Yes, Really! - Kate Turkington

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milk.

      This was not, however, where our grandfather had been born. One cold day, when the wind was whipping the white horses into furious activity, we piled into the family car and went to visit the small fishing village on the eastern coast of Götland that had been his birthplace. It was a long drive. When we finally reached Ronehamn, we were directed to an ancient weather-beaten man who had known Grandad as a boy. He invited us to lunch in his old wooden house and told us sorrowfully of prosperous times gone by. Then he related how he had helped Johann steal away from his warm bed one winter night and stow away below deck on a cargo boat at anchor in the harbour. We told him how Grandad had since sailed the world before coming to final port in England where he married Edith, became father to five children (including the indomitable Doris) and became a naturalised Englishman but never forgot his island home and often talked to us about it.

      As we wandered the creaking floors and hollow rooms of the now derelict wooden house, we began to understand how the urge to see new places and experience more than this village could ever offer our grandfather might have become insatiable, and had led him to take off while still a boy. During the second half of the nineteenth century, when he ran away to sea aged twelve, Ronehamn was the second most important harbour on Götland after Visby. Today his old friend told us that fewer than one hundred people lived there. Grandad’s urge to escape had come at just the right time.

      Rita and I returned to a cold autumn England and waited for our futures to unfold.

      Fifty years on, in 1998, there’s an interesting ‘sequel’ to the story of our visit to the land of our grandfather’s people, but it unfolds on another coastline, on a different continent.

      An ancient ritual, one that has survived climate change, the impact of asteroids, human evolution and animal extinction, is about to be played out, by moonlight, on a protected beach in the Maputaland Coastal Reserve in northern KwaZulu-Natal. It is a ritual much older than humankind, unchanged in 100 million years.

      I defy anybody to witness this ancient process and remain spiritually, mentally or physically untouched.

      It is night-time. We are a group of four, including the guide, and Gail from San Francisco, who will become one of my dearest friends and travel the globe with me. The iridescent surf booms softly under the blazing full moon. White ghost crabs scuttle across the smooth unmarked sand. Then we see the tread-marks of a small tractor’s tyres heading up towards the high-water mark. But it’s not a tractor that has made these impressions. The marks are those of a giant leatherback turtle who has come ashore to lay her eggs.

      Every year, between October and February, loggerhead and leatherback turtles come ashore – from Sodwana Bay to Kosi Bay – to lay their eggs in the same area where they themselves were hatched. If you’re lucky, you may see one of them wave-hopping, instinctively lifting her giant neck above the waves to seek out the exact location of her own birth among the low dunes.

      This female leatherback has waited over 20 years to achieve this moment of fruition, a long, lonely journey through the cold, deep blackness of the great oceans of the world. This is the only time she will know land, feel solid earth beneath her massive body. Her pull uphill from surf to beyond the tide lines is long on power, only 20 minutes in time.

      We plod up into the soft sand and follow her tracks. And suddenly there she is. We sink to our knees, gasping in awe, wonder and amazement at the huge creature digging in the sand. Nothing – not photographs, not wildlife documentaries – prepares you for the size of these creatures. She’s over two metres long and weighs about 450 kg – all four of us could sit comfortably on her back. She stops, gazes impenetrably into my eyes, then faces away from the sea and purposefully prepares her nest, oblivious to onlookers. Her immense front flippers, twice the size of the back flippers, rest in front of her head. Get in the way of one these and your leg will be snapped like a twig. Their turn to work will come later. It’s the back flippers doing all the work first, each flipper taking turns to carefully scoop out a hole over a metre deep. In the beginning she scoops out great piles of sand, but as the hole becomes deeper and deeper, eventually she can scoop out only teaspoonfuls. At last, satisfied with her work, she rests, breathing heavily. Then, emitting creaky groans, she begins to lay. First one egg, then another one, then two or three together come pulsing out, then half a dozen at a time, until she has laid between 100 and 120 eggs. The eggs are round, gleaming white, bigger than a golf ball, smaller than a tennis ball. It has taken her a long time to achieve this moment, meeting and mating only once every seven years. As she lays, she is in a deep trance, and tears run down her great leathery cheeks. It’s a phenomenon that’s been written about – the crying of the turtle.

      These turtles are among the gentlest creatures on earth and among its most endangered.

      ‘You can touch her,’ says our guide.

      And touch her we do, feeling the icy cold of the deep, deep oceans in her great thick shell. She is so huge, so powerful, so harmless, so defenceless, so vulnerable. When she has finished laying we feel drained, exhausted – having undergone a mutual catharsis.

      Finally, after a few hours, when she has filled, covered and disguised her nest with her massive front flippers so that the beach-prowling jackals and predatory sea birds can’t find it, she drags her great body back to the sea, orientating herself by the gleam of the surf, exhaling deep sighs as she pauses to rest between each cumbrous heave. She sounds like a ramped-up Darth Vader.

      We are exhausted, moved, still.

      And then a thought creeps unbidden into my head.

      Could she …

      Could she … possibly be … Gertrude or Gladys?

      4

      Blow Jobs and Dutch Caps

      At eighteen, I thought I was pretty expert at affairs of the heart.

      After all, I’d experienced a 24-hour non-consummated love affair with an American soldier in Stockholm and been proposed to by a French Foreign Legionnaire on a beach in Cannes.

      It had been a long hot leisurely day on the beach with not too many people. In those far-off days Cannes hadn’t yet become the hotspot of film festivals, the international jet set, glitterati and wannabes hoping to be spotted and become famous. It was still very much a French family seaside resort where Parisians in particular traditionally spent the July and August holidays.

      Rita and I had saved our pocket and odd-jobs money and taken ourselves off via ferry and train to the south of France. She had just finished her first year at King’s College, London, and I had just finished twelve years at the convent school of Loreto College, St Albans, Hertfordshire.

      We’d been sunning ourselves all day on the beach but it was now early evening and pale stars were just beginning to come out. Sun worshippers had packed up and gone home, picnic things had been gathered up, and deckchairs dismantled. The beach was becoming deserted.

      We were sipping freshly made lemonade from glass bottles – the real stuff bought from a local vendor – when four young bronzed men approached. Straight out of a Hollywood movie, they were lean, fit and strong. None of your fake beach-bum pretentiousness about this lot.

      From then on things moved pretty quickly.

      Although the French Foreign Legion was part of France’s military forces, it was also open to foreign nationals. Its name had become synonymous with men of mystery of all nationalities, fleeing criminals, daredevils and would-be adventurers. Its mythic quality was reinforced by the novels of PC Wren, whose fictional hero Beau Geste was the Indiana Jones of our day, a daring handsome chap who fought and won against the forces of evil.

      Our young men told us tales of desert forts and battles with warring desert tribes; of thirst, sand and unbelievable heat; and of a country called Indochina where a savage war was being waged.

      Can you imagine Rita’s and my reaction? Two young girls from rural England meeting, and then being decidedly wooed by, four gorgeous young men

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