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Joey’s Canadian canoe glides between the reeds. The coastline is bejewelled with streams and islets. This marsh belongs to the birds: stilts, avocets, and flamingos.  Up ahead, through the river mouth,  Tavira’s white cubic houses cling to the hill beneath the ancient castle.

 On the horizon, gun-metal clouds mass, the sea roars. Salt air stings the wound on his forehead.  There was no need for Rodgers to sling the rock at him.

A sudden gust of wind seems to be singing. No, it’s not the wind – he’d recognise that voice anywhere.  It’s Ana. He pictures Tavira’s young Fado singer,  raven hair blowing in the sea breeze as her mournful song surrounds him.

This love is not a river. It has the vastness of the sea.

The green dance of the waves, sobbing in my eyes. *

She must be out here on the marsh somewhere. But there’s only the stilts flying by, their red legs out straight like the rudder of a boat.  

It’s impossible that he can hear her voice so far from town.

Her song dies away as his paddle sinks into his islet’s sand. His muscles flex as he crunches the canoe across the crushed sea-shell beach.  Home – the upturned fishing boat squats at an awkward angle, a beached whale, salt crystallising on its hull.

On the salt pans, closer to shore, there’s more flamingos than yesterday.  Safety in crowds. Their heads are buried in shallow waters. Wind whips his face. The storm is coming. His upturned boat will lurch and lunge but the marsh will do what the marsh does. It will suck the storm waters into itself and the world will be washed new tomorrow. The mussels glisten in his net net. The sky growls. Wind whines.  Bruised clouds are so distended they’ll burst any minute. Yet when thunder bellows, he jumps. Lightening rips the sky in two.

As daylight seeps from the sky, the sea tosses.   Huge waves are still a way off, but they’re coming.  Ana’s voice surrounds him again, rising above thunder.

*Love without end, love without time and measure

Water drawn from the distance, from its source

Joey’s palms sweat. He must follow her song. He takes the back streams. The incoming tide powers him up river to Tavira, the salt-hills ghostly either side, a swollen moon ducking behind a cloud. Rain pelts his face.

Abandoned tourist yachts rock on Tavira’s riverside port. The plazas, now under water, throng with the ghosts of summer clothes, sardines and sun-cream.   There she is, Ana singing to him from the Roman Bridge.  Rain drips from her blue dress as she climbs aboard his canoe.

She’s a figurehead in front of him, her shoulders back. There’s the salt scent of her skin.  

The canoe rocks along  Tavira’s water-filled alley ways, between white houses, the paint peeling into scabs, green mould spreading on the water line. The fishing boats on the blue and white Azulejo tiles mock them from empty homes.

Together, they tug the canoe up onto an alley that’s not yet submerged. Black and white cobbles are slick beneath his feet. Her hand is cold in his as they pound up the steep incline to the castle’s battlements. 

The sea below churns, thunder rolls, lightning cracks. A baby wails, his mother rocks him. An old man kneels, his rosary draped over gnarled fingers. Panicked voices fill the air. Ana sends her voice soaring into the sky.

Light that dawns without dimming

Love that wants to be a breeze, but is a gale.

The crowd hush.

Rodgers’ bulk blocks the moonlight shining on Ana. “Bloody singing again,” he barks.  “We’ve got to reinforce the wall with sandbags. Build it higher, stronger for the next time.” A shudder runs through the huge man. “What? You again,” he growls at Joey.

“Go on,” Ana nods at Joey.

He steps round Rodgers, steadies his voice. “The boats in the port will save you. The tide when it turns will wash you out to the marsh. You will live. The marsh will soak the storms’ waters into itself.”

              Rodger’s face reddens. “Abandoning Tavira is just plain stupid.”

              The sea roars against the wall. The ground beneath them trembles. Shrieks rise into the air as the sea smashes through the wall. Roof tiles and  doors are sucked out to sea and Ana’s voice swells beside Joey.

Love that wants to be rain, but is a storm…

              One by one the crowd come to stand before them. The town’s people follow her song to the port as if she has a string tied to them. 

Light that dawns without dimming…

 At last, the pleasure boats rock on the water below the quay.

Ana steadies the old man as he climbs aboard. Joey cradles the baby, hands him to his mother on the rocking deck. Boat after boat fills. At last, a huge, calloused hand touches his. Rodgers, the last man aboard.        

