Episode Two: Adam Farrer Transcript

Adam Farrer  00:01

Driving into Withernsea, I always like to put on Seaside FM. They play hits of yesteryear, and it's only really accessible from the borders of Withernsea. It dies as you leave the town.

Joe Fenn  00:19

Welcome to the Portico Podcast.

Adam Farrer  00:22

My name is Adam Farrer, and I'm a creative non-fiction writer, and we're in the town of Withernsea.

Joe Fenn  00:29

This is Rewriting the North, a celebration of place and writing in the North of England.

Adam Farrer  00:36

And we're going to take a walk down the beach to try and find the remains of some whales that washed up on the beach on Christmas Eve of 2020. 

00:53

So the part of the country that Withernsea is based on is called Holderness, and it's part of the East Yorkshire coast. And it used to be connected to mainland Europe by an area called Doggerland. Which, at one point, you could have walked from Withernsea all the way to Norway, and the sea is eating into this land at a rate of 10 feet a year. It's one of the fastest eroding places in the UK. The coast is basically made of clay. So the waters all around the Holderness coast, they're cocoa-coloured, basically, they're just this brown, uninviting color. But it's because they're just made up of a mixture of seawater and cliffs. When I first moved here, you could get a map called The Lost Villages of Holderness. And it would show all of the towns that used to sit along this coast. There's like a dozen or so towns that like 800 feet away from where we're standing, there was a place called Owthorne that fell into the sea... about 150 years ago, and there are these legends about how during storms you can sometimes still hear the church bells. As if the whole town sort of slipped under the water like Atlantis rather than crumbling away and falling in which is what happened. Withernsea is destined to become one of those towns.

02:18

Withernsea doesn't have a far-reaching future. It feels like it's got 100 or so years before it's really going to be in trouble. The sea is going to creep around the edge of the sea defences and eat into the land. Because it's made of boulder clay leftover from the ice age, it's not going to last very long. It's just going to dissolve into the sea. On in the distance we've got the wind farms which are stretching across the entire horizon. That filters into the view of this flat brown, shallow North Sea. And there's the crashing waves that are coming onto the golden-brown sands and there's the shimmer of the sand there as the sea kind of glazes it. We've got the birds wheeling in the sky. Families wrapped up. Big coats. Jumpers. It's one of the one of the strange things about Withernsea is the sea, the thing that is going to come and destroy us, the thing that's going to take the whole town away is the thing that I love the most about it and I'm drawn to and so many people are drawn to.

Adam Farrer  03:37

Get to the very edge of town where the whales have washed to. I'm not sure of the origins of the name Withernsea but it does conjure up this idea of withering away and dying. This sort of withering by the sea. But it certainly feels appropriate because Withernsea as it stands now isn't even the first Withernsea. On these maps of the towns that have been lost to the sea, there's one that's marked as Old Withernsea. Nothing sends a clearer message that you're one day going to end up in the sea than having a town with the same name that's already in there. 

04:19

So as we look out across the the waters now ... when I moved here, probably 300 feet away from where we're looking now, there were cliffs and they're long gone. So as we're down on the beach, we're looking up at the crumbling clay cliffs and you can just see it's like... It looks like damp cake just falling down towards the the beach. So one of the ways that we're trying to stop the erosion here is to build a rock wall, it's what's referred to as rip rap. And it's these huge chunks of granite rock that have been transported over here, with the last bit of EU funding that the town secured for sea defences. And they've been transported all the way over from Norway. And it's strange that it's a land that we were once connected to, and dragging stone from that land is the one thing that isn't exactly saving Withernsea, but it's delaying its destruction. 

05:33

So up on the cliff edges here you can see the collapsed fence posts. The fence is to stop people falling off the cliff, they're hauled back onto the land and pinned into place. But it's just a temporary thing because the cliffs will be eroded again, the fences will fall, and will be put back into place. And it's just this constant game between Man and the Sea. We're constantly redefining the edge of the coast. 

05:57

I think of dissolving, just crumbling, falling away, disappearing. This whole coast is just defined by what's vanishing. And by what used to be here. Impermanent. Dying. 

06:19

We've come across the whales. Now, when I last came here in, in August, they were largely intact whales. Still profoundly dead, but in the shape of a large whale. Now, because of what the sea has done to this, this area in the last two months, we're now looking at a huge piece of the spine that's remaining, it looks like petrified wood and there's various sort of bugs and animals picking off it. It's like, there's no way you can look at this really and not see kind of a sad and tragic, tragic scene really. 

