Island on the Edge Read online

  These narrow strips of land were heavily fertilised with seaweed, sand and cow manure, all carried in creels on the backs of the islanders. It is probably more than ninety years since Soay was farmed in this way, but in autumn when the bracken is down and the sun is low on the horizon lazy beds can be seen, like unbroken, frozen waves on the sea. Beyond the croft boundary there are also boggy remnants of old peat cuttings. I am no expert, but it looks to me as if the island’s supply of good quality peat has been almost completely exhausted and digging cultivated land for fuel would be a sign of desperation. Good growing land on Soay is like gold dust.

  Former inhabitants of Soay would have relied almost entirely on the crops they could coax out of poor soil. In the old ruined village of Rhu Dhu, not far from my new home, I could see kale yards or ‘parks’. I understand these walled enclosures, built to protect crops from wind and salt spray, would have produced kale and other brassicas. How ordered and cultivated the land around the village must have looked in those days! Swathes of well-tended potatoes and oats on the hillside, green meadows drained and fertilised to grow hay for winter feed, and neat vegetable gardens next to each little thatched dwelling. Not for them the convenience of a telephone and a shop stocked with flour, potatoes and nicely packaged porridge oats. Old Soay islanders ground their own oatmeal using small stone querns and there are remnants of these querns scattered about the island.

  I was a long way from such self-reliance. Dianne, Anne and Donita gave me some of their excess seedlings and I promised I would plant them in my newly turned soil when the time was right. At this stage I was merely trying to grow food so I didn’t have to buy it and I worked the garden step by step without any real hope of success. I was not enjoying the experience but I could see the point. Everyone on the island still grew vegetables of one sort or another because regular shopping for fresh supplies was so difficult, particularly in winter. The mailboat could be delayed for weeks in poor weather at any time of year. I was learning the practicalities of day-to-day living the hard way.

  Luckily I discovered bread making was not the alchemist’s mystery I had always thought it to be. That was my mother’s fault; the only time she tried to make bread was during the 1970s when there were constant strikes, blackouts, food shortages and no bread in the shops. I don’t know what she did wrong. The loaves, beautifully glazed with egg yolk, came out of the oven looking perfect. But, when we cut into them they were almost completely hollow. There was a thick crust and just a tiny hint of bread inside. We ate it anyway, it tasted fine but didn’t go far. For years I believed that bread must be very difficult to make. Once I discovered this was not the case (after religiously following a recipe in my mother’s 1948 edition of Good Housekeeping) and learnt the best temperature in the Rayburn for baking I was away and never looked back.

  Necessity is the great mother of invention. Not having much variety in my food cupboard, I became a more creative cook and I began to understand how many of our ‘traditional’ dishes came about. Black puddings, haggis, soups and stews have all evolved from having a little that needs to go a long way.

  I tried to make savings on lighting and paraffin, too. Jeanne had lent me a copy of Martin Martin’s eighteenth-century book Cottage Economy, full of information for the poor cottager on how to make savings. I think candles were heavily taxed at the time and Martin explained how to make them at home. I didn’t have access to the tallow that would make candle wax, but I could make the wicks from rushes. They are prolific in the Western Isles wherever there are bogs or wetland (a lush meadow soon returns to rush if left untended). Rush has many uses. Dried and plied it can be woven into baskets, seats and it makes good rope too.

  If you peel away the outer skin, you find fibrous, white pith inside. Left to dry for a few days the pith makes an excellent wick for a candle, or primitive oil lamp. I used to save all leftover wax from my used candles, then melt it on the stove and pour it into a mould, or make dipped candles. Rush wicks lasted just as well as string wicks. This saved me quite a bit when I didn’t need the brighter Aladdin light. Rush wicks burn well in a jar of cooking oil too; olive oil is best, but any fresh vegetable oil will do. You need to make a little wire stand for the wick that sits in the jar to hold the wick upright. In the old days fish or seal oil would have been used and the container would probably have been an earthenware pot, but the principle is exactly the same.

  Another major expense was fuel for the Rayburn. I had two problems: I couldn’t afford to buy enough coal for the winter and I couldn’t expect my neighbours to keep transporting it for me. The only alternative was to find fuel on the island and the most obvious source was driftwood. There was still a substantial amount of wood coming ashore in those days and I had watched my neighbours collecting it on the beach. However, as I quickly learnt, a strict code of conduct applied to gathering driftwood. When someone collected driftwood they piled it up well above the high-tide line and marked it with a rock or tied an old piece of rope around it. Once this has been done no one else must take it. A woodpile could lie on the beach untouched for a very long time. It was quite common to forget where you had saved your last woodpile and only remember when you found yourself back at the same spot months or even years later.

  I began to gather fuel from nearby beaches and coves. The only wood saw I had at the time was my little handsaw which meant it was slow, hard work and I had to clamp the wood into the big vice to be able to cut it at all. I was occupied in this chore one day when Tex turned up and saw what I was doing. ‘What you need is a bow saw,’ he said. I hadn’t realised that there was a specific saw for firewood.

