For her debut book Dark, Salt, Clear, the young writer immersed herself in a Cornish fishing community, a life-changing experience that led to one of spring’s most hotly anticipated titles
Lamorna Ash has a hunch about seasickness: a conviction that there could be more than one reason why a person might feel suddenly queasy up on deck. “A fisherman told me that his cousin never used to suffer from seasickness at all,” she says. “But then he had kids, and suddenly he did. I thought this was fascinating. It made me wonder whether seasickness isn’t somehow connected to things that tie you to the land. Could it be that the more of those things there are, the more likely you are to suffer from it? Perhaps it functions a bit like homesickness in that way.” Struck by her own fancifulness, she flashes me a smile. “Well, anyway… I like that as a way of thinking about it.”
When she was 22 and studying for a master’s degree in social anthropology at University College London, seasickness was briefly Ash’s closest companion. Having decided to devote her thesis to the way that fishing shapes a community, she moved to Newlyn in Cornwall – which is where she met Don, the skipper of a rusty old trawler called the Filadelfia. Would Don consider taking her out in his boat, so that she might stand, as it were, in “the same wellies” as his crew? Somewhat to her amazement – women are supposed to bring bad luck at sea – he said that he would, and so it was that one evening in 2017 she found herself rounding Land’s End just as the sun was about to set, her stomach a tight knot of nerves, her eyes already red from the salt-licked wind. “I’m someone who doesn’t think too hard about things before I do them,” she says. “I seem not to be very cautious; I get overexcited. But that day, yes, I was nervous. I was very scared of seasickness. Not so much of being sick itself, but of it being so bad that I would be useless and they would have to take me home. I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise their trip; I knew that would cost them a lot of money.”
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