Island on the Edge Read online

  That did not look good. In general, nobody needed to lock doors on Soay. But I had started to lock front and back doors to prevent Blackie the sheep from bursting in, creating havoc and eating my meagre supplies while I was away. Also my elderly Taffy was becoming quite frail and spent most of his time asleep in his chair. I was worried he may be hurt or harassed by Blackie. However, to my frustrated neighbours a locked door may have seemed odd, selfish and discourteous, as if I didn’t trust them. Or, worse, perhaps it was deliberate sabotage on my part. I hurried home, wondering how I could have left the phone off the hook, and why nobody had simply turned the key in the front door keyhole where I had left it that morning.

  When I got to my front door I found no key in the lock, but after a hurried search spotted it jammed between two paving stones by the doorstep. It is a very old, rusty key and blended in perfectly with the ground so no one who didn’t know what it looked like would have seen it. Through the kitchen window I saw the telephone on the windowsill and, yes, the receiver was lying neatly beside it, unhooked as if someone had deliberately removed the handset. I let myself in and went into the kitchen where a sleepy-eyed dog still lying in his chair met me with a slow wag of his tail.

  Then the mystery was revealed. Lying on the floor below the windowsill was a piece of panelling that had fallen off the top of the window recess. Looking more closely, I saw that the panel had been kept in place by resting on two screws. As the house started to dry out, the wood shrank and the panel fell, neatly knocking my telephone receiver off the hook on its way down. The missing key could be explained by the fact that Blackie must have been butting the door so hard she had shaken the key out of the lock. On inspection I could see traces of wool and fresh butt marks on the door. The combinations of those two events seemed too ridiculous to use as explanation. A blanket apology would have to do instead . . . It felt as if sheep and even my own house were against me.

  As autumn turned to winter, I was grappling with a lot of new ways of thinking and not always successfully. It was often a painful process but at least I was still young enough to adapt to my new environment. Had I been ten or fifteen years older, I may well have found it much harder. I have no doubt I must have been doing all sorts of things that irritated some of the other long-term residents. They must have been wondering what I was thinking of coming to such a remote island on my own, so obviously unprepared and ignorant. However, although there must have been many shaking heads, I was shown a great deal of tolerance for which I am still very grateful.

  * * *

  It was almost Christmas before I finally realised that there was nothing else for me to do but to sell my beloved Citroen 2CV. Road tax, MOT and insurance were all due early in the new year and even if no repairs were needed I simply would not be able to find the money to pay these bills. My car was the last link to my old life and she was also my very last illusory symbol of personal independence and ‘success’.

  As I was going to stay with my family for the Christmas holidays, I collected my Citroen from Elgol car park and took the long road south for our final journey together. I found a buyer not long after seeing in the New Year with my sister and family in Luton and watched my car motor away from me up the road with a stranger at the wheel. She turned a corner and was out of my sight forever. I turned away with a pang of sadness mingled with relief. Shortly afterwards, Taffy and I headed north again, home to Soay. This time we travelled by public transport and the optimistic thumb. It was a difficult journey, and it had been hard to say goodbye. In some ways this was my lowest point. My sister Jan was very concerned about my rather drastic lifestyle changes. She knew only too well how much I had treasured my car. I had given up almost everything I had for my new life on Soay and neither of us could understand why I felt so driven to carry on.

  Coming home to an empty, cold and damp house on a dark February night is not the best kind of welcome. I had been lucky enough to catch a lift over to Soay in Golden Isles as she was landing prawns at Elgol jetty late that evening. It was already dark and a fairly choppy following sea made for an uncomfortable trip. It was also raining heavily. The weather was such that the boat had to head for the safety of the harbour rather than to the bay, so that meant nearly a mile hike in the dark with my luggage and a tired old dog traipsing along beside me. My torch was a pale, flickering, failing thing and it made my journey home that bit more difficult as there was no moon and the night was pitch black.

  How, you might be thinking, can I possibly remember that kind of detail twenty-six years later? Dear reader, I always seem to have an inadequate torch when I am fumbling home in the dark from the harbour, or any place where a reliable torch is essential. Torches, like pot plants, do not seem to like me.

  Entering the kitchen of Glenfield felt like going into a damp cave. The weather had been very wet during my absence and somehow it seemed colder inside the house than outside. I could see my breath in the dying torchlight. I lit an Aladdin lamp and set about getting the Rayburn going. Upstairs, the duvet and sheets felt cold and clammy. I pulled them off and hung the sheets and blanket on the clothes rack over the Rayburn and draped the duvet over the kitchen chairs to air. I filled my two ceramic hot water bottles with boiling water and put them on the mattress upstairs. It was hours before the kitchen felt remotely warm, and even then it was the sort of heat you might experience in a laundrette; full of condensation.

