Tim Ecott |
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For Tim Ecott, author of the bestselling Neutral Buoyancy, the underwater world is one of great healing and wonder. Here, he tells us how it helped him to come to terms with a great loss, and shares his obsession with the magic of the ocean.
Working as a journalist for the BBC World Service in the 1980s and 1990s I had the great good fortune to find myself reporting regularly from the islands of the south western Indian Ocean - dream holiday destinations like Seychelles and Mauritius and the far less developed islands of the Comoros and Madagascar.
I enjoyed visiting the region from a professional point of view because the islands were all so different from one another, both physically and culturally, as well as geographically. Politically the area was complex and fascinating, and all but overlooked by the majority of English-speaking journalists because of its strongly Francophone heritage and its seeming irrelevance to the wider world. In fact, the region was fraught with pre and post cold-war allegiances and was a magnet for adventurers of many kinds; mercenaries, treasure-hunters and entrepreneurs. I met dealers in cloves and vanilla, exporters of rare essences like ylang-ylang oil and patchouli, as well as emerald smugglers and arms dealers and a smattering of modern day pirates who lived off the cut and thrust of inter-island trading.
The very smell of the islands was intoxicating to me and I craved any opportunity to return there. As a child I had lived in Malaysia and I associated the sound of the cicadas, the heavy humid air and the clear, bright night skies with carefree days spent running around in flip-flops and shorts. Whatever my working commitments, I enjoyed the chance to swim in the Indian Ocean before I had to leave my hotel for the trip to the airport and a return flight to London. There were colourful fish and occasional sightings of barracuda and small sharks and it seemed as if swimming among them could cleanse my mind and soul.
Ironically, I had always avoided scuba diving. I always imagined that it was a dangerous sport, rather technical and cumbersome in its equipment, and no-doubt financially ruinous on a BBC salary. Occasionally I would see divers traipsing down the beach in their gear and hear them talking about their experiences afterward in the hotel bar. But somehow they never gave me an impression of just how wonderful their underwater visits could be. It was only at a time of great personal sadness that I discovered that the underwater world could be a healing and wondrous place.
When my mother died (after a long and difficult illness) I was desperately sad. Her death, even though it was expected, left a terrible void. After her funeral my immediate instinct was to escape from an empty house to the warm bright islands of the Indian Ocean. Rather than leave him alone, I invited my brother to accompany me, and it was his suggestion that we should try scuba diving.
Perhaps because I associate the tropics with a childhood reverie of unfettered adventure, diving affected me in a profound way. I became obsessed with it and did everything in my power to find a way of living on an island where I could dive whenever I wanted. For two years I made a home in Seychelles, and worked as a divemaster taking other divers on underwater tours. It was that experience that eventually led to writing Neutral Buoyancy.
Initially I wanted to write about fish sharks and dolphins, the charismatic creatures that charm anyone with a feeling for the liquid world. I wanted to take readers to the Bahamas, Seychelles, Papua New Guinea and into the cool green depths of the English channel. Only as the book took shape did I fully appreciate how fundamental the desire to go underwater has always been for mankind. While researching the history of the sport and the earliest attempts to allow men to breathe underwater I entered a world of truly inspirational human characters.
I can only describe it as an honour to have met some of the pioneers of the diving world. Non-divers may not realise that it is only in the last sixty years or so that diving for pure pleasure has been possible. In search of the history of those pioneers I met people like Jean Michel Cousteau, son of the late great Jacques, whose television films inspired countless individuals to become marine biologists, divers and explorers.
It was a great privilege to meet the Austrian diving pioneer Hans Hass, still going strong at eighty years of age and his charming wife Lotte, the first TV stars of diving way back in the 1950s. I also met ‘Dickie’ Greenland, one of the bravest divers of the Second World War and the irrepressible Dottie Frasier, America’s first female scuba instructor.
I didn’t know what kind of book Neutral Buoyancy might eventually become when I sat down to write it. In part it is a history of underwater exploration, in part a personal memoir. It is also an attempt to capture the spirit of the sea, the mesmerising appeal of breathing underwater and communing with creatures whose lives are still mostly a mystery to us. Most of all I hope I have captured something of the magic that being underwater brings to me and to so many other people who are obsessed with immersion in the liquid world.
