Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

whipped cream. I can’t work out the Icelandic lunch hour, which is sometimes half past eleven, and have just eaten a sandwich and too much chocolate. Theódór apologises repeatedly for his clear but heavily accented English, picked up while landing fish in Aberdeen and far better than my Icelandic, which isn’t improving as much as it should. Occasionally we drop into German, which he speaks better than English and I better than Icelandic. I can usually understand Margrét’s Icelandic and she follows some of my English. Between times, Teddi translates.

‘He was just telling me that he’d bought a new boat the day before the eruption, actually got it at 8.30 p.m. And then four hours later they were woken by the telephone. That’s how it was done: they called people to say that the eruption had started. Everybody went downtown, to the harbour, because that was the only way out. The airport was too close to the eruption site. Many of them were wearing only their pyjamas and bringing nothing, no belongings. A few had a suitcase, maybe, with some small things. And he was saying that many people went straight to his boat, because it was freshly painted and looked smart, and he didn’t stop people coming, just let everyone in. He had 430 on board in the end, one tenth of the population. That’s how it was done. He took them all over to Þorlákshöfn where there were buses waiting to take them to Reykjavík, to the big school there, and it was only there that everyone registered and was counted. But when the eruption began, people just went down to the harbour, and got away.’

I’m still trying to imagine this scene. I’m seeing, I realise, my own grandmother’s wartime memories, mothers and children running for shelters that were often no refuge at all while the bombs rained on York and houses flamed out around the cathedral. ‘So no-one organised it?’

‘Not really. Everyone just got in the boats and left.’

Someone must have taken charge, I think. Someone made those phone calls.

Theódór and Margrét have followed this. ‘No. It was just people calling their family and friends. People who noticed something was wrong. And then the fire-trucks started driving around with their sirens.’ Margrét speaks. Teddi translates. ‘She’s saying that they went out half-dressed. My mother had a sweater and pants but no socks. My sister was only two.’

‘It sounds very frightening,’ I say. For the first time, it does.

‘No,’ says Theódór. ‘Not for me. Some people were very afraid, but I have lost four ships. Three ran aground and broke up, one sank. I have many, many times gone to sea in bad weather. I sailed for years between England and Iceland, first in small boats and then in a bigger one. I have never been frightened.’

Theódór is a slight man, his pink cheeks and crisp checked shirt reminding me of my grandfather, who was an accountant who liked shopping and holidays and garden centres. Theódór looks as if he’d smell of Imperial Leather, not like a Viking at all, and yet I’ve never heard Icelandic masculinity so plainly articulated. I don’t see how anyone who didn’t want to die could fail to be frightened by the North Atlantic even without the volcano.

Margrét puts down her coffee, urges her men to take more pancakes. ‘I was frightened. I grabbed the children, six children, just put them into whatever I could find and ran for the harbour and I didn’t feel safe until the boat was outside the bay.’

It’s a reversal of order for Icelanders to feel safer at sea, certainly for the wives of fishermen to feel safer at sea. How can you rest once you understand that the earth itself can explode under your feet at any moment?

I sip my coffee. ‘Was there any warning?’

‘No,’ says Margrét. She looks out of the window. ‘There was no warning. Nothing. There were no monitors then. There was no warning. It just happened.’

‘Did you know it was a live volcano?’

‘We knew the islands were volcanic,’ says Theódór. ‘We had a big eruption in 1963, when the new island, Surtsey, came up. My father was the first to see that one. He saw fire and smoke on the water and thought it was a ship burning, but when they steamed off that way they found that it was flames coming up out of the sea. And then the island came up, 123 metres high.’

‘So was it still a shock when the volcano blew?’

‘We hadn’t thought it could happen on Heimaey,’ says Theódór. ‘Not until it did.’

‘They never thought it would happen on the island,’ adds Margrét. ‘Even though it happened at Surtsey ten years earlier. They didn’t think it would come this close.’

Theódór starts moving coffee cups and saucers around, a pancake for a volcano, a biscuit for the town. ‘The fault just goes along like this. It’s all in a line. Surtsey, Eldfell, Eyjafjallajökull. And then Katla. Just one line.’ He looks up and switches to Icelandic. Something about a shipwreck. Teddi takes over. ‘He’s saying that as the eruption began he made five trips back and forth, first with people, then with people’s furniture and belongings, and then for the fishing equipment. Five trips in six days. But the first trip was the hardest, of course. He was meant to take care of the engine, because he was the engineer, but there was no time to do that and the ship was so crowded it was hard to move around, so instead he was trying to take care of the people, everyone standing crammed close together, down below where the fish go and in the front and everywhere people pushed against each other. The weather was not that good and the boat was rocking and everyone started vomiting, so close together, so he was handing around buckets and bags but anyway they all got full up. And he remembers, there was a woman there with two small children, and