About Me — Harry Hogg
There’s not much to know. I’ve been fortunate. Now I write.
I started life in an orphanage. That is not strictly true; I started life hidden beneath a shrub on a roundabout in Gants Hill, Essex. I was found by a young couple leaving the Odeon cinema (since demolished), having spent their evening watching a Spencer Tracy movie, Edward, My Son.
My earliest memory is that of my housemother, Grace. I was around six years of age. There were other boys, though their names have deserted me. The one poignant memory outside of Grace is that of a smell. At six years old, I began outside schooling. After breakfast, Grace would walk me to the bathroom and insist on watching me brush my teeth, clean my ears, and brush my hair. Before leaving the orphanage, she would hug me. I was put on the bus and taken to school. The school was never fun. Never.
The Red House orphanage was a Barnardo home in Ripon, North Yorkshire. It was my home. It was a place I felt loved, to the extent any 6–8-year-old child knows he’s loved. In the orphanage’s grounds was an oak tree on which I skinned my knees a hundred times and collected a million acorns from its branches. (Hmmm, that might be a child’s exaggeration; anyway, it was a lot and filled every pocket in my pants). It was the same tree I’d seen felled by lightning when I was eight. I saw that…no, honestly, no exaggeration, I really did…from the dormitory window on a stormy night. It might have meant something. Today, as I recall it, it felt biblical. But honestly, if it did mean anything, it was lost on me.
Red House was a Georgian Mansion. Visitors to the house were struck by the vibrancy of the beautifully manicured gardens and, beyond them, the imposing grandeur of the Georgian architecture. There were corridors, staircases, and chandeliers. The staircases were sweeping. Fun was had sliding down the bannister rails, but only if Grace didn’t catch me. Get caught, and Grace, holding a broom, would chase me through the corridors. She never caught me, she never caught any of us, she never meant to.
The clean smell I earlier alluded to is the lasting memory of my early childhood. This smell was in many ways scary because on the days when it was strongest, lingering in the corridors, squeezing under the dormitory doors, a boy from the orphanage disappeared. No, that is an absolute fact, supported by the empty chair at the supper table. I knew I would never see that boy again. I didn’t know why. Nor could I ask.
In the summertime, I was playing in the gardens. Mr. Bunsen, the caretaker with silvered hair, huge craggy hands, and a gimpy walk, was mowing the lawns. He might have been cleaning windows, but you get what I mean. He was there about, and so was the smell. The smell exuded from a tall man wearing a suit. I think he wore glasses. Years later, I found out the smell was carbolic soap. The man used that kind of soap.
I never saw the clean-smelling man approaching; the freshly mown grass disguised his appearance. Here, he said, in a kindly voice, let me fix that for you. I was wearing a child’s space outfit with a round fishbowl helmet. It fitted badly. He took my hand and walked me to the matron’s office.
Matron, smiling, greeted me with arms open, beckoning me around the desk. Grace was sitting beside her. There were tears in Grace’s eyes. I went to Grace first. She hugged me hard. The clean-smelling man dragged a chair from the back wall to the desk, where he sat with his hands on his lap and spoke to me quietly about the two people coming to see me. They were nice.
Grace then released me from her arms. Not quickly, slowly…very slowly…then pulled me back close and kissed me on the forehead, a strange kiss, longer than her nightly kiss goodnight. The clean-smelling man called me to his knee. I went to him as a child goes early to bed. He put his hands on my shoulders and then, with one hand, lifted my chin. How would you like to call these people your parents? He said.
It had been the first time I ever slept away from home. The couple took me on a weekend adventure by train to London. We stayed in a hotel near Buckingham Palace. They told me the Queen lived there. There were men in huge furry hats marching up and down. The man told me to call the woman Marion and him Frank. They were friendly. The lady was pretty, with smiling eyes. She wore a red beret on the back of her head. On the lapel of her cream jacket was pinned a corsage of fruits. Frank appeared as a giant. The biggest man I’d ever seen. He talked about the sea, catching fish from a boat. He told me many stories, scared and excited me simultaneously, and gave me a boat he’d made from matchsticks. I’d only ever seen photos of the sea.
Grace dabbed a handkerchief to her eyes.
I had lived for eight years in a secret world. The place in which my bed became a spaceship, where I was kissed and tucked in, where I could hear the older children, those playing outside the grounds. It was more than a home; it was where I rode my childhood dreams, which was about as far as any child could ride, coming home to find Grace waiting to change me out of my school clothes, unaware I’d ridden off to war that day. To whom does a kid explain such magical sophistries? I was a fabulous opera, suffering the brilliant argument of childhood madness, a child born in a whirlwind of misunderstanding and hurt. In the end, damned by the rainbow, I rode wooden dolphins until I was muddied by affection.
I didn’t want to leave Grace.
I was a tough kid with terrible tantrums, divulging into floods of tears if I never got my way in everything. Mum held a troublesome child safe and never let go, even when dealing with spitting verbal abuse. She made a world that held me spellbound. At ten years old, I was no longer broken. A child still, yes, sighing harmonica notes without the endless need to cry.