  Tex must have taken pity on me because he returned soon after to lend me his second best bow saw for the job. He also spent some time explaining how to take care of a bow saw and how to use a saw set, an essential tool for keeping the saw in good working condition. The saw blade has sharpened teeth that bend away from each other alternately along the blade. Over time the teeth have a tendency to close up, which makes sawing through damp wood harder work and the saw will stick. Every so often the edges of the teeth should be sharpened which keeps the blade useable for much longer. (If the wood is very damp, rubbing the blade with candle wax helps as well.) When Tex saw my pitiful pile of driftwood he said I could saw up any dead wood I found in the copses. This made an enormous difference to my supply, as there was a lot of fallen timber in little woods close to the house. With the right saw and plenty of dead trees, my woodpile started to look much healthier.

  Newcomers to the island often wonder why four-wheeled vehicles are so rarely used but wheeled transport is more trouble than it’s worth in a place where there are no roads and the ground is full of holes, heather and bogs. Here the plastic fishbox comes into its own. I wish I could say I pioneered the idea, but I actually stole it from watching Anne and Gordon transport all sorts of heavy objects over uneven and difficult terrain. Fishboxes were once made of wood and they washed up on beaches all over the west coast. They had many uses apart from firewood. The box ends had handle holes cut into them which made perfect holders for a mackerel fishing line if a V-shaped notch were cut into either side. They could be used for growing plants or as wood baskets. I made a little stool for a friend once, using the last of the wooden fishboxes I found on the beach. When wooden boxes were finally phased out by the fishing industry, plastic ones took their place and inevitably they washed up on Soay too.

  Everything you need to make a fishbox cart could be found on the beach. Old fishing rope is very useful if you have patience to untangle the inevitable knots. Another helpful addition is a piece of plastic pipe. There are always different lengths of pipe lying around. You thread the rope through a short length of plastic pipe – between thirty and sixty centimetres, depending on your preferences – to make good pulling handles. The rope is attached to the fishbox in a loop, either to the plastic handle or by drilling holes into the corners of the shortest end. The length of the loop depends on how you intend to use the ca
rt. If you are going to pull it by gripping the pipe with your hands, then the rope can be fairly short. However if you are going to drag it husky-dog style with rope and pipe around your waist, it is important to have enough length to avoid banging your heels on the fishbox. It can trip you up very easily.

  The beauty of the fishbox cart is that it is free, takes rough treatment, needs very little maintenance and when it is worn out you simply make another one. It glides smoothly over bogs, is very stable and can take a surprising amount of weight. I could get a whole day’s fuel for the Rayburn in one box cart by cutting logs to fit and securing them with a rope – there is nothing more disheartening than turning the cart over on a rock and tipping out your hard-won wood.

  All the little copses were higher up the hillside than my house so it was a relatively easy downhill pull, which helped with the amount I could drag. Back home I sawed the logs to fit the Rayburn. It was my regular morning chore for many years.

  While I learned the almost endless versatility of the humble fishbox, there was another crucial discovery. My wardrobe was woefully inadequate for island life. For a start, I had no proper waterproof clothing; just my wellies, a waxed jacket and one lightweight shower-proof raincoat with a hood. Ideal for a light shower in town, but absolutely worthless in the Highlands, and no use at all for winkling. Even on the mildest of days I came home soaked above the knees. All my colourfully designed sweaters were made of acrylic fibre, useless for keeping me warm, and stretched to the size of circus tents by hand washing and wringing. Biddy took pity on me and gave me some of her old wool sweaters and lent me a set of waterproof trousers. I was to become the receiver of quite a few pieces of necessary spare clothing from various people (and I’m always grateful). I had arrived on Soay with a wardrobe of Laura Ashley dresses and flimsy blouses with lace collars. I also came complete with a full-length black velvet ball gown and a pair of black suede court shoes. It was another culture shock. I not only lacked the money to buy the correct clothing, I realised there was no such thing as nipping out to the shops. The nearest town for that kind of thing was either Portree, about fifty miles away, or Inverness, over ninety miles away. Not counting the sea trip.

  Sometimes tiny miracles happen when you least expect them. One spring tide in late autumn, I was off picking winkles on the far west side of the island, still wearing my superannuated wardrobe. On the way home, wet through as usual, I was thinking how desperately I needed some new waterproofs. Not only new waterproof trousers, but a decent jacket too. Winter was looming and I would require a jacket with a hood and one that was guaranteed to keep me dry – my waxed jacket was getting very tired and less water-resistant every day. I knew the kind of waterproof gear I was thinking of would be very expensive. Where and when could I get them? Even as I was pondering this problem I tripped over something lying in the heather. I bent down and picked up a sealed plastic bag. Inside was a brand new set of camouflage waterproofs – jacket and trousers.

  When I got them home, I found they fitted me perfectly. The jacket had plenty of room for thick sweaters underneath and was of the very best quality. The unopened package must have fallen out of the rucksack of a soldier on exercise back in June. There it had lain perfectly camouflaged and buried deep in the heather. If I had been looking for this bag I would never have seen it. The only way to find it was to literally trip over it. In two thousand acres of land, I had simply fallen on top of the jacket and trousers I desperately needed. It really did feel like a miracle. I would get many years of good use out of them but that little stroke of good luck had other significance for me. Coming just at the right time, it gave me a morale boost and the kind of encouragement which mattered even more than keeping dry.