06:57

So I've written a story about the whales. And I'm going to sit here on the rocks in front of the sea and read it. It's called The Californian. 

I first heard about the Withernsea whales on Christmas Day of 2020, when my mother called me on WhatsApp video to wish me a Merry Christmas and show me the knickers that she’d received that morning.

“They’ve got Captain America on them,” she said unnecessarily, as she hoisted her skirt, the image of a red, white and blue shield hurtling past her crotch.

“Lovely,” I replied, long used to this sort of thing. Since she began her burlesque career at the age of 63, the sight of my mother’s underwear has become as familiar to me as my own. But despite this, she can still find ways to surprise me. 

“There are ten dead whales on the beach!” she said. Her words were delivered like a newsflash but, coming off the back of “Look at my knickers!”, they sounded like a non sequitur.

“Really!?” I replied.

“It’s true,” she said. “Ten! They washed up on Christmas Eve. It’s all over the news.”

Withernsea rarely makes the mainstream media and, now that I live in Manchester, what little news I do get about my hometown tends to arrive through the prism of my mother. Her reports are amped up and storified, the boring parts cut away until only the juicy anecdote remains. But on this occasion, it seemed that the unedited truth would do just fine. A whole pod of whales coming to die on Withernsea’s beleaguered sands in the aftermath of the Government’s decision to cancel Christmas; it was story enough. And the mental image of it shook me.

I thought of the animal size chart I’d had pinned to my bedroom wall as a child, which featured a human, a lion, an elephant and a whale, each compared alongside one another. The whale topped the chart by some considerable distance and easily measured the length of five elephants. And now here were ten whales, equal to fifty elephants, stranded on Withernsea beach and rolling in the shallows. The idea of this was startling. The biggest thing I’d ever seen on that beach had been my own body, during an unhappy period of my life when my weight ballooned to around 19 stone. What did ten whales equate to when converted into sad Adams? Five hundred? A thousand? All of them marble-skinned and helplessly gasping their last on the freezing sands. It didn’t bear thinking about, but I thought about it anyway and would probably have carried on thinking about it until the day I died, had my mother not changed the subject. 

“So, what do you have planned for today?” 

I issued a list of the few activities open to me that day. Phoning friends. Watching The Muppets Christmas Carol. Eating until I was sore. But, if I’d answered honestly, I’d have said “I’m going to fret about the whales, and then have a little nap, then fret some more,” And, true to those unspoken words, I did just that. 

It’s important to mention here that, during the pandemic, with time on my hands and apparently believing that the threat of an acute respiratory virus was not scary enough, I’d been developing a morbid fascination with complete global and environmental collapse. The majority of the non-COVID news seemed to be detailing a planet that was alternately bursting into flames, disappearing under flood waters or, in the case of Siberia, a combination of both. Watching a report on California’s wildfires, I saw some footage of a twisting column of flame, referred to as a “firenado”. Hearing this word out of context I’d have assumed it was the title of a Jason Statham movie, but presented on the news it became a tipping point, throwing me into a full-scale panic about imminent global end times. I began using my time to chain-watch distressing documentaries about melting permafrost, microplastics in the food chain and degraded agricultural land, certain that I’d soon receive a concerned email from Netflix, asking me if everything was okay. But what I got was ten whales turning up and dying in what I still thought of as my backyard, an occurrence I could only interpret as a grim environmental portent. 

I wanted to know how the whales had ended up on the beach and couldn’t rest until I had an explanation. Ideally, a comforting one, rather than the news that the sea had been transformed into an uninhabitable poison. So, I spent the Christmas holidays reading news websites, refreshing them several times an hour on the off chance they’d update with a satisfactory answer. Instead, I got images. Lots of them. A close up of a whale, its skin the grey-pink of short-dated oyster flesh, mouth open in what looked to me like shock. Another draped across the groynes, so grim and snotty looking you could believe that Neptune had risen from the waters and cleared it from his sinuses. What I did manage to learn was that there were only seven whales, which makes it slightly less heart-breaking but really, there’s no such thing as only seven dead whales. That’s still a good seven hundred dead Adams and while, yes, I’m biased, I don’t think that’s insignificant. It also raises the question; how did anyone lose count? But these numbers didn’t seem so important once the reports began to focus on the emergence of ‘dead whale tourism’.