  Despite my efforts, going to bed was a damp and unpleasant experience that first night. I learnt a good lesson from that cold homecoming. If ever I was going to be away from the house for any length of time during the winter I must strip the bed, leave sheets hanging over the drying rack and the duvet in a tightly sealed plastic bag. The mattress should be pulled off the bed and lifted so that air could circulate around it. Above all, leave the upstairs windows open at least a couple of inches to allow damp air to escape. I had been too used to houses with automatic central heating, damp courses and watertight roofing. It was days before the house began to feel dry again, and I had to open doors and windows whenever the weather was remotely dry or sunny.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Island spring

  April–May 1991

  As daylight hours increased my portfolio began to grow. It seemed no time at all before April arrived and now the exhibition was alarmingly close. Originally, Robert and I planned to share the exhibition space between us. However, I had seen quite a few really good pieces of work produced by David Rosie, the man who first introduced me to the ways of the Aladdin lamp.

  David crewed for Duncan Geddes and lived in the bothy, a renovated blackhouse in the grounds of Burnside House belonging to Duncan and Dianne. He came from Thurso, where he had been a teacher for six years before deciding to try life as a fisherman. By chance he had heard from friends that Duncan was finding it difficult to get reliable crewman. On a whim, David wrote to Duncan and was invited to Soay for a week’s trial in October 1981. It was the best week’s fishing Duncan had ever had up to that point, but he warned David that it was not always so lucrative (crew normally receive a percentage of the boat’s profit as pay). Nothing daunted, David gave in his notice at his school and began life as a full-time fisherman the following January.

  He had never regretted it, but he was also a keen artist and had been working hard for some time to get into Glasgow School of Art. The year I arrived on Soay he had been accepted onto the degree course for the autumn of 1991. He was a prolific artist and absolutely dedicated to his work producing sketches, oils and pastels of excellent competence despite his full-time commitments at sea.

  David had built himself a light, airy porch at the front of his bothy so that he could paint and draw, making full use of natural light. Using rocks and stones from the beach to build the walls and corrugated tin for the roof, David had created a very pleasant extra living and working space. Incidentally, the kitchen/sitting-room ceiling had been raised by about six inches so David could practise his bagpipes without the top of the pi
pes hitting the ceiling whenever rain prevented him playing outside. There was nothing more stirring than hearing the skirl of David’s bagpipes echoing across the bay and back off the mountains.

  Many of David’s paintings were of Soay and surrounding islands. I felt his work would blend very happily with my watercolours and Robert’s sculptures. On a crackling telephone line, I put the idea to Robert and he agreed that it would be an advantage to have three different artists showing their work. We were both very pleased when David accepted our proposal.

  The exhibition on the Isle of Muck was to be for the whole month of May, spanning the Muck Open Day. We hoped they would both combine to attract extra visitors to the island. Muck Open Day was an innovation of the island’s proprietor Lawrence MacEwen, supported by his wife Jenny and his brother Ewen MacEwen. It had been a popular event right from the very beginning, attracting not only holidaymakers, but also locals from the mainland, Skye and the surrounding small isles.

  I got over to the island a few days after Robert and his young family, and David turned up a couple of days after me. Robert had transformed the Muck tearoom into our exhibition space by the time we arrived. Lawrence and Jenny had very kindly allowed us use of it for the month and it was an ideal location. The tearoom was in Port, the main settlement on Muck, not far from the jetty. Robert installed spotlights and plinths and even repainted the concrete floor with fresh brick-red floor paint. Robert told me later that he had been painting the floor until well after midnight. In those days the island generator supplying electricity to houses in Port was turned off before midnight, so Robert had to finish the job with a torch in his mouth.

  Lawrence MacEwen, wearing his best kilt, officially opened the exhibition with a brief but welcoming speech, and David Rosie played his pipes to mark the occasion. A few people began to trickle in.

  At first the flow of visitors and, more importantly, purchasers was slow, but towards the end of the month an increasing number of people began to turn up. Word had gradually spread and first David, then Robert and finally myself, began to sell the odd piece here and there. That was a bonus for an impoverished artist, but I also got the chance to meet residents from the other islands for the first time. So I made new friends and, to add to the sense of occasion, Golden Isles and Duncan’s creel boat Barnacle III both made the twenty-odd mile sea trip over with a few Soay islanders.

  Although Muck is a very small island – only half the size of Soay – it is lush farming land and it has kept a stable, thriving community for many years. In contrast with Soay, Muck has supported a population almost continually for more than a thousand years. In the 1990s the population was around fifteen to seventeen people, about the same as Soay, and there were only three or four children in the school, two of them being Mary and Colin MacEwen. Colin was in his final year of primary school and Mary was about seven years old. The schoolhouse in those days was just a long, low, corrugated iron building, with the teacher’s living quarters at one end and the schoolroom at the other. Ironically, Soay’s schoolhouse, with its stone walls, slate roof and tall windows, seemed a much grander edifice.

  Most of the houses on Muck are clustered around Port, the southernmost part of the island. At the far northern end along a mile of tarmac road is Gallanach where the MacEwen’s farmhouse is and (at that time) there were a few holiday-let properties and one or two residents’ homes. Gallanach is a beautiful place; white sands and wild blue seas roll beyond rather terrifying looking black reefs. From here you can see across to Rum and further in the distance there are the Cuillin Mountains, small but clear on a good day. Soay is nothing more than a blurred grey smudge beneath them.

