On the Broken Shore

‘And if I said, “So what?”’

Typical Stubbs. He was as impressed as hell, but hated showing it. He delighted in the counter-intuitive challenge, and always insisted on making his students work hard for the answer that he already knew.

So Leo told him what they both knew: that identifying the language of creatures that had been on the planet longer than humans was the start of a scientific journey to unlock the minds of those with whom we share this earth.

They had had a celebratory drink that night, first at the small bar next to the old Cross Keys Hotel, and then back at Stubbs’s flat in Hope Street. It was four o’clock in the morning and light when he and a few collegues straggled down to the West Sands and fell down on the dunes to watch the sun come up over the bay. Freezing cold, of course, but with that much whisky inside them it didn’t matter.

And then, their darkened heads just visible over the waves, a pod of grey seals appeared with the sun, slipping through the water, hunting for sand eels and flat fish that had come in with the tide.

It was a magical moment. And Margot had been somewhere in the crowd that had collected as the party gathered pace throughout the evening; a young primary-school teacher who hung out with the junior academics looking for a little intellectual stimulation and a break from the boredom of cramming maths into the minds of 9-year-olds.

After the publication of his paper ‘Underwater Vocalisation of the North Sea Harbour and Grey Seal’, Kemp’s reputation in the small and cloistered world of sea-mammal research was born. Invitations to speak came from the most prestigious institutions, the ocean sciences department at the University of California Santa Cruz and the Australian Institute of Marine Science among them

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