I loved early mornings, having tea with Dad at 5:00 a.m. and listening to the shipping forecast on his old battery-powered radio. There’s nothing that compares with the tone of that old valve radio. The words in the forecast sounded like poetry to me, the same poetry my father loved: Bailey, Rockall, Shannon, Fastnet or Forties, Dogger, Malin, and German Bight. Descriptions, Dad told me, were weather zones. He paid particular attention to the areas of Malin, Rockall, Faeroes, and the Hebrides. In such zones, he spent days trawling for cod.
Talla Rainbow was the name of our home in the shadow of Ben More, and today is the better part of two hundred and fifty years old. My great-great-grandfather, a crofter, built the original.
Today, when I come home to the shadow of Ben More, to the cottage, I’m reminded of the first day I came to the island. The rocky terrain, the cottage, and the kitchen haven’t changed in sixty-two years.
These memories are like water bumping through the lead pipes of my brain. I remember the fragrance of Swan Vesta matches being struck and hearing the boom of exploding gas igniting a blue flame. More than a room, the kitchen is where I recall Mum spending most of her day. It was the heart of my family’s existence, evoking childhood memories. The copper kettle is sitting on the cream and black Aga. Its battered swan-neck spout and buckled lid — the same kettle on the stove the first day I arrived.
On the wintry days, Mum offered a blanket for visitors’ knees to enjoy the warmth of the Aga while she made pancakes. Mum said there are as many ways to make pancakes as to make friendships. She made them thick, adding fresh berries and syrup. The cottage was kept spotless, bare, and some might say dismal — now antique, well-polished, practical furniture.
As rare as they are, friends comment on the whimsical Victorian style. To me, after sixty years, it feels normal.
The island encourages a feeling of serenity, but nowhere more than in my study. It’s a room with enormous furniture, bookcases, a desk, lamps, and old photos. On its pale-yellow walls, Margaret Tarrant prints once hung in my boyhood bedroom, have been moved to my study to enhance my feeling of security.
It was there, sitting at my desk with a laptop, I learned to breathe. From that breathing came life. I have no grand ideas that I’m a talented writer, let alone chase the idea of greatness; I am a storyteller. But I know poetry hangs in the Celtic air when I stand on Scottish soil.
In my old age, it isn’t unusual to spend hours walking the shorelines, jagged and unforgiving; others sandy, and regain that long-ago feeling of dad walking with me along the water’s edge.
In my youth, I climbed Ben More to free myself from the island’s capture and enjoy the elation of looking toward the mainland. Oftentimes, catching sight of a yacht tacking hard, fighting the wind mid-sound. I’d wave as a city kid might wave at trains.
To talk of the mountain, its craggy face, wet and shadowy, is to have people understand it is a living thing, a protector, a guardian, a constant, like a parent. It has good days and sad, one day gentle, the following severe. So it is with the mountain, letting you go but calling you home.
As a trawlerman, Dad lived a tough existence. He was a poet. Not a romanticist. He worked with the perils offered by one of nature’s wildest and unpredictable children. He was a man beaten, shaped, and inspired by the sea.
Beneath the east-facing window of my study is an aged Smith-Corona. It belonged to Dad. I still hear the clickety-clack of letters punched out, making poems. I imagine those he had yet to write — a thought which keeps him within an inch of my heart.
Sometimes, I feel a million miles from Ben More’s shadow — from my youth, I return home as an old man to listen to the snow falling, protected from the storms of life. Listen to the screech of the gulls, sniff the lobster pots, and taste the salt air cleaning my throat. Entwined in the fog’s mystery, we island people live respectfully, passionately, and unafraid of hard work.
Sometimes hurting, tears came without notice. I always found my way home. Or remembering how the hills looked against the coastline, wanting the coolness of the water around my ankles.
Leaving childhood, the kitchen, beyond youth, beyond Paris, there were no more homemade pancakes. There was no clatter of the Smith Corona’s keys, no heat next to the Aga. I seldom receive friends, but when I do, I make tea.
It’s hard to know when I became a dutiful son. In later life, Mum found comfort in the sherry bottle come the evening. Dad watched the nine o’clock news on BBC with a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit. On my last visit home, before Mum died, I arrived home at ten in the evening. She was in bed and wanted to get up, but I refused to let her. She was eighty-seven. I held her hand and told her made-up stories of pebbles, sand, and seaweed. She loved it whenever I talked to her about the sea. Dad and I spoke before he went to bed. He showered, put on his PJs, and retired to their room. In that short time, Mum had gone. Dad stayed with her body that night, never coming to tell me or bring me to her. It was his time.
Two years later, in 2012, Dad died and was then given to the island waters, following his lifelong friend, Snowy McLeod. They are where they belong. Before his burial, I had time with Dad, though I didn’t touch him — this man had been everything to me.
In life, there are super achievers, at least to the extent that they excelled throughout their careers. I was a man born of rape, incestuous rape. I had no God-given right to be alive. I felt a new sensation in my body. I’d not thought it before. It became my career, spending hundreds of hours practicing techniques in a controlled environment. Developing the confidence and skills to hover a Sea Harrier VTOL over a moving deck of an aircraft carrier. When the day came. When everything practiced is put to the test, sensations ignited in every nerve end of my body.