*Full lyrics can be found on Fado, wind and Sea https://blogs.harvard.edu/sulaymanibnqiddees/2013/03/19/fado-wind-and-sea/             

How I did it:

The Portuguese town of Tavira sits on the south coast, near the border with Spain, sheltered by salt marshes and islands with miles of sand.  The marsh belongs to the birds: stilts, avocets, and flamingos, so many of them they leave you breathless. This is the place that got me thinking about how important marshland is, not only for soaking up carbon, but also for finding a way to be friends with the sea. Instead of building walls, perhaps we need to accommodate  the sea’s changing moods and rising  levels.

My story, King Canute is again triggered by my ‘What if?’ game. What if the sea levels do become frighteningly high? What if we have to change our way of life forever? However, I had no wish to write a purely dystopian tale. I was aiming more for a ‘thrutopian’ tale, a story which indicates how we may possibly live with future rising sea levels. Our precious marshlands could well be the key to our survival. Perhaps we need to let the sea rush in through reclaimed land and do what it used to do before sea-defences, so that our coastlines are bejewelled with streams and islets and wild birds?

Perhaps too faced with the realities of climate change, we need, as Rupert Read suggests in the HUFFPOST article, Thrutopia: Why Neither Dystopias Nor Utopias Are Enough to Get Us Through The Climate Crisis, And How a ‘Thrutopia’ Could Be: “…a narrative that speaks to [the climate] crisis and how to address it . Philosophy and the arts have a crucial role to play here. In particular, it needs to be possible for us to picture what it would actually be like to get through and survive the crisis.”

So, I guess, I was attempting a ‘Thrutopia’ with my tale. But there were two other elements that were crucial to this story. One was the Fado concert that I went to in Igreja do Misericordia in Tavira, a church full of blue and white azulejo tiles telling bible stories, and gilded cherubs. The traditional Portuguese guitar and Spanish guitar, along with the amazing, beautiful female Fado singer, dressed in scarlet, her voice so sonorous, haunted me.

Fado is music born out of emigration and loss – loss of lovers, family, home and roots. It seems a prescient music tradition when we, as humans, may well be on the brink of mass migration due to changing weather patterns. So without me even being aware of it, Fado became linked with the marshes, and both became linked,by my What if? scenarios about possible effects of climate change.

I researched Fado songs about the sea and used the lyrics from Harvard University’s Fado, Wind and Sea as the haunting song that Ana sings in my tale. As often happens with my writing, a little bit of magic realism enters the arena as I wanted it to be ambiguous as to whether there is a magical element to how Ana’s song reaches Joey and persuades him to have one final shot at helping the town’s people.

I aimed to create some links between this tale and an earlier short story, and so I resurrected Joey from The Bronze Otter, where he is an artistic little boy in an Irish country school, in Glenmalure, County Wicklow. From the start, he is a little boy of unusual strengths and artistic insight. In King Canute I found myself writing the story of his adult life where his skills, which were misunderstood by his academic father, come into their own.

How the arts have woven themselves into my subconscious  always fascinates me. Looking back on King Canute, the importance of story in my life is clear: from the story of King Canute trying to hold back the sea; to Homer’s sirens luring sailors to their destruction; to tales about mermaids. These inter-textual threads are woven through my story, yet when I was writing it, I was quite unaware of these influences.

The cultural tapestry of my life enriches every day, every creative attempt. It makes me rather sad that the creative arts have received such a hammering in the education system, reduced to a by-product in the last decades, with GCSE students’ creative writing often a panicked add-on, to fulfil its tiny examination window. At primary level, the emphasis on frontal adverbials has been attacked by many and the travesty of Year 6s in 2023 weeping because their English SATs were so technically difficult is sad beyond belief.

What occurs to me about my creative process in King Canute is how embedded every piece of writing is in the environment, both cultural and natural, and how these strands can interweave to present ways of thinking that open the door to a narrative about the future and how we may engage with it as a species both imaginatively and practically. It also occurs to me that the current Government emphasis on  STEM subjects is short-sighted. I’m not for a second saying we don’t need scientists – they are vital for our survival, but they tell us half of the story. For people to change their world-view we need the other half of the story – we need the arts because we need to touch hearts as well as minds.

If you want to have a go:

• Yet again, play the What if? game, this time concentrating on a possible consequence of climate change, where water almost becomes another character.
•  Research the ‘Thrutopia’ genre  – making sure not to become too ‘preachy’ in your story, but to also write a tale where the characters and their interactions matter.
• Use potent snippets of description to make the sensory details of the environment come alive.
• Remember to use the Zoom-out, Zoom-in camera shot technique, whereby you Zoom-out to let us know exactly where we are; and Zoom in to show the emotional life of the character.
• Choose song lyrics, or a piece of music, which will add atmosphere to your tale and convey the feelings of the character.
• Have fun with it.