I have had a dream since childhood of walking into the sea, swimming out as far as I could and, slipping easily and swiftly through the water, finding that I had become a seal. My pale, thin skin had gone to be replaced by a coat of thick blubber. My hands had become flippers and my legs had fused into a powerful tail. That small, round, funny face of mine had turned into a long sleek snout bristling with whiskers and capped with beautiful dark eyes.Looking back on the shore I would see friends and family on the beach.I would feel neither sadness nor sense of loss as I turned seawards and swam towards the horizon.

I think this fantasy first took root in my mind – and became part of my dreams – during childhood holidays on the south coast of Britain. I never saw any seals during our annual fortnight by the sea, indeed the curtain of rain that inevitably descended on our summer holiday meant it was difficult to see anything out at sea.

But in spite of a happy family life with my parents and brothers the urge to escape, to find a new life somewhere out there beyond the horizon, always took hold of me when we found ourselves at the seaside .And I suppose the sea lions that I had seen at the London Zoo, although a different species from seals,allowed my imagination to transport me into a new life as a sea creature. And thus I would escape and be to swim the oceans of the world sliding through the waves, impervious to storms and a playful spectator of passing ships.

This fantasy partly explains how I came to write my book, The Language of the Sea. When I decided to turn the childhood dream into a story and create fiction from fantasy my obvious starting point was St Andrews University in Scotland which hosts the Sea Mammal Research Unit, a major centre in Britain for the study of seals and other marine mammals. At St Andrews, Professor Mike Fedak and Dr Tecumseh Fitch, both experts in the behaviour and history of seals (among much else I should say), gave me three crucial pieces of intelligence which shaped this book:

Firstly the high intelligence of seals has enabled them to develop a language of trills, clicks, grunts and bell like tones by which they communicate underwater with their own species across many miles of ocean. Seals are highly vocal creatures and their jaw structure is such that in at least one famous case they can mimic human speech.

Secondly, Professor Fedak explained how the history of these creatures is interwoven with that of homo-sapiens in a long, cruel relationship from which mankind benefited enormously. When early man moved north from the African landmass into the colder climes of what is now northern Europe 60,000 years ago, it was seals that made the migration possible. They were easy prey for the club-wielding hunters and provided blubber from which to make candles, skins for clothing, and musky flesh for high protein food. This is why seals figure prominently on cave drawings that can still be seen today in Scandinavia. From that time the killing of seals never stopped and by the nineteenth century it had become a major industry in Europe and America. The killing goes on today carried out by the Canadians and various Scandinavians countries driven by commerce and with the dubious justification of conserving fish stocks.

Above all I learnt that I needed to complete my research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod – one of the world’s great centres of marine study. It was there in the late spring of 2009 that my book came together. On the Cape Ilearnt moreabout the extraordinary intelligence and almost human behaviour of seals but also how important their ocean habitat is to our future on this planet.
It was on the Cape that my characters formed themselves, the plot took shape and the Atlantic ocean moved from background to foreground inthe making of the book. As one reviewer has said, the sea is almost as much a character in the book as the men and women whose stories unfold across its pages. I loved my time on the Cape .In those weeks before Memorial day the beaches were clean and clear, the crowds had yet to arrive and the local fisherman had plenty of time to take me out on their boats to visit the seal rookeries along the coast.

I left the Cape having made good friends and with my book complete. But my dream remained then, as it does now, undimmed. I still want to shed my human skin, escape the world around me…… and become a seal.