  Horse Island, on this side of Muck, is a seal haven only accessible at low spring tides, and you can sometimes hear their mournful, haunting song at sunset. It was a pleasure and a privilege to have the chance of staying here for those four weeks. We were made very welcome and included in all the island activities, including the traditional hockey game played on the sandy beach at low tide beneath Gallanach farm – a very competitive game it was too! There was no roll-on/roll-off ferry in those days nor the easy landing provided by today’s large pier. Until quite recently, people, livestock, supplies, building materials and even farm vehicles were all loaded off and on a small stone-built jetty only accessible at high tide. On big spring tides, at dead low water, even the Sheerwater could not get alongside the jetty and passengers had to be transferred to a little wooden rowing dinghy. Even then they sometimes had to wade the last few yards in shallow water to get ashore.

  Lawrence and Jenny had worked incredibly hard to make the island prosper and they somehow managed to juggle a huge amount of commitments between them. They were cheerful and friendly hosts, able to give their time generously to anyone who needed it.

  I only discovered later that David Rosie had left Soay earlier than expected, before our exhibition closed. He had much to do before he became a student. Meanwhile, Robert and I had been presented with another new and exciting opportunity. Sea Spirit, a yacht belonging to Gordonstoun School near Elgin, arrived in Port packed with enthusiastic school children. They made an impromptu visit to our exhibition and later in the day one of their art teachers approached us with an invitation to be artists in residence for a month at Gordonstoun, sometime the following year. This seemed too good an offer to miss, so we accepted gratefully.

  When the time came to leave Muck and go our separate ways we felt that we could call our exhibition a success. We had not made our fortunes by any means, but we had covered the cost of setting up the exhibition, with a little over. On my way home to Soay I realised I could plan ahead for at least another year on the island. The residency at Gordonstoun was designated for June 1992 and I had work to do. I would have to replace those paintings that I had managed to sell.

  I had a very pleasant surprise when I returned home. Before leaving for Muck I had planted the seedlings donated to me for my virgin vegetable patch. I had done it almost without thinking and without the least expectation of success, particularly as I had to leave the garden to its own devices for a whole month of the growing season. I climbed the hill to my little fenced plot to check on its progress. At first I could see nothing more than a riot of well-manured weeds. On closer inspection, however, I discovered burgeoning cabbages, flowering peas and beans along with healthy-looking carrot tops and potatoes hidden among the long grass, dockens and nettles. Some aggressive weeding revealed an ordered and established vegetable patch. With help and advice from my new neighbours, I was finally free from my black-fingered curse and for the first time in my life I experienced the pleasure of growing my own vegetables.

  So much had happened since that May Day when I first set foot on Soay. In my wildest dreams, I could never have foreseen that a year later I would be learning to feed and support myself to say nothing of exhibiting my paintings on the Isle of Muck. Despite the crazy odds, my own inadequacies and ignorance, I had survived the first year in my new life.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A changing island

  I didn’t realise it then, but the spring of 1991 was the beginning of a new era on Soay. David Rosie had finished his time as a fisherman and was heading off for a new life. His departure marked the start of a gradual decline in the island population. Not much later, Laurance Reed left too. He was suffering from ill health and, after fourteen years on Soay, decided it was time to move back to civilisation. As summer began, he put Leac Mhor on the market.

  I was surprised how many people made the difficult and expensive trip to look at the house. It had no running water, toilet, bath or electricity but it was still a very attractive little property, with a spectacular garden. Besides, island properties do catch the eye (as I should know) and islands attract many different dreamers. Tex once told me about a group of hippies who turned up in the harbour in the mid 1960s when communal living in the wild was the fashion. They came, perhaps twenty men, women and children, and set up camp by
the shark station. The first anyone knew about them was when Tex went down to the harbour to mend his creels and discovered the campers had built a huge bonfire out of wooden fishboxes. These were boxes Tex used to send his lobsters to market. He went in search of the group and was taken to their ‘leader’, an apparently wealthy man who had financed the expedition and brought his accountant with him. This leader said the island was available to all and they just wanted freedom ‘to do our thing’. All Tex wanted was to see them off and thought of asking the few island men to help him. But the island (plus midges) did the job for them. Once food and easy firewood ran out the hippies got back in their boat and were never seen again.

  A middle-aged couple bought Leac Mhor. They were from the Wirral, near Liverpool, and intended to settle on the island as permanent residents. One bitterly cold and wet mailboat day in February 1992, Jill Fitzgerald arrived ready to move into their new home. Her husband Peter was still working for British Rail, waiting for the redundancy he expected once the railways were privatised. Gordon Smith picked Jill up in his assault craft along with Soay mail and monthly provisions from the Sheerwater. Her belongings, such as she had, were piled high. Like me two years earlier, she stepped ashore to meet a welcoming group of islanders. This time, I was among them and we were joined by Tex whose curiosity overcame his usual show of indifference.

  Jill had just turned fifty, was generously built, wearing day-glow-bright clothing and an enormous pair of dangling magenta earrings. Tex looked askance, shook his head and rasped, ‘You should have done this twenty years ago lass.’ First impressions were certainly against Jill, but I soon discovered she had tremendous energy, optimism and many practical skills, along with a superlative Liverpool wit.