It seems that, robbed of the usual options of panto or Christmas markets, large numbers of people had transferred their attentions onto the whale news and decided to visit Withernsea, denying the COVID travel restrictions in their desperation to witness the rare and tragic spectacle on the sands. 

At first, they stood in curious groups on the promenade, peering down at the whales in something approaching solemn contemplation. Over time though, they grew bolder, less respectful, creeping down onto the sands to take a closer look and prod in fascination at the barnacled and glistening skin. Before long the beach was alive with content creators, taking selfies for Instagram and posing against the beached bodies like hunters who’d just bagged the biggest game of all. For most, the appeal of this was limited, and they’d only stick around for so long before heading off to grab fish and chips or a hot drink from a seafront café, the local economy benefiting from the morbid boon of rotting sea giants. But rumours would soon spread that some of these tourists had grown a little too fascinated, removing teeth from the gaping jaws to keep as gruesome souvenirs of a Christmas like no other. Not quite believing this, I asked my mother to clarify. 

“Yes,” she said, “It’s true. It’s all over Facebook. Someone sawed off a whole jaw.” 

I tried to imagine the kind of person who would take a saw to the beach and found that I could only picture notable serial killers, a legion of Jeffrey Dahmer lookalikes strolling the sands of my hometown, so I was relieved to see the news in early January that the whales were finally being removed. By that time, I’d already learned the most likely theory about the whales. It’s believed they took a wrong turn while hunting for squid off the coast of Norway and ended up struggling in the shallow waters of the North Sea where, too hungry and weak to avoid their fate, they became stranded on the beach. 

Having found an answer, I relaxed a little and, gradually, the whales slipped to the back of my mind. I wouldn’t give them much thought until the summer when, during a visit to see my family, my brother-in-law explained that two of the whales were still on the beach. 

“They got washed past the groynes to the edge of town,” he said, “so, the council doesn’t have to do anything about them.”

“So, they’re just being left there to rot?” 

“Yeah, they’re in no-man’s land,” he said.

“Oh god,” my mother said, sensing where this was going. “You’re going to look at them, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “Do you want to come?”

”No,” she replied, “it’s too sad.”

I put my coat on and headed down to the beach, sad to be going alone but understanding her reticence. After all, environmental tragedies tend to lose their novelty when you’re living in one and trying your hardest not to think about that. 

Withernsea is located on East Yorkshire’s Holderness coast, arguably the fastest eroding area of the UK. Faced with the might of the North Sea, the fragile clay cliffs show all the resilience of a twice-dunked rich tea biscuit, collapsing into the waters at a rate of roughly 10 feet a year. The town’s fate has become so compelling that it’s now taught to GCSE Geography pupils, allowing them to study a high-speed geological phenomenon. I could not take you to the cliff top places where I stood 30 years ago, when I first moved to Withernsea, because those places no longer exist. Long swallowed up by the sea, they remain only as The Ghosts of Cliffs Past, floating out above the water. And beyond them lie the dozens of lost towns and villages that have tumbled into the sea over the years and now have more in common with the horizon than the land. Each day more of the coastline dissolves into the waters, creating the distinctive cocoa-coloured waves that lap the beaches. In time, Withernsea will fall beneath these waves and disappear from the map altogether.

You’d think that this fate would make living in the town unbearable, but Withernsea is by some distance the most hopeful place I’ve ever known. A tired but once prosperous seaside resort, it’s inhabited by a community that is far more interested in restoring the town’s former glories than pondering its future status as East Yorkshire’s answer to Atlantis. Most of the local energy is centred on attracting holidaymakers and turning the local economy around, which it’s hoped will be achieved with the construction of a new pier. The previous one was destroyed during the late 1800’s in a series of nautical disasters, leaving only the crenelated entrance way standing. In the same way that past calamities haven’t deterred the building of a Titanic II, a committee of Withernsea locals began raising funds for an ambitious new structure, reaching 560 feet out to sea and topped off with a hydroelectric restaurant, for which they’ve secured a 99-year lease. This could seem like a hope too far given that, in 99 years, it’s speculated Withernsea may have already dissolved into the sea, its pier only accessible by boat from the UK coast, rapidly receding into the distance. Still, this kind of hope is infectious, and as soon as I heard that a GoFundMe campaign had been set up to pay for it, I found myself donating £50. The rational part of my brain yelled “why don’t you just cut out the middleman and throw your wallet into the sea?” but the alternative would be to give in and embrace doom, and that’s not really the way things are done in Withernsea. So, we ignore the threats and hope that someone will come up with a solution. And when whales start washing up on the beach, the arrangement of their bodies seeming to spell out “YOU’RE NEXT,” we ignore those too. 