  One other good thing came out of all this winkling, wood gathering, sawing, walking and carefully rationed food. Slowly but surely, I started to get fitter and healthier than I had ever been in my life before. After a few months of carrying 25kg winkle bags around, they seemed a fraction of the weight they had been when I began.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Cold comfort

  Days were growing shorter. As the year wore on into October daylight hours were dwindling and I started having problems trying to paint with watercolours during the evening. Very often this was the only spare time I had but it was not productive. The painting would look fine by the light of the Aladdin lamp but next morning I could see the colours were all wrong, either too yellow or too green. I got around the problem by pre-mixing colours in the morning so that I had a fairly good idea what they were however ‘off’ they looked in the lamplight.

  Spare time was precious because I was feeling under pressure. I had committed myself to an ambitious project with Robert and I knew that somehow I must produce some half-decent work for the exhibition which was now just over six months away. Although I did my sketching in the field, I rarely painted watercolours outside because the light could change so quickly. Wildlife is impossible to paint as accurately as I like to portray it by brief observation alone, so I was making a compromise between real-life observational sketches and research from photographs and books for finer detail. Progress seemed slow, but at least I was producing something.

  Apart from the challenges of day-to-day survival there were few distractions. Some global events occasionally made their way into my new world. I was aware of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in early August of 1990, and the Gulf War that followed, but for the most part the outside world had become a distant place. Soay was my reality now and the life I had left behind seemed far away and remote. Before coming to the island, I had always kept up-to-date with the latest news, television programmes and popular music. On Soay I soon lost touch for the simple reason that I no longer had twenty-four-hour access to television or newspapers. I did have a radio but needed to ration my battery use; it was a four-week wait for replacements and I was counting every penny.

  I discovered that I could coax a longer lifespan out of radio batteries if I warmed them up on top of the Rayburn for a few minutes every day. Apart from catching the news headlines this also enabled me to enjoy programmes like The Archers, Just a Minute or The News Quiz – sometimes even the comfort of A Book at Bedtime – without them dying on me halfway through the episode.

  Before I left ‘civilisation’ good friends had clubbed together to give me a ‘ghetto blaster’ radio-cassette player as a leaving present. It required six of the biggest, most expensive batteries. My thoughtful chums had even compiled tapes of the music we had enjoyed together. Some nights I indulged myself with half an hour of listening to these tapes, enjoying them most while soaking in a hot bath in my draughty, candlelit bathroom. Somehow the strict rationing of batteries combined with the flickering candlelight to give the music more meaning and power than when I could listen for as long as I liked. From 1990 onward my knowledge of contemporary musical froze in time. My very last album purchase was Graceland by Paul Simon in 1989.

  While I was learning to save energy and reduce waste, the Internet was born and households across the UK were beginning to acquire their own computers. I was totally unaware of these huge changes until a former colleague telephoned one evening. He talked with great enthusiasm and excitement about some new-fangled thing called the Internet. He explained that it was going to be the biggest leap in technology since the harnessing of electricity. It would be going global and we should be getting in on website design ASAP.

  Computers were only just beginning to be discussed in our London agency a few months before I resigned and I had no real interest in them. They were nothing but a nuisance as far as I was concerned. I had found myself roped into writing a programme for one of our typesetting machines, really just a slightly sophisticated version of a word-processor, but programmable in a limited way. I was expected to produce a standardised page-layout to save time on a quarterly magazine we produced for a client. I spent several days working on the new layout. Just one wrong digit or misplaced decimal point and I had to stop, find the
mistake in my calculations and start all over again. To my mind, it was a complete pain and I wanted nothing more to do with computers ever again.

  I was also far too enamoured with my life on Soay to really take in what my old colleague was talking about. I had absolutely no interest in getting involved in his proposal. The poor fellow gave up trying to convince me what a good thing this was going to be and rang off bewildered by my apparent lack of interest. In truth, I had no idea what he was talking about. For a while I must have been living in a kind of cultural limbo. I was falling well behind what was happening out in the ‘real’ world but was definitely not yet fully integrated or initiated into the life that I had chosen. For example, there was that incident with island telecoms I promised to tell you about.

  Very early on, I had not endeared myself to my new neighbours by inadvertently cutting off Soay’s entire communication system for practically a whole day. It happened during one of those glorious sunny days out at sea with Tex and Biddy. We came back to the bay and I was invited to Soay House for tea and cake before going home. We had only been inside the house for a few minutes when there was a sharp rap at the front door. I heard muffled voices and then Tex came in to say that no one had been able to make a phone call all day. In desperation, somebody had gone up to the telephone exchange shed at the top of the hill to discover that one of the telephone connection lights showed ‘on’, meaning that a phone was in use. It just happened to be mine. It was assumed that my phone had been left off the hook, but nobody could get into my house to put the receiver back on because I had locked both doors.