Shanti Mathias explores what the quartet of underwater adventure novels meant to her childhood self, and what they mean to her now.
There’s a wave on my bookshelf. The spines of Helen Dunmore’s Ingo books, a collection of differently sized editions, make clear lines of blue and purple and green. I’m rereading these children’s books in the sticky Auckland summer, diving into their ocean of adventure where it’s possible to breathe underwater and you can ride ocean currents like a rollercoaster.
The Ingo series has four books – Ingo, The Tide Knot, The Deep, and The Crossing of Ingo, with a standalone addition, Stormswept, published later with different characters. They’re children’s books by the acclaimed late British poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, set in the rocky cliffs and azure sea of Cornwall in the southern part of Great Britain. Published between 2005 and 2008, the series features the adventures of protagonist Sapphire and her brother Conor, whose father mysteriously disappears at the start of the first book. Living in a cottage by the coast, Conor and Sapphy meet Elvira and Faro, two young Mer – never mermaids – before they discover that they, too, can dive into the lush underwater world the Mer inhabit, where seals are guardians, sharks do their duty, and, if you listen hard enough, it might be possible to talk to dolphins.
Sapphy and Conor can travel in Ingo, they learn, because they have Mer blood. Initially, travelling between worlds feels “like a knife”, then it becomes easier; soon, Sapphy can breathe on her own underwater, not needing to hold Faro’s wrist to stay oxygenated. Over the four books, Sapphy and Conor go deeper and farther into Ingo, becoming involved with Mer politics, making friends and enemies, finding that the world underwater is more beautiful and dangerous than they could imagine.
I read the first book in the series as a child in Christchurch, wearing fluorescent yellow vests to walk, two by two, to the public library. I stroked the plastic binding, the book an alluring blue with a picture of a mermaid. I read it, loved it, slid the book back into the stainless steel slot a few weeks later, just one of many books that had to be returned when we moved to India to live deep in the mountains, far from libraries.
In that new place, we were bound by mountains, but I still dreamed of the sea. I begged and wheedled my parents for the rest of the Ingo series, and strings must have been pulled with godparents and visitors: they were unpacked from someone’s suitcase, all of their ocean colours bright and new, and they were mine.
Cornwall, the setting of the Ingo books, was almost unimaginably far away. But the setting, both on land and in the water, was so evocative that it was easy to imagine myself there. A seaweed forest has “thick stems and feathery branches, schools of silvery flickering fish [and] sea anemones and limpets making their home on the fallen stones”. On land, “cliffs loom, old and hoary as dinosaurs”. An autumn breeze has a “clear, tingling taste”. Sapphy walks over the heather-covered downs to get to the whitewashed cottage of Granny Carne, local wise woman and/or witch, and I felt the grass under my shoes too.
Fifty million years ago, the Indian tectonic plate collided with the Eurasian plate, propelled by the currents of magma that move the earth’s crust into new formations above the deep interior heat of the planet. This ongoing collision turned what had been sea floor into the world’s tallest mountain range, the even density of the plates meaning that neither was subducted. It was muddy down there, and shellfish lived their ordinary lives, sucking on saltwater; as the earth rose, they were covered in sediment, compressed by mighty forces, fossilised.
Millions of years later, I was a nine-year-old living 3,000 metres above sea level, thousands of kilometres from the ocean. But there were traces still of that ancient ocean that had rippled and folded to become the world’s highest mountain range: there were fossils. In walks in the hills, across dry scree slopes, we spotted them: curvy preserved ammonites, often crumbled, kind of ugly. They were easy to collect, to tuck in a pocket. I lined up fossils of this forgotten ocean on my windowsill, and I read Ingo over and over, and the sea didn’t seem so distant after all.
When I re-read Ingo this summer the story of adventures found and obstacles overcome were as familiar as the feeling of walking into the sea. But I found I was also reading as the child I’d been – the one who was so immersed in these books, utterly convinced of their importance. I know that if I read them for the first time now, I wouldn’t realise they were so special. Why did I love them so much then? The attention to place is certainly part of it: in the books, the ocean is deeply mysterious and alive, but it’s also shaped by the actions of humans. Climate change gets more than one mention; Mer rail against underwater mining, trawling, pollution, nets that kill dolphins.
The Ingo books are dotted with pieces of the Mer language, based on Cornish, a Celtic language that has been revived since the early 20th century. Sapphy’s father has abandoned his family for the call of the ocean: still he calls her “myrgh kerenza”, darling daughter. This is one of the first phrases of the Mer language that she understands. By the fourth book, she’s completely fluent: she speaks in front of an audience of Mer who want to prevent her from making the Crossing of Ingo, the journey by which Mer children become adults. She can converse with dolphins and whales; she speaks, too, a little of the language of the adult world, trying not to tell transparent lies, seeing things from her mother’s point of view. These fragments of another language makes the world seem dense with possibility; Sapphire learns so much, and there is so much she still doesn’t know.