It took me a good 20 minutes of walking to reach the final groyne on the edge of town, by which point the beach was empty, save for me and another man, who was sitting in the opening of a pop-up tent against the sea wall, sheltering from the winds. He called out to me as I passed.

“Going to see the whales?” 

“Yes,” I called back to him, “How did you know?”

“That’s the only reason anyone goes that way,” he said. “Just make sure you leave them in one piece.”

I promised him I would, then continued on my way, annoyed at his inference that I was the sort of person who might interfere with a dead whale. But as I vaulted the groyne and found myself suddenly confronted with their bodies, partially swallowed by the sands, I felt exactly like that sort of person. I’d come to the whales in search of something and, worse than the trophy hunters, I wasn’t even sure what that something was. I guess what I had in mind was an epiphany. That, by spending time with them, I’d gain some meaningful level of understanding and acceptance around the inevitability of ecological collapse. It was a lot to ask of a corpse, especially these two, who’d already gone through so much. What with the starving, the washing up on Withernsea beach, where they’d been prodded and posed with. And then the final indignity, of me arriving to say, “I hope you don’t mind, but I have a few questions about the environment...”

I’d also had the vague, foolish idea that, once dead, a whale was basically soluble, the lapping of the sea quickly reducing it to a skeleton, the way a cartoon cat will dunk a fish into its mouth and suck it down to its bones. So, it was shock to see them like this after 8 months, their bodies still largely intact, save for the occasional rib or oven-sized chunk of vertebrae poking through rips in their now tan and leathery skin. I had no interest in seeing them like this, so irreversibly dead. What I’d really wanted was to have been on this spot last December, saving the day.

I do this a lot, mentally overplay my capabilities. Convince myself that, given the right set of circumstances, I could arrive on a scene and make everything better. So, were it not for the inconvenience of COVID, I’d have been on that beach on Christmas Eve, helping the RNLI wrestle the whales into the sea and happily back to Norway. It’s odd but, while I’m always doubtful of my proven abilities, I have absolutely no trouble speculating about the ones that haven’t been tested yet. So, why wouldn’t I be able to roll a whale back into the sea? If I’d managed that, then all this drama could have been avoided. The sadness, the environmental concerns, the dark tourism. And with the whales safely out of the way, I could get to work on rebuilding the coastline, scraping the collapsed cliffs off the beach and patting them back into place, one filthy handful at a time, saving Withernsea from its watery fate. But instead, this being the real world, I was just a guy standing beside two dead whales and staring up at the crumbling cliffs, wondering if it might be easier if we all just evolved gills.

My mobile rang. It was my mother, wondering if I wanted anything to eat before I drove back to Manchester.

“Did you find the whales?” she added.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m with them now.”

“How do you feel?”

“Terrible.”

“Well, I could have told you that,” she said. “Come home, I’m heating up a quiche.”

I said I’d be there soon, but hung around a while longer, thinking about this town I loved, with its hope, its grand plans and its 99-year lease on the future, wondering if it would one day make a decent subject for an environmental disaster documentary. A cautionary tale about the dangers of false hope, with a title like Withernsea: A Town on the Edge.

And I thought of how it might appeal to my Californian equivalent, someone anxious about the incoming wildfires and scrolling Netflix for a distraction. I pictured them clicking play on the trailer, where an aerial shot slowly tracks the Holderness coastline, capturing me as it passes. Just a speck on the beach, two dead whales at my side, the three of us caught between a town and the waves. Intrigued, the Californian settles in to watch this tale about an abundance of water and a town about to be extinguished, hoping that someone will do something, while he waits for the firenados to arrive. 

Joe Fenn  22:03

That was a new commission from Adam Farrer in Withernsea. And I'm Joe Fenn speaking to you from the historic Portico Library in Manchester, home of Northern England’s biggest literary award, the Portico Prize, the celebration of place and writing in the North of England. We're really excited to announce the shortlist of the Portico Prize 2022. Find out which six books have made it by checking in with us on Tuesday, 7th December. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes. The Portico Podcast is funded by Arts Council England. The producer is Nija Dalal-Small. Concept and programming by Sarah Hill, with special thanks to Dr. David Cooper. Join us next time.