Whatever success is, the men of the sea taught me how best to get through life. I was well-equipped to deal with everything but loss when I left the island. I had learned their language; it was a harsh language, loose and harsh, but it was built on nature’s anger and not a little poverty.
Trawlermen will tell you there are only two ways of gaining riches: finding it in oneself over wealth or increasing your possessions by decreasing someone else’s.
I grew up among people who, and this is the truth, did not concern themselves with wealth but with life’s riches. There is a difference. The richness of life, involving hard work and fierce manual labor, cannot compare to a man who might have sold well on the stock market.
Wealth may divide their lifestyles, but the richness of life separates them as men. I was never a trawlerman at heart. My father knew that. I had a softness that let me down, an ache for romance that every trawlerman scoffed at, yet I loved those men fiercely.
I became a leader of men accidentally. Such an accident, well, it taught me the single most important thing about leadership. Humility. There is no way to talk about humility and appear humble. Leadership is not about a title — the title is part of the accident.
I became a Greenpeace activist. I had skipped over the usual first levels of leadership, where I thought I was supposed to learn how to manage people, and I ended up as a director. I don’t necessarily recommend this leadership course; it was terrifying. I still remember the first time one of my teams turned to me and said, “well, you’re the director now; what do we do about it?” It also meant that I thought about leadership differently than those who join the ranks of influence through the usual channels.
Today, with my body falling apart, I continue to dream the same dream. When I sail into Tobermory Harbor with Paladin, white water from the bow, I see him, this enormous man, waving. Seagulls appear from everywhere at once, hundreds and hundreds of them. Dad steps ashore and hugs me as if I were still his eight-year-old son. His smell is intoxicating; his rubbery, salt-burned body, seabirds exploding with excitement behind him. I sail into harbor, close my eyes, and know I’m home.
I’m a sailing man in my heart and soul. That’s just it. I mean, really, there’s nothing to add.
Some morning risings have been exquisite of late, each a seeming dress rehearsal for the next. I write a lot when out sailing, it is a gigantic task to finish my book. I slept three hours, till 11. pm., woken by a passing Grey whale with a calf, breaking the surface and (disguising themselves as a steam train) the sound of breath spraying silver in the moonlight. I wanted to feel that wetness on my face, but too soon, they swiftly swam out of sight.
I stayed naked most of the day.
Writing came late, maybe too early. I’ve studied the false ego of the writer, swept away a million skeletons, exhausted myself on the great ocean of life, and concluded that the first task of a man who wants to be a poet is to study his awareness of himself. A Poet I am not. What can be learned from books is second to natural development. No one is born a visionary; only a long journey through all the forms of love, suffering, and perhaps, too, madness.
A poet, then, must first be destroyed to become whole.
Things are different now. Writing every day has changed all that. I’m often forced to scavenge for the right idea to connect or complement what I’ve written. I’ve come upon poems or long-forgotten prose buried in the back of a paperback or sailing log. I like to work on it again. It’s seldom better.
Some lines could have been written yesterday because they reflect something that only started happening to me a few days ago. Flashbacks are not so scary, but flash-forwards are a wonder. This past week, I investigated the face of the vast ocean and saw myself exactly as I was thirty-some years ago, just as I’d predicted, failing to meet love’s every new tide.
These are heady days for me. I’m doing what I like — sailing, horse riding, writing, and working on some songs. There are rough days, too, but nothing I can’t handle. My battle with time has not been helped by seeing myself as I was 30 years ago. Funny, there was never time enough then, either.
I am one of life’s fortunate people, and one day, if not too late, I’ll appreciate that. I’ve been a squatter, sometimes a gipsy, content anywhere, a long-time wanderer who spent much of my life rootless, not collected at birth — but since collected. I became adept at conjuring people’s love for me, carrying only what I wanted, or supposed, from place to place.
The first half of life is spent acquiring possessions and the second getting rid of them. I started on both journeys late.
In my head and heart, I am building a barn. Big, redwood, huge enough to hold my lifetime. I’ll build it. I will. It’s the last big dream [until the next one], and I’ll make it happen. A barn. Imagine. Three stories high with lofts to store all my dreams, my memories, my promises, my maybe’s, my hopes, some yet to be recognized, and of course, my dogs and cats.
It won’t be a castle. I learned that lesson and saw it dissolve and become dust again. No, it will be a rugged barn where I can get through the day and where the night won’t make me nervous. The night does make me nervous. Not for any reason, except maybe it catches me unaware and follows me like a woman does when she wants something.
I waited through the ruins, maybe for a face — kind, fresh, encircled by a halo of cascading hair; a face, the beauty of it passing without a hello spoken, would break my heart, stop my breath. Jenny stopped.
I know life hangs on, but only long enough to get through the day’s lies. So, my words must stay largely private, unrecognized, except by those for whom, with age, truth has become a way of reconciliation.
Life, I must say, could not be better.
Thank you for the compliment you pay me in reading.
