Underwater, by Elizabeth Kay

 The sheer beauty of the underwater world is amazing

I taught myself to read in secret whilst sitting on the lavatory. The girl next door was six months older than me, and started school six months earlier. She lorded it over me, saying she could read but I wouldn’t be able to until I went to school, so I felt I wasn’t allowed to tackle books yet although I really wanted to. I would struggle through a sentence of Brer Rabbit until it made sense, and then the next time I locked myself away in the only room in which that was permitted I would read my practised sentence, and then struggle through the next one. Consequently, I could read before I went to school but I kept it very quiet. The very first book that I couldn’t stop reading was The Deep Sea Horse, by Primrose Cumming. I don’t know how old I was, probably about six or seven, but I remember my mother saying “Put that book down now Elizabeth, it’s tea time”, and my father (noticing how engrossed I was) shaking his head at her and waving a finger. He was Polish, and therefore regarded education as far more important than my English mother, and I was left to read in peace.

Claud, a horse that ends up in the sea, has many adventures underwater and I was completely entranced by this undiscovered world. I learned a great deal about the creatures of the deep, and as I was an animal-obsessed child I never forgot about any of them, which may well have contributed towards my love of snorkelling later on. Claud first encounters a shoal of small fishes, and when he speaks to them they disappeared like so many flickers of light, then darted back again… I encountered two such shoals off the coast of Indonesia, one electric blue and one electric green. All the descriptions and the characters in the story were really good – Cod, the Giant Octopus, the conger-eel… and Swordfish.

He was a long, racily built fish, and his upper lip was drawn out into a slim,  bony beak almost half as long again as himself… “No need for alarm,” said the stranger. “My name is Swordfish, and my weapon is entirely at your service.”

A few years later I became equally obsessed with the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was my favourite. Lucy is watching The Sea People from the deck of the ship, and suddenly they notice the hull of the boat above them and decide to investigate. They’re bad news, and they approach the ship until they’re very close.

…their bodies were the colour of old ivory, their hair dark purple. The King in the centre (no one could mistake him for anything but the King) looked proudly and fiercely into Lucy’s face and shook a spear in his hand. His knights did the same.

I moved on to science fiction in my teens, when H.G.Wells and Isaac Asimov were accessible at the library – and Jules Verne. And so, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (not twenty thousand leagues deep, which would have been impossible, but twenty thousand leagues in distance travelled) I moved onto more adult and scientific descriptions of this other world.

…Japanese mackerel from the genus Scomber with blue bodies and silver heads, glittering azure goldfish whose name by itself gives their full description, several varieties of porgy or gilthead (some banded gilthead with fins variously blue and yellow, some with horizontal heraldic bars and enhanced by a black strip around their caudal area, some with colour zones and elegantly corseted in their six waistbands, trumpetfish with flutelike beaks that looked like genuine seafaring woodcocks and were sometimes a meter long, Japanese salamanders, serpentine moray eels from the genus Echidna that were six feet long with sharp little eyes and a huge mouth bristling with teeth.

After that, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World became my favourite book, despite not having any underwater scenes. It was the idea of undiscovered places, where anything could happen, that fascinated me. And although I have travelled widely now, there are not many places that haven’t been documented and frequently ruined by man.

However, just a few metres from any beach there can be a landscape unmapped and unique. I have been down in a submarine three times, and the best by far was the Red Sea, where a diver went in and fed the fish. The water was incredibly clear, and I saw colourful wrasses, clownfish, parrotfish, even a lionfish. I now have an underwater camera, and although my photography isn’t very good I can nonetheless look back at some of my own adventures and marvel at them. The octopus I met off the Cornish coast, who was as intrigued by me as I was by him (or her).

Brown and prickly

 Cephalopods are surprisingly intelligent. I   was swimming (Indonesia again) and a   small part of the sea floor, covered with   coral and plantlife, seemed to move.   Eventually I realised it was a cuttlefish,   changing its colour to match the   substrate.  After a bit I swam on, having   the time of my life. And then I turned round and there it was, just hanging there watching me with real curiosity, newly camouflaged against the surface of the water above.

All stripey now

Galapagos was really good for underwater stuff, too. The first time I ventured into the water I looked to my left, and there was a huge sea turtle, swimming alongside. And there, on the other side, was a sea lion. The sea lions enjoyed showing off. I watched a pair of them doing acrobatics, and then turning to look at me as if they were laughing at me and saying, you can’t do that, can you? Loser!

I have yet to write an underwater scene myself, as the breathing issue is a hard one to overcome unless you use magic, or scary technology. I suppose I could always write something from the point of view of a clownfish… oh hang on, that’s been done…