Like Sapphy, I often was surrounded by a language I didn’t understand. I had awkward pieces of classroom Hindi, but it wasn’t enough to follow my friends’ jokes. Even when I understood the words, I missed the context, just like Faro and Sapphy trying, and failing, to make each other laugh with anecdotes about schools of fish, or schools of children. I longed to understand and be understood, but I didn’t have the words for it. Sapphy does: she is angry and jealous, wishing she could be one of the people, under and above water, who “know they’ll never have to choose between one world and another.” Instinctively, she understands that life in the ocean and in the air are completely different, nearly inimical, but united by the fact that she can, and does, go between them.
The Ingo books, too, are a dream of children’s independence. In one particularly striking scene in The Deep, Sapphy returns from Ingo, having accidentally spent a full day and night underwater. Her mother is out; her brother has lied for her to conceal her disappearance, saying she stayed the night with friends. She throws her jeans into the washing machine to rinse the salt out then realises that this is a tell-tale sign of her presence. She pulls the wet jeans out, puts them in a plastic bag, and hides them in the garden, demonstrating a presence of mind, and domestic competency, that I admired.
When Sapphy and Conor know that Ingo is growing stronger – that the breaking of the Tide Knot is going to cause a flood – they tell the adults around them to rouse the town and move to higher ground. They don’t have any evidence, but they are believed, and lives are saved. The word “magic” is rarely used in the Ingo books: if it comes up, it’s scorned, because working with the power of air and water is something organic to the characters, not magical at all. Instead, if Ingo is a fantasy, it’s one where children are loved and taken care of by the adults around them, but they still have space to exercise agency and power.
I continued to swim through Ingo as I got older, the paperbacks getting a little ragged at the edges. As a 13-year-old I would jump in pools with my legs pressed together, imagining that they were a tail: mermaids were beautiful and powerful, fully at home in their element and their bodies. In the water, I felt the same way, even if the rectangular, chlorinated school pool – reached by walking through a forest filled with monkeys and, once, a dead flying squirrel – was nothing like the living ocean that Sapphy and Conor explore.
I can find old photos of myself on a school trip with a sand mermaid tail that a friend had sculpted. The symbolism is nearly too obvious. Mermaids perfectly represent a split: dual nature, water and land, India and New Zealand – maybe even child and adult. In the Ingo books, Faro, with his strong seal tail, proclaims that he is not half of anything – he’s all Mer, but Dunmore subtly suggests that there are reasons he’s been so compelled to the surface when most Mer stay in their shadowy caves and jungles of kelp.
When I read the books as an adolescent in India, surrounded by trees and hills, I felt the pull of the distant ocean, alive within me. Monsoon, three months of cool grey rain and mist in your hair, was an ocean. I imagined the warm water on Bay of Bengal beaches evaporating in the seasonal winds, lifting and curdling across the plains, the sea coming to me. The rain that twined down the hills, gathering into the downhill logic of big rivers was returning to the sea.
The love of the ocean connected me to New Zealand, too. I had read in a book of facts that nowhere in Aotearoa is more than 75 kilometres from the coast, although I’m not sure this is true. We had an anthology of children’s books from New Zealand: I traced my finger over the illustrations in The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate by Margaret Mahy, remembering beaches in Aotearoa where “great, graceful breakers moved like kings into court, trailing the peacock-patterned sea behind them.”
It was easy to read my life into books, to draw lines of connection even if my ordinary school days and my ordinary family weren’t embroiled in a quest to, say, save the world from a kraken. My identification with these stories were children’s books functioning as they are meant to: the immersive possibilities of adventure beyond normal life were facilitated by slightly blatant dialogue, unambiguous plots, brave but ordinary protagonists.
That doesn’t mean that children’s books don’t hold potential for adult readers (or rereaders!) too. In her essay Why You Should Read Children’s Books Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, children’s author Katherine Rundell says that she writes for both her child and adult self. “My 12-year-old self wanted autonomy, peril, justice, food, and above all a kind of density of atmosphere into which I could step and be engulfed. My adult self wants all those things, and also acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart.”
I know exactly what she means: it’s why I’ve kept the tatty paperbacks of my Ingo books with me as I have moved from India to Aotearoa, from Wellington to Auckland. My copy of The Crossing of Ingo is singed from the winter in a chilly concrete house where I huddled close to the electric heater, reading until the shiny embossing on the book blistered. I will never be able to breathe underwater like Sapphy and Conor; I have never been to Cornwall, but I didn’t have to for the books to mean something to me. The Ingo series isn’t simply about children exploring the magical ocean: they’re a reminder that I have grown – am growing – up, but things my child-self wanted remain with me now. I still crave a sense of belonging to two places. I still cherish my uneasy un-fluency in Hindi. I’m still drawn into the fluid possibilities of stories, as uncontainable as the sea.