmer than it should be at this time of year, that fish are appearing which ought not to be here. I ask if they ever see any dolphins out there. She defers to her captain, who says yes, a few miles out.

      ‘The Common Porpoise,’ Mr Adams reassures me, ‘occasionally passes along our southern shore in small shoals.’ But even bigger cetaceans have been found here. In 1758, a Royal Navy ship captured a sixty-six-foot fin whale which had been seen floating dead in the water, only to leave go of it off the Needles, from where it washed up at what would become known as Whale Chine. It took a century for another fin whale to appear at the feet of Tennyson Down, in 1842; it ended up in the amusement park at nearby Blackgang Chine, where its enclosed bones became a kind of cavernous shopping-bazaar-cum-boatshed, lined with plates, baskets, pictures, shells and glass lighthouses filled with coloured sand from Alum Bay, while its empty jaws pointed forlornly to the window and the sea beyond. It was still there when I visited the island as a boy, although I remember being more excited by the plaster gnomes and toadstools outside.

      Leaving the beach, I turn inland, passing a pair of bay-fronted villas at the foot of the downs – the sort of seaside houses that offer bed and breakfast, polyester chintz and cracked shower cubicles; but a crenellated tower and oriel windows suggest another story.

      Dimbola Lodge was the home of Julia Margaret Cameron, who, swathed in purple paisley, her hands stained ‘as black as an Ethiopian Queen’s’ by silver nitrate, created alchemical images in her greenhouse, having summoned subjects spotted in the streets from her eyrie. As the name of her house suggests, she too was a migrant, an exotic bird blown onto the island’s shores.

      Cameron was born in Calcutta in 1815. Her family name, Pattle – close to the Hindu ‘Patel’ – indicates an Asian ancestry, evident in her broad forehead and ‘Pondicherry eyes’, the same features seen in her great-nieces, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Theirs was a family which looked east. Julia’s husband Charles, twenty years her senior, had fallen in love with Ceylon as a young man, and continually returned there. Their house in Freshwater was named after the family’s coffee plantation, while the subcontinent’s influence was reflected in its Indian gothic arches.

      Writing from Dimbola, Julia tried to entice Charles back with her fanciful comparisons. ‘This island might equal your island now for richness of effects,’ she declared, as if West Wight had somehow magically moved to the Indian Ocean, or at least been towed there in her imagination. ‘The downs are covered with golden gorse & beneath them the blue hyacinth is so thickly opened that the valleys look as if the “sky were upbreaking thro’ the Earth” … The trees too are luxuriant here – far more flourishing than they usually are by the sea – and Alfred Tennyson’s wood may satisfy any forester.’

      Here Cameron pursued her art. Her photographic images show only human faces, but they’re lit by the chalk downs and the limitless sea around them. With their shifting focus and depth, their draped shawls and tresses of hair, they resemble underwater scenes. They are worlds of their own, more organic scenes than portraits. On her way south from London, Julia would change at Brockenhurst, where her photographs of Darwin, Browning, Tennyson and others still hang in the booking hall, along with a hand-written sepia inscription:

      This gallery of the great men of our age is presented for this Room by Mrs Cameron in grateful memory of this being the spot where she first met one of her sons after a long absence (of four years) in Ceylon. 11th of November 1871.

      She must have made for a lively travelling companion. Henry Allingham encountered her at the station, ‘queenly in a carriage by herself surrounded by photographs … talking all the time. “I want to do a large photograph of Tennyson, and he objects! Says I make bags under his eyes – and Carlyle refuses to give me a sitting, he says it’s a kind of Inferno! The greatest men of the age (with strong emphasis), Sir John Herschel, Henry Taylor, Watts, say I have immortalised them – and these other men object!! What is one to do – Hm?’ (Her conversation was constantly punctuated with ‘eh?’ and ‘hm?’).

      Julia presided over an unlikely irruption of bohemianism on this islet. ‘Everybody is either a genius or a painter or peculiar in some way,’ complained one visitor, ‘is there nobody commonplace?’ With its perpetual parties and play-acting, Freshwater was one long performance, and Dimbola its proscenium arch. Such was the throng of art and letters that one writer compared it ‘to Athens in the time of Pericles, as being the place to which all the famous men of the reign of Queen Victoria gravitated’; another considered its society closer to a French salon than any English gathering.

      It’s hard to imagine now that this sleepy village should have been filled with such fanciful displays. Leaving Dimbola and its eccentric cast behind, I push my bike up the hill – and nearly blunder into a skylark at my feet. Ahead of me, the island rises, ‘walled up from the ocean by a bulwark of immense cliffs’, as Adams writes, caught up in the spirit