Daughter of the Sea

Daughter of the Sea is an award-winning selkie book set on the Shetland island of Papa Stour. Gioga is found by a fisherman, and he and his wife bring her up as their own. But one day the Lord of the Oceans comes to claim her back. Fantasy. Winner of the Wtiters’ Guild Award. 10+

EBOOK

Available from Amazon.

It was also available as a hardback and paperback book, a Chivers audiocassette read by Siân Phillips, a Chivers large print edition and a Longman New Century Readers schools edition. These are all unavailable, although you may be able to find secondhand copies.

A version read by the author and set to music by the Sally Doherty Quartet is available to download or stream from my daughter Sally’s Bandcamp page.

“I’ll never let you go,” Jannet whispered. “They’ll not have you, whoever they are.”

My inspiration for ‘Daughter of the Sea’

When I was a child I lived in Wirral by the sea, a mile away from Hilbre Island. Every other Sunday was what we called Hilbre Sunday, because then the tide was just right. You could walk out to the island after breakfast and stay there all day while the sea surrounded it. You had to go the right way or the quicksands would get you. I lost a gymshoe there once, because it was sucked right off my foot.

The tide would come sweeping round the island like a moat, cutting us off from land. We had to stay out there all day before it was safe to go home again. And round the back of the island were the seals. They used to fascinate me, the way they’d slither onto the rocks to bask in the sun. I loved their round, wise eyes, and the strange, singing call they would make to each other. I never tired of watching them, and sometimes I used to swim with them. But I was always a little bit scared of them, you know. They were wild creatures, after all. They belonged to the sea.

The Silkie of Sule Skerrie

Seals visit coasts and islands all round the world, and there are always stories told about them. They befriend fishermen, haunt seal-catchers and lament the death of their young ones with singing that would break your heart. Sometimes called selkies, or silkies, they’re said to come onto land and shed their skin and become people. They are even said to marry humans. Yet they never forget their origins, never forget that they belong to the sea.

I always wanted to write my own story of the sea and the seals. There’s a folk song called ‘The Silkie of Sule Skerrie’, about a seal-man who comes on land to claim his son. I wanted to create my own story round that song, building up from it and making it into something of my own.

First I had to invent a community of islanders who would fear and respect the seals who visited them. I named my main character Gioga after a sea princess in an ancient story. In the legend, she rescued a drowning sailor by carrying him to his home in a little bay, Hamna Voe, on a small Shetland island called Papa Stour. So I decided to set my own story there, even though I had never been there. I could imagine it. I could imagine the crofters of long ago. I could imagine my Daughter of the Sea.

The writing of ‘Daughter of the Sea’

Actually, I didn’t write it! Everything was beginning to fit into place. It’s a wonderful feeling, when you know what you want to write about and the story takes shape in your head and haunts you. I knew I wanted to call it a folk-novel, as if it had grown out of years of retelling. I started to write it, but then something very frustrating happened. I lost the use of my writing arm because of a frozen shoulder! For a whole year I couldn’t type or hold a pen, yet I had this story burning inside me and longing to be written.

So instead of writing it I told it, as you might tell a folk story. I walked round the house and down the lanes and along the river telling my story into a little pocket tape-recorder. I visited Papa Stour in a stormy week in December and sat watching the seals in their furious sea at Hamna Voe, and told my story into a howling gale. It seemed to be the right way to do it, somehow. As a last touch the book was sent to the artist Siân Bailey. She captured exactly the starkness of that tiny island and the lonely figures in the wild seascape.

‘Daughter of the Sea’ and music

In 2004 an opera of Daughter of the Sea received its world premiere at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield. The music is by Richard Chew and I wrote the libretto. It has also been performed in Adelaide, Australia.

And now the whole thing has turned full circle, because my story has become an album too. Sally Doherty, my daughter, is a professional singer/composer, and has created a sung and spoken version, with harp, cello and violin. It is a shortened version, and Daughter of the Sea has become a tale to be spoken and sung, just as it would have been in the old days, when people crowded into each other’s cottages to hear the stories of long ago.

‘Daughter of the Sea’ is written with a lilting call of voice. Its prose is an invitation to the fireside, whilst the snow and ice grips the darkness in the howl of the wind outside. The sea not only haunts the book’s characters and story, but its whole tone too. We feel the touch of ancient depths of human experience in its telling; the accumulated voices of many folk long gone.

Bookish Nature