Love Letters to the Natural World

One of the challenges in our season of writing was to create a love letter to something in the natural world, which had a particular impact on our writers. Who would have thought that we would get a love letter written to the oyster.  

Photo credit: Jan Johan ter Poorten

My Love of the Oyster

I have had a relationship with many oysters in my life, but never more than when I worked for the lyrically named Seasalter and Ham Oyster Fishery Company in Whitstable, Kent. This was not the classy seaside resort it is now, but in the early 1970s it centred on a slightly run-down harbour with a fishing fleet and small coasters bringing in goods from the continent. My working home there was the wooden oyster company building, which was accessed by a track past the sheds where they boiled whelks and cockles. The smell of the boilers as well as the general smell of rotting shellfish bits in the piles of shells was the aroma of productivity. I visited the place some years later and started to write, but never finished, a poem about these sheds:

Old frayed rope and flaking paint reinforces conviction

The charm of this place is its sheer dereliction

Amidst tangled chains and old oyster dredges

Lie rusty winches and cracked wooden wedges

The gulls on the roofs and the rats in the litter

With old paint pots and shells just make it all fitter

 

But much as I loved these tatty, wooden buildings, it was the native oysters that were brought here from all over the country, cleaned, sorted and sold through Billingsgate, that had my heart and my stomach.  Even in the 1970s, the native oyster was already becoming rare because of overfishing, water pollution and disease, and was being replaced in the trade by a sharp shelled, farmed and far less tasty Japanese Oyster. But this interloper could not rival the bivalve I loved, which was flatter, rounder, whiter, fatter fleshed and tasted so good alive and raw. Although I was employed as a scientist, I was also a taster at times as, surprisingly, neither of the two company directors seemed to like eating oysters. So, I was in my element! But unlike the Walrus and the Carpenter, I sampled modestly and did not eat every one!

Source: Myrabella

I loved too where these oysters lived in sea creeks, estuaries and inlets. Here I found them at the coast’s edge at low tide, sitting with their kind in large beds, filtering seawater through their frilly gills to get at their planktonic food. This maritime fringe, exposed by the retreating tide, was where the wading birds and gulls probed their way through the oyster beds picking up worms, crabs and other small crustacea. But they picked their way on the mud so delicately, leaving small indentations to show their route, whereas I slogged and sucked my booted way leaving an unsightly track across this pristine, other world. The sight and sound of the birds, as well as the bubbling, popping mud, are all part of the symphony of the muddy sea’s edge. Early in the morning one winter, I disturbed two snow geese from one of our oyster beds in an Essex creek. I immediately thought of the snow goose in the book of the same name by Paul Gallico. I had doubted whether these North American birds were even seen in England, but here were two, wonderful white birds with black tipped wings. The sight a gift from my beloved oysters or, at least, a vision given me by my fixation with oysters, pulling me out of my warm bed to a muddy creak in midwinter.

So really, my love of the oyster, its shape and its taste are bound together with my love of the places where it lives and where it is prepared for trade. My doctorate was a study of another edible bivalve, a clam, which lived in mud. In the preface to my thesis I used a quote from J.A. Baker’s book, The Peregrine, which seemed to perfectly sum up my love of this habitat and its denizens, ‘Mud is another element. One comes to love it, to be like a wading bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meet, where there is no shade and nowhere for fear to hide.’

Roger Mitchell