Fear and wonder underwater

Text 1: Ten Minutes in the Diving Bell, by Frances Merriman

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

My dear Edith, You will scarcely believe it, but on Thursday I went to the bottom of the sea. Mr Rowan, who is building the new pier at Sandmouth, had promised Papa that we might go down in the diving bell, and I held him to it, though Mamma turned quite pale. The bell is a great iron box, open at the bottom, with thick glass windows set in its roof, and it is lowered from a barge by a crane while men at the pumps force air down to you through a leather pipe.

I will not pretend that I was brave. As the water closed over the windows and the light turned green, a pain began in my ears as though someone were pushing knitting needles into them, and I was obliged to hold my nose and blow, as Mr Rowan showed me, until they cracked. The pumps above made a dull thudding, like a great heart, and I found myself listening to it with all my attention, for I knew that if it stopped we should have only the air in the bell. Once it did stop, for perhaps three seconds. I have never known three seconds so long.

Then we touched the bottom, and the bell settled, and I looked down through the open floor at the sand of the seabed, ribbed like a ploughed field, not two feet beneath my boots. A crab walked across it, sideways and unhurried, as though we were not there at all. Small silver fish came and looked at us through the water and went away again. The light was green and gold and wavering. I believe I sat there with my mouth open for the whole ten minutes, and quite forgot my ears, and when the signal came to go up I could have wept.

Text 2: Thirty Metres Down, by Josh Haldane

An original contemporary blog.

The wreck lies in thirty metres of water off the Cornish coast, a cargo steamer that went down in a storm in 1917 with most of her crew. I had been diving for two years and had thirty dives in my logbook when I was finally allowed to join the club trip to see her. On the boat out, the others talked about her as if she were a famous building: the boilers, the bow, the bell that nobody has ever found.

Going down the shot line, the water turned from blue to green to a kind of thick grey dusk. At twenty metres the cold came through my wetsuit like a hand. Then a shape loomed out of the gloom below me, enormous and wrong, a ship lying on her side where no ship should be, her hull furred with anemones in white and orange. I had seen photographs, but nothing prepares you for the scale. I hung above her in the water and could not move for wonder.

Then I made a beginner’s mistake. I kicked too close to the seabed and stirred up silt, and in seconds I could not see my own hand. I could not see my buddy. I could not tell which way was up. My breathing went fast and loud, and I was aware, in a calm, distant part of my mind, that panic at thirty metres is how divers die. I made myself stop. I counted ten breaths. I found the line by touch and followed it up, slowly, the way I had been trained. On the surface I was sick over the side of the boat. That evening I booked my next dive to the wreck. I still dream about her, the anemones and the dark and the silt, and I am not sure whether the dreams are good ones.

‘Both writers show more fear than wonder.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about each writer’s experience beneath the sea
• explain how far you agree that both writers show more fear than wonder
• compare the ways the writers present fear and wonder.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.