THE PRINCIPLE OF CAMOUFLAGE
Frances Bingham
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Hesketh, an artist, is isolated with her daughter Kezia on a remote island coast where they came for sanctuary ten years ago. The effort of trying to maintain her powers of creation has turned her half-mad. Their only neighbour, Crambo, is a wild elemental, bereft of speech, who lives on the beach. An unknown wounded officer arrives to convalesce with Hesketh and Kezia, but far from being the expected eligible stranger, Fitz is an exiled anti-hero whose love is reserved for London, play-making, and Meredith, a poet. Their strange existence is threatened by the arrival of a machine-gun crew who not only pollute the beach, but awaken dumb Crambo to the new powers of language – and explosives. As war sweeps ever closer, a violent sea-change brings all these castaways to their fate.
The Principle of Camouflage is a magical exploration of place, exile and home, the powers and duties of the artist, the restoration of lost things, the discovery of love, and the survival of hope in an apparently doomed world.
Praise for The Principle of Camouflage:
'A true work of the imagination transporting Prospero's island, and us, to wartime Britain on a shining wave of sea images. ' Maureen Duffy
About Frances Bingham
Frances Bingham has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry, most recently Journey from Winter (Carcanet, 2008) the biographical critical edition of Valentine Ackland’s poems. Frances has performed at literary festivals, read poetry live on Woman’s Hour, and contributed to the Radio 4 series From the Ban to the Booker. She is the daughter of the Scots historian and biographer Caroline Bingham, and now lives and works in London with her partner Liz Mathews.
An extract from The Principle of Camouflage
Crambo
This island’s mine. It isn’t an island but practically is one. I was here before they came, will be here after they’ve gone. My island runs from the little creek where the holy stream flows down from the low hill and across the marsh and cuts sand-cliffs through the higher-up beach and opens out like feather-grasses lower where it meets the shallows of the sea, all the way along the beach along along past the old boathouse, past the wreck, past the sand-dune islands in the bay and the giant whale wishbone beached up by the shingle cliff and my rocking stone to the pebble mountains where the great gravel-spit starts. Then the deepwater channel comes out, the inlet up to Saltstreet quay where the boats are, miles upstream. Don’t go further than that, don’t know anything past that. Inland, over the dunes and past the marsh to the church green as far as the lane, to the end of the ditch by the sea embankment wall, it’s all mine. Beyond, I don’t know. Seawards, outland, doesn’t belong to anyone, not even Her. When the tide goes back sometimes and the underneath sand is out so far you can walk to the wreck and the seal-bank, I think it’s mine. But the water always comes back.
My kingdom opens and closes, doubles and halves, twice most days. Sometimes the sea comes up over the dunes and covers the marsh, all water then except the tops of the sand-hills. When the tide comes in it brings me things, tribute, presents anyway. I keep all the glass. We burn the wood, if it’s been in the sea for long it shrinks as it dries, a plank becomes a splinter. The dead things are like that too. Nails and rope and string and fishing-line and net, I make my things with, and cork floats and empty tins and bones and shells and dried creatures. I don’t like feathers, I never touch them. One time the sea was sunset colour at midday as it came in and the beach too when the sea reached it, and it was shoals of oranges, which are fruits, and as it went back from the whole tideline it left drifts of them on the shingle. Sometimes it’s razorshells or sea urchins or weed left in neat crescents deeply banked, but these were oranges and the wood of their broken boxes. I ate them and ate them, salty and bitter, and I carried hundreds of them away to hide and bury, and up to Her and Kezia. They still liked me then, and they made sharp sweet jam out of them, but it was still distantly salty. The best time, I saw a thing in the water like a great grey-white jelly fish, big as a sail, spread out clinging like oil on the surface of the water. I got it, and it was all stitching and ropes on silken sodden material. They told me it was a parachute. All my shirts are made of it now. My trousers are a red Yarmouth sail which came up the creek. They’ll never wear out.
In the summer, I mostly live in the dunes. There’s water where the stream comes down, not salt or brackish, and the sweet spring on the other side of the marsh. All the animals go there. I eat fish, all the kinds I can catch, eels and crabs mostly, but you have to cook them. Raw, I eat whelks and urchins and cockles and oysters, always oysters. The others, mussels and clams and scallops, need cooking really. Birds aren’t nice raw either, and because of the feathers I can’t touch them, so I don’t eat them. I like eggs though, when I can get them. Some seaweed is possible, when there isn’t anything else I make soup with it, like drinking the sea. Samphire just tastes of sea-twigs too. There is a lovely time, when there are blackberries and little nuts in the hedges, and mushrooms, and wild apples and field leaves, but it doesn’t last long. In the winter, there’s only what comes out of the sea. Before they came, when I was smaller, this was my place, alone. Sometimes, rarely, I saw other people here, mostly the fishermen coming along on the off-chance, or digging for bait-worms. An old chap sent to mend the fence, postman curvetting on his bicycle, vicar in a car, I might see once in a while. Women came too, collecting shellfish in baskets, or eggs, and children from the village or inland folk came to get wood. Not often, though. In summer, visitors used to come sometimes from the camping field by the pub, invading the village for a few weeks. We heard about them, but it was too far along here for most of them to walk, they stayed far along, beyond the inlet, and went boating. My mother warned me, long ago, never to go near them and I never did.
She used to come with me when I was small, and show me how to do things. From her I learnt the secrets of the island, about the things to eat and the things that are bad to eat, making fire, how to take shelter, where to make a camp. She made me wash in the sea every day, wash me and my clothes, clean away mess, keep the beach tidy. Pumice, razor-shell, sponge, broke-toothed comb, washed-up toothbrush. She was bent over in a curve, like the pine trees which the wind has doubled up, and she leaned on me, more and more heavily. Now she is always inside, can’t get out, stuck there inside like a lobster in its pot. I can’t go in. I sit outside and sing to her, in my own way, not in talking, so perhaps she thinks it’s the wind blowing her back again until she’s upright and the long imprisonment is over.
Before, sometimes I could go indoors, into those closed spaces, and hold on for a while until I had to be out again. The panic feeling would be there within me, but I could tell it was far off, as far as the sea when it’s out so far that the blue line looks like the bottom edge of the sky. Then it starts to roll in, closer, and gets faster as it gets nearer until it bursts over my head in a drowning chaos. Now I stay outside, so this can’t happen unawares. I can make a roof, a shelter, anywhere, safe as a shell, but open.
When they came, my mother went in. Was it a spell, a curse, magic? Must have been, that’s what I think. They used to say she was a witch, but she was just my mother. Hesketh put the eye on her, locked her up inside forever. Hesketh is so strong. Everyone is afraid of Her, the seals come when She calls, the fish shoal or flinch away, the birds hide. I hear that. I hear the vibration beneath Her feet wherever She walks, the thrumming of the things in the air which accompany Her. Kezia is Her daughter, but she is silent, she passes without disturbing the world. I am her slave.
