Sea Marked by Linda Cracknell review: 'an intriguing train of thought'

The temptation when confronted by a group of portraits of people who are all united by one thing is to look for commonalities in the images: is there some sort of tell-tale sign that someone might be a sea person? A certain saltwater-specific weathering of the face, perhaps? Or a particular kind of thousand-yard stare?

If there’s one thing Ocean Portraits makes very clear, however, it’s that ocean people can look as different from each other as people anywhere, in any walk of life. Sure, plenty of those featured in Ocean Portraits have tanned, leathery skin and crow’s feet around their eyes from years of squinting into the sun, but then so might an Egyptologist who had spent most of their life in the desert. In his sharp-suited, narrow-shouldered, slightly impish portrait, Jacques Cousteau looks more like a jazz musician than a pioneering oceanographer. But just because the sea doesn’t leave any unique marks on the outside of those who spend their lives in or around it, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it won’t leave marks on the inside; and – as its title suggests – that idea lies at the heart of the latest book from the reliably excellent Linda Cracknell.

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Although she has been based in Scotland for most of her adult life, currently residing many miles from the sea in Highland Perthshire, and although she spent much of her childhood in a landlocked suburban setting in the south-east of England, Cracknell’s family on her mother’s side are from north Devon, specifically from the port town of Braunton, and for many generations they were seafarers. Ostensibly, the task Cracknell sets herself in Sea Marked is to join up the dots of her hazy family history – partly as a way of improving a somewhat problematic relationship with her elderly mother – and to work out how the two of them fit into the complex network of “Drakes, Newcombes and Hartnolls” who used to sail trading ketches out of the tricky-to-navigate Taw-Torridge Estuary in the 19th century. However, this book is much more than a 270-page version of Who Do You Think You Are? and where it starts getting really interesting is where Cracknell begins to wonder to what extent the kind of psychology that inevitably develops in a seafaring community, where bereavement and financial catastrophe are only ever one storm away, might filter down the generations, even as far as an apparent landlubber like her.

“Both my sister and I when young had voiced some reluctance about marrying,” she writes. “Our female inheritance was the seafaring burden – our men would die young. We’ve never been a superstitious family and yet this uneasiness amounts to the same thing. Plumbing the unconscious now raises the wreck of an idea – we are all still living as a community at sea.”

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There then follows a fascinating exploration of the idea of transgenerational trauma. As Cracknell acknowledges, this is still a relatively new concept in psychology, and is usually applied to families that have been subjected to particularly extreme suffering, such as Holocaust survivors or the descendants of those sold into slavery. “But could it be,” she wonders, “that seafaring families, braced as they must be against loss when human life is so fragile, have passed down a particular propensity not just for forbearance, but amongst women an armoured acceptance of repeated ‘abandonment?’ ”

Cracknell then uses this as a lens through which to view some of her own life choices, and in particular her choice of partners: “always an element of away-ness... of patterns of separation and reunion. Had I been unknowingly practising the old ways of that coast of widows?”

Is this taking things a step too far? Making the parallels too specific? Perhaps. There are certainly plenty of other things in the author’s life that could equally be at the root of some of the attitudes she describes. Either way, though, it doesn’t really matter: this intriguing train of thought opens up a novel way of viewing not just the author’s own psychology, but the psychology of our North Atlantic archipelago in general.

Although she begins and ends the book in the south-west of England, Cracknell’s search for her ancestors ends up taking her all around the British Isles, including up to Orkney, where a boat called Pirate, once owned by one of her ancestors (the improbably named Francis Drake), was constructed in 1888. As a result, the question it inevitably poses is: given the extent to which life in these islands has been bound up with the rhythms of the sea for thousands of years, could our entire society be said to be “sea marked” to a certain extent? And if so, what kind of self-knowledge could we glean if we started thinking about ourselves in this way?

Sea Marked: Throwing a Line to a Coastal Past, by Linda Cracknell, Saraband, £12.99

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